Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: All right, you ready for this?
Who likes, who enjoyed their college classes or high school, high school lectures that were 45 minutes and up? Who liked those?
Okay, good.
Because there's just not a way to say what needs to be said in little, short, sweet 29 and a half minute messages, which is by law the maximum amount of time that you're able to communicate to a human being before they lose their train of thought.
It can't happen with something like what we're getting ready to do, which is an intense look, academic, scholarly, theological, spiritual, every component of the book of romans we need to investigate. So let's jump in. Romans 323. I'm going to read you some scriptures, okay? And I want you to tell me if you know what they are. Romans 323. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of goddess. Romans 623. For the wages of sin is death. Second part of 623. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans ten, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And romans 1013, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. What is it?
That's the Roman's road to salvation.
Jack Hiles, a now infamous 20th century independent Baptist pastor. He was later accused of some heinous things, but he is the one who claimed in 1970 to have invented the Roman's road.
Okay, it can't be verified, but anyway, the verses were short, easy to memorize and express such a compact description of salvation that the Romans road just spread like wildfire as a tool for evangelism, for christians to share their faith. Has anyone ever heard those verses presented in that way in a gospel track? Or anyone ever said it to you when you were living your heathen pagan life? Oh, wait, that's me. Sorry.
You probably are at least familiar with those in the gospel presentation. Now, I want to say this about roman roads. Historically speaking, roman roads were amazing. I'm talking about in Rome. They were exceptionally well built. There are still roman roads today. And the thing that was unique about roman roads is they were not circuitous. They had a way of getting stuff done through mountains, and goodness only knows what else. In ancient times, they made straight paths on roman roads.
Now, as it relates to personal salvation, these verses that are presented here also sort of follow that track in the presentation of the gospel according to the. According to the theory, it's a straight track. It's supposed to lead you somewhere. It's supposed to lead you. The destination point at the end of the Romans road is something called this. Let me see if you can identify this one.
God, I know I am a sinner. I know that I deserve the consequences of my sin. However, I am trusting in Jesus Christ as my savior. I believe that it is death and resurrection provided for my forgiveness. I trust in Jesus and Jesus alone as my personal lord and savior. Thank you, Lord, for saving me and forgiving me. Amen.
What is it?
The sinner's prayer. That's the destination of the Roman's road. It's where you're supposed to find yourself.
Now there's an easy accusation to throw at this, which is you can't just say a prayer. There's got to be more than that. And the thing is, that's not a messianic jewish slam. Gotquestions.org is the most widely searched bible answers website on the Internet. I'm pretty sure gotquestions.org, about the Romans Road says saying a sinner's prayer will not accomplish anything on its own. This is from a very evangelical christian website, gotquestions.org. dot. It won't do anything on its own. A true sinner's prayer only represents what a person knows, understands and believes about their sinfulness and need for salvation. Saying the sinner's prayer is simply a way of declaring to God that you are relying on Jesus Christ as your savior. There are no magical words that result in salvation. Now listen, for me, I think that's really good to know. I think that's good that that's presented that way on a site, because too often there is a thing that's called cheap or greasy grace, which means you just say a few words and it's all good. Okay, got questions. And many, many other christian sources and very, very strong pastors and christian theology say the same thing.
But there are some bigger questions that deserve attention.
The road has been constructed from the book of Romans. Now that is to say from the supposed theology of who.
Who wrote the book of Romans? Paul Undisputed. Paul wrote the book of Romans, which is arguably the most important book in the Bible for Christianity.
I would say. Listen, this is, let's just get the controversial stuff out of the way, like out of the gate. Let's just start talking, saying things that are going to offend people.
I would say that even more than the words of Jesus, for many churches, Paul's writings and letters represent the foundation of theology. Listen, there are four gospels.
There are 13 letters of Paul. Seven are what you call undisputed there's no question he wrote them, some of them. The other six are disputed. They are probably written maybe by Paul, maybe by someone who was a disciple of Paul. We can't really know that. And then the Book of Hebrews was also tradition attributed it to Paul. So listen, let me tell you something. That makes 14 books of the New Testament that are attributed to Paul.
Then the Book of Acts is mostly about Paul. So is it any wonder at all that Paul's theology provides the basis for most of christian thought? Here's the summary. What Jesus did is appreciated, loved, cherished. Thank God for my salvation. What Paul taught is the theology.
Now, people can disagree with that, but I've spent a lot of time in a lot of religious circles and I like to think that sometimes I know what I'm talking about and I've seen that to be the case. But Yeshua, Jesus is the core of the christian message.
But Paul became the key to unlocking that message.
Romans and the road derived from the book are supposed to be the universal story of humanity as it relates to our created nature, our ability to please God, or better stated, absolute inability to please God.
Or that all of us need to demonstrate belief in order to be saved, but not by works. That's a jewish thing. We do it by faith. This presentation and way of thinking transformed the western world theologically. Listen to that statement. The western world was transformed by the writings of Paul.
I want you to listen to this wonderful summary of Romans, its impact. I got this from a blog at CBU, California Baptist University. The Book of Romans has been described with the most praiseworthy of expressions. Listen to the names of who I am going to read. As I tell you these quotes, I think you will know them.
John Calvin said that when anyone understands this epistle, he has a passage open to him, to the understanding of the whole scripture. Martin Luther said, this letter is really the chief part of the New Testament and the very purest gospel. Remember what I said about Paul's prominence?
Luther's successor, Philip Melanchthon, referred to Romans as the compendium of christian doctrine. John Knox, founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, suggested it was unquestionably the most important letter ever written, and even more so, the personal impact on theologians and pastors throughout the centuries. You simply cannot overstate this, this message.
Men and likely women who have impacted, not likely men and women who have impacted millions upon millions of people in their thinking on how God works, who Jesus is, why Jesus is the experiential testimony of someone named Augustine. You know, who Augustine is, people always say St. Augustine, that's a place in Florida. Augustine was one of the most influential church fathers, Luther, Wesley, probably countless others.
His conversion was by reading romans 13 in the year 386. The german monk Luther converted 1200 years later at grasping the significance of romans 117. You shall be what justified by John Calvin, his comprehensive work on christian doctrine. It's replete with references to Romans. John Wesley recounted the experience that he had on May 24, 1738. Listen as he heard the preface of Luther's commentary on what book Romans being read. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation and assurance was given that he had taken my sins, even mind, and save me from the law of sin and death.
Swiss theologian, Bible commentator, Godet. Every great spiritual revival in the church will be connected as effect and cause with a deeper understanding of this book.
Do we understand the book cause? That's a pretty big question. With that kind of weight, that kind of emphasis, the Book of Romans absolutely needs to be understood based on this, a spiritual revival. That's what we're about to undertake here, a spiritual revival.
Understanding the most important Pauline letter by this deeper understanding of the book written by Paul the Jew, Pharisee to the end. If you don't believe me, he said it, read it in acts 23 six.
The Book of Romans has undoubtedly heavily influenced some of the most influential thinkers of Christianity. As I described, roman roads were amazing, but what point is a great and straight road?
No matter what it cuts through, if it ends up at the wrong place, you are lost for all, all of the theological stock in Romans and the development of christian theology. We just have to stop as we go through the next weeks and ask, have all of those influential minds taken us down the right road?
Does their understanding and the subsequent doctrine align with a few things. The author who wrote the book, Paul, does it align with the author's original intention and purpose? Does it align with the audience and their understanding of the material that Paul was presenting, the theological foundations which Paul intended to lay there?
Or do these longstanding interpretations align more closely with something else? Later commentators like Augustine and Luther, who saw in Romans their own personal story, which then was overlaid into the theology that many people claim to be the destination.
I cannot stress to you how incredibly important Martin Luther's personal story, and even more so, Augustine's personal story, impacted their interpretation of this book.
And those interpretations came after the founding of Christianity as well, and long after the split between Christianity and Judaism had occurred.
So, listen, I want to make this very, very clear up front I do not presume to know more than Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Calvin or Augustine.
My Greek is terrible compared to theirs. I'm certain of it.
They have in some sense paved the road. It's not my intention to say that the ideas that I present to you over the next week are immune to criticism or critique. Great thing. You'll be able to see it all lay out before you. Because when I teach and these messages go on YouTube, just sit back and relax, get some popcorn, get ready for the comments. They're just so enjoyable.
Heretic, heathen, demon possessed. My ideas will be criticized. That's okay. It goes to show something, though. It goes to show you how deeply embedded into christian orthodoxy the ideas that I propose to challenge actually are.
When you talk about the Bible and it elicits hateful comments from someone to you. That's not how it's supposed to work, actually, but it does.
Now, if we're honest, there are significant challenges to the way many people, even the most influential, read and interpret and most important, teach the book. And the result is that there are some improper foundations. I can point to one idea that has absolutely, without a doubt, been birthed from these interpretations of the book of Romans. We call it supersessionism. In our theology classes, it is replacement theology.
This finds its nurturing womb in the Book of Romans as interpreted the idea that God, through Jesus Christ, changed the story and the players, that he rewrote the script, that the value of Torah and obedience to any kind of law like that was eradicated, and that God's people, who once had special consideration, were also now out of the story. That God has a new people, he has a new israelite, a new Israel that consisted solely of Christ followers who were primarily gentile. Christianity and Christians, terms which did not even exist when Paul is writing the book, become though God's chosen people. And where does that leave the original chosen?
It's as if you took the pages, ripped them out, set them on fire and walked away. They are written out of the story, but not just the people, the religion as well, the religion of Jesus and Paul has been eclipsed by something new.
Pauline scholar Magnus Zetterholm says this, and it's so perfect. While Paul believed that he represented the perfection of Judaism, not the eradication, the church quite swiftly became a religious movement opposed to the practice of Judaism. Similarly, while a jewish identity was normalized within the early jewish movement, the church found jewish identity to be incompatible with being christian, and Christianity soon became an anti jewish religion devoid of any Jews. This is not me. It's history.
You cannot argue with history. I don't care how hard you try.
And let me just say one other thing that's not in my notes. I have absolutely no intention of berating, degrading, tearing down any, any church, christian, or any believer in God, or unbeliever, for that matter. I don't care. I don't want to tear people down. But I do. As a rabbi, as a messianic jewish rabbi, as a teacher, I have a calling that when God puts something into my heart and to my spirit to clarify, I need to do it with confidence. And sometimes that just means saying some things that don't sit well with people. It's just the way it is.
But I don't mean to be disrespectful. Okay. So speaking of history, could what I just read you possibly be what Paul had intended?
Paul? That we have an anti jewish religion which separates from the faith of his master.
Eventually we'll get there. Not anytime soon. But there's those pesky chapters in Romans nine through eleven which talk about pride and being cut off and the jewish people. Is that possibly what he could mean?
That there's a totally different story?
It's not there.
There is a new story, but it's not that one.
And that is the goal, not just to understand what Paul said, but why now? The other terrible and related consequence of misreading Paul, misreading Romans, is that Paul gets a really bad rapid because he looks like a schizophrenic.
Is it works or is it faith? He actually mentions both of them as good.
Is it Torah? Is the Torah good? Is the Torah bad? It's not clear from a plain read. Is it good to be jewish? Or is it a terrible thing to be jewish that you should cast off like a dirty garment? Does Paul love his fellow Jews? Or the way he apparently seems to talk to them in places? Does he despise them and the way they think in their misguided devotion to works of the law? Do our deeds matter at all? Or is it just faith and a prayer?
The general consensus among many schools over millennia is Paul converted. Right?
What was his old jewish name?
Saul. And then he had a conversion and he became gentile Paul, because Shaul Sha'ul is a hebrew name. We got to ditch that Paul, that he realized the error of his ways in Judaism. He threw it on the garbage heap where worthless things belong. That Paul's done with the Jews for good reason, other than to see them come to faith, as he did in his conversion on the way to Damascus. That means to become a Christian again, a term that he didn't even know.
And that his mission was to have the Gentiles then provoke the Jews to jealousy. To do that. We're going to spend a good bit of time talking about that. Not today.
How can one letter lead to so many conclusions that seem to speak directly against the figure of Paul, the pharisaic Jew? How can it happen?
It's easy. Answer. Perspective.
Perspective.
So, as we begin this introduction to our series, which is actually what we're doing right now, I want to give you some of the perspectives that have informed the interpretation of Romans, because it's important and have led to much of what's out there. But let me say, I've already said it. I just want to say it again. I usually do a series like this once a year. The rest of it's all about how you can float out there in the universe and be a happy person. Right?
These things are intense. You need to read the Book of Romans. You need to listen. If you miss a week, you'll be completely lost. So either you bail now or you stay with me for up to twelve weeks, minimum. Not even a joke. Twelve? It's the number of Israel. What other number could I choose?
No, I don't know how long, but long enough. Long enough to get the point. So I'm inviting you to. I'm giving you an out, or I'm inviting you in. But you're going to have to do some work.
Read the Book of Romans. Write down problems you encounter there. Questions. Do it now. Anyway, back to perspective. I want to tell you, first of all, you need to understand how letters are written. Paul's letters. The term is scriptio continua. You know that term?
It's how you wrote letters in the ancient world. There are no periods, there are no commas, there are no paragraphs, there are no chapters, there's nothing like that.
Lines on a scroll, all connected.
And what was expected was that the person you gave this letter to knew what you meant, because you trusted them to give it. And so they would come and they would read the letter out loud and they would be able to interpret. And there are rhetorical devices that are being used in Paul's letters. We will talk a lot about it. Things like speech in character, where you have someone in the story that you're actually acting like you're theme, but it's not you. But the person who's reading this scroll and understands it, has to present it like they're giving a theater show because you couldn't just look at it. Now, what happens, though, when interpreters come in and apply commas periods and most importantly, chapters and verses where all of the Bible publishers can then put a big, bold heading above a particular section that says things like Paul's conversion to Christianity.
I'm going to let you know, that was not in the original greek text, and we would be completely lost, even if our greek was good, if someone gave us one of those without knowing the authorization, knowing what? And of course, they'd be passed around and you could learn to do this scriptio continua.
The letter becomes a completely different theological read when you insert these breaks and chapters.
It's just the way grammar and letters work.
But what's easy is this is the letter of Paul to the Romans. When we read this in context and we use all of our brainpower, we can determine from that the letter of Paul to the Romans. We can think about this, we can ponder it, and then we can ask this question. Who was the letter written to?
Use all your brain cells. Let them fire. Let them fire. What are you thinking?
[00:27:39] Speaker B: The Romans.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
Wow.
In other words, like many of Paul's letters, there is a specific situation in a specific place with specific people, with specific problems that he's writing to. They were in where Rome.
The later interpretations very quickly actually made attempts to transform this letter into a universal Pauline theological statement that this was the absolute story of the human race, original sin and something Paul didn't believe. That in this process of turning Paul's specific letter to Rome into Paul's doctrinal instruction for the world, jews and gentiles, a world theology manual, the original context, the purpose, the audience, the message became less important. And what came out were moral and theological ideas, doctrine that became the thing that Paul wrote the letter for. It no longer has anything to do with the Romans. It's for you, Karen. You're supposed to. This is your universal story here.
It's different than that, friends. This is a historical letter. So much changed, as a matter of fact, that in the first or second century, they just took. Some people, took out chapters 14 through 16 and said, ah, that's that teaching part of it. We don't even need that. That's not relevant. They just removed it.
15 and 16 gone, which were very specific instructions to the community in Rome about how you're supposed to deal with each other. You can't just take that out unless you have a different intention in mind, which is to create a doctrinal theological treatise based on the most influential apostle in the book.
Why is that?
Well, again, back to it. It's perspective. It's about a desired outcome.
Okay, it's about a desired outcome, the patristic perspective. This is the early church, the church fathers, right? Particularly Augustine. His most prolific period of writing was 386. He died in 430. But by the time he is communicating his perspective on Romans. I already told you this about original sin, about predestination.
Oh my goodness, that's a good one. I don't actually want to talk about that one. But we'll see the nature of the church and salvation as he's becoming one of the most influential church fathers in western Christianity. Let me explain something to you. By that time, the situation into which Paul was writing had it didn't exist anymore. The situation had changed so much, the church was no longer a sect within Judaism. Now there was a stereotypical Jew Judaism and we know it because it persists today. Legalistic law keepers convinced that the Torah was a way to salvation, that the works of the law could save them, they rejected grace, mercy, all of it. And in so doing, they had actually become. This is the jews opposed to everything that Yeshua stood for.
That's the world into which Augustine is writing.
But also there's something really interesting that we talk about history. He was writing.
First of all, I don't have the time you need. Just read about Augustine, understand him, understand where he came from.
He was a sinner and then he got involved with like neoplatonic thought and all kinds of things. And then he came into this realization. There's something called the pelagian heresy or Pelagius.
And this is one of the main things that Augustine felt was, this is incumbent upon me, I must challenge this. It is absolutely condemned today. Listen to it and tell me what you think about it.
The pelagian controversy. I'm sure the g is a hard g Pelagian, but I don't know. The monk Pelagius, who appeared in Rome around 380, argued that humans had to be capable of doing what God expected from them since they were equipped with free will, otherwise they could not be held accountable by a just God. Pelagius also denied any form of original sin that had so corrupted the human soul that it was impossible for one to choose what God commanded. Against this, Augustine claimed the opposite. Humans can in no way please God, even choose to want to please God, and are, precisely because of their corrupted nature, incapable of doing what God demands. Human salvation is in every way a result of God's grace, the problem of free will, the extent of God's race, the condition of human salvation. Predestination would dominate the theological debate for many centuries. Pelagius, I like Pelagius.
I like some of the things he said. I think God created us to be able to live up to some basic standard of good.
But he got. And so understand that. Think about what I just said. He's coming against original sin and predestination and all this stuff. And Augustine says, no way. It's right here in Romans, and proceeds to change the world.
He proceeds to change the world. And one who subscribed to Augustine's idea, oh, let me just say Augustine was pretty okay with the Jews, though.
He didn't like them, but he thought they served some purpose, that they were like a confirmation that the Bible is true. I'm not going to go into all that.
He said, well, let them keep doing what they do. They are a confirmation of the story of Christ. Then someone who was really influenced by him came along a little while later, a lot later, didn't have quite the same positive opinion on the Jews, but had certainly as much or more of a profound effect on christian theology. Who do you think I might be talking about?
Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation.
You can learn all you need to know about Luther when it comes to Jews. That's not the purpose of this message. He wrote a book called on the jew and their lies. You can read that, but from a doctrinal perspective, it would be hard to find any idea more concretized in christian thought than Luther's writings on the justification by faith, which he derived from Romans. I told you that one verse that he heard, 117. He heard it read and it changed everything for him. He figured it out and proceeded to change the world.
Primarily, he also was responding to something. Who was the archenemy of Martin Luther? What was the 95 theses about? Who was he talking to? Primarily, the most powerful religious body in existence at the time, the Catholic Church. And you know what Luther did?
Luther said, all right, look, you have all these really messed up theologies, like buying your way into salvation, and I can't remember the term indulgences. You can do all these things, uh uh. It's wrong. And you know where he found the clearest picture of it? Paul's writings in Romans and the Catholic Church was the jewish story. And the jewish people were overlaid onto Luther's hatred for the Catholic Church.
And so everything that he despised about the Catholic Church and what was going on, he saw in his compatriot Paul, saying the same thing to the Jews in the Book of Romans, he projected his view onto Judaism through his interpretation of the context for Paul's opposition in Romans, that expressing one's faithfulness to God through Torah, to believe that one could ever do anything good for God. It's coming from Augustine, but it's now expanded through history. It can only lead you one place to think that you could ever do anything good for God.
Self righteousness. And that defines for Martin Luther not only the jew, but Paul's entire purpose in writing the book of Romans.
God knows we have no conceivable reason to believe we could ever earn favor, right? And Luther found, and others found, all their ideas firmly planted in the soil of the book of Romans. This is a difficulty, actually, it's a real difficulty, because when you read Luther and then you read Romans, you can actually find things that are confusing. When Paul starts talking about the Torah and when he says, you, so called jew, and all these things, that's a real difficulty, which is why we're doing this.
I want to make that clear. But again, understanding the what, the why, and the who, both the audience and the writer of a letter from the first century pre jewish Christian split, it's also surprising and actually shocking, as I said, when you understand just how much these traditional interpretations were influenced by the personality of these fathers, of these writers.
But I do want to say, and I'm believe it or not, coming to the end, thank God that perspective broadened.
It did. It's been much later in history that this perspective broadened, but it did. Anyone know who EP Sanders is?
Ep Sanders was one of the most influential voices on redefining Paul.
He wrote a book called Paul and Palestinian Judaism in the seventies, 1977. He argued this, and I know this can get real boring, but I need you to understand it for perspective. He argued that Second Temple Judaism, including that which Paul encountered, was not actually anything like what the Protestants had said. It wasn't actually that they were self righteous and thought that they could earn their way to heaven. It wasn't any of those things, but that Jews had an idea that was called covenant gnomism, which meant that by God giving us the Torah and establishing a covenant with us, part of the way that we maintain relationship with God is through observing the Torah. Covenant lawism, nomism, meaning the Torah is good. Jews are not the spawn of Satan that they've been presented to, presented as there's good in the Torah, and Paul says it. That's why it's in there. That was EP Sanders biggest big thing.
He said a pious jew was not observing Torah for salvation. They believed they were part of God's covenant and grace. And their Torah observance demonstrates their willingness to stay in that covenant. That's covenant nomism. But ultimately, here's the problem that Sanders came up with. The Torah wasn't bad.
It was just that Paul actually was coming to start a new religion.
And Sanders is famous for the quote that says the only problem with Judaism was that it was not Christianity because, yeah, the Jews had that. But Paul's coming along and saying, no, no, no, none of that matters anymore. Jesus is the covenant confirmation.
That's Paul. According to EP Sanders, covenant nomism that then developed into something else.
People took Sanders writing, people like James Dunn, who knows who nt wright is, absolute, very brain trust of modern christian interpretation. They said, well, no, it's more than that. It's more than what Sanders said. They pointed out that Sanders hadn't really understood the consequences of his interpretation with respect to Paul. James Dunn, JG Dunn is the one who first came up with a term that was called the new perspective on Paul. Anyone ever heard that new perspective on Paul, that Paul opposed only certain aspects of Torah.
These were the identity markers of Torah. These were things like circumcision, Kashrut, Kosher Sabbath, different things like that. Do you know why Paul opposed it?
This is a rational, good argument. He opposed it because the Jews were using that as boundaries to keep the Gentiles out, that they were still, they had a superiority, jewish superiority. And those covenant markers were the things that Paul was opposed to. Why Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. Everybody's got to get in. So then ultimately what happens from the new perspective on Paul is that, that we lose an identity.
We now have gentiles, but not really gentiles, Jews, but not really Jews.
And it all falls under this one new umbrella that Paul has created, which is called the one new man.
There are no distinctions like this. Those are actually bad. Paul wants to do away with those.
That is such a skimming of it. I'm almost like, I'm almost hesitant to just leave it at that. But that's enough. If you want to know more, you can do your own research.
So they emphasize Paul's jewishness, but in the end of it, it's so redefined that ethnicity no longer matters and Israel is just a designation for Jews and non Jews that come into this big third party thing that falls under Jesus. Now you might be saying, and that makes total sense.
Well, we have to talk about that.
It does make sense, and there's merit, but we have to talk about it.
The new perspective on Paul, that was a christian theological attempt to come to terms with a much better, healthier new view of Judaism while still being able to have this well defined one new man thing, which all leads us to something that is going to be the end.
It's called.
These are the perspectives. I told you, you had the traditional perspective. You had. Then the new perspective on Paul. And then what's next?
The radical new perspective on Paul.
Not kidding. Also called Paul within Judaism.
Paul within Judaism.
A reading of Paul and Romans that places Paul not outside of Torah, not abandoning or condemning Judaism, but as a Torah keeping jew within Judaism, laboring by his calling to gentiles to incorporate them into a jewish faith, of jewish covenants without becoming jewish. Does that sound easy?
That's Paul's job.
No wonder he was so mad. Talking about people circumcising themselves and stuff.
That was a joke.
It's a tough job. But he didn't condemn Judaism. So listen, Paul within Judaism, you have scholars like Mark Nanos, you may have heard these names, Matthew Thiessen, Magnus Zetterholm, Paula Fredrickson, Neil Elliot, Stanley Stowers, and a lot of them are Jews, traditional Jews, not Yeshua followers who have come along and said, okay, enough's enough, enough. Enough's enough with the replacement theology and misunderstanding this jewish guy who's talking to non Jews about jewish stuff. Enough. We're going to spend decades working on the sources and the history, and that is where the perspective of Paul within Judaism came from.
Well, guess what?
I'm probably going to teach you some things from Paul within Judaism because it's good and you can still believe anything else you want to believe about Augustine and all of it. Because I don't have in my mind the intention to dogmatize you or convert you or do anything, but I'm going to gonna make you think that much I'm gonna do.
And when you read Paul's writings, listen, they can be confusing. I wanna know who in this room who has lived a messianic, jewish messianic lifestyle. Take Jewish out of it, forget it, whatever messianic lifestyle and has tried to share with a friend or family about something you're doing and who's the first point of objection that's raised?
But Paul said.
But Romans says it says, Paul said, don't put yourself under the law. And what do you do when people pull out the Romans text and they say, for by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
You're actually going to do that? Zack, what's the matter with you? Romans 520. Now, the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh. And for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.
Do you have good responses to these things? Are you all settled in your theological presentation?
I want to help you. I've heard many messianic believers say, you know what? I don't like Paul.
I don't even read Paul anymore. I've served weird hebrew roots. Freak people who, like, have taken Paul's writings out of their bibles, because clearly Paul didn't know what he was doing. Paul knew what he was doing, and he's a genius. And you know what? Thank God, because many of you are sitting here because of what Paul did.
Ultimately, this study is about us, a messianic community of Jews and gentiles. That's why this is so important, trying to figure out how we walk in this faith Yeshua obedience Torah thing together. And remarkably, guess what? It's exactly what Paul was trying to do. And it didn't work because there was a massive split and because things went bad.
So I'll leave you with the last word on perspective. And this is short, I promise you. I want you to imagine a bus traveling down the road. It's filled with passengers. They have a specific viewpoint. They can see what they can see, right?
Their focus, the world is passing by on the windows. Their focus is primarily on their immediate surroundings in the bus. But we shift our focus to us sitting back at the bus station and we're watching all the buses come in, and we have a totally different perspective because we're not caught up in the bus. That person sees only the bus and the immediate surroundings traveling down the road. But we see it all happening, the broader context of the journey, that we can see the bus approaching. We can see pitfalls and problems. We can see if someone's running out in front of the road or whatever. Our perspective is different from the station than the person on the bus. And there's a limited view from within the passengers. They. They can't see it all. They're moving with the bus.
And so, listen, I want to give us the broader view from the station.
That's what I want us to have.
Not a stationary or fixed viewpoint. I want to give you all the room you need to think. But listen, I believe that the last 25 years of scholarship in Paul, in Romans have placed us in a place where we can absolutely sit confidently at the bus station and watch all of these other theological buses around us.
And we're going to have some unique perspective because of what we know.
And while many people will never be challenged to get off the bus, I don't think that's you.
I think you're here because you like a challenge and you want to understand the Bible and you want to understand these things, especially if they're going to be part of your life.
And so there are significant obstacles in front of these buses.
There have been, there are, and I hope to be able to help you see them and in turn to allow us to repair not the potholes, but like the missing chunks of asphalt, like sinkholes in the Romans road.
I hope together that we can do this, that we can learn, that we can grow as we strive to repave. The Romans wrote Shabbat Shalom.
[00:53:26] Speaker B: Please visit our website, shalommakin.org, to learn more about join our live services, access other teachings sign up for our newsletter join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world or contribute to the work of Shalom. Macon, thank you for watching, and we look forward to connecting with.
