07/16/2020 DAB Transcript

1 Chronicles 22:1-23:32, Romans 3:9-31, Psalms 12:1-8, Proverbs 19:13-14

Today is the 16th day of July welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is a joy and honor to be here with you today once again, around the Global Campfire. No matter what time of day or night it is, no matter where we are there is this place and we can come here whenever we want and know that we’re not alone and have God’s word available to us just to speak into our lives. And what a remarkable gift that is. And, so, let’s partake of this gift by taking the next step forward in our week and month and year. This will lead us back into book at first Chronicles for the Old Testament portion of today. We’ll read first Chronicles chapters 22 and 23 and we’re still moving through the life and reign of David and we’re reading from the Lexham English Bible this week.

Commentary:

Alright. So in the third chapter of Romans, which is where we spent our time in the New Testament today Paul is…like…I mean what we’re….what he peeled away today is the essence or the foundation of faith in Jesus and why it works. And we have remember, Paul’s speaking to Hebrew people but we also have to remember that like, nothing that Paul’s gonna say…none of its gonna make any sense like completely divorced from the Hebrew context. Jesus was in a Hebrew context. Paul was a Hebrew Pharisee. Like, the lens that we’re looking through, even though Gentiles never really lived under that, there’s no way to fully grasp what Paul’s saying devoid of any kind of Hebrew context. It sounds like gobbledygook. It sounds like nonsense, which is something that Paul will say in one of his letters later. But the problem is that for the Hebrew people this is also sounding kind of like nonsense, kind of like they’re supposed to reject…like Paul’s trying to say the story is moving forward. We are being swept forward into the story. For them though, on so many levels it’s like, “no. You are asking us to be in a different story and to be in a different story is to reject all that we have ever known at all that God has done to make us a chosen people.” And, so we see in today’s portion of the letter is kind of a distillation like…like it comes down to one thing – nobody, Jew or Gentile, nobody is perfect. Nobody. And even if God gave us a pathway to perfection through the Mosaic law nobody can do it. Nobody is perfect. Nobody on their own is going to be able to perfectly obey the law and find themselves in the presence of Yahweh, of God, demanding fellowship because of their own righteousness. So, on one level Paul’s trying to say that this is the equalizer. Jew or Gentile, no matter mineral you are nobody is perfect. Nobody is a righteous. And we all believe that if we want fellowship with God, that is…that requires righteousness. So, we have a path but that nobody can follow. And, so, fellowship with God is unattainable, Jew or Gentile. So, what…what are we to do then? Like, how is it that we are then going to achieve the unachievable? How is it that we’re gonna reach for God and pursue it our whole lives and fall short in the end? How do we actually find ourselves in right standing before God so that we might have a covenantal relationship with Him? Paul says, “apart from the law the righteousness of God has been revealed being testified about by the law and the prophets. That is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. For there is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” This is the bedrock. This is the foundation. This is…I mean Paul has a number of arguments that we are going to enter into in all of his different writings for all kinds of different purposes, but in terms of salvation and in terms of relationship with God, Paul is saying, “you can’t achieve the unachievable. It’s not possible. But God can achieve whatever God wants to achieve. And what He wants to achieve is to make you righteous before Him and welcome you as His son or daughter into intimate fellowship together and all you have to do is believe that He wants you, believe that He sent His son to rescue you.” I mean…fund…fundamentally, Paul’s speaking to people who are like devoted to studying Torah, to studying the Bible, to find out what to do so that they can try to do those things so that they can get God to act on the behalf. And in so many ways he’s saying, “you can study that until you’re blue in the face. You can memorize it. If…if you’re not gonna live it it’s not gonna matter and no matter what you do, no matter how well you understand this, you cannot achieve it by yourself on your own in your own strength. Like, you can build all the theological formulas that you want. Just building the formula building the box, that doesn’t do it. You have to believe through faith that it’s already done.” Ahhh…and that…that’s beautiful, that’s the good news…good news and it is so good that I almost want to sit down and ponder it for a minute and come back. But we know…we…we know this, and yet we’re still so often trying to do the same thing, trying to study to find the formula, to jump through the hoops correctly and pull the levers in sequence to get things to happen that are already done. And, so, live less than we are our whole lives when the whole world needs us to be a kingdom of priests, right? To shine the light into the world, not by what we claim, not by what we say, not by our theology, by the way we live, that we are the light in the darkness. And, so, when people are in the dark, they’re looking for the light. But we’re still kind of so busy trying to get the formula right that we never really shine. But fear not, Paul has much more to say. And before we get through the letters of Paul, the things that he is going to say about who we are, are mind bending. Absolutely blow your mind stuff is in front of us in these next months. But right here right now as we expose the bedrock upon which Paul will build, we understand that no matter how hard we try we’re going to fail. We cannot be perfect. And that’s bad news for perfectionists out there until you realize that you already have been made perfect before God through faith in Jesus.

Prayer:

Father, Holy Spirit fall upon us with this awareness of what we’ve always known, but make it real to us, give us eyes to see this and ears to hear this because it’s not just about our personal redemption. It is about the rescue of the world. So, come…come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

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