Romans Overview and Themes

Are you trying to understand the book of Romans? Then you've come to the right place. We're going to do a complete overview of the entire book of Romans in less than an hour, all from the original Jewish Hebraic author's perspective. We're going to do it and find out what Christianity has been missing for almost 2,000 years, right after this. Hello everyone, Jim Staley, Passion for Truth Ministries, and welcome to today's broadcast. where we're going to do a complete recap of the book of Romans, an overview, if you will, in less than an hour. We're going to go through 16 chapters. I'm going to pull out all the key verses and give you a really good idea of what Romans is all about in both a recap and a review. For those of you that did not go through our in-depth verse-by-verse study on this, you can check that out on our website or on our YouTube channel playlist, where we go through the entire book of Romans, decoding it, verse by verse from the original author's perspective. If you've not heard the Jewish Hebrew perspective that Paul was coming from in the first century, then you don't even know what you've been missing. Western Christianity has gotten most of the book of Romans all wrong. And that's simply because they're unfamiliar with the nuances of Judaism in the first century. And that's what we're doing here on this channel in these studies, going verse by verse and unpacking some of the most difficult books in the New Testament. so that we can truly understand what God has for us, what these apostles really meant, and how do we apply it to our lives. That's what we're going to do right now. All right, so the book of Romans, listen, it's not a standalone treatise on how Christians should live, nor is it a treatise on systematic theology, as many have commonly believed. This is a letter written to both the believing Jews and the believing Gentiles that are meeting and worshiping together in Rome. Paul was the... best student of Rabbi Gamaliel, who was Gamaliel, he was the president of the Sanhedrin at the time, the most learned rabbi of his time period. And his Hebrew name, Paul, was Shaul. He was a rabbi. And his Roman name was Paulos. Of course, that's what we're most used to calling him, is in the English, Paul. But we forget, just because he was an apostle to the Gentiles, he was Jewish through and through. He thinks in processes just like an Ivy League graduate, rabbi of the first century. Just like Ivy League students today have a completely different culture and vocabulary, it was the same with Paul. God chose the most decorated rabbi of his time to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. Why would he use the most decorated rabbi? Because the Gentiles would not understand the Torah. They wouldn't understand the prophets. Paul was trained in it. And he was about to go right into every synagogue that he could walk into and first go to the Jews and share the gospel from Genesis all the way to Malachi and beyond. And then he was going to train them to train the Gentiles. That's what it's all about. Most Christians believe that the Jewish religious culture of that time revolved around the Torah, which is, of course, the first five books of the Bible known as the law. But this is simply not true. It was based on what was called Halakha. And you have to know this in order to truly understand the book of Romans. What is halakha? It's the traditions and doctrines of the elders as it relates to the Torah. That's what it was totally revolving around. It wasn't revolving around the Torah itself. It was revolving around what the rabbis believed the Torah said and how to apply it. That's where all the traditions and the regulations came from. That tradition said that righteousness came from keeping all of the law. The problem is that their definition of the law was both the written. and the oral law. In other words, many religious Jews were coming to faith in Yeshua, but they were bringing with them both the written Torah, which is good, and the man-made traditions they believed made them wise, which were harmful. In doing so, often unknowingly, they were recreating a version of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the same issue that Yeshua had with Judaism of his day, and Paul confronted it as well. The people had been taught for generations that righteousness came through adherence to rabbinic Judaism, them. and the traditions of the elders. As a result, they struggled to comprehend the full power of what Messiah had accomplished. Yeshua Jesus wasn't opposed to God's law. He was opposed to how religious leaders had added to it, taken from it, and misused it as a system of salvation, which was never God's intent. On one side, you had religious Jews deeply entrenched in traditions and man-made rules that exceeded far beyond what God had ever commanded. And on the other, Gentiles were coming out of pagan cultures filled with idolatry and virtually no moral boundaries. On the surface, this looked like a hopeless union. But what united them, what truly made them one, was the blood of Christ. And this is exactly what Paul's trying to emphasize throughout his letter. And what is his letter about? Well, it's first of all, it's to the Jews, telling the Jews to stop judging the Gentiles for not doing everything you want them to do, the way you were taught. You were taught wrong about how to keep the Torah, says Paul. And two, it was to the Gentile believers, telling them to stop sinning the way that they used to before they were saved, and to help them understand there's a book of instructions that God gave everyone in the entire... point of all of the law of God was to help all of us be like Christ. So the main point of Romans was to correct misunderstandings about the Torah and how it relates to righteousness. It was to show how God continues to remain faithful to the promises of Israel, that the Gentiles are now part of this entire covenant. Number three was to explain to the Jewish believers that they've been taught wrong. The Gentiles have always been allowed to be grafted into the covenant family without following the rabbinic traditions. They only needed to follow God's commandments and to be completely surrendered in faith to him. And lastly, he wanted to call everyone to humility, love, and unity in Messiah. So here's the breakdown. This is what we're going to do. We're going to walk chapter by chapter, pull out key verses, scriptures, misunderstood verses, and we're going to break it down and explain it for you. But in very short detail because we have to go through all 16 chapters in just this one broadcast. We've got to do it quickly. If you want further detail, I encourage you to start at the beginning of Romans 1 or even the introduction that gives a ton of intro and background. You have to know the culture. You don't necessarily need to know the language, but you definitely need to know the culture, the debates, who the players are, what the idiomatic expressions are, what were the things that were going on in the time of Paul that he's addressing for us to fully understand what he's talking about. All right, chapter 1 and chapter 2 are pretty easy. Chapter 1 is all about... focusing on the universal sinfulness of all of the parties, but really a big focus on the Gentiles, which are guilty of their complete moral collapse. And the Jews in chapter two, he focuses on, which are guilty of hypocrisy, judging the Gentiles for not moving fast enough in their spirituality and trusting the Torah as their identity, not obedience. And there is a big difference. And that brings us to chapter three, all the way to one of the most famous verses, chapter 3. verse 23, where it says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And I would add, all would say, stop judging. So stop judging. Chapter one is all about talking to the Gentiles. Chapter two is all about disciplining the Jews. And in chapter three, he really kind of ends the chapter by saying, guys, everyone has sinned. So why are you judging everybody? Everyone has fallen short of God's glory. That is the whole point of this book that he is writing. to these churches he's never been to. So in Christianity, one of the biggest lies that we have in the book of Romans as it deals with the Jews and the Gentiles is the Gentiles are under the law of love and the Jews are under the law of God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible says that everyone has broken God's law. That's what causes you to be a sinner. The definition of sin in 1 John 3, 4 is those who have transgressed against God's law. It's the breaking of God's law. That is the definition of sin. So if you break God's law, you become a sinner. You fall under the curse of the law, which causes you to need a savior. And that's when Christ comes in. The irony is if you get rid of God's law, like the traditional interpretation of the book of Romans is and Galatians and Hebrews and so on, then no one can be a sinner. Because how can you be a sinner if there's no law that you are subject to break? So if there's no law, you can't break it. There's no curse on your life, which means you don't need a Savior. Can you see the problem that we have? That's why it's so important to interpret the Scriptures correctly. Numbers 15, 15 and 16 says this, There will be one ordinance shall be for you, for the assembly, and for the stranger who dwells with you. An ordinance forever throughout your generations. As you are, so shall the stranger be before God. One law and one custom shall be for you. and for the stranger that were there as Gentiles who dwells with you. In other words, what God is saying is, look, there's going to be one law for everyone, the native-born Israelite and the Gentile. One covenant, one law under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, if you will. And so that is really kind of where we're going to be going here in the book of Romans. We're going to be uncovering some of these most misunderstood verses. And that brings us to chapter 2, verse 13, which is a really good summation of what I just said. He says, for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified. How can the law of God be done away with when Paul, right here in the second chapter, says the doers of the law are going to be justified before God? If the law is not relevant for Jews or Gentiles, then he can't say that. He would say that it's irrelevant. James 1.22-25 says the same exact thing. God's law is not the problem, my friends. It's how the religious Jews who were getting saved were using it. They were using it incorrectly. That was the problem. So Paul ends his entire treaties here so far. In 3.31, he says, look, do we make void the law through faith? because he's putting such... a focus on faith in Christ. And the Jews that were coming and getting saved had such a focus on the Torah. He's like, am I saying the Torah has no place in the life of a believer? Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish God's law. In other words, Christ doesn't do away with God's law. It establishes it even more because now we're going to understand it. And as we move into chapter four and five, which is all about Abraham's faith, Paul is going to take some of the things that Abraham was commissioned with and make some connections to the Jews. so they can better understand what this salvation is all about. Some misunderstood scriptures, chapter 4, verse 14. Let's take a look at it. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect, because the law brings about wrath. Where there is no law, there is no sin. There's no transgression. So to the Jews, verse 14, it would say it this way. If you rely on just keeping the law for salvation, it will only condemn you. Because everyone has sinned, broken God's law. And because there is a law and a transgression that does exist, you are condemned if you use this line of thinking. This is really what Paul would say. This is how he would say it today so we can understand it. Look, you're focusing on God's law for salvation. You're done. You're condemned by it. God's law cannot save you, period. It's the blood of the lamb that saves you. God's law is simply the... guard rails that keep you inside of the pen as a sheep, if you will. Take the guard rails out, and guess what sheep do? They find wolves. That's just what we do. We end up walking, wandering, jumping off cliffs, or they're not the most intelligent animals for sure. And by the way, one more thing to mention before we move on to chapter five is when it says that the law brings about wrath. The reason why it brings about wrath is when we break it. Remember, God said that I put before you blessings if you keep my commandments and curses if you don't. So it carries a curse if you break it, and that's what it's talking about. And because all men have fallen short of God's glory and everyone has sinned, it brings about wrath for everyone. The entire world is subject to God's law. If they were not, there would be no such thing as sin. And, of course, no one would need a Savior. But everyone needs Christ because everyone sinned, which means by default everyone has broken God's law, which means that everyone is subject to it. They just don't know it. in modern-day Christianity. We are taught that there is no law that we're subject to except for the Ten Commandments, but we don't have to keep the fourth one because we're not really sure why. But we don't want to keep the fourth one. We want to do it on Sunday and not Saturday. I'm being a little facetious, but at the end of the day, we've got to fix some of our theology and kill the gap. We've got to shorten the gap between what Paul actually meant in the first century and what we believe here in the 21st century. All right, moving on to chapter 5. 5 verse 20, moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound. What does that mean? It means the law was given so that people could see just how much they're offending God. They were already sinning, already going beyond what God wanted them to. He gave them the law to prove it so that they would absolutely know just how much sin was all around them. All right, moving on to chapter 6, let's hit verse 1. It's a key scripture for sure. It says, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? And then, of course, verse 15, what then? Shall we sin because we're not under the law but under grace? Certainly not. So Paul is making it very clear here in chapter 6 that we should not continue to break God's law just because grace is here or that grace may abound because he knew that there are certain people who think, well, wow, grace is here. Now we can break God's law all we want. We don't need, we don't, we'll just. plead the blood of Christ. And there are entire groups of people probably today that take that same stance. And God says through the apostle Paul, shall we continue to sin because we're under grace and not under the penalty of God's law? Certainly not. So verse 15 is not saying that we're not subject to God's law. It's saying that we're not under it anymore. In other words, we're not condemned by it. That's a completely different. And I go through it in detail in chapter 6 of the verse-by-verse study. that we have. But that phrase under the law does not mean that you're subject to the law. It literally means that you are under it. You've broken it. You're under it. You're condemned by it. Okay. Not that you're not subject to it. And that's been misunderstood for sure. All right, let's get back to it. Verse 14, for sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. Again, just like I just said, it's not saying that you're not subject to God's law. Think about how ludicrous that is, that now everyone is lawless, that there is no law, there's no commandments, there's no rules. He flat out gives all kinds of rules just in the book of Romans, much less all the rest of his writings. And he's quoting hundreds and hundreds of times from the Torah, from the prophets as proof text. You can't quote something that's not relevant. He's quoting it because it is relevant. And he says you're not under law, not meaning that you're not subject to it, but you're simply not under it anymore. You're under grace. What does that mean? Grace is covering the fact that you're breaking God's law. It's giving you a way to not be condemned by God's law. And that is what... the whole point of the gospel is all about. To be, quote, in the law was to follow the written law of God. It's what you do as a lifestyle to prove that you love God. 1 John 5, 3 says that. Psalms 119, verse 1 says, blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord. Now, contrast that with the phrase under the law. To be under the law meant the law itself was your judge and you were subjecting yourself to its punishment for breaking it. One was about content, okay? One was about authority. When you're in the law, it's the content of the law. You're following the content of the law. When you're under it, the authority of that law will kill you. It will condemn you because you've sinned and only knows one thing. It only knows how to put you in jail. Praise God that God, through Yeshua, is the sheriff who has the keys. And that key is Christ and his blood. And that brings us to 623, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Guys, I want you to see this. Every time you see the word sin, you really can almost every time replace it with breaking God's law because that's the definition of sin is a transgression of God's law. For the wages of the penalty of breaking God's law is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. That's what he's trying to explain. Stop focusing on God's law because you're breaking it. You're condemned. So no matter how. good you keep it, Jewish believer of the first century, you're condemned to death. Unless you have Christ, that's what Christ came for. All right, now let's move quickly over to chapter 7, as we're almost halfway through. It says, therefore, the law is holy, in verse 12, and the commandment is holy and just and good. In 14, he says, for we know that the law is spiritual, but I'm carnal, sold under sin. Verse 22, for I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. So then with the mind, in verse 25, I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. How in the world, my friends, the seminary after seminary after seminary after pastor after preacher after scholar and even theologian, would say that Paul is against the law of God and believes that in his teaching that we don't have to keep the law of God anymore, but yet he is saying he delights in it. He wants to serve the law of God by keeping it. Uh, and then the commandment is holy and just how could something that's holy and good and just be thrown away? It's not we've simply misunderstood him and that brings us to the most powerful verse I believe in all the book of romans It's eight verse one after spending an entire chapter in chapter seven saying how much he wants to keep god's law But with his mind he finds another law inside of him the law of sin and death that's keeping him from doing it He says man, what a wretched man and I am I want to keep god's law, but but I but I but I keep breaking it which I know creates condemnation and a curse. But then he says this in verse 1 of chapter 8. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. You see what I'm saying, my friends? Christ sets us free, not from the law, from the curse that the law brings to everyone who breaks it. And we've all sinned. Verse 7 is a really incredible verse that is very rarely ever read in any church. It says, because the carnal mind is enmity against God. What does that mean? It's in hatred against God. For it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be. Paul makes the argument. Look, the carnal person is not subject to the law. They don't want to be subject to the law. Nobody likes rules. Nobody likes regulations. Nobody likes guidelines or boundaries. Ask any young teenager. And actually, most of us adults don't like it either. But Paul says it's carnal to not be subject to God's law. Only those that are led by the spirit of the gospel. spirit will be willing to subject themselves to what God has to say on any given particular subject. In verse 13, it says, for if you live according to the flesh, which means you're not subject to God's law, you'll die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. And I love this verse because it's all about matching and marrying the Spirit and the truth together. See, it's not just about the truth. Jesus himself didn't come only. He came and then sent the Spirit. If the truth was the only thing that you needed, then that's the only thing that would have ever came. But we need divine assistance. We need the power of God to flow through us. We need all the help that we can get because you can't just stop your addictions. You need the Spirit of God. It's the Spirit that helps us put to death the deeds of the flesh. And that is why he sent the helper to begin with. And of course, one of my favorite verses of all time in 828, it says, We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. And if you need to hear that today, then please put that in the comments. Whatever you're going through, God will work it together for good. But here's the key, only to those who love God. Let me ask you a question. Do you know what it means to love God? It's not just about loving God the way that we want to love him. Don't create your own golden calf like the Israelites did in the desert coming out of Egypt. Love him the way he desires to be loved. And then do this. Love your neighbor as yourself more than yourself. God loves it when we are. unselfish, when we put ourselves aside, when we love others, that's the best way to love God. And secondly, trust him. Trust him and have faith that this verse is true, that everything that you're going through, it will work together for good. As a matter of fact, rejoice in whatever trial that you're going through right now because God is going to bring it to fruition, to what it was originally purposed to do in your life, to put down the deeds of the flesh. This is the spiritual thing that you're going through. It appears to be physical. It's manifesting the physical, but it is spiritual. Yahweh is purposing the spiritual into the physical to increase your spirit man and to answer your prayer and help you be more like him. The image of God does not come through just hocus pocus. Just like a potter must press his hands into the clay, and it will cause a groove. And the clay is going to go from a lump to being uncomfortable and spinning around and getting nauseous on that potter's wheel. But at the end of the day, it will be exactly what the potter intended. That's what God's doing with you. And that's the beauty behind the word of God. Now we're halfway through, so let's start burning through the rest of it. The back half here. Chapter 9 through 12. Let's do it. 9.30, key verse here. What shall we say then that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith? But Israel, talking about the Jewish people of that time. pursuing the law of righteousness, have not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? The Gentiles aren't even pursuing it, and they found it. Here's why. Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone. What's he talking about here? He's not talking about the law, because they were keeping the law. He was talking about the works of the law. The works of the law are all the tradition and the doctrine of the elders. It's all of the halakha. It's important to know that the Jewish people, they did not obtain salvation because they were looking at it through their own lens of what they could do. And a lot of people are doing that same thing today. They're trying to do everything they can to be a good person, and they're forgetting that this is a walk with Christ. You have to do everything to be a good person. That's found in the Scripture. That's found in God's law. But you have to do it by faith. It's a relationship that we're having here. So they stumbled in that stumbling stone. The first century Jew, the religious Jew, it was all about a checklist. And Paul was saying, no, it's all about the one who made the list, not the check that's on the list. It's not all Israel that rejected Christ, my friends. Thousands actually did accept Messiah in the first century, but the majority did not because they sought to attain it without faith. Attain what? Salvation. They weren't looking for a Messiah. They weren't looking. for the one who would set them free. And they certainly weren't looking for a suffering servant. If they were looking for a Messiah, they were looking for a conquering king that would come in and dethrone the Romans from their own throne of oppression over the Jews. So move to 9.25, it says, as he says also in Hosea, I will call them my people who are not my people and her beloved who was not my beloved. And it shall come to pass in the very place that it was said to them, you are not my people, there they shall be called sons of the living God. And then it says in verse 27, Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel. So this verse has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, these three verses, as talking about, you know, I'm going to call them my people who are not my people. And they define that as the Gentiles that are not God's people. But that is not at all what Paul is talking about. That's not what Hosea was talking about. You have to understand the two houses of Israel to fully understand this, that you have the northern ten tribes called the house of Israel, and you have the two tribes in the south, Judah and Benjamin primarily. but the Levites that were called the house of Judah. The house of Judah goes into captivity in Babylon for 70 years in 586 BC. They come back out. They're called the Jews. That's when they were first called Yehudah in Babylon. And they are why the Jewish people exist today, because they came back out of Babylon. But the northern ten tribes called the house of Israel, they were taken into captivity in 722 BC into Assyria, and they completely lost their identity. They never came back. Why did they never come back? Because God said he was going to divorce the northern kingdom. They were very, very much in idolatry. They hoard among the nation, so God gave them what they deserved. But he says, in the very place that I dissolved our marriage, that they're not my beloved, I will call them my beloved. And those that I'm saying are not my people anymore, I will call them sons of the living God. And that's why he says, also, Isaiah cries out about Israel. He's not talking about the Gentiles. So Really, really important to understand that particular context. Again, I go into a lot more detail on that on the verse-by-verse in chapter 9 of this Decoding Romans study. All right, moving to chapter 10, verse 4, probably one of the most misinterpreted verses in all of Romans. It says, For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. It sure sounds like Paul is saying that Christ is the end of the law, and the end of the law happens when Christ came, until you find out that the word end there is telos. And telos does not mean what you think it means. The Greek word telos carries a deep and multifaceted meaning. It often is translated as end, goal, purpose, or completion. In philosophy, especially Aristotle, telos often refers to the inherent goal or purpose of a thing. It's called teleology. An example, the telos of a seed is to become a tree. The telos of a battle is victory or defeat. In 1 Peter 1.9, I love how this reads. It says, receiving the end, that word there is telos in the Greek, receiving the telos of your faith, the salvation of your souls. He's not saying the end of your faith, the destruction of your faith. No, the point and goal of your faith is the salvation of your souls. That's exactly what chapter 10, verse 4 is talking about. Christ is the goal of righteousness for everyone who believes. It's the goal of the law. The entire purpose of the law is Christ. That's what Paul is trying to say. All right, let's move on to chapter 11. It says this, verse 1, I say then, has God cast away his people? Well, he answers it, certainly not. For I also am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham. If God casts out his people, I'm in big trouble, he says, because I'm an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast away the Jewish people who he foreknew. He says in verse 11, say then, have they stumbled that they should fall? Certainly not. He's saying the same thing in a different way. But through their fall to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles. Now, if their fall is riches for the world and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness? What's he talking about? God's not done with them yet. God's not dead, if you will. He's not done with the Jewish people. They are asleep right now. But God will open their eyes. And he's done it by the thousands in the first century, tens of thousands, in fact. And he's done it by the thousands and ten thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions since then. So we cannot just land blasts and say the Jewish people are not of God. No, the Jewish people are in God's plan. God has a plan for the Jewish people. He's working his plan perfectly. His plan sometimes is related to a previous covenant that God made with Abraham and the forefathers that has nothing to do with salvation, but just blessing them and helping them multiply to be leaders, to have power. all because God said you're going to be the head, not the tail. Your descendants are going to be blessed like the stars of the sky, the sand of the sea. And it has nothing to do whether or not they follow him or even call him Yahweh or Elohim or God at all. They can be atheists. God's going to bless them just because of the patriarchs. That's a really important point. Because most of the time, us believers, we look at everything through the lens of Christ and eternality. And that is the ultimate goal. But God is fulfilling. His goal of all the covenants and all the promises that he made, he's doing that all simultaneously while the gospel is being shared with the rest of the world. That's why it says in verse 17, if some of the branches were broken off and you are grafted in among them and with them partakers of the root and fatness of the olive tree, then don't boast because God can break you off too. Do you see what Paul is trying to say here throughout the rest of his book? The Jewish believers were judging the Gentile believers and the Gentile believers were feuding with the Jewish believers. They weren't getting along. The Gentiles are brand new. They don't know come here from Sikkim. The Jews were bringing in... their bad theology and the traditions and doctrines of men. And Paul was trying to strip them of their bad theology and strip the Gentiles of all their moral decay, marry the two into some sort of relationship, and he was having a hard time. That's why he was saying, look, guys, the Gentiles are grafted in, okay, because of the unbelieving Jews that refused to hear the Messiah. That makes room for a whole other group of people. But be careful. Arrogance. always seems to cause people to fall. Verse 25, it says, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles have come in. And so all Israel will be saved. Now, I don't have time to go into this in great detail. Check out the verse-by-verse study that I did on chapter 11 in Romans for a lot more detail. And I've got an entire multi-hour broadcast on this entire concept of the northern house of Israel and the southern house of Israel, how they become one, Ezekiel 37, Ephesians 2, all of that, the one new man. It's all connected to Israel. It has nothing to do with the Gentiles. There is no covenant for the Gentiles. The new covenant, very clearly, in Jeremiah 31, 31, is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. There is no house Gentile. So when a Gentile gets saved, they're coming into... the tree that is the olive tree called Israel. And they're subject to the covenants of promise that the scriptures talk about. They once were far off. Now they're brought near and made true. And they're brought into the covenants of promise. They are a true Israel kingdom of God follower. That's what it's all about. So when it says that all Israel will be saved, he's talking about the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom coming back to be one in the hand of the Messiah. Ezekiel chapter 37. If all that just went way over your head, I encourage you to watch Identity Crisis. That will really help you. It'll break it all down for you. All right, let's move on to chapter 12. This is a barrage of instructions on loving like Christ. It is a fantastic chapter that will encourage you. It's like reading something out of the Proverbs. It really covers a whole myriad of issues that we have as believers. And I think that verse 1 encapsulates all of it. Verse 1 and 2 really pull it all together. Listen carefully. Here's what he says. I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what that is good and acceptable and perfect will of God. In other words, when you take your body and you put it on the altar and you create a living sacrifice for God, you are proving the perfect will of God. The perfect will of God is that you lay yourself down like Christ. That is holy and acceptable sacrifice unto God. And it's our reasonable service. Why is it our reasonable service? Because of what he did for us. He died for us so that we could live. Certainly, we could live for him by dying to the flesh. He's not asking us to get up on a cross and have them put nails on our hands. He's not asking for that. He's like, look, I don't want you to die for me. I want you to do something far more difficult. I want you to live for me. There's so many men that would be willing to die for their children. But what about living for them? What about spending time with them on a deep level? What about spending time with your wife on a deep level? What about absolutely living sacrifice for those that you love? That's the real acceptable sacrifice that proves the perfect will of God. All right, and that moves us to chapter 13. Chapter 13, verse 1 says, Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Now, boy, has this verse been really misunderstood. There's been so many Christians, I even was in a church once where they taught on this during the virus days and told us that everybody's got to wear a mask because the government's saying to do this, and everybody's got to do this, and he pulled out this verse. But the scriptures are very, very clear. This is not written as a treatise of a doctrine for all time. This is dealing with a very specific issue that's happening in the church of Rome. As the Jews are beginning to be subject back to the Romans again, and things were starting to happen, the early church was confused on what they should do. And Paul's like, look, they are in authority. Subject yourselves to them. But it was understood that, look, if they tell you to do something that's against the word of God, you're not going to do that. Okay, you're just simply not going to do that. If it's against your own conscious or your moral authority, you don't have to do that either. He's not saying obey the government on every little thing that they do. If that's the case, we've got large problems for Christians in third world countries and communist countries like Russia. So at the end of the day, he's simply saying, guys, making a very overarching umbrella statement. Authorities typically are there to help. Don't cause them problems and they won't. cause problems for you. Give the taxes to whom taxes is owed and move on. We've got a lot bigger fish to fry than having this conversation. And he does a really good job of doing that in chapter 13. When you move on to chapter 14, it gets a little bit more sticky. And I really encourage you to go through the verse by verse on this because this is definitely one of the top most misunderstood chapters in the book of Romans, if not the entire New Testament. Because we take this concept in verse 1, it says, Receive one who is weak in the faith, but not to disputes over doubtful things. For one who believes he may eat all things. And then there's one who is weak that eats only vegetables. And that has been misinterpreted as those that feel like they can eat anything. You can eat pork. You can eat shellfish. You can eat a bat, poisonous frogs, whatever you want to eat. You can eat it. And that makes you strong. But the one that doesn't want to eat, that makes you weak. But if you don't understand the nuance of what's going on, what's the debate in the first century in this church right now? Definition of food is clean animals. This has nothing to do with eating clean or eating unclean. This has everything to do with whether or not the meat that they're buying at the market has been offered to an idol. 1 Corinthians 8 is the parallel chapter to this. And so he says, look, the one who understands that clean meat is clean meat, it doesn't matter where it came from. that person is strong. He gets it. God made it. There's no such thing as fallen gods anyway. They don't really exist in real time. God is the only God. He says you can eat a sheep, you can eat a sheep. But the weaker brethren has a hard time doing that because he feels like it's offered to an idol. He feels like he's engaging in that. And so he chooses to eat only vegetables. He becomes a non-meat eater, God says through Paul. Don't judge each other. Just understand where each other's at. And then he moves to verse 5, just a few verses later, it says, One person esteems one day above another. Another esteems every day alike. Let each be convinced in his own mind. And we've been taught, and that means that he's now talking about the Sabbath, that you can make any day mean whatever you want. If you want to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, you can. You want to keep it on Tuesday, let everybody convince in his own. That is not at all what Paul is saying. The whole thing is a dead giveaway in verse 6. He says, He who observes the day observes it to the Lord. He who does not observe the day to the Lord, he does not observe it. He who eats, eats to the Lord, for he gives God thanks. And he who does not eat to the Lord, he does not eat and give God thanks. What's he talking about? He's talking about fasting. The Jews fasted, I believe it was Monday and Thursday. Christians, Tuesday and Friday. There was a major clash on what day you should fast on. And that's why it's stuck here in the middle of this entire topic of food. He's not switching to the Sabbath. That would make no sense. He's talking about fasting. So it's a beautiful topic that Paul is talking about. He's nailing the idea that there's only one true God and that if you are serving him with all your heart and you're choosing to fast on this day, great. If you're choosing not to eat meat, great. If it bothers you to not know if this sheep has been sacrificed to an idol, then great, don't buy it. Stop judging each other is all he is saying. And I go into a lot more depth on that. All right, chapter 15. Verse 4, it says, for whatever things were written before were written for our learning that we through the patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Now may the God of patience and comfort grant to you to be like-minded towards one another. According to Christ Jesus, that you may be with one mind and one mouth, glorify God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Guys, do you see a constant pattern here as we're flying through these chapters? He's looking for unity. It's the same thing that God's looking for today. Unity in... the body of Christ. But we are all so about this and that and championing our own little pet doctrines of when the Messiah is going to come back. And we argue about the calendar over here. We argue about whether or not people should do this or do that or worship the way we worship hymns or contemporary worship. It's all petty. to being in unity and loving one another. Just let people be where they're at. They want to debate? Great. Debate the scriptures. Iron sharpens iron. But there better be hugs in the end, because that is the heart of Christ. And that's what Paul is trying to say. By the time you get to chapter 16, he commends all these different people and has this very interesting thing that he says in verse 1. He says, I commend to you Phoebe, our sister, who is a servant of the church in Sancria, that you may receive her in the Lord. This is an amazing verse because out of the 29 people that Paul is mentioning and thanking in the last chapter here, one-third of them are women. And the incredible amount of work that women in the first century did to help forward the gospel is really undervalued. As a matter of fact, Phoebe here is a deacon. That's exactly what it says. And I go through all of this in chapter 16 in the verse-by-verse. It's fascinating that we have a woman deacon, woman elder, woman even apostle. It's mentioned in this last chapter. That's right. I encourage you to go through it and check it out for yourself. You won't believe it. It really kind of will change a few things. At the end of the day, Paul's entire letter to the Romans of these churches that he's never even been to, the believers that are Jewish, the believers that are Gentile, His whole entire focus is to try to get them to love one another as Christ loved them. He's trying to get the Jewish people to stop interpreting salvation and stop judging the Gentiles by the law and let the Holy Spirit do all the work. He's trying to get both to say, look, the law is incredibly important. I want to do it. Only those who are spiritual can subject themselves to it. And I want... all of you to get there. But in the process of getting there, everyone's going to be at a million different levels. So stop judging everyone. Gentiles, stop your unethical and immoral behavior and your judgment of the Jews. Jews, stop your judgment of the Gentiles for not being where you think that they need to be. And I think it's an amazing message for us today. We need to stop and just focus on our side of the street, cleaning up what we need to clean up in our own lives, getting the logs out of our own eyes before we attempt to get the speck out of our neighbor. The Book of Romans, is not a treatise of Christian theology. It's not an all-in-one book as if there's no more instructions in the entire manual that we call the Bible. It's simply a letter addressing the things that are going on in those local assemblies. And there's some great information along the way. There's some incredible instruction. There are some very wise context to what Paul says and how we should operate as believers. But in the end, I like what he says. Commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant in the church of Sanctuary. What's he saying? Be a servant. Commend one another. Serve one another like Christ served us. As a matter of fact, he washed our feet. feet. We should wash the feet. My friends, I'm Jim Staley. I encourage you to go back and watch all of the verse-by-verse through Romans. We have an all about Acts as well, where we decode Acts verse-by-verse, trying to fill the gap of what 21st century Christian Western seminaries have been teaching and what the Bible actually was meant to mean by the early Jewish authors. until then my name is Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries thank you Thank you so much for supporting this ministry. If you don't have a local church and you want to be in alignment with God and tithing and offerings, we encourage you to go to our website at passionfortruth.com. Say thank you and be a part of the solution of paying this forward towards others. It takes an awful lot of the employees that we have from around the world to bring you this broadcast each and every week and everything that we do. We certainly would love to partner with you. If you'd like to partner with us, please go to passionfortruth.com, click on the donate but button and every little shingle is welcome. In the meantime, we really appreciate your prayers. As a matter of fact, if you have a gift of prayer and you are an intercessor, we would like to know that. We have a group just for you. If you feel totally called to Passion for Truth to be an intercessor and to connect with us in that way, please send us your kind of resume at info at passionfortruth.com. In the meantime, I'm Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries, and I'll see you. video

Hello everyone, Jim Staley, Passion for Truth Ministries, and welcome to today's broadcast. where we're going to do a complete recap of the book of Romans, an overview, if you will, in less than an hour. We're going to go through 16 chapters.

I'm going to pull out all the key verses and give you a really good idea of what Romans is all about in both a recap and a review. For those of you that did not go through our in-depth verse-by-verse study on this, you can check that out on our website or on our YouTube channel playlist, where we go through the entire book of Romans, decoding it, verse by verse from the original author's perspective. If you've not heard the Jewish Hebrew perspective that Paul was coming from in the first century, then you don't even know what you've been missing. Western Christianity has gotten most of the book of Romans all wrong.

And that's simply because they're unfamiliar with the nuances of Judaism in the first century. And that's what we're doing here on this channel in these studies, going verse by verse and unpacking some of the most difficult books in the New Testament. so that we can truly understand what God has for us, what these apostles really meant, and how do we apply it to our lives. That's what we're going to do right now.

All right, so the book of Romans, listen, it's not a standalone treatise on how Christians should live, nor is it a treatise on systematic theology, as many have commonly believed. This is a letter written to both the believing Jews and the believing Gentiles that are meeting and worshiping together in Rome. Paul was the... best student of Rabbi Gamaliel, who was Gamaliel, he was the president of the Sanhedrin at the time, the most learned rabbi of his time period. And his Hebrew name, Paul, was Shaul.

He was a rabbi. And his Roman name was Paulos. Of course, that's what we're most used to calling him, is in the English, Paul. But we forget, just because he was an apostle to the Gentiles, he was Jewish through and through. He thinks in processes just like an Ivy League graduate, rabbi of the first century.

Just like Ivy League students today have a completely different culture and vocabulary, it was the same with Paul. God chose the most decorated rabbi of his time to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. Why would he use the most decorated rabbi? Because the Gentiles would not understand the Torah.

They wouldn't understand the prophets. Paul was trained in it. And he was about to go right into every synagogue that he could walk into and first go to the Jews and share the gospel from Genesis all the way to Malachi and beyond. And then he was going to train them to train the Gentiles.

That's what it's all about. Most Christians believe that the Jewish religious culture of that time revolved around the Torah, which is, of course, the first five books of the Bible known as the law. But this is simply not true. It was based on what was called Halakha.

And you have to know this in order to truly understand the book of Romans. What is halakha? It's the traditions and doctrines of the elders as it relates to the Torah. That's what it was totally revolving around. It wasn't revolving around the Torah itself.

It was revolving around what the rabbis believed the Torah said and how to apply it. That's where all the traditions and the regulations came from. That tradition said that righteousness came from keeping all of the law.

The problem is that their definition of the law was both the written. and the oral law. In other words, many religious Jews were coming to faith in Yeshua, but they were bringing with them both the written Torah, which is good, and the man-made traditions they believed made them wise, which were harmful.

In doing so, often unknowingly, they were recreating a version of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the same issue that Yeshua had with Judaism of his day, and Paul confronted it as well. The people had been taught for generations that righteousness came through adherence to rabbinic Judaism, them. and the traditions of the elders. As a result, they struggled to comprehend the full power of what Messiah had accomplished.

Yeshua Jesus wasn't opposed to God's law. He was opposed to how religious leaders had added to it, taken from it, and misused it as a system of salvation, which was never God's intent. On one side, you had religious Jews deeply entrenched in traditions and man-made rules that exceeded far beyond what God had ever commanded.

And on the other, Gentiles were coming out of pagan cultures filled with idolatry and virtually no moral boundaries. On the surface, this looked like a hopeless union. But what united them, what truly made them one, was the blood of Christ.

And this is exactly what Paul's trying to emphasize throughout his letter. And what is his letter about? Well, it's first of all, it's to the Jews, telling the Jews to stop judging the Gentiles for not doing everything you want them to do, the way you were taught. You were taught wrong about how to keep the Torah, says Paul.

And two, it was to the Gentile believers, telling them to stop sinning the way that they used to before they were saved, and to help them understand there's a book of instructions that God gave everyone in the entire... point of all of the law of God was to help all of us be like Christ. So the main point of Romans was to correct misunderstandings about the Torah and how it relates to righteousness. It was to show how God continues to remain faithful to the promises of Israel, that the Gentiles are now part of this entire covenant. Number three was to explain to the Jewish believers that they've been taught wrong.

The Gentiles have always been allowed to be grafted into the covenant family without following the rabbinic traditions. They only needed to follow God's commandments and to be completely surrendered in faith to him. And lastly, he wanted to call everyone to humility, love, and unity in Messiah.

So here's the breakdown. This is what we're going to do. We're going to walk chapter by chapter, pull out key verses, scriptures, misunderstood verses, and we're going to break it down and explain it for you.

But in very short detail because we have to go through all 16 chapters in just this one broadcast. We've got to do it quickly. If you want further detail, I encourage you to start at the beginning of Romans 1 or even the introduction that gives a ton of intro and background.

You have to know the culture. You don't necessarily need to know the language, but you definitely need to know the culture, the debates, who the players are, what the idiomatic expressions are, what were the things that were going on in the time of Paul that he's addressing for us to fully understand what he's talking about. All right, chapter 1 and chapter 2 are pretty easy.

Chapter 1 is all about... focusing on the universal sinfulness of all of the parties, but really a big focus on the Gentiles, which are guilty of their complete moral collapse. And the Jews in chapter two, he focuses on, which are guilty of hypocrisy, judging the Gentiles for not moving fast enough in their spirituality and trusting the Torah as their identity, not obedience. And there is a big difference.

And that brings us to chapter three, all the way to one of the most famous verses, chapter 3. verse 23, where it says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And I would add, all would say, stop judging. So stop judging.

Chapter one is all about talking to the Gentiles. Chapter two is all about disciplining the Jews. And in chapter three, he really kind of ends the chapter by saying, guys, everyone has sinned. So why are you judging everybody? Everyone has fallen short of God's glory.

That is the whole point of this book that he is writing. to these churches he's never been to. So in Christianity, one of the biggest lies that we have in the book of Romans as it deals with the Jews and the Gentiles is the Gentiles are under the law of love and the Jews are under the law of God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bible says that everyone has broken God's law. That's what causes you to be a sinner. The definition of sin in 1 John 3, 4 is those who have transgressed against God's law.

It's the breaking of God's law. That is the definition of sin. So if you break God's law, you become a sinner. You fall under the curse of the law, which causes you to need a savior.

And that's when Christ comes in. The irony is if you get rid of God's law, like the traditional interpretation of the book of Romans is and Galatians and Hebrews and so on, then no one can be a sinner. Because how can you be a sinner if there's no law that you are subject to break?

So if there's no law, you can't break it. There's no curse on your life, which means you don't need a Savior. Can you see the problem that we have? That's why it's so important to interpret the Scriptures correctly. Numbers 15, 15 and 16 says this, There will be one ordinance shall be for you, for the assembly, and for the stranger who dwells with you.

An ordinance forever throughout your generations. As you are, so shall the stranger be before God. One law and one custom shall be for you.

and for the stranger that were there as Gentiles who dwells with you. In other words, what God is saying is, look, there's going to be one law for everyone, the native-born Israelite and the Gentile. One covenant, one law under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, if you will. And so that is really kind of where we're going to be going here in the book of Romans.

We're going to be uncovering some of these most misunderstood verses. And that brings us to chapter 2, verse 13, which is a really good summation of what I just said. He says, for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified. How can the law of God be done away with when Paul, right here in the second chapter, says the doers of the law are going to be justified before God?

If the law is not relevant for Jews or Gentiles, then he can't say that. He would say that it's irrelevant. James 1.22-25 says the same exact thing. God's law is not the problem, my friends. It's how the religious Jews who were getting saved were using it.

They were using it incorrectly. That was the problem. So Paul ends his entire treaties here so far. In 3.31, he says, look, do we make void the law through faith?

because he's putting such... a focus on faith in Christ. And the Jews that were coming and getting saved had such a focus on the Torah. He's like, am I saying the Torah has no place in the life of a believer?

Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish God's law. In other words, Christ doesn't do away with God's law. It establishes it even more because now we're going to understand it. And as we move into chapter four and five, which is all about Abraham's faith, Paul is going to take some of the things that Abraham was commissioned with and make some connections to the Jews.

so they can better understand what this salvation is all about. Some misunderstood scriptures, chapter 4, verse 14. Let's take a look at it. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect, because the law brings about wrath.

Where there is no law, there is no sin. There's no transgression. So to the Jews, verse 14, it would say it this way. If you rely on just keeping the law for salvation, it will only condemn you. Because everyone has sinned, broken God's law.

And because there is a law and a transgression that does exist, you are condemned if you use this line of thinking. This is really what Paul would say. This is how he would say it today so we can understand it.

Look, you're focusing on God's law for salvation. You're done. You're condemned by it. God's law cannot save you, period. It's the blood of the lamb that saves you.

God's law is simply the... guard rails that keep you inside of the pen as a sheep, if you will. Take the guard rails out, and guess what sheep do?

They find wolves. That's just what we do. We end up walking, wandering, jumping off cliffs, or they're not the most intelligent animals for sure. And by the way, one more thing to mention before we move on to chapter five is when it says that the law brings about wrath. The reason why it brings about wrath is when we break it.

Remember, God said that I put before you blessings if you keep my commandments and curses if you don't. So it carries a curse if you break it, and that's what it's talking about. And because all men have fallen short of God's glory and everyone has sinned, it brings about wrath for everyone.

The entire world is subject to God's law. If they were not, there would be no such thing as sin. And, of course, no one would need a Savior.

But everyone needs Christ because everyone sinned, which means by default everyone has broken God's law, which means that everyone is subject to it. They just don't know it. in modern-day Christianity. We are taught that there is no law that we're subject to except for the Ten Commandments, but we don't have to keep the fourth one because we're not really sure why. But we don't want to keep the fourth one.

We want to do it on Sunday and not Saturday. I'm being a little facetious, but at the end of the day, we've got to fix some of our theology and kill the gap. We've got to shorten the gap between what Paul actually meant in the first century and what we believe here in the 21st century. All right, moving on to chapter 5. 5 verse 20, moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound. What does that mean?

It means the law was given so that people could see just how much they're offending God. They were already sinning, already going beyond what God wanted them to. He gave them the law to prove it so that they would absolutely know just how much sin was all around them.

All right, moving on to chapter 6, let's hit verse 1. It's a key scripture for sure. It says, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?

Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? And then, of course, verse 15, what then? Shall we sin because we're not under the law but under grace?

Certainly not. So Paul is making it very clear here in chapter 6 that we should not continue to break God's law just because grace is here or that grace may abound because he knew that there are certain people who think, well, wow, grace is here. Now we can break God's law all we want. We don't need, we don't, we'll just. plead the blood of Christ.

And there are entire groups of people probably today that take that same stance. And God says through the apostle Paul, shall we continue to sin because we're under grace and not under the penalty of God's law? Certainly not. So verse 15 is not saying that we're not subject to God's law. It's saying that we're not under it anymore.

In other words, we're not condemned by it. That's a completely different. And I go through it in detail in chapter 6 of the verse-by-verse study.

that we have. But that phrase under the law does not mean that you're subject to the law. It literally means that you are under it.

You've broken it. You're under it. You're condemned by it. Okay. Not that you're not subject to it.

And that's been misunderstood for sure. All right, let's get back to it. Verse 14, for sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. Again, just like I just said, it's not saying that you're not subject to God's law.

Think about how ludicrous that is, that now everyone is lawless, that there is no law, there's no commandments, there's no rules. He flat out gives all kinds of rules just in the book of Romans, much less all the rest of his writings. And he's quoting hundreds and hundreds of times from the Torah, from the prophets as proof text.

You can't quote something that's not relevant. He's quoting it because it is relevant. And he says you're not under law, not meaning that you're not subject to it, but you're simply not under it anymore. You're under grace. What does that mean?

Grace is covering the fact that you're breaking God's law. It's giving you a way to not be condemned by God's law. And that is what...

the whole point of the gospel is all about. To be, quote, in the law was to follow the written law of God. It's what you do as a lifestyle to prove that you love God.

1 John 5, 3 says that. Psalms 119, verse 1 says, blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord. Now, contrast that with the phrase under the law. To be under the law meant the law itself was your judge and you were subjecting yourself to its punishment for breaking it.

One was about content, okay? One was about authority. When you're in the law, it's the content of the law.

You're following the content of the law. When you're under it, the authority of that law will kill you. It will condemn you because you've sinned and only knows one thing.

It only knows how to put you in jail. Praise God that God, through Yeshua, is the sheriff who has the keys. And that key is Christ and his blood. And that brings us to 623, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.

Guys, I want you to see this. Every time you see the word sin, you really can almost every time replace it with breaking God's law because that's the definition of sin is a transgression of God's law. For the wages of the penalty of breaking God's law is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. That's what he's trying to explain.

Stop focusing on God's law because you're breaking it. You're condemned. So no matter how. good you keep it, Jewish believer of the first century, you're condemned to death.

Unless you have Christ, that's what Christ came for. All right, now let's move quickly over to chapter 7, as we're almost halfway through. It says, therefore, the law is holy, in verse 12, and the commandment is holy and just and good. In 14, he says, for we know that the law is spiritual, but I'm carnal, sold under sin.

Verse 22, for I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. So then with the mind, in verse 25, I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. How in the world, my friends, the seminary after seminary after seminary after pastor after preacher after scholar and even theologian, would say that Paul is against the law of God and believes that in his teaching that we don't have to keep the law of God anymore, but yet he is saying he delights in it.

He wants to serve the law of God by keeping it. Uh, and then the commandment is holy and just how could something that's holy and good and just be thrown away? It's not we've simply misunderstood him and that brings us to the most powerful verse I believe in all the book of romans It's eight verse one after spending an entire chapter in chapter seven saying how much he wants to keep god's law But with his mind he finds another law inside of him the law of sin and death that's keeping him from doing it He says man, what a wretched man and I am I want to keep god's law, but but I but I but I keep breaking it which I know creates condemnation and a curse.

But then he says this in verse 1 of chapter 8. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. You see what I'm saying, my friends? Christ sets us free, not from the law, from the curse that the law brings to everyone who breaks it. And we've all sinned. Verse 7 is a really incredible verse that is very rarely ever read in any church.

It says, because the carnal mind is enmity against God. What does that mean? It's in hatred against God.

For it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be. Paul makes the argument. Look, the carnal person is not subject to the law.

They don't want to be subject to the law. Nobody likes rules. Nobody likes regulations.

Nobody likes guidelines or boundaries. Ask any young teenager. And actually, most of us adults don't like it either.

But Paul says it's carnal to not be subject to God's law. Only those that are led by the spirit of the gospel. spirit will be willing to subject themselves to what God has to say on any given particular subject.

In verse 13, it says, for if you live according to the flesh, which means you're not subject to God's law, you'll die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.

And I love this verse because it's all about matching and marrying the Spirit and the truth together. See, it's not just about the truth. Jesus himself didn't come only. He came and then sent the Spirit. If the truth was the only thing that you needed, then that's the only thing that would have ever came.

But we need divine assistance. We need the power of God to flow through us. We need all the help that we can get because you can't just stop your addictions. You need the Spirit of God.

It's the Spirit that helps us put to death the deeds of the flesh. And that is why he sent the helper to begin with. And of course, one of my favorite verses of all time in 828, it says, We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.

And if you need to hear that today, then please put that in the comments. Whatever you're going through, God will work it together for good. But here's the key, only to those who love God. Let me ask you a question. Do you know what it means to love God?

It's not just about loving God the way that we want to love him. Don't create your own golden calf like the Israelites did in the desert coming out of Egypt. Love him the way he desires to be loved.

And then do this. Love your neighbor as yourself more than yourself. God loves it when we are.

unselfish, when we put ourselves aside, when we love others, that's the best way to love God. And secondly, trust him. Trust him and have faith that this verse is true, that everything that you're going through, it will work together for good.

As a matter of fact, rejoice in whatever trial that you're going through right now because God is going to bring it to fruition, to what it was originally purposed to do in your life, to put down the deeds of the flesh. This is the spiritual thing that you're going through. It appears to be physical. It's manifesting the physical, but it is spiritual. Yahweh is purposing the spiritual into the physical to increase your spirit man and to answer your prayer and help you be more like him.

The image of God does not come through just hocus pocus. Just like a potter must press his hands into the clay, and it will cause a groove. And the clay is going to go from a lump to being uncomfortable and spinning around and getting nauseous on that potter's wheel. But at the end of the day, it will be exactly what the potter intended. That's what God's doing with you.

And that's the beauty behind the word of God. Now we're halfway through, so let's start burning through the rest of it. The back half here. Chapter 9 through 12. Let's do it. 9.30, key verse here.

What shall we say then that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith? But Israel, talking about the Jewish people of that time. pursuing the law of righteousness, have not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? The Gentiles aren't even pursuing it, and they found it.

Here's why. Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.

What's he talking about here? He's not talking about the law, because they were keeping the law. He was talking about the works of the law.

The works of the law are all the tradition and the doctrine of the elders. It's all of the halakha. It's important to know that the Jewish people, they did not obtain salvation because they were looking at it through their own lens of what they could do.

And a lot of people are doing that same thing today. They're trying to do everything they can to be a good person, and they're forgetting that this is a walk with Christ. You have to do everything to be a good person. That's found in the Scripture. That's found in God's law.

But you have to do it by faith. It's a relationship that we're having here. So they stumbled in that stumbling stone.

The first century Jew, the religious Jew, it was all about a checklist. And Paul was saying, no, it's all about the one who made the list, not the check that's on the list. It's not all Israel that rejected Christ, my friends.

Thousands actually did accept Messiah in the first century, but the majority did not because they sought to attain it without faith. Attain what? Salvation.

They weren't looking for a Messiah. They weren't looking. for the one who would set them free. And they certainly weren't looking for a suffering servant.

If they were looking for a Messiah, they were looking for a conquering king that would come in and dethrone the Romans from their own throne of oppression over the Jews. So move to 9.25, it says, as he says also in Hosea, I will call them my people who are not my people and her beloved who was not my beloved. And it shall come to pass in the very place that it was said to them, you are not my people, there they shall be called sons of the living God. And then it says in verse 27, Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel.

So this verse has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, these three verses, as talking about, you know, I'm going to call them my people who are not my people. And they define that as the Gentiles that are not God's people. But that is not at all what Paul is talking about.

That's not what Hosea was talking about. You have to understand the two houses of Israel to fully understand this, that you have the northern ten tribes called the house of Israel, and you have the two tribes in the south, Judah and Benjamin primarily. but the Levites that were called the house of Judah. The house of Judah goes into captivity in Babylon for 70 years in 586 BC. They come back out.

They're called the Jews. That's when they were first called Yehudah in Babylon. And they are why the Jewish people exist today, because they came back out of Babylon. But the northern ten tribes called the house of Israel, they were taken into captivity in 722 BC into Assyria, and they completely lost their identity.

They never came back. Why did they never come back? Because God said he was going to divorce the northern kingdom.

They were very, very much in idolatry. They hoard among the nation, so God gave them what they deserved. But he says, in the very place that I dissolved our marriage, that they're not my beloved, I will call them my beloved. And those that I'm saying are not my people anymore, I will call them sons of the living God.

And that's why he says, also, Isaiah cries out about Israel. He's not talking about the Gentiles. So Really, really important to understand that particular context. Again, I go into a lot more detail on that on the verse-by-verse in chapter 9 of this Decoding Romans study. All right, moving to chapter 10, verse 4, probably one of the most misinterpreted verses in all of Romans.

It says, For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. It sure sounds like Paul is saying that Christ is the end of the law, and the end of the law happens when Christ came, until you find out that the word end there is telos. And telos does not mean what you think it means.

The Greek word telos carries a deep and multifaceted meaning. It often is translated as end, goal, purpose, or completion. In philosophy, especially Aristotle, telos often refers to the inherent goal or purpose of a thing.

It's called teleology. An example, the telos of a seed is to become a tree. The telos of a battle is victory or defeat. In 1 Peter 1.9, I love how this reads. It says, receiving the end, that word there is telos in the Greek, receiving the telos of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

He's not saying the end of your faith, the destruction of your faith. No, the point and goal of your faith is the salvation of your souls. That's exactly what chapter 10, verse 4 is talking about.

Christ is the goal of righteousness for everyone who believes. It's the goal of the law. The entire purpose of the law is Christ.

That's what Paul is trying to say. All right, let's move on to chapter 11. It says this, verse 1, I say then, has God cast away his people? Well, he answers it, certainly not. For I also am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham. If God casts out his people, I'm in big trouble, he says, because I'm an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin.

God has not cast away the Jewish people who he foreknew. He says in verse 11, say then, have they stumbled that they should fall? Certainly not.

He's saying the same thing in a different way. But through their fall to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles. Now, if their fall is riches for the world and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness?

What's he talking about? God's not done with them yet. God's not dead, if you will. He's not done with the Jewish people.

They are asleep right now. But God will open their eyes. And he's done it by the thousands in the first century, tens of thousands, in fact.

And he's done it by the thousands and ten thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions since then. So we cannot just land blasts and say the Jewish people are not of God. No, the Jewish people are in God's plan. God has a plan for the Jewish people. He's working his plan perfectly.

His plan sometimes is related to a previous covenant that God made with Abraham and the forefathers that has nothing to do with salvation, but just blessing them and helping them multiply to be leaders, to have power. all because God said you're going to be the head, not the tail. Your descendants are going to be blessed like the stars of the sky, the sand of the sea.

And it has nothing to do whether or not they follow him or even call him Yahweh or Elohim or God at all. They can be atheists. God's going to bless them just because of the patriarchs.

That's a really important point. Because most of the time, us believers, we look at everything through the lens of Christ and eternality. And that is the ultimate goal. But God is fulfilling.

His goal of all the covenants and all the promises that he made, he's doing that all simultaneously while the gospel is being shared with the rest of the world. That's why it says in verse 17, if some of the branches were broken off and you are grafted in among them and with them partakers of the root and fatness of the olive tree, then don't boast because God can break you off too. Do you see what Paul is trying to say here throughout the rest of his book?

The Jewish believers were judging the Gentile believers and the Gentile believers were feuding with the Jewish believers. They weren't getting along. The Gentiles are brand new.

They don't know come here from Sikkim. The Jews were bringing in... their bad theology and the traditions and doctrines of men. And Paul was trying to strip them of their bad theology and strip the Gentiles of all their moral decay, marry the two into some sort of relationship, and he was having a hard time. That's why he was saying, look, guys, the Gentiles are grafted in, okay, because of the unbelieving Jews that refused to hear the Messiah.

That makes room for a whole other group of people. But be careful. Arrogance. always seems to cause people to fall.

Verse 25, it says, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles have come in. And so all Israel will be saved. Now, I don't have time to go into this in great detail.

Check out the verse-by-verse study that I did on chapter 11 in Romans for a lot more detail. And I've got an entire multi-hour broadcast on this entire concept of the northern house of Israel and the southern house of Israel, how they become one, Ezekiel 37, Ephesians 2, all of that, the one new man. It's all connected to Israel.

It has nothing to do with the Gentiles. There is no covenant for the Gentiles. The new covenant, very clearly, in Jeremiah 31, 31, is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

There is no house Gentile. So when a Gentile gets saved, they're coming into... the tree that is the olive tree called Israel. And they're subject to the covenants of promise that the scriptures talk about. They once were far off.

Now they're brought near and made true. And they're brought into the covenants of promise. They are a true Israel kingdom of God follower.

That's what it's all about. So when it says that all Israel will be saved, he's talking about the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom coming back to be one in the hand of the Messiah. Ezekiel chapter 37. If all that just went way over your head, I encourage you to watch Identity Crisis.

That will really help you. It'll break it all down for you. All right, let's move on to chapter 12. This is a barrage of instructions on loving like Christ.

It is a fantastic chapter that will encourage you. It's like reading something out of the Proverbs. It really covers a whole myriad of issues that we have as believers. And I think that verse 1 encapsulates all of it. Verse 1 and 2 really pull it all together.

Listen carefully. Here's what he says. I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what that is good and acceptable and perfect will of God. In other words, when you take your body and you put it on the altar and you create a living sacrifice for God, you are proving the perfect will of God. The perfect will of God is that you lay yourself down like Christ. That is holy and acceptable sacrifice unto God.

And it's our reasonable service. Why is it our reasonable service? Because of what he did for us.

He died for us so that we could live. Certainly, we could live for him by dying to the flesh. He's not asking us to get up on a cross and have them put nails on our hands.

He's not asking for that. He's like, look, I don't want you to die for me. I want you to do something far more difficult.

I want you to live for me. There's so many men that would be willing to die for their children. But what about living for them?

What about spending time with them on a deep level? What about spending time with your wife on a deep level? What about absolutely living sacrifice for those that you love?

That's the real acceptable sacrifice that proves the perfect will of God. All right, and that moves us to chapter 13. Chapter 13, verse 1 says, Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Now, boy, has this verse been really misunderstood.

There's been so many Christians, I even was in a church once where they taught on this during the virus days and told us that everybody's got to wear a mask because the government's saying to do this, and everybody's got to do this, and he pulled out this verse. But the scriptures are very, very clear. This is not written as a treatise of a doctrine for all time. This is dealing with a very specific issue that's happening in the church of Rome. As the Jews are beginning to be subject back to the Romans again, and things were starting to happen, the early church was confused on what they should do.

And Paul's like, look, they are in authority. Subject yourselves to them. But it was understood that, look, if they tell you to do something that's against the word of God, you're not going to do that. Okay, you're just simply not going to do that.

If it's against your own conscious or your moral authority, you don't have to do that either. He's not saying obey the government on every little thing that they do. If that's the case, we've got large problems for Christians in third world countries and communist countries like Russia.

So at the end of the day, he's simply saying, guys, making a very overarching umbrella statement. Authorities typically are there to help. Don't cause them problems and they won't.

cause problems for you. Give the taxes to whom taxes is owed and move on. We've got a lot bigger fish to fry than having this conversation. And he does a really good job of doing that in chapter 13. When you move on to chapter 14, it gets a little bit more sticky. And I really encourage you to go through the verse by verse on this because this is definitely one of the top most misunderstood chapters in the book of Romans, if not the entire New Testament.

Because we take this concept in verse 1, it says, Receive one who is weak in the faith, but not to disputes over doubtful things. For one who believes he may eat all things. And then there's one who is weak that eats only vegetables.

And that has been misinterpreted as those that feel like they can eat anything. You can eat pork. You can eat shellfish. You can eat a bat, poisonous frogs, whatever you want to eat. You can eat it.

And that makes you strong. But the one that doesn't want to eat, that makes you weak. But if you don't understand the nuance of what's going on, what's the debate in the first century in this church right now? Definition of food is clean animals.

This has nothing to do with eating clean or eating unclean. This has everything to do with whether or not the meat that they're buying at the market has been offered to an idol. 1 Corinthians 8 is the parallel chapter to this.

And so he says, look, the one who understands that clean meat is clean meat, it doesn't matter where it came from. that person is strong. He gets it. God made it. There's no such thing as fallen gods anyway.

They don't really exist in real time. God is the only God. He says you can eat a sheep, you can eat a sheep.

But the weaker brethren has a hard time doing that because he feels like it's offered to an idol. He feels like he's engaging in that. And so he chooses to eat only vegetables.

He becomes a non-meat eater, God says through Paul. Don't judge each other. Just understand where each other's at.

And then he moves to verse 5, just a few verses later, it says, One person esteems one day above another. Another esteems every day alike. Let each be convinced in his own mind.

And we've been taught, and that means that he's now talking about the Sabbath, that you can make any day mean whatever you want. If you want to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, you can. You want to keep it on Tuesday, let everybody convince in his own. That is not at all what Paul is saying.

The whole thing is a dead giveaway in verse 6. He says, He who observes the day observes it to the Lord. He who does not observe the day to the Lord, he does not observe it. He who eats, eats to the Lord, for he gives God thanks.

And he who does not eat to the Lord, he does not eat and give God thanks. What's he talking about? He's talking about fasting. The Jews fasted, I believe it was Monday and Thursday. Christians, Tuesday and Friday.

There was a major clash on what day you should fast on. And that's why it's stuck here in the middle of this entire topic of food. He's not switching to the Sabbath. That would make no sense. He's talking about fasting.

So it's a beautiful topic that Paul is talking about. He's nailing the idea that there's only one true God and that if you are serving him with all your heart and you're choosing to fast on this day, great. If you're choosing not to eat meat, great. If it bothers you to not know if this sheep has been sacrificed to an idol, then great, don't buy it. Stop judging each other is all he is saying.

And I go into a lot more depth on that. All right, chapter 15. Verse 4, it says, for whatever things were written before were written for our learning that we through the patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Now may the God of patience and comfort grant to you to be like-minded towards one another.

According to Christ Jesus, that you may be with one mind and one mouth, glorify God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Guys, do you see a constant pattern here as we're flying through these chapters? He's looking for unity. It's the same thing that God's looking for today. Unity in...

the body of Christ. But we are all so about this and that and championing our own little pet doctrines of when the Messiah is going to come back. And we argue about the calendar over here. We argue about whether or not people should do this or do that or worship the way we worship hymns or contemporary worship. It's all petty.

to being in unity and loving one another. Just let people be where they're at. They want to debate? Great.

Debate the scriptures. Iron sharpens iron. But there better be hugs in the end, because that is the heart of Christ. And that's what Paul is trying to say.

By the time you get to chapter 16, he commends all these different people and has this very interesting thing that he says in verse 1. He says, I commend to you Phoebe, our sister, who is a servant of the church in Sancria, that you may receive her in the Lord. This is an amazing verse because out of the 29 people that Paul is mentioning and thanking in the last chapter here, one-third of them are women. And the incredible amount of work that women in the first century did to help forward the gospel is really undervalued. As a matter of fact, Phoebe here is a deacon.

That's exactly what it says. And I go through all of this in chapter 16 in the verse-by-verse. It's fascinating that we have a woman deacon, woman elder, woman even apostle.

It's mentioned in this last chapter. That's right. I encourage you to go through it and check it out for yourself.

You won't believe it. It really kind of will change a few things. At the end of the day, Paul's entire letter to the Romans of these churches that he's never even been to, the believers that are Jewish, the believers that are Gentile, His whole entire focus is to try to get them to love one another as Christ loved them. He's trying to get the Jewish people to stop interpreting salvation and stop judging the Gentiles by the law and let the Holy Spirit do all the work.

He's trying to get both to say, look, the law is incredibly important. I want to do it. Only those who are spiritual can subject themselves to it.

And I want... all of you to get there. But in the process of getting there, everyone's going to be at a million different levels. So stop judging everyone.

Gentiles, stop your unethical and immoral behavior and your judgment of the Jews. Jews, stop your judgment of the Gentiles for not being where you think that they need to be. And I think it's an amazing message for us today. We need to stop and just focus on our side of the street, cleaning up what we need to clean up in our own lives, getting the logs out of our own eyes before we attempt to get the speck out of our neighbor. The Book of Romans, is not a treatise of Christian theology.

It's not an all-in-one book as if there's no more instructions in the entire manual that we call the Bible. It's simply a letter addressing the things that are going on in those local assemblies. And there's some great information along the way. There's some incredible instruction. There are some very wise context to what Paul says and how we should operate as believers.

But in the end, I like what he says. Commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant in the church of Sanctuary. What's he saying? Be a servant. Commend one another.

Serve one another like Christ served us. As a matter of fact, he washed our feet. feet.

We should wash the feet. My friends, I'm Jim Staley. I encourage you to go back and watch all of the verse-by-verse through Romans.

We have an all about Acts as well, where we decode Acts verse-by-verse, trying to fill the gap of what 21st century Christian Western seminaries have been teaching and what the Bible actually was meant to mean by the early Jewish authors. until then my name is Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries thank you Thank you so much for supporting this ministry. If you don't have a local church and you want to be in alignment with God and tithing and offerings, we encourage you to go to our website at passionfortruth.com.

Say thank you and be a part of the solution of paying this forward towards others. It takes an awful lot of the employees that we have from around the world to bring you this broadcast each and every week and everything that we do. We certainly would love to partner with you. If you'd like to partner with us, please go to passionfortruth.com, click on the donate but button and every little shingle is welcome.

In the meantime, we really appreciate your prayers. As a matter of fact, if you have a gift of prayer and you are an intercessor, we would like to know that. We have a group just for you. If you feel totally called to Passion for Truth to be an intercessor and to connect with us in that way, please send us your kind of resume at info at passionfortruth.com.

In the meantime, I'm Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries, and I'll see you. video

Transcript for:Romans Overview and Themes

Transcript for:
Romans Overview and Themes