Michael Kruger on Romans 1–7 (Re-release)

Today's episode of Help Me Teach the Bible was recorded in 2016. You can find episodes on every book of the Bible, along with topical conversations on Bible teaching at tgc.org/podcast. You ever walk by a very beautiful lawn and seeing a sign that said do not walk on the grass? What do you immediately want to do when you read the sign? You want to walk on the grass and then you realize if the sign hadn't been there, I probably wouldn't have wanted to walk on the grass. But when you see the sign, it makes you want to walk on the grass. And there's a sense in which it tells you something very true about the human heart. Is that you are wicked if you want to break a law just because it exists? And so the problem in the sign, the problem is your heart. The problem is in the law, the problem is you. Welcome to Help Me Teach the Bible sponsored by Crossway, I am Nancy Gethry. And this is the podcast for people who love God's Word. And we go to God's Word because we know that that is the way we will hear God speaking to us, that the Holy Spirit will use it to change us to actually transform us and conform us into the image of Christ. But we're people who go to God's Word not just for ourselves. We want to deeply understand God's Word so that we can give it out to others. Today I am in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I am in the offices of Michael Krueger, who is the president and Samuel C. Patterson, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary. So Michael, thank you for allowing us to talk with you today so that you can help us teach the Bible. Thanks Nancy, it's great to be with you. In addition to being the president of RTS in Charlotte, you are an ordained minister in the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America. And you serve as an associate pastor at your church, uptown church, here in Charlotte. You blog at Canon Father and I love reading your blog, and you're often blogging on the origins of the New Testament, Canon, other Biblical and theological issues. Sometimes something will come up, and I'm so glad when I see that you have blogged about it because I know that you will deal with it in a very clear way that I can understand that really articulates the issues at hand. Thank you. You bet. Some of our listeners may know Melissa Krueger, your wife, and she also blogs at the Gospel Coalition and she's a women's ministry coordinator also at your church, uptown PCA. You've published a number of books. You're the editor and contributor acrossway released called a Biblical theological introduction to the New Testament, contributed to by a number of RTS professors. You're the author of Canon Revisited, establishing the origins and authority of the New Testament books. Also the heresy of orthodoxy, how contemporary cultures fascination with diversity has reshaped our understanding of early Christianity. So clearly you've got some experience in the New Testament, and we are grateful because we want to impose on your experience today as you help us learn how to teach the Book of Romans. Happy to help. Romans is a favorite of mine for many years, so it's great to talk about it. Well, one reason that I wanted to talk to you about the Book of Romans is that you recently spent two years teaching through the Book of Romans, but not in the seminary classroom, even though it was here at the seminary. You taught a women's Bible study over two years through the Book of Romans. Why, with all of the things that you have on your plate here, leading this seminarian with writing projects, why did you invest two years teaching through Romans 12 women's Bible study? Yeah, I could ask that question a lot. Well, it was a vision that started years ago. I wanted to think about how to bring the Word of God to the city of Charlotte, to the surrounding community, in a way that was outside the classroom. So it was a vision of how RTS could bless Christians without them having to be seminary students. And one of the ways I decided to do that was we'll look. I mean, we teach the Bible all the time. How about if I just teach a Bible study for the community and I'll do it right here on the campus? And so that's how the vision began. And then I decided that it might work well if we made it a women's study, just because I felt like it can jeal's better as a group and as a community and that it might really be a place that they feel like they can come and learn God's Word. And so just on a scheduling level and on a format level it worked out really well. So I started it two years ago and we were sort of blown away by the response. I didn't know what I was expecting, not what we got. We got a lot of people very excited about studying the book of Romans. So I was speaking at a conference recently and I was giving some messages and there was a man speaking at the conference. And he kind of got accosted by a woman at the conference who thought, "Okay, this is a woman's conference and a man shouldn't be speaking at it." I'm not exactly sure what her thinking was. It might have been just that she felt like it was squeezing out the place for a woman. But sometimes we think only women should teach women. Yet what did you find it valuable both for yourself and for the women? For you to teach a women's Bible Center? Absolutely, yeah. I felt like one of the things I learned from the women is they feel like over the years that people don't expect much of women's groups when it comes to deep theological instruction and training and that they tend to get fairly lightweight, fluffy stuff most of the time. And so the repeated refrain I got is thank you for teaching us because you're going to take you're taking as deeper and further than we've ever had a chance to go and we're really glad for it. And so I think there was a sense in which they appreciated the opportunity for that. And from my end, I love teaching the women's groups. I think they're eager, they're excited, they're thrilled to be there. I've taught a lot of men over the years too, no surprise. And I got to say just on a peer enjoyment level, I think I had the most fun there than I've had just about anywhere else. So that was great. So week by week, as you approach this group, what assumptions did you make about their biblical literacy level as well as what they understood theologically? Because Romans is a very theological book and certainly you would have taught this different than you would have taught a Romans class in the classroom in seminary. I make that assumption that may not be true. It's true in some ways. Yes. What assumptions did you make and then how did those assumptions impact how you taught? Yeah. So we knew that not only did we have a mixed group of folks who are at different places spiritually, but we also had a group that some probably just started walking with a Lord a six months ago and some been walking with God their whole lives. And so I went in knowing that we was a very lay level Bible study and people are going to be in different places. However, what my goal was wasn't to sort of leave them there. I wanted to find out where they were and connect with them and then take them further down the path than they probably thought they could go. In other words, they may not have had a lot of Bible knowledge, but they were very bright and they were very eager. And I think once you have people who are committed to the Lord of God who are eager to learn it, you know, don't underestimate what they can accomplish. And so I think one of the things that made the Bible study successful is that I didn't go in thinking, okay, you can't know very much. I'm not going to give you very much. What I did is I said you may not know very much, but I'm still going to give you a lot because I think you can know it and can learn it and we'll love it when you get it. And that's what we found happening. So I think it just was feeding a desire that a lot of the women may not even know they had going in. But as they got further and further into it, they said, wow, we really can't understand this and it really can be at a fine. And I feel like it boosted their confidence in all the right ways. At the gospel coalition where this podcast is posted, we're also posting a link to the video of our teaching through the book of Romans over 42 sessions. 42. So there is a lot there to offer. But they're at the website where you have the video to your teaching, you also have a downloadable version of the outline that you created and handed out. So just in practical terms, those who are listening to this podcast, many of us are teachers and we're always trying to figure out should I use a PowerPoint? Should I just write a few points on the board? How much should I put in a handout? Do I do fill in the blanks? Just for outline that kind of thing. So they'll be able to see the way you outlined and what you handed out to people. Can you just as a practical matter for us as teachers? How and why did you make those determinations of what you wanted to put on the paper for them to have in front of them as you taught? Yeah, that's a great question. I get that question a lot and and actually as I train teachers and here at the seminary and at my church, I talk a lot about what to give people. I think there's lots of options depending on what a teacher's gifts and interests are. And so I don't want to suggest that the way I did it is sort of a one-size-fits-all scenario. But I'm a big believer in giving your students something to have in their hands. Something they can track with you on. Something they can follow along. Something they can fill in notes and take notes. Part of the reason for this is that when they leave, I think they want to look back on this at some point and reflect on it and those those notes are going to be really useful. But the other thing I did and people can see this when they download the notes online, is that I didn't just give them a list of questions. One of the things that I see teachers to do a lot. When they teach Bible studies, they don't hand out a list of questions. It's really driven by a commitment to a socratic method of teaching. It's just interactive. It's just facilitating. You're just asking questions and getting answers. And I appreciate a level of that. And I think every Bible study has to have some level of interaction. But I wasn't interested in so much in just laying out questions. I wanted to give them the main points. I wanted to give them the main doctrinal cues for the text. And I was going to fill in the gaps. I wasn't going to tell them everything on the outline. But I felt like, you know, you want to give them a structure for the passage. It helps teach them how to exegede it. If you just give them a list of questions, they can't go back and see how I exegede the text in their hand. But if I can show how I broke the text down, they can learn how you break text down. How you think about passages in structural ways. And so it's almost like teaching them how to study the Bible by handing them something tangible. And so I'm a big believer in outlines. And obviously I spend a lot of time on those 42 outlines. I hope they're helpful to people. I bet you did. So do you start with creating that outline and then teach from it or do more figure out how you're going to use the time and then create an outline from that. Yeah. What I'll do is, when I prepare a lesson, I'll look at the text I've picked for the day or that's next up and I'll actually study it, expound it and figure out what it says and break it into an outline. And then I take the outline and figure out how to set it within the context of a 45-minute lesson. That's part of the tricky part of teaching, isn't it? It's what to include and what not to include. And what you're going to have to cut out, even though it looks so good do you want to talk about? Well, yeah. I mean, people listen to the study I didn't think, well, 42 lessons, that's a lot. And of course, from my perspective, it isn't in the book of Romans. Anybody who knows the book of Romans knows it, 42 lessons is flying pretty high over the text. And it's just inevitable. You know, I can't have a five-year Bible study. I don't think that's practical. I'm not going to try to compete with Lloyd Jones's 372 or whatever it was, trips through Romans. I'll leave him with that record. So I had to pick what was going to be in and what was going to be out. And that's actually part of what makes a teacher a teacher. I tell my students all the time, you can't say everything about any given text. And so there needs to be scraps on the cutting room floor when you're done preparing it. And if you try to pile everything in each lesson, then you are not editing yourself. You are not, you're not streamlining what you're teaching. And you're not thinking about your audience. Part of what you leave in and what you leave out depends on who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to say to them. And so, in any given lesson, there's got to be a lot left behind. And if there isn't, you haven't done A, the research for it, and B, you haven't thought enough about how to stream it down. And I tell my students all the time, I was like, you know, you hear about these movies people making, you can get the director's cut, you know, that's hours longer. But think about what that director had to do. You know, he has hours and hours of footage and never make it into the movie. And that's part of the way you should think about your Bible study. So you did it over 42 lessons. Correct. Let's assume that most of us are going to do it maybe 10 to 12. And I don't know, do you want to tell us that we just can't do Romans in 10 to 12? Well, you can. I think you just have to understand what you're going to accomplish by that and what you're not going to accomplish by that. And so what I tell people, look, you could, you could do Romans in one lesson theoretically. I mean, you could teach a Bible study or a sermon on a whole book if you wanted to. Theoretically, you could teach a Bible or a Bible study or a sermon on the whole Bible if you wanted to. However, what you're going to accomplish with such a lesson is going to look different depending on how many lessons you have. And so if someone's going to do Romans, let's just use the number 16 because they're 16. Okay. Then you're looking at one chapter per lesson. And that means it's very broad, very general, very high level teaching, which isn't bad. But there's a certain thing you're not going to cover, certain things you're not going to be able to explain. And you just have to have that as your goal. My goal isn't to dive into some of these specific channels, but rather to look at the larger sort of lake that you're on. And if people have that understanding and what the restrictions are, then you could do it in 16 lessons. However, my advice for people is to think of it differently. I don't typically recommend trying to do Romans that way. I would rather take those 16 lessons and just do chapters one through five. In other words, I think we have this idea that we always have to do the whole book. I'm thinking, well, not necessarily. You don't have to do the whole book at one time. You can maybe later come back to the rest of the book or something like that. So in other words, you can look at chapters one through five over 16 lessons. And then a couple years later, maybe you'll have a chance to do the rest of the book. I don't think you always have to take the whole thing. And so I think you could pick a section that's definable and just stick with that. Are there some basic things we need to do to set the stage for teaching Romans? We know this is written for us. And yet this was written by a specific person to a specific group of people at a specific time facing some specific circumstances. So when you are teaching this book of Romans, what are the basics that you set out for people to understand about what's even happening in this book? Yeah, obviously any book you teach, you need to give people the preliminary lesson on, you know, date authorship background setting. Do you? And do I or should I? Do you think you always need to? I don't think you always need to do it at a scholarly level. Okay. And you know, I see some people spend in an ordinent amount of time. Yeah, I think sometimes you can lose people. Yeah. Absolutely. I really need to know all the ins and outs of, you know, Roman society, you know, to do this. And the answer of course is no. But I think people do need to recognize that scripture is contextually set. In other words, it's in history and real time and space. I think often when we read the Bible and it's kind of text floating in thin air, kind of this, you know, almost gnostic like, you know, spirituality kind of book that doesn't have any real historical context to it. And I think, you know, just pausing, even if it's briefly, giving people the setting is important. And so the way I do it with Romans is I start first with with with who's writing to you. And so I give a little bit of a background on Paul and kind of what his calling was. And I do that actually in the very first verses of Romans because Paul actually talks about himself in the very first verses. And so I build in the authorship discussion into my exegesis. It's really arising from the text. Exactly. It comes right from the text. So let's talk about Paul. Here's who's writing to you. Why should you listen to him? What? What do the Romans think of Paul? The day, well, why would they have listened to him? And so you have a little bit of a sense of of Paul's identity as an author. And then briefly, I'll, I'll remind them that look, you know, Paul's probably writing at, you know, at a point in his life, probably related to the third missionary journey in Acts, probably somewhere in the mid-late fifties. Just give him a little bit of sense of the context. I think Paul's happened to write from Corinth. And that's the base of where he's writing this from. And I could get into those things. And then a little bit about the Roman church. We don't know a lot about the Roman church, honestly. We know that Christians got there before Paul ever got there, which is interesting. So Paul's not writing to a church. He planted. He's writing to a church that was there in some other way. We don't know who planted the Roman church. We don't know who got there. Paul said, I want to get the Rome. He hasn't been to Rome yet. So one of the curious oddities of Romans, unlike some of the other letters he writes, is he actually hasn't been to Rome at this point. He wants to get there, hasn't arrived. But the gospel clearly got there before Paul did. I think the gospel arrived in Rome very early, probably certainly in the forties in my opinion. So there'd been a Christian congregation there for some time before Paul wrote. It's probably composed of Jews and Gentiles mixed, which explains a lot of the context of the letter. Paul's doing a lot with the Jew Gentile themes and the letter. And so you have a congregation of Romans is probably trying to figure that out. How do we interact with Jews and Gentiles together and what's standing to each have in the covenant and so on. And so those are themes that are picked up on the book of Romans and come naturally out of a context you might assume is happening in the Roman church. But all of that is important but not dominant. I don't think a person has to be an expert in that background. I have a fruitful Bible study because the book has lessons for every generation and they are not tied to one place. You mentioned that he hasn't necessarily met these people. He didn't plant this church. So many of the other epistles Paul or the other writers are dealing with an issue in that church with people they have known. So here Paul has written this very significant letter to these people he hasn't met. Something has pushed him to take up his pen to write these people. Do we know what that is? We don't. There's a lot of discussion about that. Some have suggested that Paul is laying out a foundational document in light of his future visit. In other words, he's basically saying because I'm coming to you and I haven't planted this church, I'm giving you my court teaching here. I'm giving you my gospel speech because you need to know it as I as a foundational aspect of my future visit. So some have suggested something like that. Others have suggested that there is a crisis Paul has heard about. That there is some jujentile conflict in Rome that is sort of bubbled up and that Paul even though he hasn't been there has heard about and is addressing. That's a possibility. I don't think we know. Roman is one of those letters that since Paul isn't saying in the letter in the same way he uses in other letters these sort of situations he's addressing that the information is just hard to pin down. All right. Well, let's dive into this first chapter. It tells us, as you mentioned, something about who Paul is and who the people are that he's writing to. What do we get from this introduction that we want to be sure and communicate to our people when we're teaching through this book? I think the first five or six verses of Romans are pure gold. And I tell people, look, don't fly over this. It sounds like an introduction that you can sort of skip. Don't do it. I love how Paul starts with describing himself. He kind of gives an essence of his attitude. He's a servant, an essence of who he is. He's called to be an apostle. And then his purpose set apart for the gospel of God, which then he goes on this sort of, what looks like a tangent where he says, okay, now I'm going to take the next four verses to tell you what the gospel of God is. And this is why it's so important. Paul lays out. this theme in these very first verses. What is the gospel? It's promised beforehand through the prophets and the Holy Scriptures. He takes us back into the Old Testament context, which throughout the book of Romans, Paul is always making it clear that, "Hey, this gospel, I'm going to tell you, isn't some newfangled thing. This idea that you're saved by faith alone, I didn't come up with this. This isn't some new thing. Even Jesus, in one sense, isn't new. Yes, he was manifest on earth and the incarnation in real time and space, but the promises about him and the Scripture that speaks of him has preceded this for generations." So these early verses are really important. He talks about Jesus' identity, Christology. He's the son of God in power. So this opening section is so important to set the themes for the book. It's like a little miniature table of contents here right at the very beginning where Paul sort of dabbles in these themes so that he's going to unpack later. He says something about himself. He says something about the gospel. Then what I love is he says something about his audience. When he says in verse 7, he says to those in Rome who are loved by God and called and saints. In fact, those three words together, you're beloved, you're called and you're saints. I think those are identity-forming concepts that Paul says, "Look, I'm going to tell you about you. Here's who you are." So the beginning here is really critical. I think it's so interesting here in chapter 1. They are their loved, their saints. Yet if we look in verse 15, he says, "So I'm eager to preach the gospel to you." So many people have come to think about the gospel as something that needs to be preached to people who aren't saints. And yet he's about to speak to those who are in Christ. And what he wants to say to them, they need what they need most to hear is the gospel. Well, you know what's funny is I found this to be true in the Bible study I taught for these women the last couple of years. I can't tell you how many people came up to me who were true believers, solid Christians, who said, "You know, I think I might have understood the gospel really for the first time having sat in this Bible study." That's not a claim that they've been converted there. And they knew enough before that to, of course, be a follower of Jesus. But to understand the gospel, to sort of get it, to be able to really frame your life around it and understand how it works, I think these women were, there were some lights going on. And that's really exciting to see. And so you're absolutely right. There's a sense in which we think the gospel is enough to get converted. And now everything else is just sanctification. And Paul is like, "No, you need to, you need to come to grips with this because if you don't understand the gospel, it's going to truncate your sanctification. It's going to shrink it. It's going to, it's going to shrivel it up." And we see that connection later in the book as he heads into sanctification issues. You mentioned that there in the opening he is anchoring what he's about to talk about in what the Old Testament prophets wrote. And even in the pictures that the Old Testament provided people like David that he's descended from David. Then when we get here to this key part in chapter one, verses 16 and 17, once again he's talking about the gospel that he's not ashamed of it. That's the power of God for salvation. And then he actually draws from the Old Testament, an Old Testament quote, which we know comes from Habakkuk, the righteous shall live by faith. What do we want to communicate from these key verses, verses 16 and 17? Yeah, well, I tell my students and I of course said it in the women's Bible study that this is the theme verse of Romans 16 and 17 or theme verses you could say. This is the, this is the thesis statement of Paul. Here he lays out, in my opinion, and of course I'm not the first one to think this, that this is the core identity of his message. And it's interesting to see how this has played out in history. Of course, famously we know that this is the text that Martin Luther so famously discovered quote unquote and realized that he had missed the gospel. It was reading actually Romans 117 or Luther had the awakening that justification was about faith alone and it wasn't a new idea. It was back in the Old Testament. Of course Paul quoting Habakkuk here is very typical of Paul throughout this entire book. He's always saying that this good news is rooted in a prior revelation. This is the fulfillment of something that started long ago. In other words, what Jesus has done is not really something new, but rather he's completed something that began before. So the story of Jesus is in a new story. It's the finishing of an old story. And this is a very important thing for Paul. And this is why when Paul gets the Romans 4 and I love this, think about it for a moment. His, his poster, his poster child for for justification by faith alone is an Old Testament saying Abraham. I mean, this is amazing. It's like how many people could he have chosen in his own day himself included as here's how justification by faith alone works. And yet he goes back thousands of years to Abraham to say, look, you know, this is something that has always been true. And so when Paul speaks that way, it really does root us in a broad picture of redemptive history. It shows us that Christ is in the Old Testament. It gives us the big framework for things. And this is what really blew the minds of many of the women in my Bible study. And for us sitting in this conversation the day, it seemed so obvious to us. But for people who haven't thought about, they could not get over that Abraham was a believer in Jesus. It didn't even, didn't even sort of cross their mind that Abraham was in essence a Christian, that he was a follower of Jesus. And Jesus himself, of course, says this. He looked forward to my day. And he saw him was glad. And Paul saying the same thing that he looked forward to the coming Messiah. And he was justified by his faith. And it was credited to him as righteousness. And I think that's so transformative and really key to the whole book. I can remember the day the light went on in a class when I came to realize that Old Testament saints were saved the same way I was. And nobody ever said outright differently. But I think I had just always thought, well, they were saved by some kind of general faith in God. And through the Old Testament sacrificial system. And I'm saved by putting my faith in Jesus. But just what you have just articulated that people don't understand as we're teaching, we shouldn't assume that people get that. Oh, most people don't, even in reform churches, most people don't. What you realize is most people are heading into these discussions. They're probably converted. They're believers. They love Jesus. But no one has ever taught this to them. And this is why sustained expository teaching of biblical books is so critical. They need to understand that and they need to understand through the lens of scripture itself and they need to see it in the text. And that's what that Romans does so well. Well, if we have broken this up into 16 weeks and we were hoping to cover all of Romans 1 in that first session, and we get to verses 18 through the rest of the chapter, we might be a little bit nervous. Yeah. That if we deal with this text in a faithful way that half of our class isn't going to come back again, because it deals with, it did. Yeah. I've not half my class. But I taught Romans 18 through 29 or 32 really, the verses you were referring to, which deal with a lot of controversial ethical issues. And I had a couple of women who said they weren't going to come back because of what I said that Paul had said. And I had 115. What did you say? Tell us what you said that they found offensive. They did not agree with my interpretation, which of course we would are using just my interpretation of Paul's view of homosexuality. And they were offended by the idea that God condemned homosexuality. And so they said they didn't think this could be the Bible study for them. Now, a lot of the, you have to realize that the Bible study attracted variety of women from different contexts. Some I don't even think were necessarily believers. But some found that problematic. And I told them, look, I hope you come back. You have to know that I'm just simply teaching what Paul said. This isn't the view I came up with. I'm reflecting what I argue is the view from scripture. And what's interesting about a couple of these individuals, I didn't even really try to say Paul didn't say it. I think they recognize that Paul was teaching it. I think they just read a point where they were willing even to say, well, then I don't agree with Paul. And I said, well, look, could you, I encourage you to come back and stick with the Bible study. And one of them did actually one woman stayed. And she stayed for the whole first year. So I was very encouraging. Well, can you help us with how you dealt with what the scriptures are saying here? Yeah, this is how did you put it in words as to the argument Paul is making what he's trying to convince us of? Yeah, well, this is the beginning, of course, of Paul's section proving justification by faith alone. And he begins by dealing with the issue of of depravity and sin. And so Paul begins in a typical place or in an untypical place, I should say, in the modern culture. He actually starts the gospel with a discussion of the wrath of God. And this is one of the things that in our modern day, we don't like to think about. We want to start the gospel with the love of God. And I get that. And there's a sense in which that's a fine place to start. I mean John 316 for God's love of the world, right? And so the Bible starts in multiple places. But it's interesting that Paul here says, look, if you want to get my message of justification by faith alone, it all begins here. God is, is, is turned his wrath on a sinful world. And it's a deserving wrath. It is not a capricious God's, you know, easily ticked off sort of wrath where God is, you know, flying off the handle for no reason. No Paul here makes the case that God's wrath is utterly entirely and fully justified because of the rebellion of human beings. And what is that rebellion? doesn't do a lot of it here, but fundamentally it's the denial of the creator, who's made them. The creator they know, Paul lays out one of the most fundamental epistemological frameworks here, which is that all human beings know God. They do. They inherently know God through the created world and through the law of God written on their heart. And then they take that knowing knowledge of God and they suppress it and they deny it and they swap the true God for idols and for false gods in the true way for false ways. And so what's interesting about Paul's argument here is he says this was knowingly, consciously, intentionally done by human beings all over the world. And then his standard example of this, of that rebellion against God and a flip flopping of what is true for what is false is the sin of homosexuality. And so homosexuality for Paul is sort of the culmination of God giving people over to their own depravity. And it's a culmination in some ways of an example of how far people go to reject the natural created order that they know. And so Paul's whole point in that section is to demonstrate the culpability of human beings and the justifiability of God's wrath. Now once you get that, then the gospel becomes all the more meaningful because people don't understand why Jesus matters if you don't get that. In fact, this is why we share the gospel when there's shrugged the shoulders at us and go, "Well, why does that matter to me? I'm a pretty good person." And Paul has to start here. But of course, at the core of it just happens to be in our day and age is a very controversial example to Paul shows, namely this issue of homosexuality. In the past, when people approach Romans one, everyone just was fine with that, that the culture agreed that homosexuality was wrong. Not in Paul's day. It's interesting. You know, when we look at Greek culture, actually Greek culture was quite willing to embrace homosexuality to a number of points. And so, we get this idea that homosexuality being promulgated in our modern day is something new in the history of the world. And I always remind people it's new in the history of America. This idea of homosexual sort of pro-homosexual agenda, but it's not new in the history of the world. The idea of homosexuality being an issue was very prevalent in Paul's day and the Greco-Roman world. And so, Paul would have been very keen to make sure that people understood that the Christian sexual ethic was very different than that. In fact, this is one of the things that's interesting about early Christianity is one of the ways that Christians stood out from their culture. They stood out in lots of ways, obviously, but one of the primary ways they stood out is they're distinct of sexual ethic. And that pertains not just to the issue of homosexuality. That pertains to the issue of just fidelity and marriage and marriage of one spouse and not sexual promiscuity. It was actually Christian sexual ethics that made them seem so peculiar in the ancient world. And so Paul, you're just laying out the biblical sexual ethic using this one example of homosexuality. And this is something that distinguishes Christians from everyone else in that time period. Well, we know that over the course of the book, Paul's going to get to presenting the hope for sinners. Yes. However, when we're teaching this, we come to the end of Romans one and we haven't quite gotten to that hope. Paul takes a while. So, I mean, in practical terms, while we're teaching this, if you're doing that first session, do you really want to end on this note of the first session? How are you going to bring in the hope of the gospel appropriately in this first session on chapter one? Yeah. So, yeah. So, it's interesting. Paul takes several chapters, actually, to get to the full revelation of his good news. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think we move over the sin thing too quickly to the gospel thing. And we don't let it marinate a little bit. We don't let it sink in. We don't let people really reflect upon it and really feel the weight of it. And we think that we're doing them a service by jumping quickly to the gospel and leaving it behind. But I think we then make the gospel less of a cherished thing, less important, less wonderful. And that's not a suggest, of course, that we teach five, six Bible studies without telling people the gospel and hopes that the mounting guilt over their sin leads them to Christ. That's not my point. But I do think there's a sense of which, after the first Bible study, if people leave with a weightiness, they need to let that be there. Now, after the first Bible study, I may say something at the end of such as, "Hey, you know, Paul's setting up for the good news here." You know, and I know that he's going to tell us that there's hope in Christ. And we're going to get to that in a later chapter. But for now, we need to recognize that the gospel message starts with wrath. As uncomfortable, as awkward, as unpopular as that might be, we've got to start there. And if we don't start there, we actually don't have the gospel. So help us as we continue to move through these first few chapters, through chapters two and three. Perhaps you can just summarize for us the argument that Paul is making. And if there are any particular points in two or three that you think often get taught wrongly, or sometimes it's not so much that we teach things wrongly, but perhaps inadequately, or not quite right. So help us with this section. Well, what Paul lays out his, you know, simpleness of human beings in chapter one, the obvious reaction he knows is coming from his fellow Jews is, "Well, that doesn't include us. That doesn't include religious people. That just includes those pagans out there." You know, we religious people are doing just fine, Paul. Thank you very much. And so chapter two, of course, is well known as Paul saying, "Well, hold on just a second. Actually, you might find that you religious people might be even more troubled than those so-called pagans out there because you think you got it together when you really don't." So Paul labors in chapter two to deal with the issue of his fellow Jews who maybe are convinced that this doesn't apply to them and that they're doing just fine, that religiosity is enough. And he talks there, obviously, about circumcision and about other things that people might rely on to sort of protect themselves. And Paul says, "Now, you're also under the same guilt." And then in chapter three, of course, in the first 19 and 20 verses is where Paul finishes his case, citing extensively from the Old Testament, saying, "Look, again, what I'm telling you is not new. The idea of a sinful humanity that doesn't seek God, doesn't look after God, doesn't pursue God, that's standard fare." And Paul lays out in the first half of Romans three, Romans three, what is probably the classic spot for our view of total depravity. And what we mean by total depravity isn't that, of course, people are as sinful as they possibly can be, but what we mean by total depravity is that all aspects of their personhood are affected by sin. It's in its totality. So in other words, their actions are affected by sin, but then their will is affected by sin. They don't even want to do good things, right? And then their cognitive thinking is also affected by sin, right? I don't think rightly. And Paul's like, "You understand. It's not just what you do. It's who you are. This sin runs everywhere in you. It's a pervasive cancer in you. You can't just coordinate off and deal with it. It's all encompassing." And that sets the stage for what I think is maybe the most beautiful passages in all of Romans, which is 321 and following. We're Paul then for the first time really articulates his view of justification. You mentioned that we don't think right. Do you think that's a challenge in our culture today and that as we teach it, it's a challenge to get people to really believe that our minds are infected with foolish thinking and dark thinking. Because in our world today we like to promote thinking outside the box and to be open to ideas. So how does that in particular a challenge to our culture today? Oh, it's an enormously important. There's so many applications of it. One obvious application is I see so many Christians get flustered and upset when non-Christians reject the gospel or when biblical scholars come in and say the Bible's rubbish or they're non-Christian friend mocks their view of Christianity. I want to remind them, look, the non-Christian without the help of the Spirit is not able to think rightly. He's not able to understand truth even when it's right under his nose. He can't comprehend or see or even want to see what is true and right. So why are you so bothered by the fact that people widely reject the gospel when the Bible actually predicts that very thing by saying that the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit. So that's a real critical sort of reassurance people look, don't get flustered by this. This is what you expect. The other application of it I think that's important is that people tend to think that their own salvation is due to the fact that they figured it out and that they understood it rightly. Well, I guess I'm just smarter than my next door neighbor and I'm like, no, your mind was messed up too, right? And so there's a sense in which God had to come in by the Spirit and enlighten you so you could see truth. And then the other application of it is even post-Christian, you still have to realize that that remnant of sin affects the way you think and that you don't think always rightly. You have to always be comparing yourself to the Word of God. Always have to go back to Scripture, always be looking to repent of false thinking because people think of sin as just what I do. You can violate God's law by the manner in which you cognitively operate. If you think according to non-Christian standards, that is a form of sin and that's a form of disloyalty. God wants us to love Him with His mind with our minds and not just with our hearts. And I think that's an important aspect here. As our people get a sense of that, that our minds are thinking doesn't work right here in chapter 3. It's going to help us much later, isn't it, when we get to chapter 12 and we're told to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed. How is that going to happen by the renewing of our mind? Absolutely. Paul circles back around on that theme very wonderfully in Romans 12. Yeah, the renewal of your mind just reminds us that the The Christian life has a very rich, robust, cognitive, intellectual dimension to it. Paul has really set up the problem in terms of the wrath of God and the sinfulness of humanity. How does this argument then pick up in chapter 3, verse 21? There's a bit of a turn. This is the best passage in the entire Book of Romans, arguably the best passage in the whole Bible. In fact, I think it was, I don't want to misquote here, it might have been either Luther or Calvin that said this passage is the center of the whole Bible. Romans 3, 21 and following. The center of the whole Bible. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. What good news? The but now is the key. All this looks grim, but you realize that you can actually have a righteous status as Paul and you can get it apart from the law and you can get it by faith through Christ. This is the sort of big punch, the big punch line that comes in here. What's interesting here is the phrase "righteousness of God." I have to say that ESV gets credit for being wooden here. The phrase in Greek, decals in A to Thaew is a genitive righteousness of God and it's been interpreted in a number of different ways. Theologians in Reformed World certainly have always argued that's what we call a genitive of source. In other words, it's better translated "righteousness from God." Here's where I have to give the old NIV credit. We don't have access to the old 1984 NIV anymore, but what I loved about that 1984 NIV was that it actually took the righteousness of God phrase and translated it consistently through Romans as "righteousness from God." I think that's right. It's that verse again with that mindset, it says, "But now a righteousness from God has been made manifest." In other words, God can give you a righteous status from Him and how am I going to get that? Not from the law. Paul is very clear, okay, you need to just put that aside. The law ain't going to get you there, but there is a way to get to it. He says it's been testified through the Old Testament, through the law and the prophets, and then his big singer in verse 22, "The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." And then he reminds them, there's no distinction. Jew and Gentile here, everybody saved in the same way. So this is the culmination of it, and there's so much more in this passage, obviously we're not going to be able to do in an interview, but I just love there's imputation here. There's a very clear understanding of justification by faith here, faith is the instrument by which we receive that righteous status, there's so many interesting things here, but this is. Well, do talk to us a little bit about some key words here, because these are good Bible words that we've got to have a deep understanding of. You use the word imputation, we've got propitiation, and we've got justification. So would you just talk to us a little bit about how we can communicate the root meaning of those words effectively? Yeah, absolutely. So let's just run through the list here. First justification, Paul says, verse 24, and we are justified by his grace, okay? So justified is, understood as an act by which God declares a sinner to be righteous, okay? Is it a legal word? Yeah, it's a legal forensic concept where God declares us as having righteous status. You contrast that with a Roman Catholic understanding and justification is God making someone righteous, has this transformative sense, but that's not what Paul is doing here with the term justified. It's God changing our status, our legal standing, that we are regarded as righteous. We are regarded as having a righteous status in his eyes. And so say that, that comes by grace, as a gift that says here, so that's really key. And whenever you think about God declaring someone to be righteous, which is what justification means, of course, the question is, well, how could God do that? In other words, how could God maintain his own integrity by looking at a sinner and saying, you're righteous when he knows, good and well, they're not, right? They're sinners and they've got all kinds of guilt. So how could God do that and escape culpability himself? And honestly, this is a question most people will never ask. They never, never ponder for a moment that God forgiving sinners might actually infringe on God's own character. They never think for a moment that, wait, if an earthly judge let a criminal go free, wouldn't we call that judge bad? So if God lets a criminal go free and calls him righteous, doesn't that make God bad? How does God avoid that? And this is where the concept of righteousness comes in. God avoids it because that righteous status really exists. It's in Christ. Christ has accomplished it for us and given it to us, that's what we mean by the term imputation. So when God looks at a sinner and declares us righteous, he's actually seeing righteousness. It's not ours, it's not earned. It's an alien righteousness given to us through Christ. And so that is a key concept here. And that's the hope of our assurance, is that I don't go to heaven based on my own merit. But Christ merit, how could God ever reject Christ? Never. So he'll never reject us. And so that's a really key phrase here. How about propitiation? Yes, this whole section is loaded. So verse 25, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood. So this is a key Old Testament term. Propitiation, I appreciate the ESP here sticking with this word. Other translations have kicked it to the curb. And on one level, you can understand why this word might not be attractive for English translators because most people don't get it. They don't know what propitiation means, they struggle to understand it. But historically, in the Old Testament context, this is a term that very much has a specific connotation of satisfying the wrath of God. In other words, propitiation isn't just taking away sins. It's not just washing away sins, it's not just redeeming or forgiving. What propitiation gets at is that through Christ, all the wrath of God is fully satisfied. And I use the analogy of, it's like Christ is this giant sponge that soaks up in Himself all the wrath of God, all of it. So God's wrath is spent, it's poured out, it's leveled completely on Christ. And so to say that Christ is our propitiation is to say that He's so absorbed the wrath of God that there's no wrath left for us. And this is part of the good news too, is that if a person fears the wrath of God, here's where Paul is going with this, if you fear the wrath of God and you believe in Christ, once you realize that He's a propitiation, it's been soaked up fully. It's been soaked up fully, what wrath is left for you? The answer is none. And so this is where the good news comes in, is that it's just a great term. And by the way, once again, notice that propitiation implies wrath. This is why Paul says, you don't understand the gospel if you don't understand wrath. That's what Jesus has done. He soaked it all up for you. Now, the culmination of this is verse 26, and I'll mention this. All this was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that, and here's the big zinger, so that God might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. In other words, he might maintain his own integrity, that he would be still just. He's still punishing sin. He's punishing it in Christ. And yet, he also is the one who can declare us righteous. He can be both just and justifier at the same time. And that is the glory of the gospel. You were talking earlier about the way in which Old Testament believers were saved, and that it's the same way as us, they put their faith in Jesus. And that becomes really clear, they're in verse 25, doesn't it? This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. But of course, we know that past over, wasn't sweeping them under the rug. Correct. In divine forbearance, God in one sense has waited to punish sin fully in Christ. That by his grace, even in the Old Testament era, he has not fully let out his wrath, that he has saved it up, so to speak, and overlook sins and anticipation of what Christ would do. When we get into chapter 4, he's, once again, he's working from the Old Testament. He's going to give us a couple of pictures of how this all works, isn't he? How it worked for Abraham. Oh, yeah. In his justification, and how it worked for David, how can we communicate these pictures? He's showing us of how justification worked for both Abraham and David in a way people can easily take hold of. Well, what's great about these sections is that Paul gives tangible real life examples. Everybody, of course, in the history of the Jewish world knows Abraham's story. They see his great faithfulness and his great deeds and his great works and his great obedience, and you could easily conclude in the story of Abraham that Abraham, because of how great he was, surely God saved him because of how great he was. Surely God saved him because of all his good deeds and what he did. And so Paul really says here, yes, Abraham did do great things, but those weren't the cause of his salvation. Those weren't the, those weren't the, wasn't the root of it. Abraham was justified by faith. Paul goes into the issue of when circumcision happened, with Abraham, hey, look, Abraham didn't get a circumcision until after he was justified by faith and that just plucks one of the arguments right out of the ground for the Jews saying, no, you know, circumcision is the means by way we have standing with God and no, not with Abraham. So Abraham sort of checks every box here as proving Paul's case and it's just unassailable and there's no way out. And this is why it's such a good, a good passage. I almost think to understand, verse four, we can help people understand it with an accounting mindset rather than a theological mindset because when we get to verse 23, but the words it was counted to him, you've got this sense, early we had a judicial sense of justification. And now we almost, now we go to the finance year's office. And we have this account before God. It's like a ledger. Yes, where he's moving it from one side to the other. That's exactly right. And this is a very real righteousness. And it wasn't just any account knows you can't just make up numbers out of thin air. It's a very real righteousness that gets his debt is paid. But that's not the sum of salvation. Also transferred to his account is a righteousness from God, as you were talking about. The text isn't arguing that that faith is the grounds for our justification. It's not like God says, "Well, because you believe, therefore I'm going to guard you righteous." No, faith is the instrument instrument by which you acquire the thing that allows you to have righteous standing, namely Christ. The righteousness of Christ. That's right. Transfer to your account. And this is one of the big mistakes theologically that people make that I love how the book of Romans fixes is people misunderstand the rule of faith. They think God's, when you say I'm saved by faith, what some people mean is I'm saved because of faith. It's the grounds of my standing. And you don't want to go there. That is in an accurate way of describing it. Because if you make your faith, the grounds of your salvation, then you're always doubting whether you have a solid ground. Because we all flux in good days and bad days where faith is strong and weak. Faith, though, according to Paul, is just the instrument by which we grab the thing that's the grounds. It's just the conduit by which we apprehend Christ and get him. And he's the grounds. And once he's the grounds, there's no, there's no worrying about that ground because it's great. As we're teaching through the book of Romans, we're spread out weak to weak. And yet Paul is building a case. So it would seem to me each week we have to keep centering our teaching in the argument that he's building. And that becomes clear when we get here to chapter 5 where he says, "Therefore, since we have been justified, we have peace with God." So where is he taking the argument now? He's told us about God's wrath, our sinfulness and even you Jews are sinful. Now there's this alien righteousness that's available to us received by faith. Where does it go in chapter 5? Chapter 5 is, I mean, you know, I sound like a broken record. Every chapter seems like the greatest chapter of all time here I know. And you know, Paul seems to outdo himself each following chapter. But chapter 5 is a stunner too. So many good things in here. He starts in chapter 5, John asked some implications of his gospel. And it's a way to help the reader understand their status shift with God. And the very opening line there is key in chapter 5. "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God." Now this language is so critical to the book because you know, when most people talk about peace with God, it means something very different than what Paul means here. You know, you might hear a person who who talks to you about their religious life and they say, "Well, finally made my peace with God." And what they really mean is I let God off the hook. I finally forgave God. I was upset with God for a while and finally I said, "Okay, God, I forgive you." You're going to be lucky enough to ask me. But Paul is talking about something very different here. He's not talking about us sort of giving God a break. Rather, the peace with God implies that there was once not peace with God. There's enmity between God and man. In other words, there was wrath. Here's that theme that pops up again. And think about it. Basically, Paul is saying through the gospel, the war is over. There's a ceasefire here. There's a truce. There's peace. And even more than that, there's not just peace. You're not part of the family. He's going to say later that he's not just that God's not going to lower the boom on you anymore because of wrath. He's actually going to invite you in as a son and a daughter and let you sit in his table and eat his food and he's going to adopt you as a child. And so Paul begins here, what he carries out through later chapters, which is a discussion of some of the some of the implications of the gospel. But the second chapter, part of chapter 5, is really a culmination of his case. I tell you, before you go, will you just touch on verse 10? I'm thinking about our modern people we're teaching. Nobody thinks of themselves as an enemy of God. Maybe we're not sure about them. Maybe we're a seeker. Maybe we're just apathetic toward God. But here, Paul says, while we were enemies, and maybe we want to read that and think that's talking about someone else. And perhaps in the same way that we resist that our thinking doesn't work right. Don't we as modern people resist the idea that we were ever enemies of God? Absolutely. Yeah, this is a key phrase and it's picked up again from what I said about verse 1 about having peace with God. The same thing you're pointing out in verse 10 is the same. And that is, you have to realize that in Christ, you go from from enemy to child and you really were at odds with God. And this is so countercultural to what people think about the relationship with God. You know, when people think about religion and they're standing with God, they think, "Well, you know, I'm an agnostic. I'm not sure what I think about God. I haven't really decided what I think about God, but what never dawns on people is what God might think of them." In other words, people always talk about what they think of God or whether they believe God exists or what he would do or wouldn't do or what his characteristics are like or what God really thinks about the world. But no one ever bothers to think about what God might think of them. And this reveals the narcissistic culture we live in. Everyone just assumes they're great and that the problem's elsewhere. And so never dawns on them that God might have a problem with them that they may not be doing so hot. They may not have such great standing. And Paul's use of the term "enemy" here is just so important is that God regarded you as an enemy that you were under His wrath and deservedly so. It's not capricious. It's not arbitrary. It's not that God was in a bad mood. No, you really deserve to be in that status. But in the gospel, we have full reconciliation. What I love here is that in verse 10, unless you get that enemy status, you don't actually get how great the gospel is. Because what Paul's point here is that God loved you when you were in the enemy status. In other words, even though you opposed him and you hated him and you didn't have anything to do with him and under his wrath, he still loved you enough to pursue you and save you while we were enemies. We were reconciled through Christ. So continuing them with the second half of chapter 5. In verses 12 through the end of 5 is a very complicated section where he talks about the first Adam and the second Adam Christ and is complicated as it is. It's also really critical to getting the gospel. Because what Paul does in verses 12 through the end of chapter 5 is he completes his ledger discussion. He began with Abraham. How is it that righteous status is given to us? In other words, what's the nuts and bolts of the accounting? How does it actually work? And here's where Paul lays out a very important thing to recognize. The way God relates to people is through representatives, through mediators, through covenant heads. People may not like the way God does that, but that's the way God has chosen to do it. In the covenant of works, we are represented by Adam who acted for us. What he did, we did. What was true of him is true of us. So Adam sinned and he became a rebel and we are regarded as sinners now because of what Adam did. But the good news, of course, is the flip of that. There's a second Adam Christ and that he obeyed or the first Adam sinned. In the first Adam, we were condemned. In the second Adam, we have life. And so what Paul does here is sets up it. Truthfully, the entire scheme of all of redemptive history, which is that there's two Adams in the question for every human being is which one represents you. Are you under the first Adam? Or are you under the second Adam? Are you under a covenant of works? Or are you under a covenant of grace? And by the way, when you think about the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, that encapsulates all of human history. This is the only two manners of which you relate to God, either relate to God through your first representative or your second. And so he sets up a paradigm here that is the grounds for our view of imputation. This is why we think that we get a righteous status from Christ because he represents us. And so if he's righteous and he represents us, then we're regarded as righteous. So when people talk about the doctor of imputation, Romans 5 is a very important passage for that. That incredible verse there would seem one to camp on as a teacher to really help people understand this. For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, of course, speaking of Adam. So by the one man's obedience, many will be made righteous. There's the hope of the gospel right there. Yeah, exactly. He's basically saying notice that Paul ties our status to the acts of others. Your fate is the term by either the act of Adam or the act of Christ. No where does he say oh and buy your own personal good works. Now, see notice what he's doing here. He's taking good works out