Dear Student of the Word,
It has been one month since I sent out my last Bible study from Romans. That is the longest period I have not sent out a study since 2001! The main reason was my trip to Kenya with 15 others, which kept us busy day and night. I am home, however, and finally found some time to edit this ninth study from Paul's letter to the Romans. Since I have many new subscribers to this Bible study, let me make a few comments to bring you up to speed.
I began these studies in 2001 and formerly sent them out every week. My goal was to look at four verses every day, and send them out once a week. Thus someone could use those four verses as their daily study of the Word, and could look forward to receiving a week's supply once a week.
In 2009, I finished the entire New Testament (all 7,957 verses) using this verse-by-verse format! What a sense of accomplishment I felt at that time. I published one of the studies from Revelation, but all the studies have been available free of charge in the Archives of my website. Now I am going back to edit all my work, republishing them once or twice a month on my Bible study blog site. Today, about 3,500 people receive these studies whenever I send them out.
People over the years have told me that they use these studies regularly. Others print them out and utilize them in small group settings or in Bible study groups. Others sit down and read them in one sitting. I would encourage you to be creative in how you apply these studies. The questions to help you apply the verses are always in bold, and there are plenty of cross references to help you study other parts of Scripture.
Every week I give you a sample in this box of one of the seven parts of the current entry. Then you can download the rest of the study at the bottom of this post. This week I wrote in part six of this seven-part study:
Study Nine, Part Six
22 What
if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great
patience the objects of his wrath-prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did
this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he
prepared in advance for glory- 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the
Jews but also from the Gentiles?25 As he says in Hosea: "I will call them
'my people' who are not my people; and I will call her 'my loved one' who is
not my loved one,"
9:22 – This verse
seems to present a better case for the fact that God could create and choose
some to be first examples of His ongoing mercy and then objects of wrath when
His patience is ignored. But we
must always be careful not to develop a doctrinal position based on a few
verses. We must look at everything
the Bible says about a topic before we come to a conclusion.
Even then, we must realize that we can never see everything
there is to see about anything.
Those who claim they do are only fooling themselves. Have you believed one thing at one
point in your life only to come to understand more and change your position
later in life? If you haven’t, you will, or you are dogmatic and
not open to growing in your understanding of God. I had a friend jokingly say one time that he no longer set
his doctrine in concrete. Instead
he put his doctrine up on a bulletin board. That made it easier to take down and replace with new
insight and revelation. There is
much wisdom in that.
While Paul wrote that some were objects of God’s wrath
according to the purpose of God, we must also take into account what Peter
wrote:
The
Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is
patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to
repentance (2 Peter 3:9).
Then there is the statement in Luke
7:29-30: All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words,
acknowledged that God's way was right, because they had been baptized by John.
But the Pharisees and experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by
John (emphasis added).
9:23-24 – We who are objects of God’s mercy tend at times to “look
down” on those who are apart from the Lord. We see ourselves as superior because we know God. But Paul puts this issue in
perspective, for God has used those vessels of wrath to show all the more how
great is His love and mercy toward the vessels of mercy. My attitude should not be one of
superiority, but an attitude of humility and a desire to reach out to as many
vessels of wrath as possible before it is too late.
If you are more disposed to
believe in predestination, then what you are doing about it? You should be reaching out to “find” as
many as are appointed to eternal life.
God can’t do that without you.
If you believe more in the freewill of man and less in
predestination, what are you doing about it? Are you working to find the most persuasive (not
manipulative) arguments as possible to convince men and women to accept Christ
and His atoning work?
9:25 – Paul had an excellent grasp of the Old Testament as one
would expect a Pharisee of his stature to have. I urge you to work hard to have a good grasp of Scripture as
well. God can’t get out of you
what you don’t spend time putting in, and that involves study and
memorization. I have never known
anyone to quote a Bible verse word for word as led by the Spirit unless that
person first spent time memorizing that verse. There are people who are more gifted in their insight, but
all of us should grow in our familiarity and understanding of the Bible. That is why you are reading this study
right now, I presume. I
congratulate you for the effort you are putting into your studies. I pray that God will give you even more
insight and the wisdom of how to share that insight with others.
In every letter Paul wrote, he
referred to his life purpose of taking the gospel to the Gentiles and he did it
by showing that this was God’s plan in the Old Testament. You have a life purpose and a verse,
passage, chapter or book from the Bible that goes with it, that helps explain
who God created you to be. Do
you know your purpose? Do you know
your life-defining passage?
Remember what Paul wrote to
Timothy and you will have all the understanding you will ever need on why your
familiarity with Scripture is so important:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man
of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16-17).
I have done a Bible study like this for every book in the
New Testament. It took me about
nine years to complete. While I
send these studies out to others, I am in part doing this for myself so I can
learn and grow in my own understanding of God’s word.
As always, I welcome your comments to this week's study. For additional Bible studies, check out my website
archive, which contains a complete collection of all my verse-by-verse
New Testament studies, along with the
unpublished volume of The Faith Files.
Download Romans Study 9
Recent Comments