2 Chronicles 11:1-13:22, Romans 8:26-39, Psalms 18:37-50, Proverbs 19:27-29
Today’s the 24th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you around the global campfire as we just come in as we do each day, different points of the day. The fires always burning. There’s always someone here. There’s never a time that we’re not together with somebody else listening to the Scriptures. And we just release whatever’s going on and let God begin to speak, allow the word of God to wash over us. So, that’s what we’ll do. That’s what we do every day. We’re reading from the English Standard Version this week. Today, second Chronicles 11,12, and 13. And, of course, in the book of second Chronicles we’re kind of reviewing some of the things that we read in second Kings. So, we have completed King Solomon’s reign and Rehoboam, his son has become king. And, of course, that has caused division. And we’re in the midst of seeing the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah begin to form. So, second Chronicles 11.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in Romans Paul continued to reveal the implications of what he’s been arguing throughout the entire letter, right? And, so, yesterday we reached this like panorama that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in us and we just kinda hung there and hopefully you’re still kinda hanging there just considering the implications to your own life. But Paul then explained more cosmic implications of this today. He explained that Jesus was the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, and this was accomplished because he was raised from the dead, right, or he was reborn into life from the dead. And, so, essentially what Paul is saying is Jesus resurrection started a completely new thing on planet Earth, one that hadn’t been seen since the Garden of Eden. And this new thing was that God and man were reunited. We’re not separated by sin any more, but we’ve been reborn out of death into the family of God, where sin doesn’t have a claim to our soul. The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us. And so, if we’re believers in Jesus well than Paul’s talking about us in the Bible today. And again, we could just stop there and just…I mean…Romans is one of those…it’s very dense. You could just, you know, read a chapter of Romans and then think about a four a week. And this is…these are obviously very, very big, very, very good things. This is very, very good news, almost indescribable, right? Even Paul says that, “what then shall we say to these things?” And his conclusion is very famous. “If God is for us who can be against us?” And obviously, that’s a very famous passage of Scripture that gets quoted all the time but that’s not the only thing Paul’s saying. Paul goes on. “Who shall bring any charge against Gods elect. It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died. More than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword? No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us for I’m sure that neither death nor life, angels or rulers, things present, things to come”, right? So, things that are happening now, things are in the future. “No power, no height, no depth, nothing. Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I…I mean you get to some of these passages in the Scriptures and I don’t know what to say because it’s just like…doesn’t your heart just burn when you hear this, when we are reminded of our reality. I mean, obviously, the things that we face in life, they wear us down and often pull us into doubt about whether God has a good heart toward us and then we come to the book of Romans and realize God has decided to live within us, indwell us by the power of His Spirit, the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead. And here we are running away rather than running inward, running toward. It’s like Paul said at the beginning of this letter, “I’m doing the things I don’t want to do and the things that I want to do are not the things that I’m not wanting to do”, which simply reveals that we are yielding to sin, something that has no claim to us whatsoever because we have died to it and been reborn into the family of God, separated from sin. Think of it this way. We know how the gospel goes. There’s a chasm, right? There’s a chasm of sin. Gods on one side, mans on the other side. There’s no way to bridge that gap. There’s no way to be reunited and Jesus comes and builds this bridge. That’s sort of gospel 101; however, we’re on the other side of the bridge now. It would be just as hard for sin to have a claim to us than it was for us to get across that bridge to God. It’s not possible unless we build the bridge. Holy…and then you insert whatever word you want or maybe we just stop with holy.
Prayer:
Father, this is holy. To think that the struggles that we keep struggling with really, actually, honestly do not have to be a part of our life? We just give them power. We animate them. We resurrect them. It’s very humbling. And yet that’s not why we come here every day. We don’t come here every day to find out about our sin. We come here every day to find out about who we really are and how to live that out in this life. And the book of Romans is showing us clear pathways of a reality that we embrace through faith. And yet we confess that we spend most of our energy in any other number of different realities than this one when this one is the only one that matters. This is the only path that will lead us to life. So, come Holy Spirit. Allow what we have read from the apostle Paul today to settle in and settle over us. Help up us to meditate upon it, get it deep inside of us, so that it is no longer a concept, but rather our reality. Come Jesus we pray in Your mighty name we ask. Amen.
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