Today, I am reading and commenting on Romans 15-16
I never realized before reading through Romans this year that there is really just one theme running through the entire letter. While Paul touches on other things as he expounds on this idea, he keeps coming back to it. Paul says again and again, in different ways, we should love others as God loves us. That means accepting people as they are, not as we wish they would be because God accepted us as we were when we first came to Him. However, that does not mean that we should not encourage people to change. Indeed, Paul tells us tat we should help others to do what is right and build them up in the Lord. Just as Christ accepted us as we were, as we are, and gave us the Holy Spirit to transform us into who God made us to be, so we should accept people as they are and encourage them to accept the Holy Spirit’s transformation of themselves.
Today, I am reading and commenting on Romans 11-14
Paul continues his discussion of the paradox between our free will and God’s providence. Our salvation is not the result of any action we have taken and therefore not something which we deserve. Rather we were saved by God’s grace and mercy because He chose us. Yet, we must be careful because if we stop having faith, and acting accordingly, God will reject us as He has rejected those who refused His free gift. Even the fact that God has chosen us does not make us better than others. Paul’s entire point here is to address a very human tendency: the desire to elevate ourselves above others, to find some way to claim that we are better than other people. Sometimes, we do that by claiming to be worse than they, to be a better sinner than those others. This even forms the basis for the problem Paul addresses when he tells us not to condemn others. If our purpose in telling others that what they do is to tell them, “I am better than you because I do not do THAT,” (whatever THAT is) then we are failing to truly love our neighbor.
In chapter 12 Paul brings all of this together. I have already touched on his instructions that we should not think more of ourselves than we really are. We should love each other with genuine affection, not just going through the motions of how we think we should treat others, but actually caring about them. As an aside I want to note that you cannot truly care about those whom you have never encountered. In order to follow Paul’s instruction to truly care for others we need to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us. Otherwise we will find ourselves conforming to behaviors and norms which our society claims are correct. Those behaviors and norms are those of people who choose to think of themselves as better than others, who choose to think that only some people are deserving of love. When we should know full well that none of us are deserving of love, but God loved us anyway. Which is why we should love others, especially those we are tempted to believe are not deserving of love.
Some of what Paul writes in today’s passage is relatively easy to understand and some of it is extremely difficult to understand. We easily understand that if we allow ourselves to think about sinful things we will find ourselves doing those things, while if we allow the Holy Spirit to control our thoughts and think about godly things we will do godly things. Following up on that is the idea that if we allow the Holy Spirit to do so, He will help us to do God’s will. (The part about helping us pray syncs right up with my comments I made the other day about needing to pray more). We can even easily understand that nothing, no power, thing, or being, can make it so that God does not love us. We will experience God’s love whether we wish to or not. For those of us who desire the experience of God’s love there can be no greater comfort than to realize that God is looking out for our best interests.
Which brings us to the things which are more difficult to understand. Elsewhere Paul speaks about the need to choose to do God’s will. Even at the beginning of this passage he writes that we must not allow our sinful nature to control us. Yet he also writes that we can neither choose nor work to receive God’s mercy; that God chooses to whom He will show mercy and to whom He will not. So, what does this mean? There may be more to it than this, but at the very least, it means that I cannot consider myself better than any other person. Being a follower of Christ does not make me better than someone who is not, not even the vilest sinner I can imagine. I am not a better person than Adolf Hitler was, than Josef Stalin was, than the murdering rapist just caught by the police. I have not done those evil, terrible things because of God’s grace and mercy, not because I am somehow better than those people. Yet, to fully experience the joy which God has in mind for me I must choose to embrace His love and allow it to transform me.
Paul tells us that Abraham’s faith in God’s promise to him never wavered. Yet, Paul was aware that Abraham took Hagar as a concubine in order to have a son by her. This tells us that God does not count our moments of human weakness against us. Or, perhaps it tells us that Abraham came to believe that he needed to change his life’s course in order for God’s promise to be fulfilled. In any case, we know that God told Abraham that His promise would be fulfilled through a son which Abraham would have with Sarah, and that is indeed what happened. My point being that even when we make mistakes in following God’s plan for us, if we maintain our faith, God will honor His promises. From a human point of view, we would say that Abraham’s faith had wavered, but Paul tells us that from God’s point of view it did not.
Perhaps Paul gives me the greatest hope towards the end of chapter seven in verse nineteen when he says, “I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.” Then he provides the answer by telling us that God, through Jesus Christ, will free us from this situation. I know that all too often I do what is wrong and do not do what is good, but I have faith that the Holy Spirit will transform me in God’s time. This passage gives me hope. If God considered Abraham’s faith to have never wavered, and if Paul found himself doing what was wrong, then I can know that even I can be changed by the Holy Spirit.
I am not going to try to hit all of the points of importance in this passage. In fact the first thing the Spirit reminded me of from this passage was not one of the things Paul was trying to communicate here. When I read how Paul prayed fro the Believers in Rome I was reminded that I do not pray as I should, nor as much as I should. It was a reminder for me to once again seek the Holy Spirit’s aid in improving my prayer life. Paul writes here of praying day and night, I am lucky to pray a few minutes each day.
Paul expounds here on a point which Jesus made. Anyone who seeks God will find God because the Universe which God created reveals His nature to anyone who truly looks. As a result of this fact, much of the wickedness in the world comes about from people attempting to convince themselves that God is not what the Universe shows them that He truly is. Those of us who acknowledge God need to be careful not to think that doing so makes us better than those who refuse to do so. The fact of the matter is that even we who acknowledge God are guilty of doing wrong, which means we are no better than those who deny His existence. In fact, no one is able to truly do what is right unless God’s Spirit transforms them. We can only be justified before God by placing our faith in Christ. This is where the whole thing gets very complicated. The fact that we can only be justified, and are justified, through faith does not mean that it is acceptable to continue to do that which we know is wrong. Our faith should tell us that doing what is wrong is self-destructive. Even when we do not know how it can work out, our faith tells us that doing what is wrong reduces the amount of joy in our lives while doing what is right increases that joy. I know this to be true, yet I still struggle with sin. Which brings me back to my point from the first paragraph: I need to seek for the Holy Spirit to transform me into someone who prays as, and as much as, I know that I ought.
Luke’s account of Paul’s testimony before Agrippa contains two things I want to highlight today. It seems that for most of Paul’s testimony, Festus viewed it as pointless exposition by a religious scholar. However, when Paul declared that he believed in the resurrection of the dead, Festus could contain himself no longer and declared that Paul was crazy to believe that. We will find many who are willing to listen to the Gospel as long as we talk about the moral code it enacts, but who will be unwilling to continue when we explain why that moral code is binding. Paul’s responds to Festus’ accusation of insanity by appealing to Agrippa’s knowledge of what had happened. I want to note that Agrippa clearly felt that Paul’s appeal to him was an attempt to get him to make a commitment to Christ. Which brings me to something we should all strive for. We should all pray, just as Paul did, that those we encounter come to know the Lord, whether it happens quickly or takes a long time. We should strive to have the same urgency to communicate the Gospel which Paul had, desiring people to respond at once but being willing to wait for the Holy Spirit to work.
Luke’s account of Paul’s trip to Rome as a prisoner tells us a lot about Paul’s character and how others saw him. When the ship docked in Sidon, the commander of the guards escorting Paul allowed him to go onshore to visit with friends. Then later, when they were in Fair Havens and debating whether to go to a better winter harbor, Paul was consulted, even though they did not take his advice. Then when the ship became caught in the storm which eventually wrecked it, Paul took a leadership role, encouraging those aboard, convincing the soldiers to keep the sailors from abandoning ship, and getting everyone to eat shortly before they ran aground.
Paul’s appearance before the Jewish high council illustrates an interesting fact. On a purely logical analysis of their beliefs, the Pharisees disagreed to a greater extent with the Sadducees than they did with Paul and the Christians. Paul took advantage of this divide to prevent the high council from adopting a charge against him which might carry weight with the Romans. It is worth looking at this divide. The Pharisees believed in the supernatural, the Sadducees did not. We see such alliances between conflicting ideologies today, where people work with people whose worldview is in complete contradiction to their own to attack others who they perceive as a greater threat. We should be prepared to point out the conflicts in these alliances and be aware when we are entering into such agreements.
We see the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders in those who plotted to kill Paul. Our focus should be on avoiding the same hypocrisy (and not necessarily letting ourselves off the hook because we will not go as far as murder). Are we willing to compromise our professed values in order to silence those with whom we disagree? Do we proclaim to believe in honesty, but then lie to win the argument? I will not go on, I think you get the point.
As Paul was traveling to Jerusalem, several prophets warned that he would be imprisoned if he went there. Paul expressed a willingness to be imprisoned, and even to die, in service to Christ. We should emulate Paul in this. However, at no point in his account does Luke explain to us why Paul felt that he had to go to Jerusalem. Perhaps the Holy Spirit was directing Paul to Jerusalem. or perhaps Paul was going to Jerusalem for his own reasons. We should be willing to do God’s will even if it means persecution and suffering, but we need not seek out persecution and suffering. Having said that, sometimes the fact that persecution and suffering will result from certain actions is evidence that God desires us to take those actions. Which is complicated by the fact that sometimes the reverse is true. We should not seek out persecution and suffering for their own sake, but we should embrace them when they result from doing God’s will. In summary, I am not convinced that it was God’s will for Paul to go to Jerusalem to be arrested, but Paul was not acting counter to God’s will by going to Jerusalem.
We do not know what led Demetrius the silversmith to set in motion the events which led to the riot in Ephesus. The context suggests that he was alarmed by events which followed Believers realizing that sorcery and incantations were incompatible with following Jesus. I see two scenarios. In one of them, Demetrius witnessed large numbers of Believers burning their spell books and realized that as more and more people become Believers, fewer and fewer would be buying the shrines he sold. In the other scenario, Demetrius observed that he was losing customers and realized this was because they were becoming believers.
In either case, he gathered together the craftsmen to whom he subcontracted work and told them that Paul was bad for business. Realizing that that those not in his business were unlikely to be concerned with his loss of profits, he made this an insult to Artemis, and thus to the city. As a result, he was able to stir people up against Christianity. Or to be more precise, he stirred people up, but most of them had no idea what they were protesting about. We learn a lot about mobs here. First, often times those who get a mob started do so for reasons different than those which they talk about. Second, once a mob gets started people join in without knowing what it is all about.
Luke intentionally contrasts the reception Paul and Silas received in Berea with that which they received in Thessalonica. In both cities, Paul used Old Testament scripture to make the case that Jesus was the Messiah. In Thessalonica, some of the Jews, and many of the God-fearing Gentiles accepted his arguments and became believers. However, a large fraction of the Jews did not accept his interpretation of the Scripture, and became upset that so many of the Gentiles did. On the other hand, in Berea the Jews actually read the Scriptures which Paul used in context and even those who did not agree with him appear to have accepted that his was a valid interpretation. It was only when the Jews who opposed Paul in Thessalonica got word that he was preaching in Berea that trouble started there. Trouble and violence seemed to follow Paul around, but this shows that it came from those who would not accept Paul’s arguments but were unable to counter them and felt threatened by those who did accept Paul’s teaching. We can expect a similar response today.
It was in Athens that Paul realized the limits of using logic to convince people to come to God. In Athens, Paul tried to start from basic assumptions to make the case for Christ, but, while a small number became believers, most people thought that faith in Jesus was foolishness because they were unwilling to accept that the dead could rise again. As a result, when he went to Corinth he used a much more experiential approach (some of this understanding comes from what Paul wrote in his letters to the Corinthians). Instead of spending so much time arguing that the logic of Scripture showed that Jesus was the Messiah, he preached, and demonstrated, that faith in Jesus would bring about a change for the better in our lives. As a result, those who opposed him were unable to gain any traction with the people or with the authorities.
