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.
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