BibleProject - How to Live Like Jesus is Lord - Letters E3

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

The New Testament letters all share a core conviction that shapes how the apostles taught followers of Jesus to live in the first century. Listen in as Tim and Jon discuss the focus of the New Testament letters and how they help us live wisely today. View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (0:00–28:45)Part two (28:45–38:00)Part three (38:00–47:30)Part four (47:30–end)Additional Resources Scot McKnight, Reading Romans BackwardsShow Music Defender Instrumental by TentsFar from Home by Toonorthdoing laundry by weird insideFrame by KVShow produced by Dan Gummel and Camden McAfee. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Hey, this is John at Bible Project. In the last two episodes of this podcast, we have begun a brand new series on how to read the New Testament letters. These are small books in the back of your Bible. These are letters written by the Apostles of Jesus to churches scattered throughout the Roman world during the first century. And it's important to emphasize that these are letters, really letters, for reading someone's mail. And I've been thinking about how strange that is. That part of God's divine word to us is half of a conversation. I mean, to me, that feels strange, maybe even a mistake or an oversight. Because if these ideas that these letters have are so important for us to understand,

shouldn't we have the whole conversation? So Tim and I are back in the studio and I had to process this through with him. Are the nature of the biblical letters, a scandal? Or perhaps, are you learning to read half a conversation? We're actually learning skills that will allow us to take the way of Jesus. It's new modern contexts. We get to watch the apostles take the biblical story and morph it into a cross-cultural story and language and apply it in cultural circumstances that Jesus did not have to deal with or encounter. After all, taking the way of Jesus to new places, well that's what the commission of Jesus was. This is the paradigm shift that I want to invite people into with these videos, is that the letters actually come

out of the missionary movement and expansion of the Jesus movement. You could say that this part of the Bible is actually the product and the fuel of the expanding Jesus movement going out to all nations. Okay, so this episode's a lot of me processing. So it's Tim likes to say, I'm sorry, Andrew, welcome. Also, Tim and I developed some vocabulary

while we talk about the whole narrative of the Bible, and where the letters fit into the whole grand narrative. And we do that by breaking the Bible down into movements. It gets a little bit confusing perhaps, and a little geeky, but don't worry. We've found it helpful in the moment, and I think you'll find it helpful too. That's all ahead in today's episode.

Thanks for joining us. Here we are back in our little studio. Yes. After having had that live conversation. Yeah. Dallas? Yep. That was super fun. That was really fun. Yeah, so many great people.

Lots of great people. Who do? I could have told you that, but meeting so many proud Texans in one weekend, it was really awesome. It was awesome. Yeah. It's my first time in Texas. I think it was my second.

I had just gone to San Antonio once for a conference. I saw the Alamo. I think that's the thing you're supposed to do. But Dallas, next level. Yes, so we have a whole conversation to continue on from that. What if we started there? We're gonna make two videos in how to read the Bible series about how to read the letters of the apostles in the New Testament. We covered some ground during the live podcast. Yeah. And let's shake that loose. I kind of, it feels like some cobwebs around it already. I was 10 days ago.

Yeah, in real time for us. Okay. I just wanted to set on the table the reality that this section of the New Testament that's fairly small. I'm number of pages compared to like the rest of the Bible, the books of the prophets or even the book of Luke X is longer than all the letters combined. Oh really? Yes. Yeah. The book of Luke X is over 30% of the New Testament. Okay. Just the gospel Luke Book of Acts. So however this small percentage of the New Testament and of the Bible has like a disproportionate amount of influence on everything else. So we talked about the reality of reading other people's mail in the New Testament and the fact that the letters from the apostles are not theology essays or essays about theology and ethics in the abstract. They're actually male, actual male between people and house churches that had a prehistory. So we explored

still mourning that fact. We explored the implications of that in our first session. Yeah, that we're reading someone's mail. Yeah. It's still hard for me. Yeah, that's just so interesting to me. Let's say I had like a great, great grandpa, who's some brilliant dude. And I found some correspondence letters. Mm-hmm.

And so I only had his side of the correspondence, but he's corresponding with someone about something he really understood well. Yeah, yeah. And maybe it was, let's just say it was like, astronomy, or which one, which one's like the study of stars versus astronomy? Astronomy, or astrophysics.

Astrophysics, yeah. He's just some brilliant astrophysics guy. And so he just understood like black holes and he understood dark matter and he understood all this stuff. But we only have his correspondence with a colleague and then we got to piece it together. That's right. And let's say that your grandpa in this... Great, great grandpa.

Your great, great grandpa. He's way out of his mind. In this parable. Your great grandpa and this colleague were out of his mind. In this parable. You're great, grandpa, and this colleague. We're talking about some pretty cutting-edge stuff. Yes. But all you have from it are snippets or sections of developed ideas that he's shared in the context of conversations.

Yeah. So you do get, you get real content, new content, but it's all framed within a conversation that has an actual purpose. And so you get snippets, or you get maybe a great, great grandpa developed an idea about quasars or something. But only to answer a question that was being asked by the colleague. Right.

And so you don't get his full understanding. A textbook, what you get is a paragraph where he's condensing stuff that he would have written whole chapters on in a textbook. And I guess to take the parable further, let's imagine that he had written a textbook. He had like put down everything he understood in one kind of thesis document. But that doesn't exist anymore. Right. All we have is the correspondences. Yeah, that's right. So now we're trying to piece it together. Yeah, that's right. kind of thesis document. But that doesn't exist anymore. All we have is the correspondences.

So now we're trying to piece it together. Now, okay, that's fine because life happens and too bad we lost his thesis. Somehow it's destroyed or buried or just missing. Life goes on, it's unfortunate. But if we're talking about the God of the universe, how he's going to communicate his will to his human partners that he created, that seems like an oversight, like he should have kept the thesis document. Ah, I see. Oh, okay, you know, okay. So we didn't talk about this, but I was thinking about

this ever since we started this conversation in the first episode. I think on this parable, the core thesis statement is the Hebrew Bible and the four Gospel accounts. That is the thesis. That's the thesis statement. Namely, God wants to rule this world in partnership with His human image bears. They have failed. He pointed Israel.

They failed. In Jesus, who is the divine image made human. Both humanity and Israel's stories are brought to their climax and carried forward and fulfilled. And as we'll see in this conversation, all of the New Testament letters have echoes of that core storyline that they believe has come true in Jesus, which is why they talk about them reigning in the heavenly realm that God's right hand in almost every one of the letters. So that's the thesis statement.

What we're watching in the letters is missionaries, pastors, apostles, corresponding with actual house churches, helping them understand how to apply and live out the reality of that Corothecist statement in the context of these different cities around the Roman Empire. So the Thesastatement is also not a theological essay. Oh, right. It's a narrative. It's a narrative. Yeah, a poetic narrative. The way biblical narrative works.

But the Thesastat statement is that Jesus is Lord, the gospel. The gospel is the thesis statement. And it leaves so many unanswered questions. Yes. And what I guess my pre-suposition is that all these unanswered questions is what the New Testament seeks to kind of tie a bell on.

It appears all these things Jesus came and brought so much kind of climax and finality to the story. But then leads us to so many more new questions. Yes, yes. About what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? What does it mean to be his body? And so I guess my assumption is the New Testament letters will tease that all out. I see. And put a bow on it. And you do, but only

through correspondences, not like someone, you know, you would think Paul would be like, write some tome of a book that just spells it all out. Yeah, got it. Yeah, I hear that. Yeah, I think he was too busy. He was too busy starting actual churches and pestering actual people and writing letters to them. What's unique about Paul is we have more letters from him than any of the other apostles. We have two from Peter, three connected to John the Elder, just not a lot else to work with. He bruises an Anonymous, but from, you know, we have you have 13 letters from somebody over the course of, you know, a decade and a half. You can really put together a picture of

The kind of textbook that they would write. And that's what we have though, is we have a bunch of people throughout your history trying to put together the textbook that they would write. The textbook that Paul would write. What textbook would Paul write? That's the question. And would he have even written one? I guess that's an interesting question. Would he have even written one?

Because my assumption is, of course we need one. Ah, yeah. And maybe that's where I'm getting tripped up. Sure, sure. But it just seems like a given. Yeah. The closest that we could get would be either Ephesians. But even there that's him corresponding with church. Yeah. But the unique thing about Ephesians is that it seems to have been a circular letter sent up and down the likest valley from Ephesus all the way on up. Because

I don't know if you remember this from Ephesus class, the actual word Ephesus is not in the earliest manuscripts of the letter to the Ephesians. What just doesn't mean it wasn't there, I think the evidence points in the direction that it was a circular letter, and the letter that has been copied and spread down was the one that arrived in Ephesus, but a few unaddressed copies are still floating back there. That's actually a more complex debate, but Ephesians or the letter to the Romans, letter to the Romans is to a network of house churches

that he never visited, but that he wants to visit, and the letters sort of like paves the way for him. However, even in both of those letters, what they're obsessed with is the Jew, non-Jew division and unity in the church. That's the main burden. And so all the theology that he develops in those letters is in the service of creating a vision of the world where Jesus is king and he's bringing Jew and non-Jew together. Because that was the issue of that generation. Yeah. So maybe to put it differently, what the New Testament letters are is their snapshots of the first generation of the apostles applying the thesis statement that Jesus is Lord of all of the nations, the exalted human image who loved us and gave himself for us.

His grace gift was given regardless of any status, rank, value, socioeconomic, gender, class, and it puts everybody on an equal playing field. So we eat together, we pray together, we give our stuff and we're forming new families and the new humanity. That's the thesis statement. And what we're watching in the letters is the apostles applying that in one particular cultural context that the early church spread into,

namely the Roman Empire in the first decades. And as we watch them apply the gospel in that cultural setting, we learn a lot about what it might look like for us to apply the gospel thesis in other cultural settings. But it's a culturally located moment. They're not floating out there as abstract theology, SS. Yeah, well, and that makes perfect sense. Yes.

But as it makes perfect sense, it continues to confound me, why is that what we have as scripture? And I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but back to the great grandpa, Parable, let's say he didn't just understand astronomy. He understands some secrets to the universe. Yeah, sure. That like everyone really needs to know. And he knew this about it, and how it would help all of humanity. And so he wanted to pass down his wisdom.

But for some reason, he decided, I'm not gonna give him my theological essay. I'm not gonna give him the whole thing. Yeah. All spelled out. I'm just gonna to give them my theological essay. I'm not going to give them the whole thing. Yeah. All spelled out. I'm just going to give them some correspondence from me and one of my colleagues or one of my friends. And that'll be enough.

That's what I'll give them. I hear that. That would be unfortunate. But fortunately, that's not how the Bible works. Because on that analogy, you know? Because. Well, on that analogy, you don't have any core statement. The Hebrew Bible. You don't have the Hebrew Bible or the Bible.

You don't have the core statement of what your great-great-great-grandpa actually figured out and discovered and what he wanted to pass down. I see. And so the Hebrew Bible and the gospels are the core thing that God wants to communicate. The letters from the Apostles were watching the first generation apply that story into specific culture contexts across the Roman Empire, trying to live out the reality of the biblical story. You had to say this twice now for it to start to land for me.

This is helpful. I have viewed it completely opposite. I think in my mind, you've got all this narrative, it's just all this preamble, so we can get to the good stuff, which is tie it all together for me, create a complete kind of matrix of ideas so that I can understand myself in the world I live in and how to please God and how to live wisely and all these things. And you're saying all that good stuff is in the preamble, what I'm calling the preamble. The good stuff is that, yeah, that's right. And what we get in the letters is just some like phone conversations.

It's like some not just some phone conversation. Yeah, I mean, there's some like some really important. Yeah, some really, really, really, really, crucially important phone conversations. Crucially important. Why are they crucially important? Oh, because we get to watch the apostles take the biblical story and morph it into a cross-cultural story and language and apply it in cultural circumstances that Jesus did not have to deal with or encounter. And if we didn't have that. Yeah, I think we'd be impoverished.

We'd be impoverished. Yeah, but yeah. Now I'm arguing the other side. What if we just didn't have the letters would be okay? It's sort of like here's the analogy the letters are actually this isn't even my parable This might be anti-rights. I don't remember it's as if there is a symphony that has say six movements Not let's say the first three movements would be the equivalent of the Hebrew Bible and the gospel accounts What's missing is movement five. What movement four is, is a whole bunch of scholars of this great composer, whoever this composer here she was, who reconstructed what the next movement would have been like.

So movement four is, is it not making any sense? I think so, keep going, keep going. No, no, no. One two three is written. One two three is written. four is it's not making any sense. I think so, keep going, keep going. No, no, no. One through three is written. One through three is written. Four, you had fragments. And so you watch another generation of people

who have studied movements one through three. And they have written under the guidance of movements one through three, a whole new movement that they think is exactly what the composer wanted for movement forward to be like. Movement 6, the way it all ends, is also written. The gap is movement 5. And it's as if we, you and I, every generation of the church after the apostles is writing movement 5. Under the guidance of movements 1 through 3 three we've already watched a previous generation

Apply movements one to three in a new setting and then we are called to follow their lead and live out the movement in Anticipation of its culmination of movement six if I could draw that that would be no I see it So moving six and this parable is the revelation of recreation. Yeah, yeah. And movement one through three is the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. And the fragments we get are the letters, the correspondences. Yeah. When you say we have to turn it into a movement

or kind of recreate the movement, meaning there's some work we have to do to flesh it out. What the, yeah, in other words, yeah. What these scholars do is they studied movements one through three and then they worked out what movement four needs to look like in order to get you on your way to how the story, how the whole symphony is going to end. But they're still a gap.

And now what we are called to do, we have movements one through three to study and see the story. We've already watched a previous generation apply it all, take it to the next, and we get to learn. Now we have two sources to learn from, the actual story of Jesus, the Hebrew Bible and Jesus. We've watched the apostles apply it in the cultural circumstances of first century, Jewish messianics and Grykko Roman cities. And, actually, you know, you and I, we also have 1900 years of church history to also Gleen from to see how followers of Jesus have applied the biblical story and cultures all over the planet.

But there's a pride of place given to the apostles' letters because Jesus actually commissioned them and appointed them as his deputies. That's what we talked about. So, but yeah, let's camp out here as long as we need to. This is the paradigm shift that I want to invite people into with these videos, is that the letters actually come out of the missionary movement and expansion of the Jesus movement. You could say that this part of the Bible is actually the product and the fuel.

It's both the product and the fuel of the expanding Jesus movement going out to all nations to fulfill the Great Commission. Remember in the Great Commission Jesus said, go out to all nations and teach them everything that I commanded you. So what we're watching and that Apostles letters is them teaching all these Greeks and Romans and Macedonians and what it looks like to follow Jesus in their city and in their context and Welcome to the letters. Welcome to the letters So movements one three three come to us from a well-crafted group of Second century scribes. The Hebrew Bible, quote.

The Hebrew Bible, quote. Yes, yeah, I got it. There's so many metaphors. Who kind of complete this narrative and poetic retelling of their history inspired by God's spirit, and in your metaphor of a symphony, to create this tune to live by, which is that there is one God, there's one creator God, and he created us to be his partners and to rule the world, and to trust him in his generosity and to use this power for good, and the propensity for us to decide to rule on our own and his desire to make this partnership work. So we get this melody, this tune, and we learn so, that from them is going to come a multitude of nations.

This was the second part of our conversation. Yeah, yeah. That's why he gets named Avraham, because he's going to be the exalted father of a multitude of nations. And so the story, the particular story of the one nation of Israel carries with it God's purpose to bring all nations together as his divine images and partners, ruling the world together with him. Israel fails. So Moses 133 is the Hebrew Bible, which is through the guidance of Holy Spirit and the scribes who bring it on tradition to craft it.

That's right. That we have this beautiful, it. That's right. That we have this beautiful, complete, like, and it's beautiful and it's not literary genius and meditate on it. Yeah, and it's saying that all humanity's story and crisis and Israel's story and crisis is all going to be fulfilled and brought together through one anointed representative. Messiah, the servant, the new Moses, the new David, the, and so on. So Dr. Complete your mind. That's just a heap of sense that it leaves a lot of things hanging.

Loose a lot hanging. But it's complete in the sense of its structure of its God, its coherent. And in its diagnosis of the problem and of what kind of solution there's going to need to be. Yeah. That's the Hebrew Bible. Score. Movement's one through three. Movement's one through three. Okay, we're changing the numbers. Okay.

No, there's enough three movements. Torah, prophets, and writings. Okay. Then he gets the Gospels. Movement four. Correct. Which there's four of them. Yes, he's even remember.

Yeah, that was good. For ancient biographies of Jesus and how he is the climax of the Hebrew scriptures. So that makes sense. That's a complete, and it feels complete. They're just structured in a way that's... That's right. In his death, announcement of God's kingdom, his death, his resurrection, and his exaltation, or sometimes called his ascension to the heavenly throne. Jesus is installed as the human image of God

that Genesis one anticipated, but no human in the Hebrew Bible ever fulfilled. So now Jesus is Lord, that that's the gospel. And so if we just had that, we just had movements one through four, you could hang, right? Ah, yeah, okay, yes. You've got enough.

You know, the story you're in, you know, the heart of God, you know Ah, yeah, okay, yes. You've got enough. Yep. The story you're in, the heart of God, the mission, the conflict and resolution, the person that Jesus in. You can decide, Jesus is King of the universe, and I'm gonna live by His ethic. Yep. And. Yep.

You could in theory go from, yeah, the resurrection narratives to the revelation. Yeah, so to speak. And be like in one day, all nations will realize that Jesus is truly King and God's Kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. Amen. However, at the end of Matthew and Luke, actually all four gospels have some kind of commissioning. Mark only does in its secondary longer form.

That's all of the rabbit hole. The gospels contain Jesus commissioning his disciples to go out and expand and spread the news and the movement. Somewhere near the end, all four, have a continuation like a dot, dot, dot. Yeah. In a way that he was scriptures as a dot, dot, dot. You're correct. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, the question is now what? Now what? Now what, Jesus is a Lord.

And he's been working through the people of Abraham. And now it's opening up to all the nations. Yeah. Now what? Yeah. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would come and teach the disciples the Apostles' truth so that they could go and represent Him. And even within the Gospels, Jesus commissions the disciples, the Apostles' truth, so that they could go and represent him. And even within the Gospels, Jesus commissions the disciples as his representatives,

like when he commissions them to go two by two, he's already starting there. They are going to continue on and expand the announcement and the Jesus' communities farther and further. And that's the Thesav statement that you're saying is. That's the Th statement that you're saying is. That's the thesis statement. You're going to go through four. You got all the goodness you need. Yeah.

But it leaves a lot of questions, practical questions. Very practical questions. And the first very practical question was, how is this Jewish religion or way of life or view of the world, going to now become. It's called a Messianic Jewish. Messianic Jewish, Jesus movement. The Messianic Jews movement. How is that gonna expand into other cultures?

Because it's, again, it's not just an Israel thing, it's an all-humanity thing. That's what Genesis 1, 2, 11 is trying to tell us. And so, and that's what movement five is, predominantly preoccupied with. Correct. And movement five, sorry, is now we're into this movement. It's post-Jesus resurrection.

He's commissioned his apostles and they're out spreading the good news that Jesus came. And Luke, with his second volume, Acts has given us a foundation narrative for those first decades of the expansion of the movement out from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, then out to the land of the Church and the Church and the Church and the Church and the Church. Yeah, yeah. In many ways, not all, but most of the New Testament letters fit somewhere in the storyline of the Book of Acts.

What we're doing right now may be helpful in the video, because the goal is to say the letters fit into a narrative context within the storyline of the Bible and access where they fit. So Acts, yeah, becomes movement five. The Book of Acts is where, predominantly Paul, but the stories of other people. It begins with Jesus exalted to the right hand of God to rule as the image of God over all creation. And then he sends out his followers to the nation.

And they receive the Holy Spirit and then they just start spreading that gospel. And a major theme of the book of Acts is how Jewish, Messianic Jews who follow Jesus and non-Jewish people who follow Jesus are working out how to live together as one family. That's a major theme in the Book of Acts. So in then movement five, so you have a narrative, but then you get all of these letters, which are correspondences with these early church Jesus movements about, here's how to make this work in your community. Yeah, that's right. And while you're making a work in community,

I'm going to talk about the story and kind of help reflect on it, but then also I'm gonna get really granular into how this applies to you guys. Yeah, and usually the letters are prompted by an actual circumstance, some issue, a prop, usually often a problem, sometimes, other things. So, some movement five is unique in all the movements,

in that it has this element of correspondence. Correct. We get a narrative of acts, and then we get little snapshots of the apostolic mission, the mission of the apostles apostles through getting to listen in on their correspondence. And so in your, apparently you were creating then, you're saying that now looking back at that, there's some work to be done to reconstruct what were the issues. I guess that would be the main thing. Yep, that's right. Yeah, so remember the first day it was, these are letters. Letters require a context for you to truly understand what they mean. So what we're doing right now is we're beginning to go through what I called

four layers of context. And the first one was the context within the larger biblical story. That's where we are right now. The next two layers of context will be the cultural context of the Roman Empire. There were culture dynamics that work there that shape the issues that the Apostles face and how they address them. Then there's another context called a situational context. This is the actual relationship between the author and the audience and the stuff that's happened that's just assumed because these people know each other.

Like someone sleeping with their stepmom or something. Correct. So I think video number one on the letters can do those three movements of context. Then the second video on the letters will be about the literary context, learning to read these letters as a unified statement, developing thoughts from beginning to end. Right. So that we stop pillaging them for versus out of context. So the first two, you would also apply to the other movements,

right? Where does this fit in the story? Yeah. And then also some understanding of the historical kind of context that was in. Correct, yeah, that's right. It's a third one that seems unique to the letters. That's right, the letters have an additional element to them

because they are letters. The letters are always written in the context of a relationship and the situations that they're written for. Because the fourth one is also something you would apply to anywhere else, which is how do you read this thing as a whole? That's right. And how do you read this thing as a whole? That's right. And how do you see kind of themes developing?

And so, okay. And so there's something unique about this, what we call it, the fifth movement, the fifth movement of what of God's people. I guess of the biblical storyline. The biblical story. Which we are to see ourselves as living within. And something unique about it,

where we have these correspondences that leaves it in a way not as complete as the other movements. I kept using the word complete. Like there's a sense of like, I've created this whole narrative structure and it's got some fidelity in and of itself. And it seems like what you're saying is now we get to the correspondences, we've got acts which acts that way. It's kind of this complete narrative package. But then we got all these correspondences. They don't have that same fidelity of completeness. Although you could argue that the book of acts itself intentionally ends with a dot dot dot. Well, they all do, yeah. When I say completeness, I don't mean that the story's over. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh'm not trying to figure out, you know, the context is given to me.

If I need it, it was given to me. Yeah, that's right. So the letters are different than poetry and narratives in that they were written in an actual relational situational context and a cultural context that shapes why they are what they are. And we need to do the work of loving the biblical author as we love ourselves Which was drive to hear them on their terms and not just listen to them To serve my agenda and I think I heard you kind of then saying that same spirit of coming to this fifth movement and

that same spirit of coming to this fifth movement and Participating with it and a new way that you didn't have to do in the other movements Is then actually setting the stage for the fact that in the sixth movement? Yeah, yeah, it's all on us Yeah in the spirit Yeah, yes, thank you the spirit Yes, thank you. The Spirit, continuing work through Jesus' followers to keep living out the reality of the gospel that Jesus is Lord, but in new cultural contexts that the apostles never encountered. But because we've learned how they encountered new cultures and issues in the book of Acts, we watched that work get worked out, and then we watched in the letters them applying the gospel to 1st century Greco-Roman house churches in major cities.

That becomes an instructive guide for us, independence on the spirit, to discern what it means for us to live out the fact that Jesus is Lord in the nations around the world today. I think that's how the biblical story works. And then we get the seventh movement, which is completed for us, so we know how it ends. So I'm coming to this thinking, there's a massive gap here that's scandalous, that seems like an oversight.

But what I hear you saying is there might be some sort of brilliant divine pedagogy. Whoa. Yeah. Well said. Yeah. Is preparing Well said. Yeah. Is preparing us to actually work with the Spirit to be a part of the story. Correct.

And if you think back, this makes a lot of sense. The narrative world of the Bible is one in which God's purposes on earth are carried out in and through his human images. Right. I think the whole premise of the biblical story is, God wants humans to take charge and to carry out his will in the world, which means that maybe that apostolic theology textbook. It just simply would have gotten in the way.

Yeah, or it's an impossible endeavor, because what that would just show us is how the apostles worked it out in their setting. But all that can ever be for me is a guide that the spirit can use to teach me how we are supposed to do it in our setting. And it's just the reality of divine revelation through humans. We've got to create some crazy library and psych... The psychopedia with every decade labeled,

and you can just go to it and just pull out the decade you're in and then this. Yeah, that's right. There's a... Yeah. How you... You know, there's an analogy here to the two halves of the Lord's Prayer, which is, may you know, may you will be done, may your kingdom come. Here on Earth as it is in heaven.

So we're acknowledging this is about God's name, God's will, God's kingdom coming. But then the second half of the Lord's prayer shifts the focus to how we are going to live in reality in that light of that reality through trust for God's provision, daily bread, through radical acts of forgiveness, and then by being faithful to God when we're in the midst of the test, our own version of the test. So God's kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. When God's people trust Him, employ radical forgiveness and are faithful to Him in difficult circumstances. So it doesn't, it doesn't divorce how God is at work in the world from how humans are to live out God's will in the world. It's always together.

So this is all in service of your point. There's a divine pedagogy that leaves a gap for us to live out the reality of the gospel in all of our different cultural contexts. And the letters play a crucially important role because they show us how the appointed representatives of Jesus, the apostles, did it in the first couple generations. And from those letters, we learn a lot about cross-cultural translation of the gospel. Yeah. Movement six that we are living in

is spirit-guided improvisation. Ha-ha-ha. Based on close study of movements one through five. We are living in is spirit guided improvisation. Or a jazz movement. Based on close study of movements one through five. Man, it's even more reason to be so saturated in the movements before. Because a good, someone who's good at improvising really knows the basics. Yeah, that's right. The basic melodies and the basic rules of how you plan this tune. Yep.

Otherwise your improvisation's gonna be pretty ugly. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it'll be just, yep, that's right. In many ways, you could say the last 1900 years of church history is just the fascinating narrative of different communities all around the world through history attempting to, you know, carry on the Jesus story by the power of the spirit and with varying degrees of success and failure. Yeah. Right, and there you go. Let me just register one final note here. If the thesis statement of movements 1 through 4, the Hebrew Bible and of the 4 gospel

accounts is about Jesus's Lord, this makes so much sense of why the gospels are all revolving around the theme of Jesus announcing or bringing God's kingdom, God's reign here on earth as is in heaven. It makes sense of why the resurrection of Jesus is portrayed as a royal enthronement. We talked about this in the How to Read the Gospels video and conversations. It also makes sense why in the letters, a key foundation point shared by all the apostles is this conviction that Jesus is exalted as the King of the Universe. It just keeps coming up. And I think in conversation two of this series, we talked about some of these texts like

Psalm 8, which is all about a son of man, human, that God appoints his ruler overall. We talked about Psalm 110, which is about a future king from the line of David, who sits at God's right hand. And those two Psalms together are the most quoted Old Testament texts in the letters. They're fixated on this. So I don't know if we want to look at any, if that's helpful at all. So the book of Acts begins famously with Jesus in chapter one saying, you know, you're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem.

He said to the apostles, you're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem today in Samaria and to the ends of the earth. The next sentence is, after he said these things, he was lifted up while they were looking on and a cloud received him out of their sight. The ascension. The ascension.

But specifically, the idea of Jesus' exaltation up, writing a cloud into the divine heavenly realm. This is all about Daniel chapter 7. The cloud writer ascending up into the heavenly realm, exalted up. So Luke's giving us a clue, and this is hyperlinked back to all of these Daniel 7 things in the gospel of Luke itself. But we're watching Daniel 7 begin of a human exalted as God's divine image at his right hand. So once you step into the letters, you see that they just take this as a given. It just saturates their language.

So Romans chapter 1 begins with Paul introducing himself to the house churches of Rome. I mean, it's just the opening lines here. Paul introduces himself as an apostle. Oh, have we talked about the word apostle? I've been using it a lot. That's an oversight. It's one of these Greek words that's just spelled with English letters. It's an actual Greek word spelled with English letters.

I remember my Greek correctly. It's the sent one. Yeah, yep. From the Greek verb, apostello, which means to send out. Yeah, one who was sent. A sent representative. So Paul, he calls himself a slave of Messiah Jesus, called as a sent one, I'm an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. Oh, where do you find the announcement of God's good news?

Well, he promised it all beforehand through his prophets in the Hebrew Bible, in the scriptures. So you can see he's working with it here. Yeah. The thesis statement, okay, that God wants to tell the world is in the Hebrew scriptures, and then in the narrative of its fulfillment, which goes on. It's about his son, born from the seed of David, according to the flesh, who was declared to be, not just the seed of David, but the son of God, with power by his resurrection from the dead,

according to the Holy Spirit. Who is this? Jesus, Messiah, our Lord, through whom we've received grace, and a apostleship. We've been commissioned to bring about the believing loyalty among all nations for his namesake, among whom y'all are also called by Jesus, Messiah. He sees himself in act 5, movement 5 of our story. Jesus has been exalted as the divine image and we're sent as his representatives to go

and form people of all the nations to give their allegiance and loyalty and faith to him. So what you can do, maybe I'll just offer this to our listeners here, get out of concordance or get an online concordance, go to Bible Hub, which is the easy online concordance or get an online concordance. Go to Bible Hub, which is the easy online concordance. And start searching phrases in the New Testament about Jesus being seated or sitting at God's right hand. Seated? Mm-hmm. I'm just gonna do seated, Bible Hub.

Mm-hmm. Foshions 3-1. Since then, you've been raised with Christ. Yes, keep going. Say your heart's on things above where Christ is seated. That's right. Great example. So. That was the first hit.

That was the first one, yep. But there's like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yeah, right across Paul, in Ephesians, in the letter to the Hebrews, whoever that's written by, in 1 Peter, right through all the apostles have this conviction that Jesus is the exalted human image fulfilling the Genesis one picture. And so the job of the apostles is to go inform the nations that the rulers of this world are not the ultimate authority. Rather, they are obligated to acknowledge one in authority over them, the exalted Jesus, the

truly human one. And they're going out, starting the alternate empire of God. I mean, the kingdom of God would have been heard in the Roman Empire as the empire of God, which... The rebellion. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the alternate Yeah, alternate kingdom. And that's how the apostles were heard in X-17 in Thessalonique. When Paul goes there, they get kicked out.

They have run out of town in like a couple weeks. Because people hear them saying, this is the line, they are announcing that there is another king. Jesus. Right. So, this is the big story unifying. So that's one, an exalted human, but the implication is then these communities coming around Jesus. People are equal recipients of the gift of God's mercy and the invitation to this kingdom. And so this is a huge theme in Paul, but also in

other letters that it's like the great equalizer. Because next step of context, in the Greco-Roman Empire, everything is about status and rank and class in a way that modern Westerners, it's almost impossible for us to imagine. But people who have grown up in more traditional, honor shame, maybe Eastern, or maybe Southern, hemisphere cultures, they way more understand this, see this dynamic in the New Testament. But, Maul. So we're gonna jump into that. That's the next layer of context.

Yeah. The implication is, if Jesus exalted as Lord of the nations, then the people forming around Him are being unified across every single kind of dividing line. And so this is famously expressed, Galatians 3.28, he's writing to a church, mostly non-Jews, there's been some messianic Jewish missionaries who've come in to say,

if you really wanna follow Jesus, you have to join the Jewish ethnicity group and be circumcised. And this just, Paul explodes in this letter. He's so ticked off. And he calls it another gospel, a different announcement of good news. Because what he sees is that's an announcement

of diminished good news because what it means is Jesus is only Lord of Israel. Mm-hmm. So it's becoming Israelite. So becoming Israelite to be in with Jesus. And he thinks this is just totally backwards. And so, yeah, famous statements like Galatians 3, 27 and following, he says, you have all been baptized into the Messiah.

You've closed yourself with Messiah. It's as if when you join the Jesus movement, when you're baptized into it, he becomes you. Then you become him. Yeah. There's a real mysticism about the theology. Oh, yeah. Being the body of Christ. Yes, yeah, that's right. Yeah.

So famously, he says, there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor slave or free, no male or female. I mean, he just went through, basically. There's no such thing as ethnicity, no such thing as social class, labor-free, no such thing as gender-powered differentials, male or female, you are all one in Messiah Jesus. And if you're all in the Messiah, you're all a part of the family of Abraham. So don't get circumcised.

You're already in. You're already in. So this was scandalous in the first century Greco-Oveman. Because of the class world structure. Yeah. The next layer is truly to understand what it was like to hear the letters in Greco-Roman cities around the Mediterranean. 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1, 1 %, 1 %, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 I am trying to summarize my mind. So he was a descendant of David, according to his earthly body of flesh. In Israelite. He's in Israelite.

He was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead. So he was more than merely human. You could say the resurrection revealed his true identity. It was an announcement of his real identity. That is also a theme fleshed out in the letters is this identity of. Yeah. But they will constantly quote from like Psalm 8 Psalm 110 to try to understand the identity of Jesus being this cosmic king. Yep. Yep. Who is is one with God. But you were kind of bringing out this theme. Maybe it's according to the flesh son of David is that the whole point was that God would have image-bearing humans

Who could serve at his right hand essentially? That's right to rule creation. Yeah, that's the whole setup It's a vision of Eden. That's the Garden of Eden. Yeah, so that's finally been accomplished Yeah, in the person of Jesus. Yeah, but the person of Jesus is no mere human and now he is the cosmic king who rules from some other dimension. And that there's plenty of Paul tripping out on that in the letters. And then he says in some really kind of mystical way is like you are united in that. Like you are his body. Yeah.

You've been baptized into him. Like his power is your power. Yeah. No Romans 8, if if the Messiah is in you, he uses temple dwelling language. Yeah. The spirit of the Messiah dwells in you. He's in you. You are in him. There's this union. Yep. And it's through that that we then regain the image bearing calling to rule with God at his right hand. Correct. Jesus followers are his body, the physical manifestation of the Messianic King here on Earth as it isn't happening. I think one of the things that's landing for me is that one of the reasons the letters

is so confusing to me is because I'm never given that thesis statement. I can think back all of my years in church and that's never spelled out the way that we just talked about it. And when that's spelled out, so much of what Paul or the other apostles talk about in the letters just start to just sparkle. You're just like just saying. But I'm just never explained that.

It's about other things. It's about doing the right things. It's the moral handbook part of it. But then it's also the saying and believing the right thing to go to the good place. Those are like the themes that I'm taught to pay attention to. Yeah, interesting. So maybe part of my hang up in the fact that it's a correspondence is that I'm just coming to the conversation, like expecting to hear a completely different conversation, even though I'm only hearing half of it.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think that might be just a deficiency in your particular tradition in hearing Paul. Yeah. Because he's constantly talking about the body of the Messiah, being the community of his followers that is the physical manifestation of his kingdom here on Earth. And of Jesus' redefinition of power in kingdom, around becoming the servant. Yeah, so maybe that's where our traditions train us both to maybe can, not all, but our traditions can set us up with wrong expectations about what the letters are and what they are about. Can you imagine, yeah, like think about listening to a correspondence and we've had this experience, you hear someone having a phone conversation, else you brought this up. Yeah, and you can piece together a lot of the conversation

Especially when you know the person and you think you know who they're talking to sure you can kind of Almost hear what the other person saying yeah in a way, but let's say you come to that conversation And you just have completely wrong paradigms about what the conversation is about. Yeah, totally. Like the main thing. Yeah, you're pre conceived assumptions about what is being talked about will shape how you read everything and understand what they're saying. Oh, I feel you're walking down the sidewalk and there's someone talking on their phone or with their little Bluetooth earbud. And all you hear them say is he is so hot right now. Yeah. And that could mean like, it could be talking about their kid at home who's like got a fever.

Yeah. Could be talking about so-and-so's like latest, you know, boyfriend or something. They could be talking about some athlete who's like totally like breaking all of their records this year. Yeah. You have no idea. You have no idea. But based on what the person's wearing, you might assume, right? It's that they're decked out in like football gear. You know, this was just brought home from me.

I'm wondering, it might be helpful in this video to take some real concrete examples. And I just finished a recent book by a scholar Scott McKnightnight, who we've interviewed, called Reading Romans Backwards. Oh, yeah. He told me about this. So good. His basic point is that Roman, the last three chapters of Romans, 14, 15, and 16, give us the concrete situation and problem that Paul is addressing and writing about and to.

Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians don't like each other, and they have divided and are meeting in separate houses, and are not receiving each other to eat at the same table anymore. And he wants, he says that the opening and the ending of the letter, he wants to come visit the church so that they can become a sending base for him to keep announcing the good news about Jesus further west, under Spain, he says. So the letter of the Romans is in service of that goal. In other words, the theology that Paul develops is all shaped in the service of uniting Jews and Gentiles in the house churches of Rome.

That all becomes clear only at the end and because scholars or preachers are usually exhausted. Yes. By the time they get to Romans 14, 15 and 16, it ends up, yeah, and it's just kind of like, oh, now this is the ethics part. We miss why Paul is saying any of what he's saying in 1 through 13. It's a really well taken point So what he does is he actually it's a common like a short form commentary on the book backwards So you start with chapters 12 through 16 Then you go 9 to 11 then you go to 5 through 8 then you go to 1 through 4. It's like momentum It was so good.

And all of a sudden, there's passages and romans that I remember reading in my first year as a Christian, and I'm hearing them in a brand new way. And I think the way Paul intends them to be taken. And it's that. If you misunderstand the purpose of a letter, you will misunderstand the letter. And that's the point.

That's the basic point. And this here of the image bearing true human who God had to become himself to fulfill is so central within a sense at the right hand. Who then we have union with. Yep, and we are the expression of Neuronurus by the guidance of his spirit. That's core melody of the whole symphony. And in the letters we're watching the Apostles guide, first century followers of Jesus in Greco-Roman cities around the Mediterranean learn how to live that out in their particular cities.

Cities. So that's the next step in our conversation then is what was it like in these Greco-Roman cities around the Mediterranean and how did the cultural context shape and inform why the apostles had to write what they wrote? Thanks for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast. If you'd like to submit a question for our upcoming question response podcast, we would love to hear from you. You can record yourself asking a question and email it to us at info at bibleproject.com. Try to keep your question to about 20 or 30 seconds. In the email when you attach the audio, if you want to go the extra mile,

write a little summary of your question as well, that would be really helpful. And let us know who you are and where you're from. Again, send your questions to info at BibleProject.com. Next week, we're going to continue this discussion, and we're going to talk about economics and the social makeup of the Greco-Roman world, and how it impacts how we understand the New Testament letters.

In the Greco-Roman Empire, everything is about status and rank and class. In a way that modern Westerners it's almost impossible for us to imagine. Today's show is produced by Dan Gummel. Show notes are by Camden McAfee. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit in Portland, Oregon. We make free resources that

help you experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. Everything we have is up on our website BibleProject.com. Hi, this is Justin from Estecata. And I'm Lily and I'm from Estecata. I first heard about the Bible project a couple of years ago at my church. And I heard about it from YouTube. From YouTube. From YouTube? Yeah. I used the Bible project as a platform to get my kids attention.

And then I can dig deeper into the Bible stories from that point. I use the Bible project to learn about God and grow in my face. Yeah, we believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We are a crowdfunded project by people like me. Find free videos, study notes, podcast and more at the Bible project.com. Thanks guys, bless. Yeah. Yeah. Great job. you