followHIM - Romans 1-6 Part 1 • Dr. Adam Miller • Aug 7 - Aug 13

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

How does the experience of being a sinner affect the experience of being saved by Jesus? Dr. Adam Miller discusses why faith is crucial to our experience of redemption.00:00 Part 1–Dr. Adam Miller01:50 Introduction of Dr. Adam Miller03:22 Background to the Letter to the Romans04:23 Dr. Miller’s training as it relates to the New Testament07:26 How to approach this book09:05 Dating the book and additional study helps12:57 The Sermon on the Mount aids in studying this letter13:32 First Key is God doesn’t hate his enemies14:42 Love is a law, not a reward16:25 Earning Heaven or the opportunity of Heaven18:13 What does Paul mean by grace?21:29 Our motivations23:07 The Law is Love24:13 Romans 1:18-2027:40 Romans 1:2530:09 Creator and Created/Creature33:09 Misunderstanding love and trials34:56 Romans 1:3136:30 Prayer softens 37:13 Romans 540:56 Christ died for the ungodly43:05 Commandment to love perfectly not be perfectly loveable47:56 Fruit of salvation50:22  Romans 3 Falling short of the glory of God53:11 Giving Himself as a mercy seat54:40 Justification and reconciliation57:25 End of Part 1–Dr. Adam MillerPlease rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.coYouTube: https://youtu.be/ENOI-USIf50Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz8yLp0dQyEcBQ8BYThanks to the follow HIM team:Shannon Sorensen: Cofounder, Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignAnnabelle Sorensen: Creative Project ManagerWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I'm your host. I'm here with the amazing John, by the way. Welcome, John. Thank you. It's good to be back. Yeah. John, we are in the Book of Romans today. I know you have some experience in the Book of Romans, of course. What are you looking forward to learning from Paul. I was talking to my wife about this last night and I said, just a family prayer. I'm like, somebody, Book of Romans, anything. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. That's what they all remembered. But there's a lot of amazing teachings in here about how grace and works, I mean, all these things, there's some wonderful stuff. And so I'm so glad we're going to talk about this today because I want to feel more understanding about justification, sanctification, grace, works, merits, Christ, all of this. So really looking forward to it.

John, we have an expert joining us this week. He's been with us before, Dr. Adam Miller. Adam, what do our listeners have to look forward to in these opening chapters of Romans? There's a lot to look forward to, I think. Paul offers to us in these opening chapters of Romans one of the best explanations of the gospel of Jesus Christ in all of scripture. Wow. I've noticed with my friends who aren't members of our church, but who are devout Christians, the book of Romans is vitally important to them. Talking with them about religion, the book of Romans frequently comes up. I was thinking last night as I was preparing that perhaps it would be difficult

for this little church. We don't think of Christianity as a little church today, but this little group of Christians in a huge world of the center of the Roman empire and what that would be like for them. I'm looking forward to this as well. John, why don't you introduce to our listeners Dr. Miller? Maybe they didn't hear our awesome episode last year. Yeah, and I'm sure they'll be excited that we have Dr. Miller back again. I'm just going to read from the back flap of his book, Original Grace, which is one of the things that we'll be talking about today in the title of this book. But Dr. Adam S. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He earned a bachelor's in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. The author

of more than 10 books, including Letters to a Young Mormon, an early resurrection, and Mormon, a brief theological introduction. He served his mission in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He and his wife, Gwen, have three children. And as we were talking before, Hank, we had Dr. Miller when we did the book of Job, and it was an amazing paradigm shifting episode that was so helpful and so beautiful. And I just love the beautiful way he expresses himself. No pressure, Adam. And so I'm really looking forward to this day. Yeah, John, I specifically remember Dr. Miller saying something that shifted my point of view, and I've taught it differently ever since, is the commandments aren't to avoid suffering, but the commandments are what

you do in your suffering to keep you close to God. To me, that was a life-changing moment. And maybe our listeners are like, well, I knew that, but I sure didn't. I was excited about that. Adam, welcome. Thank you for being here. I'm so glad to be back with you. It's a real pleasure. I hope everyone will go back and listen to that episode on Job after they finish this episode, of course. I'm going to read the opening paragraph to the Come Follow Me manual, and then Adam, let's turn it over to you and give us maybe some background on Romans and where we're going to go. This is what the manual says. It says, by the time Paul wrote his epistle to the Roman church members, who were a diverse group of Jews and Gentiles, the church of Jesus Christ had grown far beyond

a small band of believers from Galilee. About 20 years after the Savior's resurrection, there were congregations of Christians almost everywhere the apostles could reasonably travel, including Rome, the capital of a powerful empire. Still, compared to the vastness of the Roman empire, the church was small and often the object of persecution. In such conditions, some might feel ashamed of the gospel of Christ, but of course, not Paul. He knew and testified that true power, the power of God into salvation, is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So with that introduction, Adam, what do you want to do? How do you want to get started? Let's start with a couple of confessions, I think.

Okay. Set the table here. Confession number one, I'm not a New Testament scholar. That's important. Neither are John or I. I don't know if we've confessed that, John. Maybe we've proven it. Once the confessions get started, it's hard to stop. Yeah, it's hard to stop back. And confession number two is that far from being a New Testament scholar, I'm a philosopher, right? which in some ways may be the opposite. I did write my dissertation and my first scholarly book in part about Romans, Paul's epistle to the Romans. But I wrote about how those epistles were being used in contemporary French philosophy.

So again, that's a very different cup of tea than the New Testament scholarship. Grace, though, is my primary academic specialty. And I've even written and published a short paraphrase of Paul's letter to the Romans called Grace is Not God's Backup Plan. That's meant to make Paul a little more accessible for us here in the 21st century. So I'm not as a philosopher, I'm not primarily interested in Paul as a historical figure, right? Rather, I'm much more interested in the really powerful description that Paul gives us of the experience, number one, of what it's like to be a sinner, and then of the experience of what it's like to be saved, of what it's like to be redeemed. And on a personal note, I mean, though I've spent decades now with Paul as a scholar,

his epistles and this epistle in particular have changed my life. I owe them a deep, deep debt for helping me to become better acquainted with God and experience a deeper sort of conversion. I'm grateful to Paul. I feel a great deal of affection for him. I haven't seen the research on this, but I have an inkling that members of the church in general, me included, aren't as familiar with the epistles of Paul as perhaps we are with the Book of Mormon, with the gospels. I personally don't know them as well. John, I don't know if you'd agree, but I don't want to say we should.

I'm not in charge. But I think it would be helpful for us to have a grasp on these epistles, especially Romans, because it's so important. I think a lot of us, when we start, Paul, in so many of our books and manuals, we have that statement from Peter. Paul's hard to understand, so maybe we shy away from it. But anything that's hard to understand brings also its rewards when you get closer to understanding. It's like Isaiah. When you do have a moment of illumination, you're like, oh, and then you begin to love it. Like you said, Adam, you love Romans now and feel a debt of gratitude for this text. Pretty much.

All right, Adam, is that all the confessions or do you need to confess more? Because we're here. We're here if you need to. Those are all the confessions for now. We'll see how it goes. We'll see if there's more coming. If I'm doing my confessions, you'd ask if you want them in alphabetical order or chronological order.

Should we jump into chapter one? Is there some background that we need to understand of why Paul is writing to these people? Does he know them? Has he met them? I think it's useful to remember that when we reach this point in the New Testament, we're kind of shifting gears from stories and narratives as presented in the gospels and then in the book of acts to collections of epistles right to letters that are written to specific people at specific times and places with specific problems and those letters i think are of deeply general interest to all of us but their specific

contexts will always matter there too let's note about pa Paul that Paul in general, as Joseph Smith said of himself, is kind of a rough stone rolling. Paul has lots of sharp edges that sometimes are helpful and sometimes are not. We don't have to think that Paul is right about everything to all agree that Paul is an apostle and that Paul is a powerful witness of Jesus Christ. Yeah. I've often wondered, Adam, Paul doesn't realize he's writing scripture. I don't think he thinks millions of people in the future or billions of people in the future are going to be reading these letters. Don't you think he's just, I intended them for the people in Rome. That was my intended audience.

That's a great point. He did not intend for me and you to read them. He certainly did not intend for me to write a dissertation about them in the context of contemporary French philosophy. But that being said, wouldn't we say though that Romans has, haven't we already said, kind of a really clear repetition of the gospel, kind of the doctrine of Christ? Yeah, I think that's true. And this, I think, especially of all the letters, because of all Paul's letters, this one is the least specific. He composes this letter sometime between 55 and 57 AD. He composes this letter probably as the last of the letters that we have, even though it comes here first in the presentation in the New Testament, because the letters are ordered by length, not by chronology. I mean, it comes first here, even though it was written last, because it's the longest.

And this letter is an unusual one, because unlike the others, Paul is writing here to a group of saints in Rome that he's never met. The other letters that we have are letters that Paul wrote to people that he knew addressing very specific problems that they had. And even individuals, right? Yeah. But this letter he's writing to the saints in Rome, to the church in Rome as a kind of introduction, as an introductory letter, meant to both introduce himself and introduce his understanding of the gospel. So, he intends it more as a kind of explanation to be read by a broad audience than any of the other letters. And in that sense, it's maybe even more valuable to you and I. Great.

Two other notes in general. Romans is beautiful, powerful, and unusual. Paul is talking about the same thing as everybody else, all the other apostles. He's talking about Christ and resurrection and redemption, and he's preaching the gospel, but he doesn't always talk about it in the same way or use the same vocabulary as the other apostles. In some sense, Paul here is attempting, or at least he's contributing to the creation of a kind of Christian vocabulary, trying to talk about what the gospel is and reach people who especially didn't grow up in the Jewish faith. And so it's kind of a work in progress. And that's part of what I think makes it a little bit difficult is the way that his approach and vocabulary are so unique and personal to him.

The one other thing to note, I think, has to do with the way that, in my opinion, the book of Romans suffers more in the King James Version than any other book of Scripture. I think it suffers even more than Isaiah when you attempt to read it in the King James translation. The King James translation is beautiful, but it is really pretty tortured. And the King James English itself is old enough that I think it's fair to say it hardly qualifies as English as you and I know it. That's a pretty significant hurdle all by itself, just in understanding Paul. And I would strongly recommend that people seek out any number of contemporary translations of Paul's epistle and just get a feel for what it's like to read Paul in English, which I think is very helpful. Super duper helpful. And then go back and worry about the King James.

If I remember right, Adam, last year you said you use an app called Blue Letter Bible. Is that right? Yeah, I do often use that. There's a lot of great ones, a lot of great free translations. You can consult multiple translations here and that'll make the work a whole lot easier, I think.

Here's what I have. I found this at Desert Industries. It's a contemporary English translation. I think it's called The Living Bible, but it has all sorts of little helps on the side. Sometimes when I go to Bible hub, I like the good news translation because it's so simple. I know I'm probably missing some things,

but at least I understand the chapter. And then I go back and read to the King James and say, Oh, I get this now. Yeah. I can help quite a bit. Let me offer a kind of what I take to be a kind of interpretive key for reading Romans. And then we can dive in and look at some specific passages and see how that plays out.

My preferred guide to reading the book of Romans is Jesus, especially the sermon on the mount i find myself increasingly convinced by this wild theory that jesus's own explanations of the gospel are the very best and that's wild and that his own very best explanations come in the sermon on the mount there are three keys i want to borrow from the Sermon on the Mount, I think is the key to essential backdrop to making sense of what Paul is doing in his letter to the Romans. The first key is that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains that God does not hate his enemies. In fact, God loves his enemies. God doesn't just love friends. He loves his enemies.

Two, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus notes that we are also commanded, like God, to love our enemies, and that in fact this is the very essence of the law as a whole. And three, Jesus argues quite sharply that loving our enemies doesn't destroy the law. It's the only thing that can fulfill the law. He acknowledges to his listeners that it may feel like he's destroying the law when he tells them that they have to not love just friends, but also their enemies, but that really it's not the case, that this is the key to fulfilling it, that this is what the law itself commands. And that I think is the key to understanding everything that Paul is going to say about what sin is, about what grace is, and about why faith is crucial to our experience of redemptions.

If we were going to print up some t-shirts to go with this podcast, you guys do as you please. I'll leave that up to you. Follow him clothing line. On the front of the t-shirt here for understanding the book of romans i would want it to say jesus was right and on the back i would want it to say love is a law not a reward then i think it would be my kind of mantra for understanding what paul is doing in the book of romans that love is always a commandment and never a reward. We'll come back to that again and again. That was awesome.

I love that idea, Adam. Love is a law, not a reward. Okay, what's next? I think in lots of ways, that's the heart of the gospel. The idea that love is always a commandment and never a reward, especially as Jesus describes it in the Sermon on the Mount. And this, I think, is also at the heart of Paul's own description of what it means to be a sinner. Because Paul's description of what it means to be a sinner is that as a sinner, we get the whole thing backwards. Rather than obeying God's command to love even our enemies, what we do as sinners is we try to use God's law to earn or deserve

God's love as a kind of reward. We turn it around. We get it upside down. We get it inside out. We get the whole thing backwards. We try to use God's law to be loved rather than to love. And that I think is a good description in general of what it's like to be a sinner. A sinner is somebody who lives their life backwards in this way, looking for love, but trying to do it in this upside down way where you want to be loved rather than doing the work of love. So you try to use the law here then as a way to earn or deserve love and be in charge of it, be in control of it because you're the one who's earning or deserving it. You don't have to depend on somebody else. I've told my students before

something that can be confusing to them. I think it's similar to what you're saying here. I told them, I don't keep the commandments so I can earn my way into heaven. I keep the commandments because I want to want heaven when the opportunity is presented to me. When Jesus says, all right, it's open to you. Do you want it? Do you want it? I made the way. And do I desire that? The model you're saying,

I'm going to earn something. I'm going to earn God's reward from God can be motivating, but also incredibly discouraging and also frustrating and also exclusive. You can start saying, I'm one of those that's earning. They're not one of those that's earning. That makes sense to me because I'm a sinner and that's how sinners think. That's how I think all the time. I think in this backwards way about myself, about other people. I think in this backwards way also in particular about God, is that God were waiting me to do something to prove that I deserved to be loved by him instead of waiting for me to join him in the work of loving others. I think we've been treated by other humans in that I've got to earn this approval type of way.

And sometimes we take some of humans' worst attributes and apply those to God, which like you said, is exactly backwards. We have to think in a whole new way about God is not using the worst attributes that humans have with each other. Sometimes we've got to earn or merit approval or love, or we feel that way anyway. And then we apply that to God. We apply it to God we play it to god which we're never told to do he's telling us all the time the way he loves but easy to do that yeah it's a little hard to get our heads around which is why we can read the sermon on the mount or we can read paul's letter to the romans here and just not see what they're doing or saying

because it's so counterintuitive. It runs so against the grain of our expectation as natural men and women, as sinners, because we tend to look at the whole thing upside down and backwards. If you're anything like me, then you may have spent the better part of your life trying to obey a commandment that God never gave. There is no commandment given in any scripture by any prophet from any pulpit in any age to make myself into someone who is perfectly lovable. There is no such commandment. There is always and only and forever the unconditional commandment to love even my enemies, even when my enemy is myself, in the same way that God does. And at the end of the day, a lot of what's at stake in redemption

is just about my learning to stop trying to keep a commandment that God never gave, and learning to start trying to keep the commandment that God actually did give, so that I can understand Him and join Him in that work. This, I think, is what Paul means by grace at the end of the day. Is that grace is the revelation that love always was a law and it never was a reward in the first place. That's excellent. Yeah. Always chasing after something that I already have. If I just stopped for a second and saw what the Lord is trying to teach me.

Yeah, and I think it fits nicely with the description you gave a couple minutes ago, Hank, of how the law really isn't about trying to earn your way into heaven, but that obeying the law, that's the thing that you're looking for. The law isn't a means to some other end. I don't obey the law to get love. Obeying the law is the work of loving. And by loving, I've found the thing that I'm looking for. But I can't do it if I'm trying to be loved. That's not the right project. I have to engage in it as the work of loving others. And then I find it. And how discouraging that is to think, God will only love me if I behave a certain way. You might think, oh, that's an excellent way to think. It will make my behavior stay in line. But really,

there's a fear there of, I won't be loved. I'll do something wrong. I'll break the law. And then not only have I broken the law, but now I've lost the love. That's a heavy load to carry. Yeah. And this, I think, is one of the ways in which Paul is among the most accessible of the writers in our scriptures. Because nobody speaks more clearly or more personally than Paul does about how painful and despairing it is to live in this way that treats love backwards, that treats the law as a way of earning love

and how that inevitably leads into a kind of trap where we both condemn others and condemn ourselves and cut ourselves off from the very thing that we wanted in the first place. Wow. John, we're like 20 minutes in and I am loving this. Yeah, this is great. This new way of thinking.

Well, it's the gospel, I think, what I'm trying. Yeah, I think so too. is that we suppress or hide the truth about God and his law. By taking the whole thing backwards, especially taking it backwards out of fear, as Hank pointed out, right? That's kind of our motivation for doing it. We're afraid. By taking the whole thing backwards,

we suppress or hide the truth about God. And that what God is doing through Christ's atonement, through his death and resurrection, is that God is displaying the truth about himself and about his law, that he both loves his enemies and is willing to sacrifice everything to save his enemies. And that only that kind of love as law rather than reward, only that kind of love, which is also what Paul calls grace, can save us, especially given what it means to be a sinner in the first place. So that, I think, is the rough shape of

his argument in general. As sinners, we hide the truth, and God, through Christ's atonement, reveals the truth about himself and his law. We could give one other image maybe to describe how this works. If you think about God's law as a kind of tool or think about God's law like a telescope, what we do as sinners is that we turn the telescope around backwards. And instead of looking through it the right direction, we look through it in the direction that makes everything look small instead of the direction that makes everything look small instead of the direction that makes everything look big yeah farther away if the law is love what we end up doing as sinners is that we use the law backwards in a way that makes love look very small and far away it's the same law but we use it in such a way that it makes everything look small and far away instead it makes god look very

far away it makes love look impossible. And what Jesus does when he comes to save us is that Jesus comes and he says, look, you lovable idiots. You've got the whole thing backwards. Right. And he takes the telescope from us and he shows us how to use it. And he shows us how to love and sacrifice. And he hands it back to us. And he says, now this is how you use it. And then when you look through it in the right direction, all of a sudden, everything looks big and sharp and clear.

And you can see God's love everywhere and in everything. This may be a nice little quasi parable to describe what's at stake here for Paul and his treatment of the gospel and the law. Yeah, I like that. You're not seeing it wrong. You're just seeing it backwards. Yeah, you've got the law. The law it backwards. Yeah, you've got the law. The law is right. Yeah, you've got the right pieces.

But you're doing the wrong thing with it. That's great. Let's try to take a look at some particular passages then here in Romans. Let's start in Romans chapter 1. I'm just going to use here for our listeners to give them a taste. I'm going to use the NET, the New English Translation of the Bible, because it's a kind of simple, baseline, accessible, I think trustworthy translation of the Greek. The NET tends to be my default, but people can choose whatever they please,

so long as it's like readable English is the main thing to start and then worry about the details later. So I'm just going to give you, I'm going to give you citations from the NET here. And if there are particular things that we want to talk about or note in the King James, we can do that too. So this is Romans chapter one, verses 18 through 20. And I'm going to tack on verse 25 here. These verses go like this, and you'll see right away, I think, why as a philosopher, these verses might stand out to me especially. So they go like this, Romans 1.18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness. Because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation

of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, they've been clearly seen, because they're understood through what has been made. And then verse 25, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. So that I think Paul, this is the first thing that Paul has to say, right? Here in Romans 1, this is kind of the frame that he gives us for understanding the rest of the epistle is that sinners, the people who are unrighteous, these are the ones he says who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness. The King James here says hold the truth in unrighteousness, but I think that means like hold down because the Greek here is pretty clear. It's kind of hiding or suppression of the truth is the sense that's at stake.

And then he goes on to say that there's something about God that's obvious, something about God that's kind of hidden in plain sight, something about his nature, something about his eternal power, something about his attributes that we have been suppressing and hiding from ourselves. We've exchanged the truth about God for a lie, he says. Suppressing the truthressing and hiding from ourselves. We've exchanged the truth about God for a lie, he says. Suppressing the truth, is that from ourselves? Because it sounds like, oh, I'm suppressing the truth from other people, but I'm kind of deceiving myself. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's how Paul describes it here too, right? We're not only deceiving ourselves about other people, but we're deceiving ourselves about ourselves. Because I think, again, as you indicated earlier, right, a lot of our motivation here is that we're afraid. A lot of the motivation at the root of every kind of sinfulness is fear,

that we're not going to get what we want, that we're not going to be in control or whatever, and that fear leads us to hide something that should be obvious about God and about ourselves from ourselves. So we exchange the truth about God for a lie, and we take what should have been obvious and we turn it upside down, and everything that should have been big and clear now looks small and far away. Pete Verse 25, Adam, you just quoted that, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature more than the creator. Can you give that to me in simpler terms? In the first, it kind of sounds like they knew what they were doing.

They changed the truth of God into a lie, like on purpose. But if I'm suppressing the truth from myself, this could be I changed the truth of God into a lie and I didn't even realize I did it. Yeah, there's both, I think, a dimension of self-deception here, but also a clear dimension of culpability. Nonetheless, we're doing something that's harming ourselves and other people. And there's a sense in which we don't quite see how we're doing it or why, even though we still bear responsibility for having done it. Pete That's what I was wondering. Yeah. If you had to tell me, sorry to push you on this. If you had to tell me what the truth was and what the lie is, what would you say in this

context? Pete That's what I want to address in the next verse that we look at. I think the truth has to do with the nature of God in particular, and it has to do with whether or not God treats love as a law or as a reward. So I've switched it to it's a reward. The truth is it's a law. I've reversed those two like we've been talking about.

Yeah, I think that's right. But what happens here, Paul says, right? They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They served the creation or the creature rather than the creator. We make the law about us and whether we are loved rather than about God and joining him in the work of love. It's that kind of shift in the purpose of the law and what we use the law for that's at stake in the lie that we're telling ourselves. And one, it sounds like to me from what you've talked about here,

that one leads to like a wonderful outcome and the other leads to discouragement, fear and excluding other people. Exactly. And Paul will spell this out, I think in great detail. I had been trying to figure out what the creature meant.

And I thought, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served. And my first thought was the creature was this lie they created, small c creature, the lie about God they created more than the real creator. Is that another way to look at it? Maybe they serve this creation that they made more than the creator. I like that. I think Paul mostly has in mind by the word creature here, just created things. Right. The things by creature, creature is kind of King James language for the things that God created. There's the creator. And then there are the things that are created and the things that are created are the creatures the creatures, quote unquote. That sounds a little funny to us 400 years later. But part of what's at stake here in that difference between the creator and the creature is just also, again, the question of life. And to acknowledge God as creator is to acknowledge that we are gifts

to ourselves from God, that we aren't in charge, we aren't in control, God is, and that our lives are themselves a gift, a kind of original expression of God's own love. And to deny the creator is to deny the gift that he gave to us as his creation. Yeah, I guess when I saw verse 23, I thought, is he talking about idolatry? They changed the glory of an uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, birds, four-footed beasts, creeping things. Yeah, so idolatry is the primary manifestation of this reversal. Instead of worshiping God, we end up worshiping some reflection of ourselves in the things that we want or the things that we make.

We make the law about whether or not we are loved rather than making the law about whether we love others. I'm going to go worship this idol or whatever it is so I can have its love. So this God that I'm worshiping will love me, give me value. Yeah, that's the very notion of idolatry then, where my relationship with the God is about me getting what I want. That's what makes it an idol. Whereas if my relationship to God is about doing what God commanded, regardless of what I want, that's actual worship. And again, you can see the same dynamic, where if my obedience is about me getting what i want again that's about whether or not i'm loved rather than whether or not i'd love i really like

this idea of god inviting us to become part of his work of love rather than do do do works works and tell you feel like you've earned your value you can now feel valuable because of what you've done yeah where i think the kind of operative assumption here for Paul is that not only is it impossible for us to do that because we're not good enough, it's impossible for us to do that because that's not what love even is. It isn't even the kind of thing that you can get. Love is the thing that you join or do or share or make, but it's not even the kind of thing that you could passively receive as a reward. It's not even the kind of thing that you could deserve. And if you think that it is the kind of thing that you can deserve and spend your life trying to deserve it, you'll never find it because that's not even what it is. Climb the ladder only to realize it's leaning against the

wrong wall. Yeah, exactly. We spend our lives trying to answer the wrong question and then wonder why we can't get the right answer. Yeah, and it comes in when difficult things happen, when trials hit, when something hard comes, you're, what did I do? What did I do to make you so angry at me that you allowed this thing to happen? That's our common way of thinking about it. Yeah. And Paul, again, I think is really good about this too. If I think that God's law is

all about deserving love, then when good things happen, I'll own them and claim them and take credit for them and say that I deserve them, which will ruin them, right? Instead of treating them as a gift. But when also the flip side is when bad things happen, which will ruin them, right? Instead of treating them as a gift. But when also the flip side is when bad things happen, which also happens all the time, when bad things happen, I'll assume it's because I deserved that too. If good things happen, I think I'll deserve it. And that ruins them. If bad things happen again, like Job, right? Then back to Job here, I'll think that I deserved that as well. And both are a kind of trap that prevent me from responding to whatever comes with the love that God commands. If a friend comes, I'm commanded to love them.

If an enemy comes, I'm commanded to love them. That's the work, not the reward. I like that. It's funny. I'm looking at this list like really, whoa, type sins. Verse 29, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whispers, backbaters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, then disobedient to

parents. I know, it just makes me laugh. I could read that to the kids. See this one? This means it's your turn to unload the dishwasher. Just because it appears in a list doesn't mean they're all equal to each other, I suppose. But it just sounded, it was kind of made me smile when I saw it. That is funny. And then Adam, it fits right with what you're saying. Verse 31, without understanding. It's backwards.

Yeah. One of the predictable effects of using the law in this backwards way is that you end up creating little groups of insiders versus outsiders. And one of the main things that you need to do to create your group of insiders is you have to applaud one another for what you're doing to make sure that everybody feels like they're being recognized and they really are great and they really have earned it and they really do deserve it. That's how you form the group. And you keep each other in the group. Self-congratulation society. That's a real danger, right?

I mean, it's easy for church itself to devolve into self-congratulation society. That's a kind of constant temptation to watch out for yeah and that's where we can be very hurtful to those who choose a different path or go a different direction we can man when someone leaves the group you see it as a threat to yourself and so you lash out yeah yeah the rameumptom group was kind of a self, what did you call it? Mutual congratulations society? Yeah, you use the law to create the enemy. The enemy is not the people like us. Those guys over there. Yeah, those guys over there who aren't doing what we think they're supposed to be doing.

And then we use the law as an excuse not to love them rather than obeying the law as a command to love them. Isn't that what Alma does? He turns and says, these are our brethren. Yeah. In his prayer, it's a wonderful little moment because when he starts his prayer in Alma 31, he's like, how can we behold such gross wickedness? And then at the end of the prayer, he says, behold, O Lord, their souls are precious and many of them are our brethren. And it seems like there's a softening during the prayer, which maybe was a revelatory experience for him. I like the way that prayer seems to soften. It reminds me of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, right?

Here's this Pharisee. I'm so grateful that I'm not as other men are. He feels like he's earned his reward. He's earned God's love. Exactly. In which case he's cut himself off from it. Let's take a look at Romans 5 for a second. We'll skip ahead a little bit. If in Romans 1, what Paul does is define sin as a suppression of the truth about God, about his nature, about his power, about his character, even about his law, then I think it's in Romans 5 where we get the clearest connection to both the Sermon on the Mount and to Paul's description then of what the truth is about God. What is it about God that we've been suppressing? What is it that we've been hiding from ourselves? What are we afraid of? If we look at Romans 5 and pick up in verse 6, while we were still helpless, at the right time God died for the ungodly.

For rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, perhaps someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more since we have been reconciled will we be saved by his life? So this I think may be Paul's clearest description here of God's character and attributes. That what characterizes God is the fact that he loves his enemies. He doesn't hate his enemies.

He loves them and he demonstrates this love for them by sacrificing himself and his son. He gives what we need before we deserved it while we were still his enemies. This is both the expression of his grace and an expression of his own willingness to abide by that imperative to love friend and enemy. This, I think, this is the truth about God. And this, above all, is what Christ's atonement demonstrates. God's I think, this is the truth about God. And this above all is what Christ's atonement demonstrates, God's own character in this way. In the King James version of Romans 5.11, not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we now have received the atonement. I didn't know this, but one of the commentaries I was reading says, this is the only use of atonement in I didn't know this, but one of the commentaries I was reading says, this is the only use of atonement in the New Testament of the King James Version of the Bible.

I just thought, wow. It's used a lot more in the Book of Mormon, but that's an interesting point. It's a good clue to something we're often not very sensitive to. It's a good clue to the way that we've inherited 2,000 years worth of assumptions from the broader Christian tradition about what the atonement is and about how it works, where in the context of scripture itself, especially the New Testament, there's very little explanation that lines up neatly with that larger 2,000-year-long tradition. And the vocabulary itself is a work in progress in the New Testament, as the apostles and church leaders are attempting to work out powerful and effective ways of describing what Jesus did to a great variety of audiences. And the fact that the word atonement itself is only used one time in the King James New

Testament is an astonishing and remarkable fact, isn't it? Our religious world centers on that, almost on that word, and yet only appears once. Yeah, it's interesting, right, to ask what words are they using? If that's not the word that they use, what words are they using, right? What words are Paul using? What words are the gospels using? If that's not the word that they use, what words are they using, right? What words are Paul using? What words are the gospels using to clearly describe this same thing, to talk about what Jesus did if they're not using that word? That's a good question to ask ourselves. In verse 7, Paul talks about human beings will rarely die for someone else, but Christ died for the ungodly. Can you clarify that to me? And then can I ask

a question too, which is, is Paul saying the fact that Christ performed this great service was a vote of confidence to what, that we would eventually get it and understand and join the work? Because if he didn't think we would ever get it, he'd be like, you know, I don't know if I die for someone who is probably never going to figure it out. I think what we get here is another nice, clear contrast between those two different ways of using God's law. The way that normal people work, Paul says, the way that most of us work most of the time is that maybe we'd be willing to die for a friend.

If it's a really, really good friend, maybe we'd do it. But even then, maybe not. Maybe not. That's because we love our friends. And if we love our friends, the more that we love them, the better they are to us the more likely we might be willing to do that but even in sacrifice yeah even in those cases it's still he says unlikely you're still not going to be likely to to die for a friend even a friend and then he contrasts that with the way that god works god doesn't weigh in the balance whether or not you're a friend or an enemy in terms of whether or not he's willing to die for you. In fact, God goes out of his way to do it for all of us who have positioned ourselves as his enemies by suppressing the truth about him, by worshiping the creature rather than the

creator. So God does exactly the opposite. God doesn't weigh in the balance whether or not I'm going to respond the right way or whether or not I'm doing what he wants. I mean, I think he hopes, he trusts that his love for us can help save us. But I think it's clear here that he would do it even if it didn't save us because that's who he is. That's how he works. That's what he does. God loves friend and enemy regardless of whether or not the outcome is what he hoped for. That kind of goes back to the Sermon on the Mount. He sends his reign on the evil and on the good, on the just and on the unjust. I think a lot of times when we look at be therefore perfect, if we look at the context in Matthew, not as much in

3 Nephi, but in Matthew, it sounds like it's his perfectly loving nature it's talking about. Exactly. Matthew 5.48 is not a commandment to make ourselves perfectly lovable. Matthew 5.48 is a commandment to join him in the work of loving perfectly. And to the degree that I'm trying to do the first, then I am trying to keep a commandment he never gave. And I will fail at keeping the commandment he actually did give. If you look at 46 and 47, before you get to Matthew 5, 48, it's, for if you love them which love you, what reward have you? Do not even the publicans the same.

If you salute your brother and only, what do you more than others? Even the publicans do that. Be ye therefore perfect perfect even as your father which is in heaven and then you go oh it's he loves all of us he sends his reign on the evil and on the good i mean that's how i've always seen that is it's more about being perfectly loving than yeah that's the only kind of perfection at stake the perfection that comes from joining him in the work of love god will never ever use his law to decide whether or not we deserve love because love is not a reward.

It is a law. I remember at a meeting years and years ago, Stephen Robinson from BYU was teaching and he said, we earn things, don't we? So he had us look up earn in the topical guide. It's not there. And then he said, oh, I must have just, I must have gave the wrong word. So he said, deserve. Let's look up deserve in the topical guide. It's not there. And then he said, oh, I must've just, I must've gave the wrong word. So he said, deserve, let's look up deserve in the topical guide. It's not

there. And he said, you know what? Here's a better word, merit. That's the word. We merit things. So we looked up merit and it's there, but it's only, we're saved by the merits of Christ. You know, we rely on the merits of Christ. There's nothing about earn, deserve, or merit about us trying to earn God's love. You may have heard me talk about this before, Hank, but I had a long flight from Newark to Salt Lake City next to an evangelical minister. And it caused me to come home and I went through every reference to merits in the index of the topical guide and it was wonderful for me it was i'm smack in my head that i didn't have those ready but we rely wholly and solely upon the merits of christ and i think the history that

we come from which is kind of funny use that word word, is like merit badges. If I earn enough of these, I will get my eagle. But I have to merit that reward. When you use that scriptural context of merits, we can't merit anything of ourselves, Lehi says. Didn't that minister say you believe in the gospel of something? Is that the guy who said that? Yeah, he said, you believe in the gospel of something is that the guy who's yeah he said you believe in the jesus of the gaps and the way my brain works is i thought well i don't really know where jesus shopped but i don't think it was the gap and then he explained that idea of you you think you do this much and jesus makes up the gap and that's when i heard heard, oh, 2 Nephi 25, he thinks after all we can do, here's all this, he's going to do this, which resulted in a great discussion and a great

thing for me to go through those merit verses. And it helped me tremendously to do what Stephen Robinson did, to go through every reference to merits and see that we really can't merit anything, but we rely on Christ and his merits. This is a good point in general, I think, for trying to read Paul's epistles, is when we think of Paul's epistles, one of the first things that comes to mind for many of us is just these kind of traditional debates that we have with our Protestant friends about grace versus works. So for me, I find those debates to be very frustrating because they tend to assume as a matter of course, the debates do, whichever side you take. They tend to assume that love is a kind of reward that you have to earn. The debate then is whether it is about how you earn it. Do you earn it all by yourself with your

own works? Or do you earn it in partnership with Jesus? Or do you earn it just by Jesus? And that's a kind of a spectrum of grace versus works debates. When for my part, those debates seem to me to miss the entire point of what Paul is saying, which is that love cannot be deserved. It is a law, not a reward, and you join it or you don't. And the invitation to join is the reward itself. The work is the blessing. Yeah, the means are the end here. I sometimes feel like we look at things like they're a formula for salvation when really they're more of a fruit of salvation. The feelings of love and charity for others are kind of a fruit of coming to Christ, not a formula for coming to Christ. Did I say that right?

That's good. I think getting the law backwards, I think, means treating the law as a means to some other end. Whereas treating the law as God does is to treat the law as an end in itself. And treating the law as an end in itself, that's what you call grace. Grace is the law as an end in itself. And treating the law as an end in itself, that's what you call grace. Grace is the law as an end in itself. When King Benjamin says, you will not have mind to injure one another, but to live peaceably, he's not saying, do this so that you can be saved. He's saying, after you're saved, you will not have a mind to injure one another. It's a fruit of coming to Christ. He wasn't giving a lecture on being kind. He was giving a lecture on coming to Christ. He wasn't giving a lecture on being kind.

He was giving a lecture on coming to Christ. And these things come after that. They flow from that. Yeah, he's describing what happens when you look through the right end of the telescope. Everything looks different. The whole world looks different. Everybody looks like an occasion to love, not an occasion to judge. And you're right.

It's all too common. I'm feeling going, man, how many times have I got the telescope backwards? Well, that's the way so many reward systems in the world work. Like I said, merit badges, I got to merit this many so that I can get this reward. And so it doesn't work theologically the way we're talking right now, though. So Adam, as Paul is writing to these people, what's his hope with all this? Is he saying, look, here's who I am and here's how the gospel works? Is this him trying to clarify something that they maybe had questions about? It's hard to tell.

My sense is that he means it as both an introduction of himself to the church in Rome, to the saints in Rome, but also as an introduction of his understanding of the gospel to the church at Rome. And that these two things are kind of part and parcel for Paul. He is the gospel. The gospel is him. He's died in Christ and Christ is in him. And to be introduced to him is inevitably in Paul's mind to simultaneously be introduced to Christ. And I think he's trying to prepare the way for him to come and see them and put them in a position to understand what he'll teach when he arrives and why they might welcome him. Okay. Yeah. Where do you want to go next let's take a look at some very famous verses in romans chapter 3 then so on the one hand we started off with a couple verses in romans chapter 1 where paul describes sin as the business of suppressing the truth about god

and then we looked i think at a very clear passage in romans 5 where paul describes the truth about God. And then we looked, I think, at a very clear passage in Romans 5 where Paul describes the truth about God, that though you and I would hardly die for a friend, God is willing to die for even his enemies. And that's how God works. That's the truth about him. And it's also the truth about his law in general, because this law commands us to love not just friends, but enemies. This is what he's inviting us to join. Then we get these verses in Romans chapter 3, picking up around verse 23. In Romans 3, 23, we're going to go through 26. Paul famously says, right, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

But, this is one of the most important buts maybe in all of scripture, but they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. And then we get this, God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed. Now, this is something that Paul does repeatedly throughout Romans and in these verses in particular, where when Paul describes the work that Christ's atonement accomplishes. He likes to describe Christ's atonement as a kind of revelation. What the atonement does, as he says in verse 25, is that the atonement publicly displays God's true nature. It publicly displays how he's willing to sacrifice himself and present his death at the mercy seat, as a mercy seat even, that's then accessible through faith.

And this again, as he says in verse 25, was to demonstrate his righteousness, to show what it means to be righteous, to show how you go about fulfilling the law. This is what the atonement demonstrates. Because if the law commands us to love even our enemies, then this is God showing us how you do that. How do you love your enemies? You sacrifice yourself. You give yourself up. You allow yourself to be crucified on their behalf.

You die for them. That's what it looks like to fulfill the law. And in this way, the atonement saves us from sin as a suppression of the truth by displaying, he says, the truth, publicly displaying and demonstrating the truth about God. Can you clarify, he gives himself up as a mercy seat, not giving himself up so we can go to the mercy seat, but he himself is the place we go to? Am I asking that correctly? Yeah, the image here seems to be that God displays Christ at his death as the mercy seat that's accessible through faith, right? The mercy seat, of course, referring here to the Ark of the Covenant, to that space on top of the Ark of the Covenant between the angels' wings that are stretched across the top of the Ark where God is enthroned. The presence of God is enthroned there. On that mercy seat.

You're still using that N-E-T translation? Yeah, that was the N-E-T. Yeah. Verse 25 in King James says. Whom God hath set forth. Set forth, displayed publicly. To be a propitiation through faith in his blood. It's not a word I use every day.

Yeah. The footnote on the word propitiation says Greek mercy seat. So that's great. Yeah. Glad you pointed that out. And again, the purpose there is to declare God's righteousness. So God is demonstrating here, I think, what the law is and how it gets fulfilled. Because the law commands us to love our enemies,

and this is what it looks like when you love your enemies, the atonement. It's probably also worth reflecting here for a moment on Paul's use of the word, especially in the King James, of justification. Paul talks about righteousness and justification and people being justified. And it's a kind of a bewildering array of terms here, I think, in King James English. Bewildering array of terms. For what I think in the Greek is actually a pretty straightforward idea. I agree.

I've been bewildered. The nice thing about Paul's own language is that in the original, those are all variations on the same word. Every time Paul says righteousness or talks about the righteousness of God or about justice or justification or justifying, in Greek, those are all just the variations on the very same word that just means essentially to make things right. Reconciliation. Re reconciliation reconciliation is nice yeah but i also just like the simplicity of god's putting things right with the emphasis on right here justifying things in the sense of like when you've got a word document things are left justified or right justified or center justified, what they're lined up with. In that sense, you're setting them right in the sense that you're lining them up properly.

And this is what God does. The purpose of God's law is to set things right. To set things right in relationship to the law. To set things right in relationship to him. And to set us right in relationship to each other. And the only right relationship is love. When we've been justified, when we've been made right, this means that we are now in proper relationship to God and his law. We're not doing it backwards anymore. What was out of joint has been put back in place.

Please join us for part two of this podcast.