2 Chronicles 17:1-18:34, Romans 9:25-10:13, Psalms 20:1-9, Proverbs 20:2-3
Today’s the 26th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is a joy to be here with you as we end another work week. And we’re about to complete the final full week of July this year. Next week we will start in one month and end in another. And we see day by day the passage of time and we see day by day God’s faithfulness to us in His Word. And, so, we’ll take the next step forward. We’re in the book of second Chronicles in our Old Testament reading. We will read chapters 17 and 18 today. And this week we’ve been reading from the English Standard Version.
Commentary:
Okay. So, obviously as we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans, we see that there’s some highly theological technical language in here. And at some points as he’s making an argument for what the law is and what the law is not, and this is a very controversial conversation that he is having, especially from people who have been raised in Judaism and who revere the law. Paul is obviously misunderstood on a number of levels, but we can see from this letter, especially even from today’s reading that he’s not attempting to throw the religion he was raised in, which is Judaism, out the window in favor of like a completely different belief system. Instead, he’s trying to show that Jesus is a part of that story, like He continues that story and that story began with Abraham not Moses, which is a very…absolutely irreplaceable distinction for Paul’s theology. Paul’s not just writing this like for no reason. He was a well-educated person, a very articulate, deeply devoted to God, a Pharisee, a person like giving and devoting their life to strictly obeying the Mosaic law and Paul had attempted to find his way to God through that process only to discover that it’s impossible. It’s impossible to become perfect on your own by just simply trying to obey certain sets of rules. So, Paul in his own personal struggle and then in his encounter with Jesus begin to realize the essence of what Jesus was teaching, that God’s people had lost the plot of the story. They were trying to obey a set of rules that were no longer connected to the spiritual underpinning and the result was that the life was sucked out of the law and there’s only this shell of ritual left behind or just in the words of Paul, “what shall we say then? Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is a righteousness that is by faith, but that Israel who pursued the law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law? Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone.” So, here’s the deal. What we’re talking right here for Paul and for that matter for Jesus, this is where the train went off the tracks. The law was to be a continual reminder of what God had brought them out of and to lead them into complete dependence on God and into deep intimacy with Himself, but instead over the generations the law had become this source of power and control that lead people to believe they could achieve righteousness before God all on their own if they could simply obey the law perfectly, which nobody could. And Paul had tried hard. And, so, Paul says it like this, “I do bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness”, right? So, nobody could do it. As hard as people have been trying to do it, no one could reach perfection until Jesus came along. And then Paul says Jesus is essentially the first picture of a person who got it right, like was perfect and He didn’t do it by strictly adhering to the rituals. And we know this because not adhering to the rituals was what got Jesus in trouble. So, for Paul, Jesus demonstrated that He fulfilled the law by demonstrating His complete and total dependence on God and His obvious intimacy with the Father and that can only happen through faith. Right? The reality of what we hope for, the evidence of things we cannot see. So, Paul finally threw his hands up in the air realizing that it was impossible to obey the law perfectly in one’s own strength. No one ever did it before but maybe the impossibility was the point. The law was to lead a person to the end of their own feeble attempts to be righteous and at the end of that road there’s nowhere to go but to take a leap of faith and that leap of faith…and man…this is not so Jewish that we can’t understand this as Gentile Christians because we’re trying to follow all the rules and find the right recipes and the right mixture of things that we should do and prayers that we should pray to get the things done that we need to be done and how to find inner peace inside of ourselves and try to find the Holy Spirit’s leading…like we’re trying to do it by rote, by rule, usually. Maybe not everybody, but me. Like, I can raise my hand and say yeah, when I really got serios about my faith I got really serious about obeying, like really trying to deconstruct it to the point that I could say this is how it works. And every road leads to one place, a leap of faith. There is no other way to find intimacy with God other than to take a leap of faith and believe in what you have no control over. So, if life has been lived under a cloud, wondering when the mighty hammer of God’s gonna fall on you because you’re breaking the rules, that’s not what’s happening. Like, that’s not what’s happening here. Faith in Christ is the bridge and once you cross over it you have been made perfect in God’s sight and your upbringing or your ethnicity or whatever it’s not…it doesn’t matter anymore. Anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord has this open invitation or again like, let’s just read it out of the Bible. This is Paul’s words. This is his way of explaining this. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him. For whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” And that’s that. Like, there’s no blackout dates on that. Like, there’s no caveats. There’s no exclusions there. It just is what it is. So, if you’re one of the ones here in this community who have been an outsider for so long you don’t know where you stand. If you are a strong believer trying to obey all the rules perfectly and feeling like a failure every day because you can’t or if you’re just here trying to find out what the Bible actually says, but you don’t believe anything, if you’ve never crossed that threshold and leapt into a relationship with God, maybe this is your time. And if you’ve lived the rituals that keep you in fear then maybe this is your time to walk in freedom. I’m not making something up here. We’re reading from the book of Romans from the pen of the apostle Paul who wrote two thirds of the New Testament that comprises the faith of all believers of Jesus. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Song:
Come To Jesus
This is for the weary and the
weak
This is for the desperate and ashamed
This is for the hopeless hiding in the shadows
Cupping hands around a flicker of faith
This is for the ones who don’t belong
This is for the silent castaways
This is for the sinner peeking through the stained glass
From a sidewalk in the cold, driving rain
We all fall down
We all need saving once in a while
You are not alone
We all lose faith
And lean on mercy but through our darkest night
He said He’d wait for us
Just come to Jesus
For anyone who’s given up on God
For those who’ve tripped and fallen out of grace
For anyone who’s looking
To the bottom of a bottle
For the strength to make it through another day
He did not come to raise the
living
Or touch the eyes of those who see
It was for the bitter and burned
out
It was for the unforgivable
It was for the failure standing on the bridge
Because the guilt’s too high a price to pay to live