This transcript is not verbatim. It has been minimally edited for readability. In some instances, minor corrections and/or clarifications have been made, usually found in the parenthesis. We have not edited for publication.
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Intro:
Welcome to the Mind of Miz Podcast. This episode is part of the “Romans Online Bible Study Series.” The episodes are recorded live with an online Bible study group. The question-and-answer session is not included here, but if you want to be a part of the live Bible study, go to mindofmiz.com/romans and sign up. To support the Mind of Miz Podcast go to mindofmiz.com/support Thank you for listening and enjoy the program.
Pre-Roll:
Here's the road that Paul took. He was a citizen of Tarsus. He was a citizen of Rome. He was part of the social elite class. He had status. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews. He was a Pharisee. He was educated in Jerusalem under the greatest teacher there was. He was appointed to a high position in society, receiving letters from the Jewish leaders and appointed to do a special job.
But none of it mattered to Paul when he came to Christ. None of that status mattered. His citizenship didn't matter. His Hebrew background as a Pharisee, that didn't matter. What mattered was this; here's how he describes himself: (paraphrase) “a slave of Jesus Christ, an apostle to the Gentiles.”
Podcast:
Let's start with Romans Chapter 11, this is the scripture we're going to read today. I know it's kind of weird that we are we starting in Chapter 11, but it’s because this really talks about the profundity of God, who He is, how we understand Him. And helps us understand the Providence of God and how God moves all things through history.
Today, this very moment, wherever you’re sitting, listening, even reading out of the book of Romans and trying to glean something from it for yourself, all of it, is part of God's Providence for your life.
Romans 11:33-36 “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR? Or WHO HAS FIRST GIVEN TO HIM THAT IT MIGHT BE PAID BACK TO HIM AGAIN? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”
I want to talk about the Providence of God.
I don't know how many of you have heard of the Providence of God, but it's a real simple idea. Providence is a doctrine that is taught in the Bible. And the best way to explain it, to keep it short, would be to start by saying that God created the world.
Think of everything that God created, the entire universe, all the planets, all the stars, and all those things that we don't even know about. You've seen pictures of how massive space looks. Now, think about this world that God created, earth. The oceans, mountains, plains, animals, humans…trees, all of these things that God made. When God acts in order to preserve the very creation that he created. That action, is what we call Providence.
And the reason that Providence is important is because today so many people have lost their view that God is not just “in control.” We say things like that, don’t we? “God is in control; God is in charge.” But it's not just that God is in control, but that God is the first cause of everything that is happening in this world. There’s nothing that happens in this world, whether it's good or whether it's a tragedy that God hasn’t already ordained and that God is not behind and that God hasn’t done. (We mean this in light of God’s sovereignty.)
And that is something that we have to understand, because in our country, we're used to freedom. We're used to our free will. We're used to doing things our way. And what we have to understand is that God is the one that is doing the calling. God is the one that is doing the work first. And then when we act, because we are free agents, and we do have free choices, God also works through those actions. Even when you're trying to do something, when you think that something is luck, God is actually behind that.
I wanted to talk about the Empire of Rome, because the book of Romans, obviously is written to people that lived in the city of Rome. And the city of Rome was an interesting place. One of the things that I wanted to cover today is how God's Providence (referring to Christ) came at the perfect time in history.
When Jesus was born, He was born in a in a time where the world was ready to receive the Christ, to receive the Messiah, He couldn't come at any other time. We learned that from the Bible.
Rome had conquered so much of the world, that the world was ready, basically, to unite. The world had this prevailing mindset that they wanted to be one. They wanted to have better things. They wanted to live in a better way. They were looking for something, but they didn't know what it was. And everywhere that Rome (the Empire) went, people were quick to say, “Yes, we want to do things the Roman way.” This is really important because Jesus is born into this world. Not only that, Paul is also born into this world, and that is the Providence of God. That is God working through history.
Never in the history of the world, until the Romans came along, had there been an ability to travel the way they did. The Romans built these massive roads systems. (If you look them up on Google or Google Maps, you'll actually still find that there are Roman roads that still exist today.) They had their own form of cement… and they used to be able to put things together in such a way…that was just amazing. This road system was what Paul would later use to travel from city to city. The roads connected all major population areas. Rome did this, in part, to conquer the world. Yet, those same roads Paul used to conquer the world for Christ to preach the gospel.
That is the Providence of God.
Roman soldiers were being deployed and stationed in the population centers along the roads, and they would go miles…hundreds and thousands of miles away from the city of Rome. When Paul was preaching the gospel, people started getting converted and people started evangelizing to these soldiers. And a lot of these soldiers actually started getting converted to Christianity themselves. Britain, for example, we understand from history, actually received the gospel from Roman soldiers, as the solders had themselves been converted.
You can see how God was using the Roman Empire, which did a lot of bad things, and conquered a lot of lands, killed a lot of people, enslaved a lot of people. Yet God in His Providence was utilizing them. The Romans who worked for their self-interest had no idea God was utilizing their actions in order to later on bring the gospel to millions of people.
And that's important because since before that time, really, the word of God was only being preached in one place. And that place was in Jerusalem. It was in Israel. It wasn't really going anywhere else because the Jews, for reasons of their own, didn’t proselytize. What we find is that there's a promise that God has given and we read it in the Old Testament, where He says that one day will come, when the promises that have been given to the Jewish people will also be given to the Gentiles, to the world.
What we find then, as we come to the book of Romans, and the New Testament, is that God in His Providence is making all of this come together at one particular time in history.
Our religion that we believe in, Christianity, is a religion of history. When we say that Jesus Christ came to the world, we actually mean that He physically came to this world. When we say that He died on a cross. We are saying there was a moment in time when His arms were spread on a cross and He died. When we say that He was risen we mean to say that there was a moment in time, in history, when Jesus Christ was risen. When we look at Rome, when we look at the road system, when we look at the soldiers, when we look at everything that they were doing, we realize that God was moving His hand in order so that Christ could be preached, so that the gospel could be preached.
It's amazing to me that God would do that. It's amazing to me that God would ordain all of these things, in time, in history, in order to do those things.
I did want to read one scripture to you so that you understand what I'm talking about. And this is out of the book of Galatians, a letter that Paul wrote.
Galatians 4:4-5 “…but when the fullness of the time came. (Think about that. The ‘fullness of the time’ when everything was in place, when everything that had to happen, happened; good or bad…in the fullness of time,) God sent forth His Son, born of a woman born under the law, so that He, (Jesus Christ) might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons…” (this is me and you; in order that we can receive the adoption as sons, that is to be made sons and daughters of God.) That is to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.
That's what He did. The reason that I'm going over this and the Providence of God is because when we get into the book of Romans, you're probably going to hear things or learn things that you've never heard before. And you need to keep at the forefront (of your mind) that God is not just in charge, that God is not just in control, but that God is the first cause of everything, that God has decreed things since before He made the world. He has decreed these things to pass.
When we start learning these truths, these mysteries revealed, a lot of times they shake your world, because you think to yourself “this is not what I've heard in the past, this is not how it was taught to me in the past; I don't know that I even believe that…” because what happens is that we want to live life our own way. We have to bend our knee to God. We have to be able to say, “God, you are the one that has decreed whatever it is for my life.” We have to be able to say that.
Back to Galatians 4:6 “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba Father.!’”
People say Abba means something like daddy. And there is a connotation where there is this kind of sweetness behind it. So don't get me wrong. But it's deeper than that. It says He's the one that made you the way that you are. He's the one that formed you in your mother's womb. He is the one that did that. When we say “Abba Father!”, not only are we just saying, “Oh, dad, give me something.” We're saying, “You made me. You created me. You own me. I'm yours.”
Then Galatians 4:7 says, “therefore, you are no longer a slave… (a slave to sin) but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.”
What does that mean? Where does God live? What does God own? That's what we have. Do we have it in this life? Of course not. Why? Because sin doesn't allow for it. But we have the hope. We have the assurance that one day we're going to be with our Father. That's important.
We have to understand, the world was primed for Christ when Jesus came. The Jewish nation was ready for a Messiah. The Roman conquest had united much of the world. The Greek culture thrived. And because of Greek culture, there was one global, universal language, Greek, that everybody spoke and everybody understood. And it was in Greek that Paul wrote his thirteen letters we find in the New Testament. It was in Greek primarily that the New Testament was written so that everybody can read it.
In fact, one of the sins of the Roman Catholic Church later on was that after Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, the new global language of the day, he did it because not everybody was speaking Greek anymore, so it made sense.
But for a thousand years, they kept that same translation even when Latin became a dead language. The people who were now speaking forms of German, Old English and different languages, couldn't understand the Bible, in fact, couldn’t even read it. They had to listen to a man say stuff that they didn't know. (We can see how what God does, He does it perfectly and then when man comes along, well, we screw the whole thing up.)
Pantheism was dead before the Romans came. Before people would worship 500 different gods. But what was happening at this time, people were saying, “no, that can't be the way.” There has to be one way to salvation. There has to be only one thing. So, God was already working in the people's minds to accept the Christ when he came.
Let's talk a little bit about Paul, because we're running down on time here. Paul was an interesting person, but the Providence of God was in his life. Paul was a Roman citizen. That's why (by God’s Providence) he was born in Tarsus, so that he would be a citizen of Tarsus and a Roman citizen. The implications of that are crazy, because what that means is that he actually was in the upper social class of Tarsus when he was growing up. We know that from scripture.
In Acts 22 Paul finds himself, about to be scourged for preaching the gospel, “stirring up the people” and a real dislike on part of the Jews.
Acts 22:25 “But when they stretched him (Paul) out, with thongs, Paul's said to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman?’”
Paul is telling them ‘I’m a Roman” and “un-condemned.”
Acts 22:26-27 “when the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and told him, saying, ‘what are you about to do for this man is a Roman?’ The commander came and said to him (Paul), ‘Tell me, are you a Roman?’”
Now, we've heard the word “Roman” here three times. Paul calls the centurion and tells him that he’s a Roman. Now, the commander is asking him, Are you a Roman? And Paul says, “yes” at the end of v. 27.
Acts 22:28 “the commander answered, ‘I acquired this citizenship with a large sum of money.’ And Paul said, ‘but I was actually born a citizen.’”
I remember when my wife and I went to Haiti on a mission trip. When we got back, one of the coolest things happened to me. I had never been out of the country and on our way back we're going through Miami (International) Airport. An immigration officer asked for my passport, which I promptly handed over, He looked at me…looked at the passport…looked at me…then looked back at the passport…and then he stamped the passport. He gave it back to me and said, “welcome home.” See, I was a citizen of America and that was awesome. I was like, that's pretty cool. You know, there's people that would pay large sums of money for that blue passport.
Paul was a citizen of Tarsus. The city of Tarsus was a cool city. You’ve heard of Cleopatra; Antony, was her lover. And the first time they met was in the city that Paul was born in, Tarsus. One of the greatest minds and advisor to Caesar Augustus (Athenodorus) hailed from Tarsus. Tarsus was a place of education. It was better in that sense than even Athens, according to historian and theologian F.F Bruce. This is the pedigree that Paul had. But Paul really didn't care too much about that pedigree, did he? We're going to see that in a minute.
Paul was also a Hebrew of Hebrews. He was a Pharisee by (training). Here then, we have a Roman citizen, a citizen of Tarsus, a man who was a Hebrew of Hebrews. He was a Pharisee taught under the great Gamaliel, who was an awesome teacher. Gamaliel was like the Einstein of Jerusalem in his time. This was the guy you wanted to go to, to learn from. That Paul’s family had enough money to send Paul to Jerusalem in his youth from Tarsus all the way to Jerusalem to get an education gives you an idea of the kind of upbringing he had.
Why am I saying all this? Because God's Providence was in that. Because all of this, all the traveling that Paul would do later on, on Roman roads, he could do it because he had a Roman passport, because he can actually travel the world, because when they were going to scourge him and possibly even kill him, they couldn't. Why? Because he was a Roman citizen. It’s important.
Well, sadly to say, Paul was also a persecutor. Look at how Paul describes himself:
Acts 26:11 “And as I punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them… (he’s talking about Christians here) to blaspheme; and being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities.”
That's a monster.
That's what Paul turned out to be. He had all this pedigree and he was using it to persecute the Church of Christ. He didn't know he was persecuting the Church of Christ but he was. He was doing it out of ignorance.
1 Corinthians 15:9 “For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
You think he was, perhaps, feeling a little guilty? Maybe, but he understood what he had done. He understood his past. He understood God's Providence was at work in him and allowed him to have this certain lifestyle, bring him to this place, bring him to a position of fame (prominence) where he can now be this guy who's the persecutor of the church trying to uphold the Jewish law. And yet we look at it and we say he was out of the will of God, but God was doing a work in his life.
Paul said of himself:
1 Timothy 1:13 “Even though I was formerly, a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor, yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief.”
It’s important for us as Christians to not forget how ignorant we were, how evil, how lost we were before God…before Christ, came into our lives. And this is why we don't act like we used to act. This is why we change the way we behave. This is why we don't walk in the former ways that we used to. Because we have to remember, God pulled us out of that mess. There's no reason for me to be in that mess.
I encourage you to read Acts 7. I won't read it here because of time, but it’s the story of the stoning of Stephen, who became the first martyr of the church.
Acts 8:3a “But Saul began ravaging the church, entering house after house.”
Think about someone knocking down your door because you're a Christian. This was what Paul was doing, and he would drag away “men and women, (and) put them in prison.” (8:3b)
Think about that. That's crazy. But that's what he was doing.
The word “ravaging” in the text, I believe, is only used in Acts 8:3 in the New Testament. It means to dishonor, to bring shame. It's used in the Septuagint Bible, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament. I actually got a copy somewhere here. It's used, in a way, to talk about a woman who is a prostitute who dishonors herself. It's a terrible word to describe Paul, who at the time was going by the name Saul.
We also have the conversion of Paul, where he famously says:
1 Corinthians 15:8 (paraphrased by the author) “Last of all…Christ appeared to me…”
Here Paul was on his way to Damascus to put people in prison. At that time, in Jerusalem, there was such a (large and aggressive) persecution of Christians. Saul, was so enraged and the persecution was so strong, that it caused Christians to leave the city. Saul decides he's going to get letters from the high priest so that he can go persecute these people, so he can go to this other city and bring them and dragged them back… that’s what he wanted to do.
1 Corinthians 15:3-8 (NIV) “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”
Here was Paul living a life, thinking, “you know, this is what I have to do.” And yet in that moment, Christ appears to him, Jesus revealed Himself, Jesus called him and Jesus sent him.
Next week, when we're looking at Romans 1:1, we're going to look at exactly what that means. Exactly, what Paul means when he says, (paraphrased) “God called me, God sent me to do something and I have to do it, and I have to live this way.” That's the passion that man had, and all part of God’s Providence. All of this working, all of this education. God was working through it.
Here's the road that Paul took. He was a citizen of Tarsus. He was a citizen of Rome. He was part of the social elite class. He had status. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews. He was a Pharisee. He was educated in Jerusalem under the greatest teacher there was. He was appointed to a high position in society, receiving letters from the Jewish leaders and appointed to do a special job.
But none of it mattered to Paul when he came to Christ. None of that status mattered. His citizenship didn't matter. His Hebrew background as a Pharisee, that didn't matter. What mattered was this; here's how he describes himself: (paraphrase) “a slave of Jesus Christ, an apostle to the Gentiles.”
That is what Paul thought of himself. Paul then became a man on the move. Four different provinces of Rome, he conquered for God. Not with the sword, not with any weapons, not with an army, with the Word of God. And he went from city to city to the point that he says:
Romans 15:23 “…there are no further opportunities for me in these regions…”
I imagine him saying, “my job is done here. It's time for me to go to Spain.” All of this happened in the life of Paul. In the Book of Martyrs, we learned that Paul at the end of his life got arrested. He had been arrested in Rome, then he got released. He did some ministry work, got arrested again, and this time they beheaded him. That was his life. He ended up being a martyr for the cause of Christ.
Understand that Romans is a powerfully written a letter. God used Paul, in his Providence, to bring it to us.
Here are the passions that explain Paul’s state of mind when he wrote the letter. We can boil it down to three things:
His heritage as a Jew,
His calling to preach the gospel to the Gentiles
His desire to continually bring together Jew and Gentile.
And you'll see that there's about four or five chapters dedicated to that in Romans alone, where he's trying to get the Gentile world and the Jewish world to just be one in Christ. That's what was pushing him. That's what he wanted to do.
What does all this mean for us? If, there was a theme that that we can say Romans is all about, we could say it's about two small words… “In Christ.”
What we do, we do it “in Christ.” We pray “in Christ,” we read the word “in Christ.”
Let's look at this in Scripture. (Notice “in Christ.”) I’ll be going rapid fire here:
Romans 3:23-24 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ.”
Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.”
Romans 8:2 “For the law of the spirit of life in Christ, Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.
Romans 8:39 “Nor height, nor death, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ. Jesus, our Lord.”
Romans 9:1 “I am telling the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscious testifies with me in the Holy Spirit.”
Romans 12:5 “So we who are many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.”
Romans 16:3 “Greet Prisca and Aquila. My fellow workers in Christ.”
Romans 16:7 “Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners who are outstanding among the apostles who also were in Christ before me.”
Romans 16:9 “Greet Ampliatus, Our fellow worker in Christ.”
Romans 16:10 “Greet Apelles the approved in Christ.”
Now, there's a whole lot of other verses we can read outside of Romans. Those are just in Romans.
For example:
1 Corinthians 4:17 “For this reason, I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in the church”
2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. Those things have passed away. Behold, the new things have come.”
God's Providence is a beautiful thing. God's Providence allows you and me today to read the book of Romans and glean what God has in it for us. That we may be closer to God, that we may be able to glorify God and glorify Christ, because that's what it's about. It's about Christ. It's in Christ. We do everything in that name. Outside of that name, there is no other power. It's all about God. And I hope you understand that.
Of course, you know me. I got many more verses. But we're running down on time. I want to encourage you guys to read through the book of Romans. I've been on a journey…I read it, and then I'll sit and think. I’ll read it again, finish it, read it again. And I'm going to continue doing that through these 12 weeks. And I know that we're not going to be able to go through every single thing. But at the end of the day, I do want you to understand what God wants to tell you through this book and to understand that it has been His Providence that has brought this to us. Amen.
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