Alex Gomez

← Anchored: Paul's Letters: A Plain-Language Study Guide to Scripture - Volume Eight

Anchored · Book 8

Anchored: Paul's Letters: A Plain-Language Study Guide to Scripture - Volume Eight

ROMANS: Part 1 (Chapter 1)

Volume 8: Paul’s Letters

(If colors don’t display in your viewer, gold/blue text will just look bold: the [G]/[J] tags still mark who’s talking.)

Meet your teachers: Pastor Eli Grace (warm and relational; focuses on what God has already done for you: grace and faith) and Teacher Naomi Cross (grounded and structured; focuses on how faith shows itself in action: obedience and works). - Pastor Eli Grace : warm, relational, focuses on what God has already done for you - Teacher Naomi Cross : grounded, structured, focuses on how faith shows itself in action

Book Snapshot: Romans

CHAPTER 1: The Announcement, and the Trap Being Set

The World Back Then

Paul writes to Rome around AD 57, from Corinth, to a church he has never visited and did not plant. Rome holds something like a million people, and its believers meet in rented rooms and crowded apartment blocks scattered across the city: no building, no single leader, no easy way to gather everyone at once. About eight years earlier the emperor Claudius threw the Jews out of Rome; by now they are drifting back, and Jewish and Gentile believers are having to work out how to be one church in one city. Nero is emperor. Paul wants to reach Spain, and he needs Rome behind him.

The Story (Free Paraphrase, verse by verse)

v1-4 Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s good news. It is not a new message: God promised it long ago through his prophets, in the holy writings. It is about his Son: the one who came from David’s line as far as human descent goes, and who was marked out as Son of God in power, by the Spirit of holiness, when God raised him from the dead. That is Jesus Christ our Lord.

v5-7 Through him we were handed God’s free favor and a job to do as apostles, so that people among all the nations would come to the obedience that trust brings, for the honor of his name. You in Rome are among those nations; you too were called by Jesus Christ. So this letter goes to everyone in Rome whom God loves and has called to be his holy people. God’s free favor to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

v8-10 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your trust is being talked about all over the world. God is my witness, the God I serve with my spirit in the good news about his Son, that I never stop mentioning you. Every time I pray, I ask that somehow, at long last, God might clear the road for me to come to you.

v11-13 For I am longing to see you, so that I can hand on some spiritual gift and leave you steadier than I found you. Or rather, so that we can encourage each other: your trust and mine, each doing the other good. I do not want you left in the dark, brothers and sisters: I have planned to come to you many times and been blocked every time, because I wanted some harvest among you as I have had among the other nations.

v14-15 I am in debt to Greeks and to foreigners, to the educated and the uneducated alike. That is why, as far as it is up to me, I am ready to announce the good news to you in Rome as well.

v16-17 For I am not ashamed of the good news. It is God’s own power, and it rescues everyone who trusts: the Jew first, and the Greek too. For in it God’s own rightness is unveiled, from trust to trust, as it stands written: the one who is right with God will live by trust.

Deep Dive: Two verses that run the whole letter Pastor Eli: Verses 16 and 17 are the thesis of Romans. Everything from here to the end of chapter 11 is Paul unpacking them, and everything from chapter 12 on is what you do about it. And look at what he says the good news is. Not advice. Not a philosophy. Power : the Greek word is dynamis. An announcement that does something to you while you are hearing it. Teacher Naomi: The quotation at the end is doing work, not decorating. It is Habakkuk 2:4, which Volume 5 walked, a prophet up on a watchtower demanding to know why the wicked are winning, and getting back one line: the righteous will live by his faithfulness. Habakkuk was talking about hanging on when the world makes no sense. Paul reads that same line as the pattern for how any human being stands before God at all. It is a big move and he makes it in nine words. Pastor Eli: One phrase in there is slippery, from trust to trust. From God’s faithfulness to our trust? From one degree of trust to a deeper one? From the trust of the preacher to the trust of the hearer? Careful readers have taken all three. Teacher Naomi: And here we agree flatly. Whatever that phrase means, the sentence around it is not ambiguous. What God unveils in the good news is his own rightness, and it reaches people through trust from the first inch to the last.

Deep Dive: Two verses that run the whole letter

Pastor Eli: Verses 16 and 17 are the thesis of Romans. Everything from here to the end of chapter 11 is Paul unpacking them, and everything from chapter 12 on is what you do about it.

And look at what he says the good news is. Not advice. Not a philosophy. Power : the Greek word is dynamis. An announcement that does something to you while you are hearing it.

Teacher Naomi: The quotation at the end is doing work, not decorating. It is Habakkuk 2:4, which Volume 5 walked, a prophet up on a watchtower demanding to know why the wicked are winning, and getting back one line: the righteous will live by his faithfulness.

Habakkuk was talking about hanging on when the world makes no sense. Paul reads that same line as the pattern for how any human being stands before God at all. It is a big move and he makes it in nine words.

Pastor Eli: One phrase in there is slippery, from trust to trust. From God’s faithfulness to our trust? From one degree of trust to a deeper one? From the trust of the preacher to the trust of the hearer? Careful readers have taken all three.

Teacher Naomi: And here we agree flatly. Whatever that phrase means, the sentence around it is not ambiguous. What God unveils in the good news is his own rightness, and it reaches people through trust from the first inch to the last.

v18-20 For God’s anger is being unveiled from heaven against everything ungodly and everything wrong in people who hold the truth down and keep it from getting out. What can be known about God is plain to them, because God himself made it plain to them. Ever since the world was made, the invisible things about him (his eternal power, his divine nature) have been there to be seen in the things he made, and understood from them. So they have no excuse.

v21-23 Because although they knew God, they would not honor him as God or thank him. Their thinking ran off into nothing, and their senseless hearts went dark. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. And they traded the glory of the God who never decays for images shaped like a human being who does, and like birds, and four-footed animals, and things that crawl.

v24-25 So God handed them over. He let them go, with the cravings of their own hearts, into uncleanness, and they dishonored their own bodies among themselves. They swapped the truth about God for a lie, and they worshiped and served the thing that was made instead of the One who made it, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Deep Dive: Before you read verses 26 and 27 Pastor Eli: We are stopping here on purpose. The next two verses describe sex between women and sex between men, and some of the people reading this page are gay. So the most important thing goes first, before anything else gets said. What follows is a disagreement about how to read a text. It is not a disagreement about whether God loves you. Christians who read these two verses in opposite directions agree completely on that, and anyone who has used this passage to tell you otherwise was using it for something Paul is not doing here. Teacher Naomi: Then both readings, at full strength, because that is what we owe you. The traditional reading takes verses 26 and 27 at their widest. Paul says “natural” and “against nature,” and he describes women as well as men, which almost no ancient writer bothers to do if only one narrow practice is in view. On this reading Paul is looking past particular abuses to the pattern itself, and he offers it as one example among many of a world that has turned its back on its Creator. Pastor Eli: The other reading is not a modern dodge, and it deserves to be stated properly. It asks what a first-century Jew writing to Rome had in front of his eyes, and that is documented: sex between grown men and boys, sex bought at temples, sex taken from household slaves who had no standing to refuse. Every one of those is exploitative by definition, and none of them is the question a modern reader is asking, which is about two people committed to each other for life. On this reading Paul condemns what he saw, at full force, and was never asked the modern question. Readers who take this line point to the words Paul picks (burning, craving, exchanging, going after) which describe appetite off its leash rather than covenant. Teacher Naomi: And here is something both sides can hold, because it is a fact about where the sentence sits rather than a reading of it. This paragraph is a setup. Paul spends a whole chapter describing pagan wickedness so that his readers will nod along, and then, in the very next verse, 2:1, he wheels around: therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge. Anyone who quotes 1:26-27 and stops there has stopped in the middle of Paul’s sentence. The paragraph was aimed at the reader doing the nodding. Pastor Eli: So we hand you both readings and crown neither, which is what this book does everywhere. And we hand you one more thing that is not a reading at all. You are addressed by this book. You are not discussed by it.

Deep Dive: Before you read verses 26 and 27

Pastor Eli: We are stopping here on purpose. The next two verses describe sex between women and sex between men, and some of the people reading this page are gay. So the most important thing goes first, before anything else gets said.

What follows is a disagreement about how to read a text. It is not a disagreement about whether God loves you. Christians who read these two verses in opposite directions agree completely on that, and anyone who has used this passage to tell you otherwise was using it for something Paul is not doing here.

Teacher Naomi: Then both readings, at full strength, because that is what we owe you.

The traditional reading takes verses 26 and 27 at their widest. Paul says “natural” and “against nature,” and he describes women as well as men, which almost no ancient writer bothers to do if only one narrow practice is in view. On this reading Paul is looking past particular abuses to the pattern itself, and he offers it as one example among many of a world that has turned its back on its Creator.

Pastor Eli: The other reading is not a modern dodge, and it deserves to be stated properly. It asks what a first-century Jew writing to Rome had in front of his eyes, and that is documented: sex between grown men and boys, sex bought at temples, sex taken from household slaves who had no standing to refuse. Every one of those is exploitative by definition, and none of them is the question a modern reader is asking, which is about two people committed to each other for life.

On this reading Paul condemns what he saw, at full force, and was never asked the modern question. Readers who take this line point to the words Paul picks (burning, craving, exchanging, going after) which describe appetite off its leash rather than covenant.

Teacher Naomi: And here is something both sides can hold, because it is a fact about where the sentence sits rather than a reading of it. This paragraph is a setup. Paul spends a whole chapter describing pagan wickedness so that his readers will nod along, and then, in the very next verse, 2:1, he wheels around: therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge.

Anyone who quotes 1:26-27 and stops there has stopped in the middle of Paul’s sentence. The paragraph was aimed at the reader doing the nodding.

Pastor Eli: So we hand you both readings and crown neither, which is what this book does everywhere. And we hand you one more thing that is not a reading at all. You are addressed by this book. You are not discussed by it.

v26-27 This is why God handed them over to passions that degrade them. Their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. And the men did the same, giving up the natural use of the woman and burning with craving for one another, men with men, doing what is shameful, and taking into themselves the fitting payback for their going astray.

v28-29 And since they did not think God worth keeping in their knowledge, God handed them over to a mind that fails every test, to do the things that should never be done. They are filled up with every kind of wrongdoing: sexual immorality, evil, greed, malice. They are loaded with envy, murder, quarreling, trickery, spite. They are whisperers.

v30-31 They run people down behind their backs. They hate God. They are insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventive at finding fresh ways to do harm, disobedient to their parents. They have no sense, no loyalty, no natural affection, no mercy, and there is no talking them into peace.

v32 They know God’s verdict perfectly well: people who do such things deserve death. They go on doing them anyway. And they do one thing more: they applaud everybody else who does them too.

Deep Dive: Why the list runs on so long Teacher Naomi: Count the items in verses 29 to 31 and you get around twenty-three. Most of them are things you could do at a dinner party. Gossip. Boasting. Arrogance. Running somebody down while they are out of the room. Paul files the socially respectable sins in the same paragraph as murder, and he does it on purpose. Pastor Eli: Because the list is a trap and the trap is one verse from springing. Every reader has been nodding along (yes, that is what those people are like) and Paul has been counting the nods. Teacher Naomi: Read the last line of the chapter again before you turn the page. It is not only that they do these things. It is that they cheer for the people who do them. Approval is the final charge on the list, which is a strange note to end on unless the next thing you plan to talk about is an audience.

Deep Dive: Why the list runs on so long

Teacher Naomi: Count the items in verses 29 to 31 and you get around twenty-three. Most of them are things you could do at a dinner party. Gossip. Boasting. Arrogance. Running somebody down while they are out of the room. Paul files the socially respectable sins in the same paragraph as murder, and he does it on purpose.

Pastor Eli: Because the list is a trap and the trap is one verse from springing. Every reader has been nodding along (yes, that is what those people are like) and Paul has been counting the nods.

Teacher Naomi: Read the last line of the chapter again before you turn the page. It is not only that they do these things. It is that they cheer for the people who do them. Approval is the final charge on the list, which is a strange note to end on unless the next thing you plan to talk about is an audience.

Key Words

Key Themes

Big Idea

Paul opens with the announcement he is not ashamed of: God’s power to rescue anyone who trusts, Jew or Greek, with God’s own rightness unveiled in it. Then he turns and describes a world that knew God and would not honor him, and God letting that world have what it wanted. If you finish the chapter feeling like one of the good ones, keep reading: the next verse is about you.

Try It

Verse 21 says the first crack was not immorality. It was refusing to honor God and refusing to thank him. Name one thing today you would have called luck, and thank God for it out loud instead.

Connections

Get the book

Continue reading on Amazon Buy on Amazon