Day 31: Romans 3-4 - The Bible Dept.

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Bible Dept. – Day 31: Romans 3-4

Introduction

In the thirty-first episode of The Bible Dept., hosted by Dr. Manny Arango of ARMA Courses, listeners delve into Romans chapters 3 and 4. This episode forms a critical part of a 365-day Bible reading plan aimed at guiding individuals through the entire Bible within a year. Dr. Arango emphasizes the importance of following along with the daily readings to maximize the understanding and benefits of the podcast content.

Paul’s Argument in Romans 3-4

Dr. Arango begins by exploring the literary strategy employed by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 3. Paul introduces a series of objections to his earlier arguments, a method Dr. Arango describes as a powerful literary device he often used in his sermons to anticipate and address potential counterarguments from his audience.

Addressing Objections (00:00 – 08:30)

First Objection: “What advantage then is there in being a Jew? Or what value is there in circumcision?”
(00:45)
Paul anticipates Jewish listeners questioning the value of their identity and practices in light of previous arguments indicating universal guilt.
Second Objection: “What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God's faithfulness?”
(02:15)
This addresses concerns about whether human unfaithfulness undermines God’s steadfastness.
Third Objection: “But if our unrighteousness brings out God's righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust and bringing his wrath on us?”
(03:50)
Paul confronts the paradox of human sin highlighting divine righteousness, questioning how God can justify judging sinners.

Dr. Arango notes that Paul effectively validates these objections but also demonstrates their limitations, reinforcing the universality of human guilt and the impartiality of divine judgment.

Stringing Pearls: A Rabbinical Tradition (08:30 – 16:20)

Paul employs a technique known as "stringing pearls," wherein he cites a series of Old Testament scriptures from Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah to illustrate the inherent guilt of even the devout Jewish believers. Dr. Arango underscores the brilliance of Paul's approach:

"Paul demonstrates to the Jews that from the Jews' own scriptures, their scriptures indict them."
(10:15)

This method reinforces the message that possessing the Torah does not exempt one from sin, setting the stage for the transformative message of grace that follows.

Key Shift in Romans 3:21 – The Introduction of Grace (16:20 – 35:10)

A pivotal moment occurs in Romans 3:21, marking a significant transition from themes of guilt and divine wrath to the revelation of God's righteousness through grace. Dr. Arango highlights this as the "hinge" upon which the entire argument pivots:

“Romans 3:21 is a massive, massive shift in this argument. Actually, I want to read it. Romans 3:21. It's kind of the door or the hinge that Romans really kind of swivels on.”
(17:05)

This verse introduces the concept that righteousness from God is accessible apart from the law, accomplished through faith in Jesus Christ. Dr. Arango breaks down key theological terms to elucidate Paul's message:

Justification:
(20:00)
Defined as being exonerated by God despite inherent guilt, akin to being declared righteous through Christ's atoning sacrifice.
Propitiation/Atonement:
(22:30)
Refers to Jesus' sacrificial death covering human sins, similar to the mercy seat's role in the Ark of the Covenant, symbolizing the removal of guilt.
Redemption:
(25:45)
Illustrated through three Old Testament stories—Abraham redeeming Lot, Ruth and Boaz, and Hosea redeeming Gomer—to represent the comprehensive nature of Christ's redemption of humanity.

Dr. Arango emphasizes the depth of Paul's theological bridge between Jewish narratives and Greco-Roman understanding, fostering unity among believers by connecting faith with established scriptural truths.

Faith as the Foundation of Righteousness (35:10 – 48:50)

Transitioning to Romans chapter 4, Dr. Arango focuses on Abraham as the exemplar of faith. Abraham's unique position as both the progenitor of the Jewish people and a Gentile underscores the universality of faith as the means to righteousness:

“Paul wants you to see that there's a congruency from the Old Testament to the New Testament. This that God's not doing something new now that he's in the New Covenant. But God's idea for becoming righteous has never changed.”
(38:20)

Key Points:

Abraham’s Dual Identity:
Abraham embodies both Jewish heritage and Gentile faith, making him a relatable figure for all believers.
Consistency of God’s Plan:
The method of attaining righteousness through faith remains unchanged from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
Obedience Follows Faith:
Abraham’s actions, such as circumcision, serve as responses to his justified standing, not prerequisites for it.

Timeless Truth: Faith as the Currency of the Kingdom (48:50 – 55:30)

Concluding the episode, Dr. Arango distills the discussions into a profound timeless truth:

“Faith is the currency for the kingdom of God. Faith. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Without faith, it's impossible to unlock everything that Jesus Christ has done for us.”
(50:15)

This assertion encapsulates the essence of Paul's teachings in Romans 3-4, affirming that faith is the essential requirement for righteousness and access to God's grace. Dr. Arango reinforces that this principle levels the playing field for all believers, irrespective of their background or past, emphasizing the egalitarian nature of divine salvation.

Conclusion

Dr. Manny Arango adeptly navigates through Romans chapters 3 and 4, unpacking Paul's intricate arguments about universal sinfulness, divine righteousness, and the transformative power of faith. By connecting Old Testament narratives with New Testament theology, the episode elucidates the foundational Christian belief that faith, not heritage or law, grants access to God's grace and righteousness.

Listeners are encouraged to continue their Bible reading journey, leveraging the ARMA platform for deeper theological exploration and community engagement. Dr. Arango's insightful analysis not only clarifies complex biblical concepts but also inspires a more profound connection with Scripture.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

“Paul demonstrates to the Jews that from the Jews' own scriptures, their scriptures indict them.”
— Dr. Manny Arango (10:15)
“Romans 3:21 is a massive, massive shift in this argument. Actually, I want to read it. Romans 3:21. It's kind of the door or the hinge that Romans really kind of swivels on.”
— Dr. Manny Arango (17:05)
“Faith is the currency for the kingdom of God. Faith. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Without faith, it's impossible to unlock everything that Jesus Christ has done for us.”
— Dr. Manny Arango (50:15)

Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide through critical theological debates presented in Romans 3 and 4. Dr. Arango's expertise provides listeners with a robust framework to understand and apply biblical principles, fostering both intellectual and spiritual growth. Engaging with this content not only enhances one’s knowledge of Scripture but also strengthens the foundational faith necessary for personal transformation.

Transcript

Dr. Manny Arango (0:00)

Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango, and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. All right, family, let's dig into Romans chapter 3 and 4. Romans chapter 3 starts the chapter with objections to everything that he's been saying. This is a really powerful literary device. I used to do this a lot when I was preaching. Really, like, to the same group of young people all the time. I would write my sermon and I would think, what would Kenneth disagree with? Or what would Monty disagree with? And I would predict their objections and then write into my sermon responses to their objections. It's actually a. A phenomenal literary tool, and it's what Paul is now going to start doing. And he's actually gonna do this through the remainder of the letter. Hey, right here. Before we even get too deep into today's content, if you haven't done the reading, then this video, this audio is not gonna make the most sense. We want you to use this as a supplement, not a substitute. Pause this. Stop listening to me. Go do the reading for the day. It's Romans, chapter three and four. Come back and. And I hope that this content helps to supplement what you are reading in the Scriptures. So here are three objections that Paul is going to immediately start with In Romans chapter 3. Romans 3, one says this. What advantage then is there in being a Jew? Or what value is there in circumcision? Okay, that's the first. You can imagine Paul's audience. They've heard chapters one and two, and in chapters one and two, he's saying that the pagan, you're guilty. The Greco Roman, Gentile, moralist, or believer, you're guilty. Jews, you're guilty. So of course, you can maybe think that a Jewish person would be thinking, what advantage then is there in being a Jew? What value is there in being circumcised? Romans 3. 3. Here's another objection. What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God's faithfulness? Exactly. And then again in chapter three, verse five. But if our unrighteousness brings out God's righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust and bringing his wrath on us? You see how these are natural questions that an audience may be asking. Wait, so if we're guilty and our guilt makes God look even better. How can God judge us for being guilty? And. And after each question, Paul just goes, hey, that's a valid question, but it's also kind of a dumb question. Okay, so Paul deals with all these objections. Then we get to. I want to get to our context clue for the day. This is a rabbinical tradition that Paul is about to move into. That's called stringing pearls. Okay, so Romans, chapter 3, verse 10. All the way to verse 18. Is Paul stringing pearls? Okay, you're gonna get a. You're gonna get hit with a litany of scriptures from the Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah and from the Hebrew scriptures from the Old Testament. Paul is going to demonstrate how the people who believe in the scriptures are guilty before God. So this is Paul still going in on the Jews. Okay, yesterday we left off where Paul was beginning to argue that even the Jews were guilty and they were more guilty since they had the Torah. Paul's not done with that yet. Paul is still on this train, and you could see the brilliance in his argument. What he's saying is this. He demonstrates to the Jews that from the Jews own scriptures that their scriptures indict them. We can kind of read this. It says this. Romans, chapter 3, verse starting at verse 10. There is no one righteous. No, not even one. There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good. Not even one. Verse 13. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways and the way of peace. They do not know there is no fear of God before their eyes. This is not Paul talking about the pagans or the Gentile believers. No. This is Paul saying that the Old Testament already indicts people of the Jewish faith that are a part of ethnic Israel. Now, this is going to be huge when we get to chapters nine and 11, because Paul is really going to deal with Jews and Gentiles and the future of Israel and whether or not Israel is going to be saved. And we'll deal with that when we get there. But you're going to have to, like, remember that from the foundation of this letter that Paul is saying, just because you're Jewish does not give you some automatic ticket into heaven. That everyone, despite your ethnicity, despite your background, despite whether you grew up in a Christian family or whether you got saved from being addicted to alcohol and gambling last week. No matter who you are, where you're from, there's a level playing field at the foot of the cross. Now here's our nerdy nugget, because Paul is now going to turn the Corner in Romans 3:21 is a massive, massive shift in this argument. Actually, I want to read it. Romans 3:21. It's kind of the door or the hinge that Romans really kind of swivels on. And you can feel it. Okay, he's been saying that the pagans are guilty, the moralist is guilty, the gentile believers are guilty, the Jews are guilty. And here we go. Chapter three, verse 21. It's the hinge. We're now moving from. The wrath of God was really the big theme. Now we're moving to the grace of God. I wish honestly that the chapter changed right here. Like, I wish that this is where chapter three started. I feel like that'd be a better place to put chapter three. But hey, I'm not the person who inserted chapters and verses into the Bible, so I'll just have to be happy with what we got. The topic and the tone completely changes. But okay, big old but remember, it's been guilt and wrath up until this point. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify. So the Old Testament, the law and the prophets, okay, the Torah, all the books of the Torah. So all the books of the law, the first five books, and then all the prophets. The whole Old Testament testifies that there's a righteousness from God that's now revealed that has nothing to do with the Old Testament law. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe there is no difference between Jew and gentile. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement or propitiation. Now for our nerdy nugget for the day. I'm going to kind of break down some words in that chunk that I just read. There are three key words that we need to understand. I'll do the simple ones. First, justification and propitiation or atonement are the easy words to break down. Justification, just. Justified. Just if I'd never sinned, okay, justified, a better word actually in English for justified would be exonerated. It means that I was found guilty. It doesn't mean that I'm not guilty. It Means that even though I was found guilty, now a judge has exonerated me. Different than, like, expunged. Ex. Expunged means my record has been made clean and I'm actually not guilty of whatever it is that I was, that people thought I was guilty for. Exonerated is I did the crime, but I'm being exonerated. The second word that we need to know here is the NIV translates this as atonement. A lot of passages, or a lot of other translations will translate this word in verse 25 as propitiation. That word is a Greek word, and I want to pronounce it for us the correct way. Hylast is how you pronounce that in Greek. And it actually refers to the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant, or the place of propitiation, which was the mercy seat for the Ark of the Covenant. And what did the mercy seat do? Once a year, the Day of Atonement, you dash blood on that mercy seat, which was a sacrificial atoning action. But that mercy seat covered all the articles that were in the Ark of the Covenant. And so God is saying two things. Number one, I've pronounced you righteous. I've exonerated you. You're no longer guilty. Although what you've done, you are guilty of doing what you did do. I've now exonerated you. I've declared that you're righteous. Why? Because of the sacrificial atoning death of my son, Jesus, who, what blood covers you in the same way that the mercy seat covered the articles that were inside of the Ark of the Covenant. I want you to think about, like Harry Potter has an invisible cloak, right? And you can't see anything that's underneath that invisible cloak the blood of Jesus covers. So when Jesus, when God looks at me, he does not see my guilt that is actually there. He sees the blood of Jesus that has covered me. And all of this, Paul says, is wrapped up in a word called redemption. Now, that's why this is our nerdy nugget for the day. Because the Greek world really functions on definitions and prose and words. But the Hebrew world, the Jewish world, really functions on stories and narratives and images. And so Paul is a bridge between the Jewish world and the Greco Roman world. And so he's going to use this word redemption. But the roots of that word are actually found in the Old Testament in three stories. The first story is this. Abram goes after Lot, who has been taken as a spoil of war. Abraham gets his men together, they go off to fight so they can redeem Lot, which means take him back. They fight an actual battle in order to redeem Lot, get him back out of the enemy's possession and back into his family's possession. Okay? That is redemption. Second story, Ruth and Boaz. Okay? Ruth is poor, she's doomed. She's a widow. She's is going to be family less because her husband has died. Okay? And Boaz is a kinsman. Redeemer redeems her by providing financial provision and food and family in connection for her last Hosea and Gomer. Hosea marries a woman by the name of Gomer. She is his possession, but she then falls into prostitution. And Hosea pays a price for a woman who is already his. And by paying that price buys her back. She already is his. But he then spends money to buy that which already belongs to him. And these three stories are the core stories of redemption in the Old Testament. Paul has all three of these stories in mind when he uses this very precise word to say, what is redemption? Redemption is the fact that there was a war waged in order for Abraham to get Lot back and redeem him. In the same way there's been an invisible spiritual war waged in order for God to get you back from the enemy. Number two, you were familyless. You were an orphan, you were a widow, you were poor. You had no means to support yourself. And what does God do? He sends a kinsman, redeemer. He sends Jesus to get you back into the family so that you can be a son of God and a co heir with Christ. And lastly, God says, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Every human belongs to me, but I still paid the price of my son's blood to get you back, Gomer, to get you back, man. To get you back, woman. From the power of darkness. I paid the price to redeem you. You. So you see how Paul is using a word, but that word has tons of implications in the Hebrew scriptures. Now this is why it's important that the church here in Rome fight for unity. Because gentiles don't know all those stories from the Old Testament. They need their Jewish brothers and sisters sitting next to them saying, ooh, Paul used the word redemption. I want to let you know what, what that word actually means. See, this is the core. Paul is not gonna explain all these stories that are actually rooted in the word redemption. He's going to write this letter and allow the Jewish believers and the Gentile believers to actually strengthen one another and walk in unity. What if I told you that what you're learning in this video was just the tip of the iceberg? The Bible department is actually powered by arma. What is arma? I'm so glad you asked. ARMA is an online subscription based platform that we designed to help people, everyday people, learn the Bible for themselves. We started ARMA so that anybody, anywhere could have access to trustworthy and entertaining Bible and theology content. In addition to this podcast, we we have over 60 courses on individual books of the Bible, on theology topics, and on some hot topics like homosexuality, tithing and women in ministry. But really, ARMA is a community. A community of people that I've gotten to know. A community where thousands of people are currently finding family, asking questions and nerding out on the Bible together. If you want a community to read the Bible with you this year, or if you want to dive into some deeper theological content, or if you want more exclusive access to me and the entire armor team, how about you go to thebibledepartment.com I'll be sure to post the link in the description of this video. Let's make this your year to become a Bible nerd. We'll just cover chapter four really briefly. All of chapter four is all about Abraham. Why does Paul use Abraham? Reason number one, Abraham is both a Gentile and a Jew. Okay, Abraham is this hinge point in history where he's the first Jew, he's the father of the Jews, but he himself is a Gentile. So you can relate to both groups. Number two, Paul wants you to see that there's a congruency from the Old Testament to the New Testament. This that God's not doing something new now that he's in the New Covenant. But God's idea for becoming righteous has never changed. And how do we become righteous? The same way Abraham became righteous. Is it through the works of the law? No, it's through faith. Last thing about Abraham is that once Abraham attains this righteous standing with God, he is circumcised because obedience comes after salvation, not before. What's our timeless truth for the day is that faith unlocks everything. We are not made righteous. We are not justified by the works of the law. We are made righteous. We are justified by faith. And since we're justified by faith, none of us have anything to boast about. And we all are standing at that same level playing field. It's the same way that Paul says, hey, you're all guilty now. Paul is saying, since everyone experiences the same level of guilt, everyone now has to experience the same thing that admits them into grace, and that is faith in Jesus. And that's timeless. Our timeless truth for the day is this one phrase. Faith is the currency for the kingdom of God. Faith. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Without faith, it's impossible to unlock everything that Jesus Christ has done for us. Faith is the currency of the kingdom. All right, I'll see you right here tomorrow. We got Romans, chapter five through eight and we are going to dig in. Can't wait to see you. I'm so proud of you for going through this Bible reading plan and for watching this content. I hope it's blessing your life. Love you guys. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show@the bibledepartment.com and on Instagram at the Bible Department. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses at thebibledepartment. Com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.