Romans 8: The Truncation of the Pauline Letters

[Rebbe]

PAUL'S LETTER TO THE ROMAN CHRISTIANS [8]

Analytical Commentary on Romans
The Truncation of the Pauline Letters

The Audio MP3 of this lecture is available via this link: http://www.bripodcasts.com/Romans/Lecture8.MP3

Copyright © BRI 2016 All Rights Reserved Worldwide by Les Aron Gosling,
Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

CAUTION: BRI Yeshiva notes are not available to the general public. They are not for distribution. They are not for reproduction. The notes may also bear little or no resemblance to the actual audio or video recorded BRI Yeshiva lecture.


"The great Rabbi Gamaliel had among his disciples one who, according to a passage in the Talmud, gave his master a good deal of trouble, manifesting 'impudence in matters of learning.' But his name is not given; he is remembered simply as 'that pupil'" (F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame, 1958, 81. See also J. Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, 1944, 310f; Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30b).

"In Romans we have the answer to the question, 'What is Christianity?' by the strongest thinker in the early church" (A.M. Hunter, Toward Understanding Romans, 1962, 37,38).

"The history of the Christian church is consequently witness to the fact that the Epistle to the Romans has in a peculiar way been able to supply the impulse for the renewal of Christianity. When man has slipped away from the gospel, a deep study of Romans has often been the means by which the lost has been recovered" (Anders Nygren, Commentary on Romans, 1949, 3).

Paul's Letter to the Roman Christians begins with eleven chapters of awesome theology about salvation. This is a salvation by God's GRACE through FAITH apart from the Torah. Then in Romans 12 we find the Jewish Rabbi suddenly switch gears and starts what we can call an instructive application of that which he has been propounding , how a person being transformed by the holy Spirit of RIGHT KNOWLEDGE will live.

Over the past seven lectures we have discovered that this Pauline document is in fact a letter. It is not a book. There is no such document called the "Book of Romans." Again, its a letter and its not addressed to "the Romans." Its addressed to the Roman Christians. And those believers are not called to become saints, but are called saints, for they ARE saints.

Paul has written a theological ms. That is true. But it is MORE than this! This letter is a political manifesto. This will become very evident by the time we reach Romans 16.20. That the pre-Christ Nazoreans were a political entity has been established in our previous lectures so that there is no longer any shred of doubt about it.

In fact, as I have shared with our global student body already, Rav Shaul opens his epistle with his bold-faced declaration that Nero is about to be deposed. The expanded Greek speaks of the Lord Yeshua as the emperor of the world. But we have also seen that Paul is shockingly naïve in some respects , as well as headstrong , for he then includes the names of prominent Christians in Rome. After committing high treason and placing his head on the chopping block by invoking Yeshua as emperor I do not think these Christians would have been too appreciative of being identified for Nero's agents to come knocking on their doors.

We have also covered the fact that this letter possesses a variety of structures in early ms format. Indeed, we do not now know for certain where Romans begins and where it actually concludes. This is primarily due to the procedure that many of his writings were truncated for the purposes of a wider circulation around the various ekklesias of the late Second Temple Period. I have also covered when it was most likely that each epistle was penned. In achieving this we have come to realise that the two letters of Paul to the Corinthian Greeks were originally four in number and we have now reconstructed them as they would have originally appeared. Having recapitulated for necessary reasons we are now prepared for lecture 8.

FINAL WORDS CONFIRMING TRUNCATION OF PAULINE LETTERS
The lower order of Jewish priests backed by the Zealots sparked the first insurrection against Rome when they refused the daily Temple sacrifice required for the Emperor Nero and all foreigners. Eleazer, a priest, who was to see the slaughter of the high priests by the Zealots , again, with aid from the lower priesthood , refused to offer the sacrifice on behalf of Nero, and thus plunged the Jewish Commonwealth into a formidable darkness from which the Jews as a nation never recovered until 1948. Immediately prior to the time of the open outbreak of Jewish-Roman hostilities in 66 CE the apostle Peter had written of Paul's circular letters as being both acknowledged and accepted as "Scripture" , as the Word of God , along with the Torah, Writings and Prophets. Please note the phrase "the rest of the Scriptures" in 2 Peter 3.15-17:

"Consider also that our Lord"™s patience brings salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, concerning which those who are unschooled and intellectually challenged distort from their proper meaning, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. Therefore, divinely loved ones, since you already know these things, be on your guard not to be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure standing."

The writings of Rav Shaul, according to Peter, were being widely assessed as inspired by the Ruach HaKodesh. Paul admitted as much when he wrote to Timothy that "all [Paul's] writing [Gk, graphe) is inspired of God, and is profitable for teaching, etc" (2 Tim 3.16. See also verse 15 where "Scripture" is the Greek, gramma). Further evidence that Paul accepted the early circulation of the Gospels , at least the Gospels of Matthew and Luke , as on a par with the Hebrew Scriptures can be seen by his quotation from Mt 10.10 and Lk 10.7 in 1 Tim 5.18 in which text he speaks of this quotation as "Scripture." Almost needless to say, Paul thus grants evidence of the very early creation of at least these two Gospels, and therefore we can heartily reject antichrist views of a second century composition for them! (See R.A. Ward, Commentary on 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, 1974; Burton James Coffman, Commentary on 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, & Philemon, 1986, esp., 270). Bottom line: many of the Messianic Scriptures were already in circulation circa 15 years prior to his penning of 1 & 2 Timothy!

Not only is this the case but Paul virtually admitted in 2 Tim 2.15 that his letters (or some of them) were being circulated around the Messianic assemblies in edited form, and he urged Timothy as an editor to appropriately and rightly "partition [or, cut] the word of truth" (Greek). Of course, he may have had the Hebrew Scriptures in mind and this consensus probability has been "stressed to the max" concerning various doctrinal formulations, and emphasised as accepted dogma in all Christian circles. However, it is my opinion that he may also have been speaking about his own letters (which as we have seen were already being acknowledged as "Scripture" among Messianic congregations). Certainly we have seen that Paul's letter to the Galatians was early interfered with and not only so, but his four letters to the Corinthians were dovetailed for reasons of circulation as being two in number. So by realising that the Greek for "rightly dividing" or "correctly partitioning" is orthotomeo carrying the basic meaning, according to scholar Young of "cutting straight," we may be entertained by an entirely new vision of what Paul had in mind in relation to this expert "cutting" or heavily editing of his inspired workmanship. Whatever the case, this approach has its merits and really needs the attention of scholarly evaluation concerning this new biblical insight.

PAUL INVENTS A NEW LITERARY FORM
I might mention at this early juncture that it is not widely recognised that Paul was ahead of his time in being a creative letter writer. Indeed, as scholar Robert H. Grundy points out, "In the Graeco-Roman world private letters averaged close to ninety words in length. Literary letters, such as those by the Roman orator and statesman Cicero" and I follow the late Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's hard "C" pronunciation as opposed to the soft "c" variant Sisero in common use today "and by Seneca the philosopher, averaged around two hundred words. As the usual papyrus sheet measure about 9.5" x 11"... and could accommodate 150-250 words, depending on the size of writing, most ancient letters occupied no more than one papyrus page. But the average length of Paul's epistles runs to about 1,300 words, ranging from 335 words in Philemon to 7,101 words in Romans... Paul's epistles are several times longer than the average letter of ancient times, so that in a sense Paul invented a new literary form, the epistle , new in its prolongation as a letter in the theological nature of its contents, and (usually) in the communal nature of its address" (R.H. Grundy, A Survey of the New Testament, 1970, 257).

Grundy continues, "... Since the course grain of papyrus made writing tedious, it was usual to dictate letters to a professional scribe, called an amanuensis, who used shorthand during rapid dictation. The ruggedness of Pauline literary style , seen, for example, in numerous incomplete sentences , suggests that at times Paul dictated too rapidly for close attention to careful sentence structure and that his amanuensis found it difficult to keep up. Sudden breaks in thought similarly suggest temporary suspension of dictation, perhaps overnight or for shorter or longer periods. Sometimes an author simply left oral instructions, a rough draft, or notes for his amanuensis to follow. Under such circumstances the amanuensis himself molded the exact phrasing, a factor which may account for some of the stylistic differences among epistles by the same author. The author finally edited the letter. We know for certain that Paul used amanuenses from the fact that his amanuensis once identifies himself by name (Tertius , Romans 16:22). Also, Paul's frequent statements that he is writing the final greeting with his own hand imply that the major portions of the epistles were written through an amanuensis (1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; compare Philemon 19)" (Survey, ibid, 257,258).

And you thought how "free flowing" and "articulate" Romans was read by you in English!

So, at this juncture let us return to the text of Paul's Letter to the Roman Christians.

THE TEXT
"First, I thank my God through Yeshua the Messiah for all of you, because the report of your trust is spreading throughout the whole world. For God, whom I serve in my spirit by spreading the Good News about his Son, is my witness that I regularly remember you in my prayers; and I always pray that somehow, now or in the future, I might, by God"™s will, succeed in coming to visit you. For I long to see you, so that I might share with you some spiritual gift with the intent to establish you , or, to put it another way, so that by my being with you, we might, through the mutual shared faith be of encouragement to one another. Brothers, I want you to know that although I have been prevented from visiting you until now, I have often planned to do so, in order that I might have some fruit among you, just as I have among the other Gentiles. I owe a debt to both civilized Greeks and uncivilized people, to both the educated and the ignorant; therefore I am eager to proclaim the Good News also to you who live in Rome for I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Messiah, since it is God"™s powerful means of bringing salvation to everyone who keeps on trusting, to the Jew especially, but equally to the Gentile. For in it is revealed how God declares people righteous in his sight; and from beginning to end it is through trust , as the Tanakh puts it, "But the person who is righteous will live his life by trust." What is revealed is God"™s anger from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who in their wickedness keep suppressing the truth" (Romans 1.8-18).

MEETING WITH MARK TRONSON
I first met Baptist sports chaplain Dr Mark Tronson over a dozen years ago when he discovered that I was a "Messianic Jew" living in his vicinity in the Northern Rivers Region of New South Wales. [Mark is a well-known Australian Baptist pastor and evangelist working in the field of sports mainly as a Chaplain. Trained at Morling Baptist Theological College in Sydney (1977-80) his life is outlined on Wikipedia on the Internet. In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics Mark was invited to attend as the Chaplain by the Australian Olympic Committee President, and in subsequent Olympic Games Tronson himself has appointed Australian Olympic Chaplains. In 2000 my friend was invited to the IOC Lausanne Switzerland to assist in the development of an Olympic Villages Religious Services protocol. Mark, his own ancestry Jewish, has engaged in evangelism in the US, UK, South Korea, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Israel, Turkey, Italy and France. In 2005 he was voted as one of Australia's 25 most influential Evangelicals by the national Evangelical newspaper New Life. Carl Lewis ("Olympian of the Century") presented Mark (along with his wife) with Gold Medals in 2009 in Dallas Texas for their 27 years of sports and Olympic Ministry.]

In any event, Mark contacted me and wanted to meet. At our first meeting he asked immediately, "What as a Messianic Jew is your understanding of salvation in relation to the Covenant?" He was most pointed in his question, and mildly aggressive. I knew why. His sub-text was very clear to me: "Are you as a Jew saved by the Covenant or by some other means?"

My forthright reply was given without any hesitation. "None of us, whether Jew or Gentile, can be saved without the shed blood of Yeshua the Jewish Messiah (and God manifest in human flesh) being applied to us, to our sins , as the Foundation of God's Gracious intent for humankind. I am not saved as a Jew because of any covenant or contract, Sinai or New Covenant, Mark." I then quickly added: "For any covenant or contract exists because of SIN. I am saved by GRACE, which is God's character and Nature, by His love and always forgiving desire for all of humankind to enter into all that pertains to Deity. Salvation in Jewish thoughtform is not merely an attempt to escape the savage fires of an eternal damnation , which is an entirely negative view of salvation ,  but IS about humankind entering into ALL that God is. As Rav Shaul states candidly we are reconciled to God by the death of His Son, MUCH MORE being reconciled we are saved by His life , by Christ living His resurrection life over again in us by His Spirit, and all that pertains to this spiritual exercise by Messiah on our behalf exists and occurs precisely and only because of GRACE."

He seemed very satisfied with my answer, and has attended IMCF meetings in the past, which distance has discouraged because of his failing health, but we have experienced a very refreshing relationship over the years. His meeting with me brought forth my crystallization of thought response to that same question that has dogged my steps for many years as Messianic Jews have come through our doors, usually en-route from Jerusalem, repudiating the shed blood of the Mashiach and elevating their spiritual (read, religious) superiority of salvation through the Covenant and the Sinai Torah.

I do not tolerate legalism, and like Paul, will resist it to my dying breath.

Paul opens his epistle extolling the Messiah as the emperor of the world, disparaging Nero Caesar, and then speaks (as we have seen) of his love for the Roman brethren, most of whom he has never met. It is with the introduction to his letter that we catch a glimpse of Paul's personal feelings for the ekklesia , and we discover the fact that he is not backward in revealing his heart to others. But Paul is circumspect! He has revealed his heart but then seeks to protect that same heart by leaving his sentiments behind him. This is the last heart-revelation until he states his preoccupation with the negative side of his character and personality in Romans 7.

Paul's introduction encourages their trust (Gk, pistis) in the Messiah and frankly wherever we locate pistis in the NT we ought to translate it as trust rather than by our English words faith or belief which fall far short of the intention of the Greek. For, one of the charges brought against Gentile Christians by Jews over the years has been that faith or belief of itself doesn't finally or necessarily provoke good acts in life or good works in obedience to God. And of course they're right in this matter. For, as history records, antinomianism has been a charge leveled at the Constantinian Church for 2000 years. As far as pistis is concerned "the present tense of a Greek verb implies ongoing activity, not a once-and-for-all event" (David Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 1992, 329).

This is substantiated by the Amplified Version's comments on "belief" (pisteuo). "To adhere to, cleave to; to trust, to have faith in; to rely on... summed up in, 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved', means an absolute personal reliance upon the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour" (The Amplified New Testament, Introduction).

Paul adds that he seeks to establish the Christians in a structured way. He wishes to impart spiritual gifts to the end that they may be "established." The spiritual gifts to the ekklesia which he desires to impart to them are manifest in other of his writings (e.g., Eph 4.11; 1 Cor 12.4-11; Phil 1.1; Titus 1.5,7; cf Acts 14.23). He insists it is his lack of opportunity to visit the Christians in Rome which scholars propose (and in my opinion they do so correctly) brought accusations against the apostle and from which he needed, not to distance himself, but to defend himself.

But Paul's emphatic love for God and for the spiritual brethren of Christ (aptly demonstrated in his letter), can be an occasion for the temptation of distancing oneself from Paul's view of the stern judgments of God. If we attempt to do such a thing we are being decidedly foolish. Indeed, shortly after speaking of his love of (and for) the brethren Paul launches in this very epistle into a virtual tirade of general condemnation on all of humankind.

BE CAREFUL HOW YOU READ BRI/IMCF MATERIAL
There have been numerous BRI/IMCF students (as well as frequent visitors to our sites) who, over the decades, have delighted in consuming my teachings on universal salvation and the true Gospel and on my emphasis on God's Self-sacrificial love for humankind. Many have appreciated experiencing a great burden being lifted off their shoulders kindling and relishing within themselves their new birth into a positive theology expressed in terms of a vibrant new and healthy relationship in the REALISED-incarnation of Christ in the heart. But , so often in so doing , they unfortunately turn a blind eye to ALL that Anochi I-Source IS, in this His/Her character and Nature. For, if nothing else is true this one thing remains FIRM: God holds ALL human beings entirely accountable for the truth they receive.

True, God's judgments and justice are rooted in Grace and love and are thus expressed with a basic attitude toward SALVATION. God is, by His/Her very NATURE, Salvific. In Jewish thoughtform justice is equivalent to God's Salvific intention. God's intention and God's will are one and the same. God's justice found a complete satisfaction in His Son's travail on the bloodied tree of Golgoleth (Isa 53.11). Hell can never satisfy the divine justice. Christ alone can and Christ alone does.

What is disregarded with immature impunity by many believers is the realisation that God can and does get angry, just as a human Father and Mother can and do express anger concerning negative and hurtful acts their children often perform and/or indulge in to the harm of both themselves and others. After all, I have majored for decades on the FACT that we human beings (or, better, human doings) are the creative IMAGE , the MIRRORED REFLECTION , of God. This anger of God Almighty CAN and DOES on occasion flare (FIRE-up) into an explosive rage concerning which Yeshua warned.

But God's anger is rarely ever a sudden flare up, although God is on record as volleying what I can only describe as "emotionally passionate displeasure," which both arises and subsides rapidly, as was the case when God wanted to destroy Israel and build another race, another Chosen People, as descendants of His servant Moses. God's anger usually is described as "a strong and settled opposition to all that is [morally and ethically] evil" and that "arising out of God's very nature" (Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 1955, 1965, 180).

None of us can afford to "duck for cover" behind semantics and a defiant refusal to acknowledge and accept the fact of the existence of "wrath" when it is ascribed to God. To do so is to charge Yochanan the Immerser with idiocy when he warned of "the wrath to come" (Mt 3.7; Lk 3.7) and to charge John the priestly apostle with short-term memory loss when he spoke of "wrath abiding on" the disobedient unbeliever (Jn 3.36). Yeshua himself stated explicitly that there are some who stand in danger of a hell of fire (Mt 5.22). Certainly Messiah addressed the fact that his Father God was to be feared (trepidatiously appreciated) for God "after he has killed has power to cast into Gehenna" (Lk 12.5). In most of Messiah's parables a negative judgment is a stressed and persistent theme (Mt 13.42,50; 18.34;21.44; 22.7,33). While there are many ministers of the Christian religion, and many believers, who would lately jettison any mention of God's wrath from their conception of Deity (and biblical scholar C.H. Dodd comes readily to mind as does the equally unscholarly Derek Flood), "anger" as righteous indignation is decidedly linked to the all-rounded positive balanced Nature and character of the Father of the Lord Yeshua. Both Paul and John as apostles of Christ would assess my ascription as worthy of merit (Jn 3.36; Rev 6.16; 16.19; 19.15; Rom 1.18; Eph 5.6; Col 3.6). The unknown author of the circular book of Hebrews states it perfectly, in his reflection upon the Torah: "Our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12.29).

While the Dodd's and Derek Floods of this world cast aside the personalised anger of God in favour of impersonal retribution, or as Dodd puts it "[the mention of wrath does not] describe the attitude of God to man, but [describes] an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe" Emil Brunner puts it succinctly: "[God's] Holy Will is unconditionally active: if it is not effective for blessing or salvation, then, in consequence of the human break in the divine order, it works in the opposite direction, and produces disaster. But this will is personal. God is present in this anger, it is actually His anger" (Emil Brunner, The Mediator, 1942, 518).

We cannot sweep this character-attribute of God under our neat theological carpet, denying it exists, any more than we can disbelieve in our own hostility toward the things of God, on the one hand, and our negative reactions to those who would do us and our loved ones harm, on the other. Again, I speak as one who actually believes humankind is created in the IMAGE of God. In other words, to deny this aspect of God is to detract from Anochi I-Source in the fact that this same proclivity is to be found acutely in God's IMAGE, humankind.

God above all else has the RIGHT to be RIGHT and to bring about, in HIS plans and purposes for the universe , in His intention , to usher in a STATE of perfection or "RIGHTNESS." If God must eventually crush obstinate man in order for a full, total surrender of a hostile will in Salvific redirection (and I cannot say this casually), then so be it (Rev 20.11-15).

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. Certainly I do not often speak of the negative side of the judgments of God involving humanity. The reason I do not do so is because this factor of judgment has been used for centuries to control a fragile humankind by a select cabal occupying priestly office, and I think two millennia has been long enough without the balance of the true meaning of God's justice, in a restored lost Jewish thoughtform, being theologically exercised. In any event, Yeshua never disregarded nor discarded the conception of the anger of God.

As we persevere through the next few chapters of Romans we need to be prepared for the revelation given to Paul by Messiah in respect of the judgment of God on the world. This world has been judged as in need of salvation! God, according to Paul, has judged the world and has utterly condemned it. As we will come to appreciate in the following section of Romans 1, Paul's thoughts flow into an expansive vision reflected and articulated in his opening words, "What is revealed is God"™s anger from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who in their wickedness keep suppressing the truth."

H. Wheeler Robinson states, "this wrath of God is not the blind and automatic working of abstract law , always a fiction, since 'law' is a conception, not an entity, till it finds expression through its instruments. The wrath of God is the wrath of divine Personality" (H. Wheeler Robinson, Redemption and Revelation, 1942, 269).

Paul is intent on revealing the anger of God. He starts with a revelation of God's wrath but unlike many other teachers I take a greater overview of Romans than do they. Studying the letter I can agree with these men that there is a startling revelation here propounded. BUT while Paul speaks of this as a revelation, we shall see later that he goes on to another three revelations. He does not stop with the revelation of God's anger. As we progress please note the three further revelations that flow freely in this epistle.

There is, as already described...

[1] the REVELATION of the wrath of God followed by...

[2] the REVELATION of the righteousness of God.

[3] Then there is the REVELATION of the wisdom of God, and finally...

[4] the REVELATION of the will of God.

This is why the Jewish Rabbi gets quite excited in the summing up of his entire treatise to the Roman Christians with his exclamation "What a wise God He is! To Him belongs the glory through Yeshua the Messiah forever!" (Rom 16.27).

"I AM NOT ASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST"
Paul is adamant about the Gospel he preaches. "For I am not ashamed of the GOSPEL [the evangel , the great news] of Mashiach: for it is the power [dunamis , from which we get our word dynamite] of God unto salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew emphatically, and equally [or, along with] the Greek [really, Gentile]" (Rom 1.16).

The great Greek scholar Kenneth Wuest (d. 1962) said of the Greek dunamis, that "it means power in the sense of that which overcomes resistance. Our English word 'dynamite' comes from this Greek word. The gospel is God's spiritual dynamite which breaks the granite-like heart of the sinner into rock dust, pulverising it so that it becomes rich soil in which the seed of the Word finds root and grows. The gospel is the most powerful thing in all the world. When it is unloosed in the Spirit-empowering preaching of the Word, souls are saved" (Kenneth S. Wuest, Golden Nuggets From the Greek New Testament in Wuest's Word Studies From the Greek New Testament, 1973 edition, Vol.lll, 95,96).

We must not lose sight of the fact that as Paul writes his Letter to the Roman Christians he always has the Gospel in the forefront of his mind when addressing the Christians over various issues. And we must never forget that we today usually need to jettison biased and hostile "traditional" Gentile Christian interpretations of Romans the first chapter , in particular vss. 21-32  ,  from our minds. In doing so, however, it is highly imperative to immediately replace these aggressive homophobic suggestions and dogmatic postulations and overtones with a restored Jewish thoughtform from the Second Temple Period. Perhaps we also have the duty to remember that we live in the 21st century and ought not to necessarily carry over into our culture and democracy the cultural values of certain Mediterranean societies of the Second Temple period as being applicable to our age now. Recall that if Paul had ever met a barbaric German warrior in his day, I have little doubt that he would have modified his views on the hair-length of males as constituting a sign of rampant effeminacy (see 1 Cor 11.14). He would also have ditched his ideas of what consisted of "nature."

We shall see in our next lecture that the issue of Romans 1.21-32 in Paul's introduction is IDOLATRY, and not the question of everyday run-of-the-mill homosexuality, or any other "-ality." Please note that cultic or religious homosexual practices of Egyptian Alexandria are here linked to bestiality (priestesses and animals) which should make Paul's point and objective plain enough. Rabbinic scholars readily admit that Rav Shaul is speaking of religious abominations that oriented around temple worship of demonic gods. We must always be on our guard to disallow modern views and trends and prejudices to overlap in our interpretations of documents penned two thousand (and more) years past. If a document was written in the first century of our common era, we need to approach it from a first century CE-coloured cultural, social, racial, religious and political viewpoint. If a text that is 3000-4000 years old happens to be under discussion we must utilise the same textual regard in relation to it and decidedly not approach it with, and apply to it, a 21st century modern European "sensitivity" or lack thereof.

According to the "Gospel of God," "the Gospel of Christ," "my Gospel," as Paul understood it, humankind is to share in the glory of the Infinite Creative Intelligence that brought us all forth in the first place. We are to experience a new body, a spirit body, and a totally new identity. But this expectant body is ultimately nothing but an intensification of our spirit. We will not be naked (2 Cor 5.3,4) , we will have an exceeding and eternal weight of glory in the intensification of our being.

In the final judgment of God we shall see our spirits released into God"™s very glory, and we shall partake of that same glory, intensifying our own (and therefore God"™s) experience of the Self. This Gospel of God's Salvific intention should always be held in the forefront of our mind whenever we reflect on the judgments of God. They are ever, always and invariably judgments leading to one goal , that of Salvation.

THIS CONCLUDES LECTURE EIGHT

Have you been spiritually edified with this lecture? Would you like to know more about the biblical revelation from such a unique perspective? Our private BRI/IMCF International Internet Yeshiva Members Forum has hundreds of in-depth lectures available for those who subscribe to the IMCF. Membership is entirely by donation and Messianic Enterprises has provided a PIN PAYMENT icon for your convenience which you can access on the front page of the public BRI/IMCF site at:

http://www.biblicalresearchinstitute.com.au/

Just depress the Pay Now icon and within days your request for International Messianic Community of Faith (IMCF) membership will be acknowledged.

Thank you for becoming supportive of this growing unique Work of God and for allowing us to serve you in this manner.

PAUL'S LETTER TO THE ROMAN CHRISTIANS [8]

Analytical Commentary on Romans
The Truncation of the Pauline Letters

The Audio MP3 of this lecture is available via this link: http://www.bripodcasts.com/Romans/Lecture8.MP3

Copyright © BRI 2016 All Rights Reserved Worldwide by Les Aron Gosling,
Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

CAUTION: BRI Yeshiva notes are not available to the general public. They are not for distribution. They are not for reproduction. The notes may also bear little or no resemblance to the actual audio or video recorded BRI Yeshiva lecture.


"The great Rabbi Gamaliel had among his disciples one who, according to a passage in the Talmud, gave his master a good deal of trouble, manifesting 'impudence in matters of learning.' But his name is not given; he is remembered simply as 'that pupil'" (F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame, 1958, 81. See also J. Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, 1944, 310f; Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30b).

"In Romans we have the answer to the question, 'What is Christianity?' by the strongest thinker in the early church" (A.M. Hunter, Toward Understanding Romans, 1962, 37,38).

"The history of the Christian church is consequently witness to the fact that the Epistle to the Romans has in a peculiar way been able to supply the impulse for the renewal of Christianity. When man has slipped away from the gospel, a deep study of Romans has often been the means by which the lost has been recovered" (Anders Nygren, Commentary on Romans, 1949, 3).

Paul's Letter to the Roman Christians begins with eleven chapters of awesome theology about salvation. This is a salvation by God's GRACE through FAITH apart from the Torah. Then in Romans 12 we find the Jewish Rabbi suddenly switch gears and starts what we can call an instructive application of that which he has been propounding , how a person being transformed by the holy Spirit of RIGHT KNOWLEDGE will live.

Over the past seven lectures we have discovered that this Pauline document is in fact a letter. It is not a book. There is no such document called the "Book of Romans." Again, its a letter and its not addressed to "the Romans." Its addressed to the Roman Christians. And those believers are not called to become saints, but are called saints, for they ARE saints.

Paul has written a theological ms. That is true. But it is MORE than this! This letter is a political manifesto. This will become very evident by the time we reach Romans 16.20. That the pre-Christ Nazoreans were a political entity has been established in our previous lectures so that there is no longer any shred of doubt about it.

In fact, as I have shared with our global student body already, Rav Shaul opens his epistle with his bold-faced declaration that Nero is about to be deposed. The expanded Greek speaks of the Lord Yeshua as the emperor of the world. But we have also seen that Paul is shockingly naïve in some respects , as well as headstrong , for he then includes the names of prominent Christians in Rome. After committing high treason and placing his head on the chopping block by invoking Yeshua as emperor I do not think these Christians would have been too appreciative of being identified for Nero's agents to come knocking on their doors.

We have also covered the fact that this letter possesses a variety of structures in early ms format. Indeed, we do not now know for certain where Romans begins and where it actually concludes. This is primarily due to the procedure that many of his writings were truncated for the purposes of a wider circulation around the various ekklesias of the late Second Temple Period. I have also covered when it was most likely that each epistle was penned. In achieving this we have come to realise that the two letters of Paul to the Corinthian Greeks were originally four in number and we have now reconstructed them as they would have originally appeared. Having recapitulated for necessary reasons we are now prepared for lecture 8.

FINAL WORDS CONFIRMING TRUNCATION OF PAULINE LETTERS
The lower order of Jewish priests backed by the Zealots sparked the first insurrection against Rome when they refused the daily Temple sacrifice required for the Emperor Nero and all foreigners. Eleazer, a priest, who was to see the slaughter of the high priests by the Zealots , again, with aid from the lower priesthood , refused to offer the sacrifice on behalf of Nero, and thus plunged the Jewish Commonwealth into a formidable darkness from which the Jews as a nation never recovered until 1948. Immediately prior to the time of the open outbreak of Jewish-Roman hostilities in 66 CE the apostle Peter had written of Paul's circular letters as being both acknowledged and accepted as "Scripture" , as the Word of God , along with the Torah, Writings and Prophets. Please note the phrase "the rest of the Scriptures" in 2 Peter 3.15-17:

"Consider also that our Lord"™s patience brings salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, concerning which those who are unschooled and intellectually challenged distort from their proper meaning, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. Therefore, divinely loved ones, since you already know these things, be on your guard not to be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure standing."

The writings of Rav Shaul, according to Peter, were being widely assessed as inspired by the Ruach HaKodesh. Paul admitted as much when he wrote to Timothy that "all [Paul's] writing [Gk, graphe) is inspired of God, and is profitable for teaching, etc" (2 Tim 3.16. See also verse 15 where "Scripture" is the Greek, gramma). Further evidence that Paul accepted the early circulation of the Gospels , at least the Gospels of Matthew and Luke , as on a par with the Hebrew Scriptures can be seen by his quotation from Mt 10.10 and Lk 10.7 in 1 Tim 5.18 in which text he speaks of this quotation as "Scripture." Almost needless to say, Paul thus grants evidence of the very early creation of at least these two Gospels, and therefore we can heartily reject antichrist views of a second century composition for them! (See R.A. Ward, Commentary on 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, 1974; Burton James Coffman, Commentary on 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, & Philemon, 1986, esp., 270). Bottom line: many of the Messianic Scriptures were already in circulation circa 15 years prior to his penning of 1 & 2 Timothy!

Not only is this the case but Paul virtually admitted in 2 Tim 2.15 that his letters (or some of them) were being circulated around the Messianic assemblies in edited form, and he urged Timothy as an editor to appropriately and rightly "partition [or, cut] the word of truth" (Greek). Of course, he may have had the Hebrew Scriptures in mind and this consensus probability has been "stressed to the max" concerning various doctrinal formulations, and emphasised as accepted dogma in all Christian circles. However, it is my opinion that he may also have been speaking about his own letters (which as we have seen were already being acknowledged as "Scripture" among Messianic congregations). Certainly we have seen that Paul's letter to the Galatians was early interfered with and not only so, but his four letters to the Corinthians were dovetailed for reasons of circulation as being two in number. So by realising that the Greek for "rightly dividing" or "correctly partitioning" is orthotomeo carrying the basic meaning, according to scholar Young of "cutting straight," we may be entertained by an entirely new vision of what Paul had in mind in relation to this expert "cutting" or heavily editing of his inspired workmanship. Whatever the case, this approach has its merits and really needs the attention of scholarly evaluation concerning this new biblical insight.

PAUL INVENTS A NEW LITERARY FORM
I might mention at this early juncture that it is not widely recognised that Paul was ahead of his time in being a creative letter writer. Indeed, as scholar Robert H. Grundy points out, "In the Graeco-Roman world private letters averaged close to ninety words in length. Literary letters, such as those by the Roman orator and statesman Cicero" and I follow the late Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's hard "C" pronunciation as opposed to the soft "c" variant Sisero in common use today "and by Seneca the philosopher, averaged around two hundred words. As the usual papyrus sheet measure about 9.5" x 11"... and could accommodate 150-250 words, depending on the size of writing, most ancient letters occupied no more than one papyrus page. But the average length of Paul's epistles runs to about 1,300 words, ranging from 335 words in Philemon to 7,101 words in Romans... Paul's epistles are several times longer than the average letter of ancient times, so that in a sense Paul invented a new literary form, the epistle , new in its prolongation as a letter in the theological nature of its contents, and (usually) in the communal nature of its address" (R.H. Grundy, A Survey of the New Testament, 1970, 257).

Grundy continues, "... Since the course grain of papyrus made writing tedious, it was usual to dictate letters to a professional scribe, called an amanuensis, who used shorthand during rapid dictation. The ruggedness of Pauline literary style , seen, for example, in numerous incomplete sentences , suggests that at times Paul dictated too rapidly for close attention to careful sentence structure and that his amanuensis found it difficult to keep up. Sudden breaks in thought similarly suggest temporary suspension of dictation, perhaps overnight or for shorter or longer periods. Sometimes an author simply left oral instructions, a rough draft, or notes for his amanuensis to follow. Under such circumstances the amanuensis himself molded the exact phrasing, a factor which may account for some of the stylistic differences among epistles by the same author. The author finally edited the letter. We know for certain that Paul used amanuenses from the fact that his amanuensis once identifies himself by name (Tertius , Romans 16:22). Also, Paul's frequent statements that he is writing the final greeting with his own hand imply that the major portions of the epistles were written through an amanuensis (1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; compare Philemon 19)" (Survey, ibid, 257,258).

And you thought how "free flowing" and "articulate" Romans was read by you in English!

So, at this juncture let us return to the text of Paul's Letter to the Roman Christians.

THE TEXT
"First, I thank my God through Yeshua the Messiah for all of you, because the report of your trust is spreading throughout the whole world. For God, whom I serve in my spirit by spreading the Good News about his Son, is my witness that I regularly remember you in my prayers; and I always pray that somehow, now or in the future, I might, by God"™s will, succeed in coming to visit you. For I long to see you, so that I might share with you some spiritual gift with the intent to establish you , or, to put it another way, so that by my being with you, we might, through the mutual shared faith be of encouragement to one another. Brothers, I want you to know that although I have been prevented from visiting you until now, I have often planned to do so, in order that I might have some fruit among you, just as I have among the other Gentiles. I owe a debt to both civilized Greeks and uncivilized people, to both the educated and the ignorant; therefore I am eager to proclaim the Good News also to you who live in Rome for I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Messiah, since it is God"™s powerful means of bringing salvation to everyone who keeps on trusting, to the Jew especially, but equally to the Gentile. For in it is revealed how God declares people righteous in his sight; and from beginning to end it is through trust , as the Tanakh puts it, "But the person who is righteous will live his life by trust." What is revealed is God"™s anger from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who in their wickedness keep suppressing the truth" (Romans 1.8-18).

MEETING WITH MARK TRONSON
I first met Baptist sports chaplain Dr Mark Tronson over a dozen years ago when he discovered that I was a "Messianic Jew" living in his vicinity in the Northern Rivers Region of New South Wales. [Mark is a well-known Australian Baptist pastor and evangelist working in the field of sports mainly as a Chaplain. Trained at Morling Baptist Theological College in Sydney (1977-80) his life is outlined on Wikipedia on the Internet. In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics Mark was invited to attend as the Chaplain by the Australian Olympic Committee President, and in subsequent Olympic Games Tronson himself has appointed Australian Olympic Chaplains. In 2000 my friend was invited to the IOC Lausanne Switzerland to assist in the development of an Olympic Villages Religious Services protocol. Mark, his own ancestry Jewish, has engaged in evangelism in the US, UK, South Korea, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Israel, Turkey, Italy and France. In 2005 he was voted as one of Australia's 25 most influential Evangelicals by the national Evangelical newspaper New Life. Carl Lewis ("Olympian of the Century") presented Mark (along with his wife) with Gold Medals in 2009 in Dallas Texas for their 27 years of sports and Olympic Ministry.]

In any event, Mark contacted me and wanted to meet. At our first meeting he asked immediately, "What as a Messianic Jew is your understanding of salvation in relation to the Covenant?" He was most pointed in his question, and mildly aggressive. I knew why. His sub-text was very clear to me: "Are you as a Jew saved by the Covenant or by some other means?"

My forthright reply was given without any hesitation. "None of us, whether Jew or Gentile, can be saved without the shed blood of Yeshua the Jewish Messiah (and God manifest in human flesh) being applied to us, to our sins , as the Foundation of God's Gracious intent for humankind. I am not saved as a Jew because of any covenant or contract, Sinai or New Covenant, Mark." I then quickly added: "For any covenant or contract exists because of SIN. I am saved by GRACE, which is God's character and Nature, by His love and always forgiving desire for all of humankind to enter into all that pertains to Deity. Salvation in Jewish thoughtform is not merely an attempt to escape the savage fires of an eternal damnation , which is an entirely negative view of salvation ,  but IS about humankind entering into ALL that God is. As Rav Shaul states candidly we are reconciled to God by the death of His Son, MUCH MORE being reconciled we are saved by His life , by Christ living His resurrection life over again in us by His Spirit, and all that pertains to this spiritual exercise by Messiah on our behalf exists and occurs precisely and only because of GRACE."

He seemed very satisfied with my answer, and has attended IMCF meetings in the past, which distance has discouraged because of his failing health, but we have experienced a very refreshing relationship over the years. His meeting with me brought forth my crystallization of thought response to that same question that has dogged my steps for many years as Messianic Jews have come through our doors, usually en-route from Jerusalem, repudiating the shed blood of the Mashiach and elevating their spiritual (read, religious) superiority of salvation through the Covenant and the Sinai Torah.

I do not tolerate legalism, and like Paul, will resist it to my dying breath.

Paul opens his epistle extolling the Messiah as the emperor of the world, disparaging Nero Caesar, and then speaks (as we have seen) of his love for the Roman brethren, most of whom he has never met. It is with the introduction to his letter that we catch a glimpse of Paul's personal feelings for the ekklesia , and we discover the fact that he is not backward in revealing his heart to others. But Paul is circumspect! He has revealed his heart but then seeks to protect that same heart by leaving his sentiments behind him. This is the last heart-revelation until he states his preoccupation with the negative side of his character and personality in Romans 7.

Paul's introduction encourages their trust (Gk, pistis) in the Messiah and frankly wherever we locate pistis in the NT we ought to translate it as trust rather than by our English words faith or belief which fall far short of the intention of the Greek. For, one of the charges brought against Gentile Christians by Jews over the years has been that faith or belief of itself doesn't finally or necessarily provoke good acts in life or good works in obedience to God. And of course they're right in this matter. For, as history records, antinomianism has been a charge leveled at the Constantinian Church for 2000 years. As far as pistis is concerned "the present tense of a Greek verb implies ongoing activity, not a once-and-for-all event" (David Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 1992, 329).

This is substantiated by the Amplified Version's comments on "belief" (pisteuo). "To adhere to, cleave to; to trust, to have faith in; to rely on... summed up in, 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved', means an absolute personal reliance upon the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour" (The Amplified New Testament, Introduction).

Paul adds that he seeks to establish the Christians in a structured way. He wishes to impart spiritual gifts to the end that they may be "established." The spiritual gifts to the ekklesia which he desires to impart to them are manifest in other of his writings (e.g., Eph 4.11; 1 Cor 12.4-11; Phil 1.1; Titus 1.5,7; cf Acts 14.23). He insists it is his lack of opportunity to visit the Christians in Rome which scholars propose (and in my opinion they do so correctly) brought accusations against the apostle and from which he needed, not to distance himself, but to defend himself.

But Paul's emphatic love for God and for the spiritual brethren of Christ (aptly demonstrated in his letter), can be an occasion for the temptation of distancing oneself from Paul's view of the stern judgments of God. If we attempt to do such a thing we are being decidedly foolish. Indeed, shortly after speaking of his love of (and for) the brethren Paul launches in this very epistle into a virtual tirade of general condemnation on all of humankind.

BE CAREFUL HOW YOU READ BRI/IMCF MATERIAL
There have been numerous BRI/IMCF students (as well as frequent visitors to our sites) who, over the decades, have delighted in consuming my teachings on universal salvation and the true Gospel and on my emphasis on God's Self-sacrificial love for humankind. Many have appreciated experiencing a great burden being lifted off their shoulders kindling and relishing within themselves their new birth into a positive theology expressed in terms of a vibrant new and healthy relationship in the REALISED-incarnation of Christ in the heart. But , so often in so doing , they unfortunately turn a blind eye to ALL that Anochi I-Source IS, in this His/Her character and Nature. For, if nothing else is true this one thing remains FIRM: God holds ALL human beings entirely accountable for the truth they receive.

True, God's judgments and justice are rooted in Grace and love and are thus expressed with a basic attitude toward SALVATION. God is, by His/Her very NATURE, Salvific. In Jewish thoughtform justice is equivalent to God's Salvific intention. God's intention and God's will are one and the same. God's justice found a complete satisfaction in His Son's travail on the bloodied tree of Golgoleth (Isa 53.11). Hell can never satisfy the divine justice. Christ alone can and Christ alone does.

What is disregarded with immature impunity by many believers is the realisation that God can and does get angry, just as a human Father and Mother can and do express anger concerning negative and hurtful acts their children often perform and/or indulge in to the harm of both themselves and others. After all, I have majored for decades on the FACT that we human beings (or, better, human doings) are the creative IMAGE , the MIRRORED REFLECTION , of God. This anger of God Almighty CAN and DOES on occasion flare (FIRE-up) into an explosive rage concerning which Yeshua warned.

But God's anger is rarely ever a sudden flare up, although God is on record as volleying what I can only describe as "emotionally passionate displeasure," which both arises and subsides rapidly, as was the case when God wanted to destroy Israel and build another race, another Chosen People, as descendants of His servant Moses. God's anger usually is described as "a strong and settled opposition to all that is [morally and ethically] evil" and that "arising out of God's very nature" (Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 1955, 1965, 180).

None of us can afford to "duck for cover" behind semantics and a defiant refusal to acknowledge and accept the fact of the existence of "wrath" when it is ascribed to God. To do so is to charge Yochanan the Immerser with idiocy when he warned of "the wrath to come" (Mt 3.7; Lk 3.7) and to charge John the priestly apostle with short-term memory loss when he spoke of "wrath abiding on" the disobedient unbeliever (Jn 3.36). Yeshua himself stated explicitly that there are some who stand in danger of a hell of fire (Mt 5.22). Certainly Messiah addressed the fact that his Father God was to be feared (trepidatiously appreciated) for God "after he has killed has power to cast into Gehenna" (Lk 12.5). In most of Messiah's parables a negative judgment is a stressed and persistent theme (Mt 13.42,50; 18.34;21.44; 22.7,33). While there are many ministers of the Christian religion, and many believers, who would lately jettison any mention of God's wrath from their conception of Deity (and biblical scholar C.H. Dodd comes readily to mind as does the equally unscholarly Derek Flood), "anger" as righteous indignation is decidedly linked to the all-rounded positive balanced Nature and character of the Father of the Lord Yeshua. Both Paul and John as apostles of Christ would assess my ascription as worthy of merit (Jn 3.36; Rev 6.16; 16.19; 19.15; Rom 1.18; Eph 5.6; Col 3.6). The unknown author of the circular book of Hebrews states it perfectly, in his reflection upon the Torah: "Our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12.29).

While the Dodd's and Derek Floods of this world cast aside the personalised anger of God in favour of impersonal retribution, or as Dodd puts it "[the mention of wrath does not] describe the attitude of God to man, but [describes] an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe" Emil Brunner puts it succinctly: "[God's] Holy Will is unconditionally active: if it is not effective for blessing or salvation, then, in consequence of the human break in the divine order, it works in the opposite direction, and produces disaster. But this will is personal. God is present in this anger, it is actually His anger" (Emil Brunner, The Mediator, 1942, 518).

We cannot sweep this character-attribute of God under our neat theological carpet, denying it exists, any more than we can disbelieve in our own hostility toward the things of God, on the one hand, and our negative reactions to those who would do us and our loved ones harm, on the other. Again, I speak as one who actually believes humankind is created in the IMAGE of God. In other words, to deny this aspect of God is to detract from Anochi I-Source in the fact that this same proclivity is to be found acutely in God's IMAGE, humankind.

God above all else has the RIGHT to be RIGHT and to bring about, in HIS plans and purposes for the universe , in His intention , to usher in a STATE of perfection or "RIGHTNESS." If God must eventually crush obstinate man in order for a full, total surrender of a hostile will in Salvific redirection (and I cannot say this casually), then so be it (Rev 20.11-15).

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. Certainly I do not often speak of the negative side of the judgments of God involving humanity. The reason I do not do so is because this factor of judgment has been used for centuries to control a fragile humankind by a select cabal occupying priestly office, and I think two millennia has been long enough without the balance of the true meaning of God's justice, in a restored lost Jewish thoughtform, being theologically exercised. In any event, Yeshua never disregarded nor discarded the conception of the anger of God.

As we persevere through the next few chapters of Romans we need to be prepared for the revelation given to Paul by Messiah in respect of the judgment of God on the world. This world has been judged as in need of salvation! God, according to Paul, has judged the world and has utterly condemned it. As we will come to appreciate in the following section of Romans 1, Paul's thoughts flow into an expansive vision reflected and articulated in his opening words, "What is revealed is God"™s anger from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who in their wickedness keep suppressing the truth."

H. Wheeler Robinson states, "this wrath of God is not the blind and automatic working of abstract law , always a fiction, since 'law' is a conception, not an entity, till it finds expression through its instruments. The wrath of God is the wrath of divine Personality" (H. Wheeler Robinson, Redemption and Revelation, 1942, 269).

Paul is intent on revealing the anger of God. He starts with a revelation of God's wrath but unlike many other teachers I take a greater overview of Romans than do they. Studying the letter I can agree with these men that there is a startling revelation here propounded. BUT while Paul speaks of this as a revelation, we shall see later that he goes on to another three revelations. He does not stop with the revelation of God's anger. As we progress please note the three further revelations that flow freely in this epistle.

There is, as already described...

[1] the REVELATION of the wrath of God followed by...

[2] the REVELATION of the righteousness of God.

[3] Then there is the REVELATION of the wisdom of God, and finally...

[4] the REVELATION of the will of God.

This is why the Jewish Rabbi gets quite excited in the summing up of his entire treatise to the Roman Christians with his exclamation "What a wise God He is! To Him belongs the glory through Yeshua the Messiah forever!" (Rom 16.27).

"I AM NOT ASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST"
Paul is adamant about the Gospel he preaches. "For I am not ashamed of the GOSPEL [the evangel , the great news] of Mashiach: for it is the power [dunamis , from which we get our word dynamite] of God unto salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew emphatically, and equally [or, along with] the Greek [really, Gentile]" (Rom 1.16).

The great Greek scholar Kenneth Wuest (d. 1962) said of the Greek dunamis, that "it means power in the sense of that which overcomes resistance. Our English word 'dynamite' comes from this Greek word. The gospel is God's spiritual dynamite which breaks the granite-like heart of the sinner into rock dust, pulverising it so that it becomes rich soil in which the seed of the Word finds root and grows. The gospel is the most powerful thing in all the world. When it is unloosed in the Spirit-empowering preaching of the Word, souls are saved" (Kenneth S. Wuest, Golden Nuggets From the Greek New Testament in Wuest's Word Studies From the Greek New Testament, 1973 edition, Vol.lll, 95,96).

We must not lose sight of the fact that as Paul writes his Letter to the Roman Christians he always has the Gospel in the forefront of his mind when addressing the Christians over various issues. And we must never forget that we today usually need to jettison biased and hostile "traditional" Gentile Christian interpretations of Romans the first chapter , in particular vss. 21-32  ,  from our minds. In doing so, however, it is highly imperative to immediately replace these aggressive homophobic suggestions and dogmatic postulations and overtones with a restored Jewish thoughtform from the Second Temple Period. Perhaps we also have the duty to remember that we live in the 21st century and ought not to necessarily carry over into our culture and democracy the cultural values of certain Mediterranean societies of the Second Temple period as being applicable to our age now. Recall that if Paul had ever met a barbaric German warrior in his day, I have little doubt that he would have modified his views on the hair-length of males as constituting a sign of rampant effeminacy (see 1 Cor 11.14). He would also have ditched his ideas of what consisted of "nature."

We shall see in our next lecture that the issue of Romans 1.21-32 in Paul's introduction is IDOLATRY, and not the question of everyday run-of-the-mill homosexuality, or any other "-ality." Please note that cultic or religious homosexual practices of Egyptian Alexandria are here linked to bestiality (priestesses and animals) which should make Paul's point and objective plain enough. Rabbinic scholars readily admit that Rav Shaul is speaking of religious abominations that oriented around temple worship of demonic gods. We must always be on our guard to disallow modern views and trends and prejudices to overlap in our interpretations of documents penned two thousand (and more) years past. If a document was written in the first century of our common era, we need to approach it from a first century CE-coloured cultural, social, racial, religious and political viewpoint. If a text that is 3000-4000 years old happens to be under discussion we must utilise the same textual regard in relation to it and decidedly not approach it with, and apply to it, a 21st century modern European "sensitivity" or lack thereof.

According to the "Gospel of God," "the Gospel of Christ," "my Gospel," as Paul understood it, humankind is to share in the glory of the Infinite Creative Intelligence that brought us all forth in the first place. We are to experience a new body, a spirit body, and a totally new identity. But this expectant body is ultimately nothing but an intensification of our spirit. We will not be naked (2 Cor 5.3,4) , we will have an exceeding and eternal weight of glory in the intensification of our being.

In the final judgment of God we shall see our spirits released into God"™s very glory, and we shall partake of that same glory, intensifying our own (and therefore God"™s) experience of the Self. This Gospel of God's Salvific intention should always be held in the forefront of our mind whenever we reflect on the judgments of God. They are ever, always and invariably judgments leading to one goal , that of Salvation.

THIS CONCLUDES LECTURE EIGHT

Have you been spiritually edified with this lecture? Would you like to know more about the biblical revelation from such a unique perspective? Our private BRI/IMCF International Internet Yeshiva Members Forum has hundreds of in-depth lectures available for those who subscribe to the IMCF. Membership is entirely by donation and Messianic Enterprises has provided a PIN PAYMENT icon for your convenience which you can access on the front page of the public BRI/IMCF site at:

http://www.biblicalresearchinstitute.com.au/

Just depress the Pay Now icon and within days your request for International Messianic Community of Faith (IMCF) membership will be acknowledged.

Thank you for becoming supportive of this growing unique Work of God and for allowing us to serve you in this manner.