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Back to the Bible. Let it be our plea. God's word alone, our authority, every word, every step in the name of Christ. Back to the Bible for the way of life.

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Welcome to this period of Bible study. My name is Larsen Plyler, and this is Back to the Bible. We are thankful for this opportunity to engage in a period of Bible study and, and we hope that the time that you find to spend with us will be profitable and ultimately will be glorifying to God our Father. We are thankful for every opportunity we have to consider God's Word. And we hope that you find us to be both faithful and clear in our considerations of God's Word. And if you find us to be coming short in that, we hope that you would reach out to us. The best way to find us is to go to the Back to the Bible podcast website@backtothebiblepodcast.com backtothebiblepodcast.com there you can find information about the program, you can find older episodes, you can find ways to access us and to ask questions about content or other spiritual questions that you might have. If you're listening on the radio or by podcast, then perhaps you've been with us for some time. But Lord willing, today will be the first program that we get to present. Also by video, you can go to YouTube.com and you can look for the Back to the Bible podcast. And beginning on this first Lord's Day in 2026, we want to make our podcast available by video as well. We're going to begin a consideration of the Book of Romans, and you can find it there at Back to the Bible podcast on YouTube as well. Of course, we're still going to make every effort to make the program available by audio, both on the radio stations where we are and on the podcast that you can access through different channels. And so we hope you find that to be useful as well. I do want to say that this year we're going to begin a study of the Book of Romans, and it will be my intention that every week we will be considering the next section of the book. In general, I've kind of been alternating between a textual study and a topic, but I think that the Book of Romans will demand my full attention and I think it will make it easier for us if we just make a consecutive progression through the book as we go. And we'll pick up there in just a moment. So you can reach out to us@thebacktothebiblepodcast.com and if you will, reach out to us there we will be happy to take your questions and to consider your comments, whether they are for critique. If you have something that you would like to suggest that we improve on or something we need to clarify or something we we are in error in. You would be our friend to reach out to us and to help us to see what we need to correct or what we need to clarify. But also, if you have a word of encouragement or a word of appreciation, we would love to hear from you. So that's the idea behind the Back to the Bible podcast. And so we hope that this time is well spent. I want to go to the Book of Romans and I want to begin in chapter one today because I think the Book of Romans is vitally important for us to get as good a hold as we can of it in our study of the Scripture. Now, there has been a lot, I believe, of misunderstanding about the Book of Romans through the history of biblical interpretation. And what happens then is as a result of that, we have to not only deal with what the book says, but I think we often have to deal a lot with what the book does not say. And so sometimes we get caught up in a lot of those discussions and we fail to see the beauty of the Book of Romans. We fail to see how powerful a book that the Book of Romans is because we're having to spend so much time working through the mess of what I consider to be false doctrines. What we want to do in our consideration of the Book of Romans is we want to go back to the Bible. We want to have a restoration of our understanding of the Book of Romans. We want to read Romans rightly, and we want to do so by looking at the book and trying to understand it for what it says, not for what people have said that it has said for the last 2000 years. Of course, we are going to rely on folks who are good Bible students and we are going to try to use those resources to better understand God's word. But what we want to do is we want to peel back all of the layers of human history and tradition of the interpretation of the Book of Romans and see what God intended to say through the Apostle Paul as the Holy Spirit inspired him and as Paul dictated this. We want to know what should we see in this great Book of Romans? So that is going to mean that there are some things through the Book of Romans that I might say that you will find to be challenging to what you thought that the book was saying. Now, that does not mean that I'm right about everything that I say, about the Book of Romans. But I do want to make a case for a better understanding of the letter. And. And if that raises objections, so be it. That's fine. What I want to do is put a reading out there, an understanding out there that demonstrates and is characterized by and is committed to a faithfulness to what the Scriptures say and especially how they connect to other passages, so that we can understand the whole Bible in a better way. So what I want to do is I want to go back beyond the 20th century. I want to go beyond the 1500s and the Reformation. I want to go back before the development of Catholicism. I want to go back to the first century with the writing of the Book of Romans. And first, what I want to do is understand what Paul was writing to the people to whom he wrote it, and then understand the ways in which that applies to us. I think the best way to begin will be just to jump right into the letter and then we'll say some introductory things as we see them. So let's go to Romans 7, excuse me, Romans 1, and we're going to read verses one through seven. Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, having been set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh, who was designated as the Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we receive grace and apostleship for the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles, for the sake of his name, among whom you are also called of Jesus Christ to all who are the beloved of God in Rome, called as saints, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. When Paul introduces himself, as he's raised, writing this letter to the Roman Churches, he identifies himself as a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle. The idea is that he is a slave in that he is totally in the service of his master, Jesus Christ. Jesus is his king, his master, and he's completely devoted to him and to his will. And he describes himself here as an apostle. He identifies himself as that in almost all of his letters. There are just a couple of exemptions. For example, the book of Philemon, he doesn't identify himself as an apostle at the beginning of the letter, but when he says he's an apostle, that means he is an official ambassador of the king. And so as this slave, bound under the will of the king, and as an apostle, he carries the authority of the King. He is an ambassador on behalf of the Majesty. Now, to reject this messenger would be to reject the one who sent him. Now, the message he has, he has been set apart. For that is, he has been specified. He has been specifically called out to share this message, which he calls the Gospel, the good news. Now, Paul wrote this letter and we can situate it at some point in the book of Acts, perhaps in the year 56 or 57, from the city of Corinth, at the end of his third journey. So he will be making his way back to Jerusalem at the end of this third journey, and then he will be arrested. So we can place this letter perhaps sometime in Acts 18 or so. Now, what we want to do is we want to see Paul's purpose as we read this letter. And I think the very best way that we can do that is to see how he opens up. Notice he says that he has been set apart for the Gospel. Now, the gospel here translates the Greek word that we get evangelism from or, or evangelist or evangelical. It's something like Euangelion. Now, literally the word means good news. And this good news is the message that through his incarnation, that is his coming in the flesh, his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, that Jesus has been exalted to the place of authority at the right hand of God. That in Jesus we see the King of kings and Lord of Lords. The news that Jesus reigns is the good news. That's the gospel. That is what the word gospel indicates in the Old Testament. We can take the time to go back and look at Isaiah, chapter 52. And as Isaiah looked forward to a time where this proclamation of good news was going to take place, he says, how lovely on the mountains are the feet of those who proclaim good news, who announce peace and proclaim good news of good things, who announces to Zion salvation and says, your God reigns. And that's the way it was used in the first century. Even in the Roman world, the idea of the gospel was good news about a royal either ascending to the throne or winning a military victory. In the Old Testament, the word gospel looked forward to a day of salvation and a day of peace and a day of joy, rooted in the fact that God was reigning. Many of the places, if not all of them in the Old Testament that use the verb form of the gospel is that they are making an announcement of military victory. Now, in the Book of Acts, the gospel is presented over and over and over as the fact that Jesus who had died, that God had exalted him and. And made him Lord and Christ, that he was ruler, that he was king over his people. You can see that echoed, for example, In Acts chapter 2 and verse 36, he says, Let all the house of Israel. Peter does let all the house of Israel know assuredly that this Jesus whom you have crucified, God has raised him up and made him Lord and Christ over. In Acts chapter 13, in one of Paul's sermons, his longest synagogue sermon that we have recorded, he says in verse 32, and we proclaim to you the good news of the promise made to the fathers, that God has fulfilled this promise to our children in that he raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm, you, you are my Son, today I have begotten you. Now, where Paul is quoting from, there is Psalm 2. And in Psalm 2, God promises that he's going to install his king on Mount Zion. And in that promise he says, you are my Son, today I have begotten you. It's interesting. The idea there of God having a son and him being begotten is not the idea of him being born. Some false religions even take this idea to be this is when Jesus is being created or that he's being declared to be divinity. That's not what's happening. The idea of being begotten is the idea of being installed into power. The kings were thought of as the sons of God in a special sense, mostly rooted in the promise that God made to David and in 2 Samuel 7, that the king would be a son to God. And so that language became prevalent when referring to the king. Now, of course, Jesus is a son of God in an even higher sense, in that not only is he God in the flesh, but that in him we see all the nature, all the attributes of God in human form. So this is how Paul defines the Gospel here in Romans chapter one, that it has to do with the message that Jesus has been exalted to this high place. Listen to what Paul says. Set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures concerning his Son who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh, who was designated as the Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. So Paul says that the gospel was testified to or that it was promised beforehand through the prophets of the Old Testament. I think there's lots of places in the prophets that we could turn to to look at a promise of the gospel. Isaiah we Talked about chapter 52 already we could look at Isaiah 9, that he would be born and called Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Eternal Father, wonderful Counselor, that upon him would be the God government on his shoulders. I think we could look at the book of Jeremiah and the promise of a new covenant that was coming. Ezekiel promised a new shepherd that would come from the line of David that would take care of his people and rule over them. The book of Zechariah points forward to a day where one would be crucified in order to atone for sins. All of those passages are pointed forward to Jesus and to the Good News. The prophets beforehand pointed to the Gospel, the good news. I want you to see something here. Paul does not see a hard, clean break between the Old Law and the prophets and the New Testament. It is not as if that was just erased, all eradicated or forgotten. Rather, God had long been promising the message of the Good news through the prophets. And we might even say he'd been promising it from just about the very beginning, even right after the first sin that will come up later on. But he's fulfilling the promises that were made specifically to David. David, the king of Israel, was promised that he would have a son who would reign on the throne. 2 Samuel 7, 14, 17 would be a good place for us to look there to see that God promised that David would have a seed who would reign on the throne. Now, by the flesh, Jesus is a son of David. That is, he is qualified to fill that role of king or Christ or Messiah or anointed one, but by the Spirit of holiness. He's not just the Son of David, but he's the Son of God in power. Now, when that phrase spirit of holiness is used, it might be a little confusing because I don't know that that phrase, just like that, is used anywhere else. But I think it's a reference to the Holy Spirit. If it's the Spirit of holiness, then perhaps that's the Holy Spirit. In Romans chapter 8 and verse 11, it says, but if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. I take it to be that that reference there to the Holy Spirit is the reference to him helping, being the power by which Jesus is raised from the dead. And so we go back to chapter one, and the Spirit of holiness is the one that declares him by the resurrection, in some way to be the Son of God in power. Now, I think we should take that idea of Son of God in power as a royal term, as a descriptive term, there is some sense, and this is a mystery, that I don't think any of us have the capacity to grab onto, but that the word that was eternal, the word that was God the Great I am, became flesh and lowered himself so that he would end up being exalted to an even higher place than he was the Son of God in power. I think we see that similarly in Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 through 11, where Paul tells them to have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped or held onto. But he emptied himself. Now, how does he empty himself? Well, he doesn't lose his divinity. He. He doesn't become not God, but he takes on the appearance of a man and humbles himself. He takes on the form of a slave by being made in the likeness of men and being found in appearance as a man. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God also highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. I think it's best described as a J shaped curve here. He is the eternal Word, but he lowers himself. He humbles himself to the form of a servant, an obedient servant, one who is obedient even to the point of death, so that God highly exalts him above all else, so that his name would be honored and worshiped, that we would give our allegiance to him and devote ourselves in loyalty to Him. So there is a sense in which the resurrection, the ascension, really what we would think of as the Christ event, his death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension, in that he is being declared, designated, installed, and as the Son of God in power by the resurrection. And then Paul describes him as Jesus Christ, Jesus, the anointed king, the promised King, our Lord, our ruler. Now that's what the gospel is about. The Gospel concerns his Son, the one who was promised in the Scriptures, the one who was born in the lineage of David, the one who was resurrected from the dead, who is installed as the Son of God in power, Jesus Christ our Lord. That's what the Gospel is about. Now, the benefits of the gospel certainly include the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life with God. But what we need to see is that the message of the Gospel is that Jesus is the king. Now notice that Paul says in verse five, through whom we have received grace and apostleship for the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name. Paul says that God gifted him and appointed him as an ambassador in order to bring people from all nations to allegiant loyalty to obedient faith for Jesus. Now, I love that phrase there, the idea of the obedience of faith. A lot of times when we go through the book of Romans, people draw a sharp line between the word faith and the word obedience. And they draw a sharp distinction between the two. But let me show you that right here Paul is saying, we're not talking about some shallow believing. We are talking about obedient faith. Faith that is characterized by obedience or a word we might think of as faithfulness or loyalty, fidelity, allegiance. This very same phrase is used in the next to last verse of the book where he says he has made known to all the Gentiles leading to the obedience of faith. Those bookends at the beginning of the letter and the end of the letter, I think should indicate to us that when Paul talks about faith, he is making no separation between believing and obedience. Rather, what the Gospel was intended to call us to, what Paul's grace and apostleship was for, was to bring people from all the nations into believing loyalty, faithful allegiance, faithfulness, fidelity to Jesus Christ as king. Now, I want you to notice that the Romans that Paul is writing to were part of that group, I think, and this might be a piece where perhaps you've read this differently. And I think this is part of why I think I read this in a different way than what I've heard before is because I believe that Paul is addressing this letter as he does most of his letters, to primarily Gentiles. Now, that doesn't mean there's no Jews in the audience. I know there are Jewish Christians there because Paul greets them at the end of the book. But I believe his audience is Gentile. Let me show you that. Look at this. In verse 6 he says, I was intended to preach in order to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ. They were part of that number upon whom he was designated to bring to the obedience of faith. Drop down to verse 13. There it says, I don't want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often planned to come to you so that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles. Do you hear that? It's as if Paul is saying, you're a part of that kind of people that I want to have success among, just like I've been able to reap fruit from the rest of the Gentiles. If I've got a mouse invasion in my pantry and I kill one and I see another one, I'm going to say, hey, hey, I'm coming after you like I am the rest of the rodents. That's including that vermin in my list there. When Paul says, I'm coming after you like I have the rest of the Gentiles, doesn't that primarily indicate them as that group of people over in chapter 11? Now this chapters 9, 11 specifically talk about the Jewish people, and it'll be a while before we get there, but Lord willing, we will. And we'll take try to talk about that when that time arrives. But I want you to Notice in verse 13 of Romans 11, he says, but I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry. Now, even though the subject in that section is the Jews, I think we need to read it in light of the fact that Paul says, I am writing to you as Gentiles over in chapter 15. In verse 15 he says, But I have written very boldly to you on some points so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me by God, for me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God so that my offering of the Gentiles might become acceptable, having been sanctified by the Spirit. And so Paul is preaching primarily addressing them as Gentiles. Now, I want to note that, because I believe that will shape how we read some of Paul's words in the book. And there will be places where I have to make the case that that's the right understanding. But hopefully that will be clear as we go. Now Paul prays for them that they would have grace and peace. Grace, the great words summarizing all that God has done for them. And peace, the words summarizing all the benefits of what God has done. That was his greeting for them and mine for you today. Until next time, we bid you a pleasant good day.