If you think back to how you know someone today, you probably remember how you met them in real life or saw them on social media. Back then, how did the Israelites know God?
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Romans
The resurrection is indeed a weighty truth. We have been looking at the truth and power of the resurrection previously. In this study, we continue our study of 1 Corinthians, looking at verses 35 to 58, and later at Romans 8. Through this study, we aim to highlight how the resurrection is a cosmic event; an event of grander scale, above the resuscitation of a physical body.
Today, we'll begin looking at the first doctrine of grace -- total depravity. This is a study about understanding ourselves in our natural state before we knew God. To help us do so, we'll take a look at Ps 53, and also a corresponding passage in the letter to the Romans.
In this third study of the series, we'll look at who Jesus is from Rom 3:21-26. Martin Luther called this passage “the chief point, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible”.
We're now in the final verses of Romans 8, and to understand the closing verses, we need to understand and recap the previous verses to understand what Paul has been trying to establish and build towards.
In this passage, Paul is dealing with the important idea of justification. Romans 4 has Paul answering one important question: how is a man justified? Justified is a legal term, and it simply means to be declared righteous. With justification comes approval and innocence. In Romans 4, Paul uses two examples that the early readers of Romans were familiar with -- Abraham and David -- to show what faith is. We too, can learn so much from this very, very rich text!
The New Testament cannot be properly understood without the unfolding story of the Old Testament. St. Augustine once wisely said that "The New is in the Old contained, the Old is in the New explained." The key to understanding the NT is to understand the themes set up in the OT, and that's what we did in the previous session. This is also the context that we need to understand.