Romans Series, session 1 - Audio
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Every time I come to Coast Bible Church, the assignment gets tougher. And this time he's given me the granddaddy of all my assignments. I have to cover the book of Romans in four nights. Can you believe it? I will do my best, as Arch always did in my in my classroom, whether I'll be as successful as he used to be. I'm not sure of that, but we're going to make an effort at it. I have decided to divide my study of the book of Romans into basically three units. Tomorrow night we will cover chapters one through four. On Tuesday night we want to cover chapters five through eight. And then on Wednesday night we want to cover chapters nine through 11 and say a few brief words perhaps about the concluding chapters, but by covering chapters one through 11 we will have covered the body of the book and the major themes that the epistles unfold. My objective for tonight is very modest. I want to simply introduce you to the theme statements of the book of Romans and I want you to go out of the auditorium tonight understanding the theme of the book of Romans. And in order to do that, and most of you could probably already turn to the verses, let's turn to the thematic statement of the book of Romans found in Romans chapter one verses 16 and 17. Romans one 16 and 17. These are very familiar verses indeed. Romans chapter one verses 16 and 17. "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith." Now I strongly suspect that all those these verses are extremely familiar to most of you, that if you were to be called upon to explain them, you would be like I was for many many years, highly likely to get them wrong. We are so used to these verses that we have very rarely stopped to think exactly what do they mean in the light of the entire book of Romans and we would probably jump at a conclusion that might not be right. And I say this because I did that for many many years and that was partly because I always heard them presented in a certain way. And it was really the discovery of what these theme verses were really about that opened up the book of Romans to make. Now in order to appreciate the theme verse, the theme verses I should say, we should look at a verse that is found in chapter five and so before I even make a comment on the thematic statements here, I invite your attention to Romans chapter five verses nine and ten. Romans five, nine and ten. Much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son. Much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. It literally happened with me that these verses opened up not only the thematic statement of the book of Romans, but also I think the epistle as a whole. So we're going to begin with Romans five, nine. I'll understand that up toward the top of the overhead, it's not always quite as clear as in other locations. Can you see this? That's good. Alright, there is one basic observation that we need to make about Romans five, nine and that is that the idea of justification and the idea of salvation are distinguished. That is the most obvious fact about these verses. Having been justified by faith, we shall be saved from wrath. It is clear that the first statement about justification belongs to the past. We have now been justified, that is, we are now in the state of having been justified. And the statement about salvation is assigned to the future relative to the preceding statement. If we thought that in the book of Romans, justification and salvation were equivalent, we were mistaken. And it is the realization that in the book of Romans, justification is
Transcription truncated.
An introduction to the theme statements/verses of Romans. In Romans justification and salvation are 2 distinct considerations for Paul. Justification is in the past and salvation is in the future.