Bern Leckie and Owen Lynch share thoughts and feelings about chapters 18 to 21 of John’s gospel and Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Was it too ambitious to try and take in these texts in a week? Any of these chapters could be studied for a lifetime, and scholars still debate the details, but Bern and Owen still found massive value in getting an overview from them and reflecting on God’s intentions for his kingdom.

Since the middle ages, the western church has often focused on a message of personal salvation which can be pieced together from these passages - a “ticket to heaven” necessary to avoid eternal suffering.

But an escape from earth to heaven does not seem as important for Jesus or Paul to teach as much as God’s plan to pour heavenly resources through believers to renew the earth, through relationships and societal change as well as personal development.

Jesus’ nature as a suffering servant, along with his willingness to accept a death caused by everyone else’s brokenness, show the power of heaven to overturn the worst of what can happen on earth. God’s kingdom is a social order which can look “upside down” to us and can turn injustice on its head.

Paul’s description to the Romans of how God moves to fix brokenness is a challenging one, perhaps requiring us to admit to being more broken than we would like to.

Bern and Owen discuss question of whether the fix is our faith in Christ, or the faithfulness of Christ - two alternative readings of the text. With the original culture in mind, some scholars are emerging with a view that this is a both/and rather than an either/or situation; what we call God’s “grace” would likely have been understood at the time as his offer of sponsorship or patronage, providing all the resources people needed to work and expecting a faithful response from people using them. This relationship seems irrelevant in terms of obtaining a “ticket to heaven”, but extremely relevant to a plan to renew the earth with heavenly resources.

Paul leads from this towards the idea that we can know how to deal with our inner and interpersonal conflicts, and know God’s mind in general. What Jesus has done has made a way for us to approach God directly, as priests offering ourselves as sacrifices. What does this mean? For one thing, it means God considers us good and acceptable. For another, it means that we can expect to have to lay down some of the things we think are essential to us - perhaps stuff, perhaps opinions - in exchange for a renewal of our minds. This is a lifelong process within faithful relationship with God.

In the next part of our boxset, we turn back to the Old Testament and listen through Lamentations and the book of Daniel. Listen along at your own pace at severnvineyard.org/bible.