Expound: Romans 1:1-23 - Part C

You'll never appreciate the good news till you all understand the bad news.

The bad news is what makes the good news so good. And the bad news is the whole world, Jew or Gentile, is consigned under God's eternal judgment and the wrath of God is upon them unless they find themselves in Christ by His grace and believe in Him. Some people believe the God of the Old Testament was a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip explores these views of God, helping you understand God's deep love for you. Before we begin, we want to let you know about a resource that will encourage you as you explore the faith and failings of prominent women in the Bible. Women play a huge role in the biblical narrative. From Eve to Esther to Bathsheba to Priscilla, we find stories of faith and failings. Lenya Heitzig explores four queens of the Bible in her new teaching series. Here's where we see Bernice sitting right by his side. Unfortunately, Bernice is going to go with the flow, succumb to peer pressure and remain silent. Hear more from Lenya as she explores four different queens in scripture.

And when you give $35 or more today, we'll send you the Queens of the Bible collection of teachings as our way of saying thank you. Peer pressure is a powerful thing. The crowd was watching. Bernice was watching.

Agrippa was watching. And you know you do stupid things in peer pressure. You'll say you don't like a movie you really like because everybody else says they don't like it. Whatever it is, you'll succumb to the peer pressure. Get your copy of these special teachings.

Visit connectwithskip.com slash offer to give online securely today or call 800-922-1888. Okay, let's dive into today's teaching. We'll be in Romans chapter one as Skip Heitzig begins the study. Paul said while he was in jail, he said, I've learned in every state, whatever state I'm in to be content.

You learn that. You learn content, but you learn thanksgiving. I love the story about the boy who built the little boat. He labored long on it. He glued it up, he painted it up and it was just a perfect day with a light breeze and he took it out to the pond near his house and he set the boat on the pond and the little sails were filled with a slight breeze and it started going across the pond and he just took such delight in it. It's like, man, I've been planning for this day.

This is perfect. But while it was right about in the middle of the lake, the slight breeze developed into a strong wind and prevailing winds took over and the little boat sank. And instead of complaining and griping, he smiled really big and he goes, what a great day to fly a kite. And he went home and got his kite. So that's a good way to look at life.

It's a good day to fly a kite. Didn't go as I planned, but I wonder what God has in store. So first, I thank God, Paul said.

And then he made requests. And he said in verse 11, I long to see you that I may impart to you some spiritual gift that you may be established. In other words, I want to come and I want to serve you, but look at how he adjusts that a little bit in verse 12. That is that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith, both of you and me. Paul, the great apostle was never above telling his audience, you really encouraged me. I really need to be together with you. It's not just me ministering to you.

It's you ministering back to me as well. And so he's writing a letter, but he longs to see them. And there's something about writing or texting or emailing that just isn't satisfying. You can only communicate so much. You want to eventually be eye to eye and see the person and get the body language and hear the inflection and the intonation.

A full orb to communication. When I was dating my wife, before she was my wife, she was my girlfriend, Lenya. I lived in Huntington Beach, California. She lived in Hawaii. And in those days, it wasn't like today with the cell phones. It was very expensive to make a long distance phone call to Hawaii.

So it was very sparing. But we wrote letters. And I still have those letters. I've kept them, that correspondence. And when I go over it, I realize by the longing in the letters, it's just very unsatisfying to just write without being able to see face to face.

Now, of course, we have since seen each other face to face, and the rest is history. But so it was with Paul and the Romans. Verse 13, Now I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I plan to come to you, but was hindered until now, that I might have some fruit among you also, just as among the other Gentiles. I am a debtor, both to the Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise. So as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also. I really want to go to Rome, Paul said, not as a tourist, not as a sightseer, but as a fruit bearer. I want to bear fruit among you. I want to do something spiritual in your midst.

I want you to encourage me, but I want to really be able to minister to you in the spirit as well. Interesting in verse 14, that phrase, I am a debtor, both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise. Let me unravel that. There's a couple of ways you can be in debt. Number one, you can borrow money from somebody. Now you are in debt to that person. You have to pay off whatever you have borrowed from them, and you are in debt to them until you pay it off.

There's a second way you can be in debt. You can be given money from someone for someone else, a third party. At that point, you are a debtor to the third party.

You have an obligation. You owe a debt, and the way you pay it off is you take the money given to you and not spend it on yourself. You deliver it to them. You are in debt to them until you have given it to them. That's how Paul uses this phrase, I'm a debtor, to both Greeks and barbarians, both to wise and unwise. And what is the debt? The debt is the gospel. I am in debt to share the message with people, including Romans, and my obligation is to not hoard the gospel but to herald the gospel.

That's the debt. I was reading it just the other day. Maybe it was yesterday in the Second Kings. So there was a famine in Samaria up in northern Israel, middle part of Israel. In the city of Samaria, there was a famine, and the Syrian army had encamped around Samaria to destroy it. And so in chapter seven, it says there were four lepers, guys with lepers, guys with leprosy, hanging out at the gate of the city of Samaria.

And they had a death sentence. They had leprosy, so eventually the disease in those days would consume their body, and they're starving to death. There's a famine in the land.

So they look at each other, and one leper says to his buddies, you know what? We're gonna die. Why should we just sit here until we die? If we just stay here, we're gonna die.

If we go into the city of Samaria, we're gonna die, because there's no food in this city. But what if we were to go to the camp of the enemy, the Syrians, and turn ourselves in? It could be that they let us live, and they feed us a meal.

Now, it could be that they don't. They could kill us, but so what? We're gonna die anyway. If we sit here, we're gonna die. We go into the city, we're gonna die. We could try going into the enemy camp and seeing if we could turn ourselves in. They may feed us. We may live.

What do we got to lose? So they go to the Syrian camp. Nobody's there.

It's totally vacant. What had happened is they imagined that they heard the sound of chariots, and they thought an army had come in, an army like of the Hittites or the Egyptians that had been conscripted by the Israelites. And so they thought, we're surrounded, and they fled the city. They ran away.

So these four lepers come in. They find all these tents filled with food, wine, water, gold, silver. They start drinking, eating, going from 10 to 10, hoarding, hiding, all the stuff they found. They go, man, we're just, this is awesome. We're having a heyday. And then they realized.

They looked at each other again. They said, this isn't right, man. What we're doing is not right, for this is a day of good news, yet we remain silent. We have just found the enemy camp with all of their supplies. We owe it to the people in the Samaria to tell them there's food for you. There's water for you. There's supplies for you. This is a day of good news, and we remain silent. Folks, this is a day this is a day of good news. We have a debt to the world. We can't remain silent. There's salvation for the taking.

There's grace that God is offering. So Paul said, I have a debt. I am a debtor to the Greeks, to the barbarians, to the Y. Now let me explain that, Greeks and barbarians. First of all, the Jews.

The Jews divided the world into two groups, Jews and Gentiles, non-Jews. And Gentiles, a stringent, devout Jew would say God created Gentiles just to make hell hotter, to kindle the fires of hell. That's why God made them.

Throw them in there, make it nice and hot to punish bad people. That's why God made them. But we're the Jews, we're the chosen race.

Now Paul's gonna deal head on with that. The Greeks also divided the whole world up into two groups, Greeks and barbarians. If you weren't a Greek, you're a barbarian.

The term barbarian is an onomatopoetic word, meaning that the sound of the word is the definition of the word. The Greeks would listen to non-Greeks speak. The Greeks believed that their language was the language of the gods.

It's beautiful, it's expressive, it's very precise. There's really none like it, I think, to this day. The Greek language is an awesome language if you studied Biblical Greek. Well, the Greeks took pride in their language and their culture, second to none.

Second to none. So if you're not a Greek, high cultured, you're a barbarian. And they would listen to the language of the non-Greeks and it sounded to them like bar, bar, bar, bar, just gibberish.

So they coined the term barbarian, somebody who doesn't speak Greek. So when Paul says I am a debtor to both Greeks and the barbarians, and he will also say Jew and Gentile, what he means is I have an obligation to the high class and to the hick class, to the down and outers and the up and outers, because they're both out. I have a debt to those who study Socrates, as well as those who can't even spell Socrates. An obligation to all men for the gospel. So as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, verse 16. For it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, notice this, to the Jew first and also for the Greek. This is a phrase that will be repeated, Jew first, also to the Greek.

That's a theological priority, first of all. God made a covenant with the Jewish people. God made promises to the Jewish people. God promised the Messiah to the Jewish people. So it is a theological priority that first it would go to the covenant people, the Jews, and the gospel did, go to Jerusalem and Judea.

And also, it is a chronological priority. Whenever Paul would go into a city, a Greek city, a Roman city, he would always go first to the synagogue and preach at the synagogue, the Jew first. He wants them to know their Messiah has arrived, all the promises in the Old Testament. They have been longing to see fulfill their sins, been longing to see fulfilled, have been fulfilled in Jesus. Then after the synagogue, he would go to the agora, the marketplace, the city at large, the Gentile, and preach to them.

So to the Jew first and also to the Gentile. For in it, verse 17, there's that great verse, it says, the promise of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Now, I told you about Martin Luther. The verse that I just read, verse 17, is the key verse transformed him.

The just shall live by faith. Martin Luther, as an Augustinian monk in Erfurt, Germany, was so burdened by his own failures, weighed down by his own sins, that he went to confession daily. And his confessor, the priest who would hear his confession, was just sick of him coming so much.

Because he would like confess little tiny things that weren't anything at all. And so finally the priest said to Martin Luther, go out and commit some sin worthy of confessing, instead of bringing all this drivel to me. Paul then traveled to, Martin Luther then traveled to Rome. And in Rome, even to this day, there's a historic church called the Church of Saint John Lateran. That's a very historical building from antiquity. It was a palace at one time of several of the Roman emperors.

And it had been turned into a church by that time. And the Church of Saint John Lateran has a set of stairs called the Sancta Scala. And it was believed purported by legend to be the very stairs up to the throne of Pontius Pilate where Jesus stood trial. And so devout Catholics in times past, Martin Luther did it for this reason, to get on his knees and crawl up the stairs. And in so doing, a person will bloody their knees and they do it on purpose. You know, they will crawl up the stairs and people to this day do it.

Pre-COVID at least they did it. I don't know about now, but every step up the Sancta Scala, you get so many years off of purgatory. So here's Martin Luther trying to burn all his sins off out of purgatory so he can go to heaven. And while he's going up the steps, since he was looking at the book of Romans, this verse came to mind. The just shall live by faith.

It really was in that moment and from remembering that verse that bore the seed of the great Protestant Reformation. I'm not, salvation isn't a fee. Salvation is free.

It's not something I earn. It's a gift. That's what got him up and got him back. And the Reformation was on. Now in verse 18, there's a little bit of a change.

Notice it. For the wrath of God is revealed. This is the first section of the book of Romans, the wrath of God. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them. Now so far the book is filled with good news, chapter one, until this point. It's the gospel. It's the good news. It's the righteousness of God revealed. Hallelujah. But now storm clouds move in. Now chapter one, verse 18 to chapter three, verse 20, the theme over and over again is you're all under the condemnation of God, the wrath of God.

Well why? Wait, wait, wait. You're telling us all about the good news? Now you're just like going to the bad news? What up, Paul?

Here's what up. He's saying you'll never appreciate the good news till you all understand the bad news. The bad news is what makes the good news so good. And the bad news is the whole world, Jew or Gentile, is consigned under God's eternal judgment and the wrath of God is upon them unless they find themselves in Christ by his grace and believe in him. So the grace of God is shown later after the backdrop of the wrath of God. So though the theme is the righteousness of God, he's showing us the unrighteousness of humanity, which makes God's imputed righteousness all that much more awesome. Now a quick little tidbit of information. How often have you heard people say, how often have you heard people say, well the God of the Old Testament's a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament's a God of love.

Ever heard that? These are people who don't know either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The Old Testament has many promises of God's grace and forgiveness and many examples thereof and the New Testament, including Romans, including Revelation, have plenty of the wrath of God and here's one of them. The wrath of God is revealed. This is in the book of Romans. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

Now he explains it. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead. So they, the world, people in the world, are without excuse because although they knew God, this is historically, although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts.

Their foolish hearts were darkened, professing to be wise. They became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. He's seen the world as a God he's describing their idolatry. Now he's making a very impressive argument to the Roman readers. He's saying that God is invisible and unknowable, but he has made himself visible, in a sense, and thus knowable. He has given you visible proof of his existence in the creation.

He's given you a conscience to apprehend the visible creation around you, and so you're without excuse. The argument that Paul is touching on or using, we would call the teleological argument. The teleological argument is the argument of design. If you look around the thinking person and looking around at the world, understands the world in which I live, looks like it's been custom-made, it's been designed. And if it indeed reveals design, it must therefore infer a designer.

So if the art hanging in the skies is impressive, and it is, the artist must be more impressive. The universe in which we live, that was the argument of David in Psalm 19. The heavens declare the glory of God.

The firmament shows his handiwork. Night into night, or day into day, they reveal speech. Night into night, they reveal knowledge.

There is no voice nor speech where their voice is not heard. The artist, just like an artist, reveals himself or herself by a poem, or a song, or a sculptor, or a painting. God reveals himself through his creation. He is invisible, but he has a visible expression in the world around him.

But they change, verse 23, the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Johan Kepler, some of you are familiar with the name Johan Kepler, he is the called the father of modern astronomy. Johan Kepler said, the undevout astronomer is mad.

I want you to hear that again. The undevout astronomer, the person who is an unbeliever, who doesn't believe in the things of God. He's not a believer. He's a believer. He's a believer. The person who is an unbeliever, who doesn't believe in the things of God. He's not devout toward God. And the undevout astronomer is nuts. In other words, if you can look around at the universe, the planetary system, the balance, the design, and not see a creator, you're like an idiot.

The undevout astronomer is mad. That's the consensus of Paul. That's the consensus of Psalm 19.

And Paul shows the stages of degeneration of the ancient world. That wraps up Skip Heitzig's message from the series Expound Romance. Now here's Skip to tell you about how you can keep encouraging messages like this one coming your way as you help connect others to God's Word. I love the fact that Jesus was called the friend of sinners. Instead of spending time with the religious elite of His day, He reached out to the lost and the outcast.

His love is for everyone. That's amazing news, and we want to share with the entire world God's love. You can be part of it when you partner with this ministry. Here's how you can give today to change lives with the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can give online at connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888.

800-922-1888. Thank you. Tomorrow Skip Heitzig shares how the full weight of the gospel reveals God's incredible power and love. The righteousness of God is actually the righteousness whereby God converts a sinner. He gives to you. He imputes to you His righteousness. You don't earn it. You don't try to approach it. You don't try to do good works in order to get it. You receive it. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.