Survey of the Pauline Epistles (Classes 1 & 2)

Pop Quiz Review and the Scope of the Pauline Epistles

All right, everybody, let's see where we are with our pop quiz. Those of you who are joining us by video or audio, the class has been taking a very quick quiz to start today. And this is to go over what we have talked about so far in this class, seven questions.

Question number one, which gospel writer is historically identified with the apostle Peter, Daisy? Okay, no. The gospel writer, which one of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Huh? No, that's okay, I didn't mean to, I wasn't trying to call you out, I was just, yeah, all right, who was it?

Yeah, Mark, remember we said Matthew was an apostle, Luke was associated with Paul, John was an apostle, and Mark was writing from the perspective of Peter. According to church tradition, Mark is writing from Peter, so therefore we could, in a sense, call Mark the gospel of Peter.

Now, which gospel is identified as autopic, John? And what does autopic mean? Means from a singular perspective, from a single perspective, the synoptic gospels come from three, it's the three sort of working together, coming from three perspectives, but the autopic gospel is a single perspective.

All right, now this one here could have a variety of answers. What three events from the life of Christ are in all four gospels? Now, there's a bunch, but somebody give me one. Watered wine's only in the gospel of John.

Yep, that was one of the miracles. That's the first miracle John mentioned, one of the seven miracles. This is something that all four gospels contain. What's something all four gospels contain? You know, I'd have to look that up, but I think you're right.

Feeding of the 5 ,000 is mentioned in all four. Anybody else have one? Cleansing of the temple. I'm not sure that that is included in all four. I'd have to look that up. Most specifically, I'm looking for death, burial, and resurrection.

That's why I had three, because the death, burial, and resurrection, the heart of the gospel is in all three. Now, Mark's gospel, with the ending controversy, we could say there's questions about how much he tells about the resurrection, but all three have the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

That, of course, being foundational to the gospel. All right, who was the first Christian martyr in the book of Acts? Stephen, that's right. Often referred to as Saint Stephen. What was the purpose of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15?

Not everybody refers to it as the Jerusalem Council, but I tend to. Yes. Yes, it was debating the inclusion of the Gentiles within the covenant, and moreover, how they would be included. Would they have to be circumcised?

But yes, the inclusion of the Gentiles was the purpose of that council. Number six, Acts focuses primarily on the ministry of two apostles. Who are they? Peter and Paul, that's right. The first 12 or so chapters deal with the ministry of Peter.

The last half or more deals with the ministry of Paul. So, Peter and Paul. How does the Bible describe the death of Paul? It is not a trick question, but it is a specifically written question. How does the Bible describe the death of Paul?

The answer is it doesn't. It doesn't describe the death of Paul. We are not given that information. In fact, the Bible doesn't tell us about the deaths of the apostles. We get that information through tradition and other historical sources, such as a lot of people believe Peter was crucified upside down.

Is that true? Well, church tradition says it is, but there's nothing biblical about that. If a person said, I don't believe that's how it happened, that's fine. I don't have any other evidence of anything else, right?

So, I just take it as the fact that it's our tradition, but it's not scriptures. Well, tonight we are going to begin a two-part lesson on the Pauline epistles. The Pauline epistles will take up this class and next class.

And I know this may seem like a very simple question, but who wrote the Pauline epistles? Paul, absolutely. We're going to be looking at the epistles that Paul wrote. Now, if you were here last week, we talked about Paul's biography, which we find portions of in the book of Acts, and we find portions of Paul's biography in his letters, most specifically the beginning of Galatians, which was his first letter.

He writes talking about what happened right after his conversion and those things. And so, I showed you on the board last week how we have to harmonize some of Acts with some of what Paul wrote to arrive at a conclusion of when things are happening in his life.

I want to read to you a quote. The man known to us as the Apostle Paul began life as Saul of Tarsus. The account of his radical conversion to Christ is found in several places in the New Testament. From the moment he was saved, he began preaching about Jesus, and over the next several years, he traveled extensively planting churches wherever he went.

When not with those churches, he still carried the responsibility for them in his heart like a father for his children. Much of the New Testament is made up of his letters to some of those churches. We know for certain that Paul wrote at least 13 letters that are included in the New Testament.

So, what are those letters? Romans would be the first one in the list. Now, this is not chronological. This is the way the Bible gives them to us. We know we have four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

We have the book of Acts, and then it immediately goes into the letters of Paul with Romans, 2 Corinthians, General Electric Power Company. Yeah, you got it, yeah. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.

All right, so how many did we just count? Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 13 books. Now, there are those who argue that Paul wrote Hebrews, which would make that the 14th writing of Paul.

But in this class, I am going to contend that he did not write the book of Hebrews. Therefore, I will not be including it in the Pauline epistles. However, if you want to believe that Paul wrote Hebrews, you are welcome to continue to believe something that is wrong.

That's a little bit of a joke, a little bit of Pauline humor, ha ha. No, I honestly don't know who wrote Hebrews, but I don't believe Paul wrote it because the book of Hebrews states, the author states that he got his information secondhand.

And Paul would never say that. Paul says, I got my information directly as a revelation from Jesus Christ. So I think that to me excludes Pauline authorship. As Hebrews chapter two, clearly he says that he received this information from others.

Whereas Paul clearly says in Galatians, I received my ministry, my gospel is a revelation of Jesus Christ specifically. Now, in our lesson on the book of Acts, we look briefly at the significance of the apostle Paul.

And as we noted, the latter half of the book of Acts recounts his missionary work. The book of Acts records three missionary journeys. So we have the first missionary journey, which is in Acts 13 and 14.

So I'm just gonna put the first missionary journey is in Acts 13 and 14. You may wanna take these down because we're gonna address some chronological things here. His second missionary journey is in Acts 15, 36 to 18, 22.

And the last missionary journey is 18, 23 to 20, 38. So the first one, Acts 13 and 14 was into lower Asia minor, and it was with Barnabas. He traveled with Barnabas on his first missionary journey. The second missionary journey was with Silas to Asia minor and Greece.

And the third missionary journey was also in Asia minor. Some believe that Paul had a fourth journey, but it is not explicitly recorded for us. These missionary journeys are important because it is where we are introduced to many of the places where Paul's letters will be addressed.

In fact, Galatia, if you're familiar with the area known right now as Turkey, that is the area that at that point would have been referred to as Asia minor. Well, not exactly. There is some debate about where Galatians was sent.

Now I have my opinion and I'll explain why I'm right in a minute, but there's a Northern area where the people were called Galatians. And then there's the Southern region that was referred to also as the Galatian region.

So there were two regions and both had names that were the same. And so you had basically like a North and South Galatia. The Northern Galatian region would not be reached until Paul's second or third missionary journey, but the Southern would have been reached on his first missionary journey.

Based upon the internal evidence of the book of Galatians that he writes to the Galatians, it seems very obvious to me that he's writing before the second and third missionary journey. He's writing after his first missionary journey.

So if you read Acts 13 and 14, you read about places like Lystra and Derbe and Iconium and those places, that's Southern Galatia. And I believe that's where Paul is writing to when he writes to the Galatians.

So on his first missionary journey, we get one letter, after, after, and that letter is the letter to the Galatians. So that's his first letter, first missionary journey. Yeah, it would have been afterwards, so it would have been in there, yeah.

Now, the second missionary journey would be where we, afterwards, where we get the Thessalonian letters, first and second Thessalonians. So as far as order, you're starting to see the order come about, right?

You're starting to see when these things are happening. After the third missionary journey is when we get the Corinthian letters and also Romans. Now, there are also the letters known as the prison epistles which are Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon.

Those are all written by Paul from prison. And then we have the pastoral epistles which are toward the end of Paul's life, which would be 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus. We know 2nd Timothy very specifically is towards the end of his life because he says, I've run the race, I've kept the faith, my time is coming to an end.

He knows that his life is close to being at an end point. And so that kind of gives you an idea. And we are going to be following the order that we have in our Bibles, Romans, 1st, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, but honestly, a proper study of Paul's epistles, if I were doing a longer, broader study, would begin with Galatians.

And I believe Galatians sets the stage for the rest of Paul's letters. It's very unique within the Pauline corpus because it is more autobiographical. He talks about his life and what he's done. He does that in other letters, but very specifically in Galatians, he's defending himself against those who would say that he's preached essentially a false gospel, that he hasn't given them all the information because they're demanding that people be circumcised and all that.

And Paul's coming in and says, no, I didn't preach a false gospel. They're preaching the false gospel. Remember, it was at the beginning of Galatians where Paul says, if any man brings to you a gospel other than what I gave you, let him be accursed.

There's a very tense opening to Galatians. Galatians, the only letter where there's no greeting, there's no, I give thanks to you. And for all, I give thanks for all of you. There's none of that Galatians.

It just goes right into, I can't, who has bewitched you? You know, who has, you know, brought this bad teaching in? So Galatians is, like I said, it's Paul's first letter. It's very bold. It's very, it's unique among the corpus.

And we're gonna talk about it some tonight, but just to give you an idea of this is the chronology of Paul's writing. So with that in mind, I do wanna say something else about Paul's theology. And I wanna mention, this is not in my notes.

This is actually something I had the opportunity to do a little bit of studying, to prepare myself to teach again, as I always try to, always trying to learn myself. Had an opportunity to listen to some lectures by Dr. Douglas Moo, who wrote the textbook that, one of the textbooks that I use for this class, and wonderful teacher, wonderful Bible teacher.

And he mentioned something that I thought would be helpful for us. And so this is new in the sense that it was from his lecture, not from my original notes. He said, when we consider the theology of Paul, we need to consider it from the perspective of coherence and contingency.

So if you'll write those two words down, coherence and contingency. And here's what he's referring to. If I were to ask you, what is the theology of Paul? Well, Paul didn't write a theological textbook.

Paul wrote 13 letters to churches and individuals that are filled with theological information, but they are not 13 theological books as if like Wayne Grudem, Wayne Grudem wrote a systematic theology and Jim Boyce wrote a systematic theology and different people have written.

Paul never sat down and said, okay, I'm gonna tell you all about God and his nature and being. And now I'm gonna tell you all about Christ and his nature and being. I'm gonna tell you all about the Holy Spirit.

Like if you guys continue in the academy, one day we'll do that course together. I teach systematic theology, one of my favorite courses because I love it. And that's what we do. We start with God and then Christ and then the spirit.

And we look at the church and the gifts and all kinds of things. It's an outlined, but Paul never does that. What he does is he writes his letters contingent. And that's where the word contingency comes from.

Contingent upon the needs of the specific church or person that he's writing to. So when he writes to Corinthians, he's writing a letter which is answering questions that they have sent to him. And here's the kicker.

We don't have the questions. We don't have the letter that he got that he's responding to. He mentioned several times in 1 Corinthians about what you wrote, about what you wrote. Well, we don't got what they wrote.

We don't know if they were asking him open-ended questions like, Paul, what do you think about thus and so? Or if they had an opinion and they were saying, this is the way it is, Paul, tell us how right we are.

So the difference in Corinthians and Romans is massive because Romans is not written to answer the questions of the Roman church, Corinthians is. 1 Corinthians is written to answer the questions of the church, right?

And what Paul deals with in Romans and 1 Corinthians is different than what he deals with in 1 Thessalonians. It's different than what he deals with in Titus and Philemon. I mean, Philemon just by itself, we'll look at it more next week, but just by itself, it's a book about a escaped slave who Paul is sending back to his master with a commendation to free him and make him a brother in Christ.

I mean, essentially, right? There's more to it than that. But if you think about it, that whole book by itself speaks very little about any theological information. We don't really read in that book about the nature of God or about the nature of justification or things like that.

And so if I said, let's look at the theology of Paul from Philemon, we'd get very little. So this is where coherence comes in. Contingency is the idea of what each book says. So it's contingent on the book, but coherence is bringing the books together, you see, and forming a coherent theology based upon the 13 letters of Paul.

And then of course you have to harmonize that with what else? The rest of the New Testament, right? There's 27 books. 13 of them belong to the apostle Paul as author, but there are more books. And then what else do you have to harmonize it with?

The Old Testament, right? You have to harmonize the New Testament and the Old Testament. So this isn't anything new, the idea of contingency and coherence, but where we get the issue with Paul is there are people who will make bold claims.

There are people who would make really bold claims about Paul and what he taught, and yet they're only focusing on one thing, one book, one contingent situation, rather than looking at the whole and making it cohere with everything.

That's the part that's most important is having your contingent statements come together in coherence with the whole. Some people think that it's impossible because there are people who don't believe the Bible is of God.

I mean, there are people who just believe these are guys, these are first century men writing from their own minds. And the idea is that Paul could have had this idea over here and this idea over here, and there's no reason to try to bring them together.

That's an ungodly way of looking at it, but that's the way a lot of people do. Or they put positions on Paul's letters. Well, Romans is more important than this, so we're gonna always take this or this, rather than trying to harmonize, they put, they kind of, and I mean, honestly, I remember a guy telling me years ago, all I need is a book of Romans.

Now, I remember him saying, he said, I've just spent the rest of my life studying Romans and preaching Romans, I don't need any of the rest of it. And I thought, what a myopic view. One of, you know, you don't need the gospels, you don't need the words of Christ.

There's one thing about Paul's letters that you'll notice, he rarely quotes Christ. Go through, go through over the next few weeks, read just the 13 letters of Paul. It's short, you can read them all in a weekend.

The letters of Paul are short, right? Read all three through all of them, find how many times he quotes Jesus. Now, I'm not saying he's wrong in that, I'm just saying it's just the idea of Paul is, Paul, it's, think of Paul like this.

The gospels are narrative, text is also narrative, but the epistles are didactic. The word didactic means that the what? No, no, that's dialogical. The word didactic means that they are teaching literature.

So narrative literature tells a story. Didactic literature teaches a lesson. But what are the didactic letters intending to do? They're intending to explain the narrative. Paul's letters are explaining to us who Christ is and what Christ did.

So the fact that he doesn't quote Christ doesn't mean he's not infatuated with Christ. He certainly loves Christ. He is infatuated with his savior and the letters are all about the Lord Jesus Christ, but he's not quoting him, he's exegeting him.

Paul is exegeting who Jesus is and what he did. So Paul's theology is wrapped up in the person and work of Jesus Christ. So tonight we are going to look at Romans to Colossians. We're going to look at authorship, dating and purpose, which we sort of already have done a little bit of.

We're going to look also at theological insights, which we're getting to. And then we're gonna look at interpretive challenges probably after the break. So let's talk about authorship. And you say, well, wait a minute, these are Paul's epistles.

We know who the author is. Yes, we do. But we need to take a step back and say, even though Paul is the author of all 13 of these books, Paul did not write all 13 of these books. You say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

If he's, how do you say he's the author, but not the writer? Well, in many of them, he used what was called an Emanuensis. And Emanuensis was a person that wrote as he spoke. So Paul spoke and they dictated what he wrote onto a paper.

So that we see him talk about that. In fact, at certain letters, the Emanuensis actually names himself and tells that he, the one who wrote this. I want to quote to you from the, this is actually from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It says of the 27 books of the New Testament, 13 are traditionally attributed to Paul, though only seven of these are accepted as being entirely authentic and dictated by Paul himself. The authorship of the others is debated and they're commonly thought to have come from contemporary or later followers writing in Paul's name.

Now, I don't agree with that. I'm just reading that quote because when I say Paul wrote 13 letters, I do believe some people wrote as he spoke, but I believe he is the author in the sense of the source of all 13 letters.

There are those who believe that Paul is not the source of certain letters. In fact, within critical theory, which takes a higher critical approach to the scriptures, there are those who would say Paul didn't write 2 Timothy, there are those who'd say Paul didn't write Colossians, there are those who would say Paul did not write a few of the other letters, and they would say only seven of them are authentically Pauline, but I disagree with that completely.

I don't believe the critical theory at that point, but just to make the simple argument, especially about 2 Timothy, 2 Timothy seems to be a very personal letter from Paul, and he speaks of personal experiences had with Timothy.

So those who argue for it tend to argue for it from the perspective of someone is using Paul's name to try to get some credibility for their work, but there's nothing in the internal information of that book that would support that, at least not from my perspective.

There's a lot of different arguments as to who might've written it, but like I said, I believe Paul is the source of all of these, not necessarily the writer, because there are people who are writing, but certainly the source.

All right, very quickly, I'm gonna give you the order that I believe they're written in. I don't know how fast you wanna try to write these down, but I'll give them to you. I believe Galatians was first, as I already mentioned, would have been written around the year 48.

This would have been just prior to the events of Acts 15. And think about it, Galatians and Acts 15 are both dealing with the same thing. And we talked about this for the pop quiz. They're both dealing with the inclusion of the Gentiles.

First Thessalonians would have been written around the year 50, second 30, second Thessalonians would have been written shortly thereafter. By the way, they didn't come with titles. They didn't come with, it didn't say, this is my first letter to Thessalonica, or this is my first letter to the second letter, or whatever.

These are letters we've attributed to them, or titles, rather, we've attributed to them. So some people have even argued that second Thessalonians was written first. I don't think that that's accurate.

I think the traditional order is correct, but they were both written close in time. First Corinthians would have been written in the mid 50s, as well as second Corinthians. Second Corinthians mentioning events from first Corinthians pretty much makes no argument as to which one came first.

Romans would have been the mid to late 50s. Philippians would have been in the early 60s, as would be Colossians, Philemon, and Ephesians. First Timothy, Titus, and second Timothy would have all been mid 60s.

And that would have been right around the time of Paul's demise. Yeah, Ephesians would have been early 60s. And Titus would have all been mid 60s. Like I said, they were the last of his writings. And what's interesting is if you look at it from that perspective, if you look at that list I just gave you, you can see an evolution in Paul's teaching.

Now be careful with the word evolution, because some people think evolution means, well, evolution does mean change, but I don't mean a change in the sense of Paul changing his views. But we see an evolution in Paul's teaching where early on in Galatians and Corinthians, he is correcting error.

But by the time of Romans and Ephesians, he's systematizing his theology and making himself clear. By the time of Titus and Timothy, he's establishing rules and procedures for the church. See how that sort of at the beginning, it's like, okay, I planted the churches and here's where you guys are messing up.

Here's in the middle where I'm gonna focus on more systematized understanding. And then by the end, okay, now we got to structure the church. And that's why Titus and Timothy gives us the outline of the elders and the pastors and the deacons and all those things.

As I said earlier, when I talked about contingency, the purpose of each of Paul's books is contextual. It's written to a specific audience and it comes in the form of a epistle. We often talk about the book of Romans or the book of Ephesians, but actually they're not books.

They are epistles. The word epistle comes from the Greek word apostole, which means a letter, a message, or a dispatch. Of the 27 books of the New Testament, 21 of them are epistles. The ones that are not epistles are four gospels, Acts and Revelations, Revelation.

Paul's epistles were written to either a specific church or a specific person. Some of them were written in response to letters we don't have, as I said, with 1 Corinthians. And here's a few verses, 1 Corinthians 7, 1, now concerning the matters which you wrote, 1 Corinthians 5, 9, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate, you know, oh, that's, I'm sorry, I just skipped over something.

There's a letter that we don't have from Paul because in 1 Corinthians 7, 1, he says, concerning what you wrote, meaning he received a letter, but in 1 Corinthians 5, he says, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate.

So there's a missing letter of Paul out there somewhere. It's not scriptural, but there was a letter of Paul to the Corinthians where he specifically addressed sexually immoral people. He says, I wrote to you in my letter.

No, this would either be saying, here's one of two ways, either there's a letter we don't know about, or Paul is saying, I wrote to you in my letter, and he's referring to the letter he's currently writing.

Like I wrote to you earlier in this letter, and that could be as well. So there's a couple of different ways that scholars have sort of dealt with that. But he addresses a letter that, potentially the idea of a letter that we don't have.

If I were to ascribe an overall purpose to Paul, I would say his letters are mainly pastoral in nature. Even though we have three that we call the pastoral epistles, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus, his entire corpus or his entire work is that of a pastor to the churches.

He's a missionary church planter and theologian, but at his heart, he is a shepherd. He's planted these churches and he's writing to instruct and rebuke error. That's what a pastor does. Now, as to the theology of Paul, which again, we've already sort of touched on, Paul is the theologian of the early church.

Therefore, it's difficult to describe exactly how much breadth and weight we can put regarding his theological contribution. It does make sense that Paul would have a great theological mind. He was trained in such a way, according to Philippians 3 .5, he was trained in theology as a Pharisee.

The Pharisees were trained in the Old Testament, but Paul does not appeal to his training as his source of information. Paul claims to have received his revelation directly from Jesus Christ. You can write this down, Galatians 1, 11 and 12.

He says this, for I have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

This is not to say that his former training didn't serve him. We know that it did, but we need to understand, because this is where a lot of people miss the mark. They come to some conclusion that Paul's teachings are somehow being over, maybe that's, that Paul's training as a Pharisee is somehow overcoming his teaching as an apostle, and therefore some of what he says is not accurate.

It's a product of his teaching. Good example. Paul clearly says that women are not to be pastors. Some people get offended by that, but Paul is clear that women are not to be pastors, and some would say, well, that's not Christian.

That is a byproduct of his Pharisaical upbringing, and I don't believe that that's true. One of the places that people argue for that, most specifically is in 1 Corinthians where Paul says, I, not the Lord, say to you.

Remember that, 1 Corinthians 7, he specifically says, I, not the Lord, and therefore they assume that what Paul means is that he's giving his own opinion, and he's not giving them revelation from Christ.

You can ask me, it's okay. Isn't that in Peter also? Not that I'm aware of, I'd have to look it up. This is specifically 1 Corinthians 7. Paul is Women pastors. Huh? Yeah, women pastors. Well, I'm talking about, in this particular instance, it's talking about marriage and divorce.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul says, I say to you, I, not the Lord, and what he is saying there, a lot of people assume that this Paul is giving his opinion, but it's not a direct revelation from the Lord, so therefore we can ignore it.

That's the way a lot of people treat it. We can ignore that. The problem with that line of thinking is what Paul is saying in context is that Christ gave specific commands about marriage and divorce when he was on the earth, Matthew 19, Matthew 6.

There's several places where Jesus specifically addresses marriage and divorce, but he didn't say everything. And so Paul says, I say to you, I, not the Lord, in the sense that the Lord Jesus said these things, but I am giving you additional revelation, and I have the authority of an apostle to do so.

Because I'm filled with the Holy Spirit, I'm being used by God as an apostle, and I have the ability to make, because Paul says to us things about marriage that Jesus doesn't. For instance, the issue of an unbelieving spouse.

Jesus doesn't address that specifically. Paul does. Paul also addresses the issue of someone being remarried, and he says it's better to marry than to burn with desire, right? That's an issue that he's specifically addressing there.

And so my point is simply to say this. Some people would say Paul is not speaking from God, he's speaking from experience. He's speaking from his life's training as a Pharisee. But Paul doesn't allow for that.

He says, no, what I'm saying is revelation from God, revelation from Christ. And so we have to come to the conclusion that Paul is either speaking from God or he's not. Some people believe he's not. Some people believe Paul absconded with the Christian faith, that Paul took what Christ taught and perverted it.

Obviously, I think those people are mad, but that is what some people believe. Paul's letters are not his interpretation of the truth, but rather they are the truth of God, which is given through him.

That is a very important understanding. Paul is not interpreting truth or history, he is proclaiming truth that has been given to him by God. Now, I think I've already said this, but I'll go ahead and tip my hand if it hasn't been obvious.

I have a favorite letter of Paul's, and it is the letter of Galatians, followed very quickly by the letter of Romans. Galatians is my favorite because it's his first letter and it's different than the others.

But Romans is my favorite second because it is Paul's magnum opus. Paul clearly outlines doctrines such as sin, justification, sanctification, election, adoption, even doctrines like predestination and reprobation, they are clearly outlined in Romans.

And it is these two books, keep it from a historical perspective, and if you take my church history class, you'll hear me say this again. These two books had the most profound impact on Martin Luther and ultimately the rest of the reformers as well.

Both letters stood at the center of the Reformation protest that rocked and eventually split the Christian church during the 16th century. In fact, the beginning of the Reformation can, with some justification, be traced to Martin Luther's lectures on Romans, which happened from 1515 to 1516, and then Galatians, which happened from 1517 to 1518 in Wittenberg.

And that was a quote, by the way, I was quoting from a blog article, but that we can look to those two books and Martin Luther's study of Romans first and then Galatians as having a profound impact. And within almost a decade between them, they demonstrate Paul's consistent theological message, because his message between Galatians and Romans, which are 10 years apart, his message remains the same.

One could argue, since we're on theological insights, one could argue that even though you can't pin down Paul's theology to any one area, one could argue that his most significant contribution comes to us in the doctrine of justification.

In fact, interestingly enough, about the doctrine of justification is there's only one place that I'm aware of, and I think I'm correct about this, I remember looking it up one time. The only place in the gospels, that is the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the only place where the word justified is used in regard to sin is when Jesus told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

Remember he said there was a Pharisee and a tax collector who went to the temple, the Pharisee went to the temple and he says, Lord, I'm not like other men, I thank Thee that I'm not like other men, don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other, and it says the tax collector stood at a distance and he beat his breast and he said, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, and then Jesus said it was that man and not the other who went home justified.

Interesting, I believe that's Jesus teaching us justification by faith, by the way, because that man didn't bring any works, that man didn't bring any goodness, he brought a broken and contrite heart.

The Bible says that's what God is looking for, a person who has a broken and contrite heart, right? That's what he did, he brought a broken heart to God and God justified him based on his faith. So thinking, yeah, they're having a barbecue across the street, I thought the house was on fire, it's a lot of smoke pouring out of that house over there, hope it isn't a fire, hope it is not a fire, that wasn't clear, I'll make sure the recording didn't think I said hope it's a fire, no, I hope it is not a fire.

Okay, so Paul, as I said earlier, Paul is exegeting the work of Christ and he provides for us insight into the doctrine of justification and he provides to us, and I'm gonna change colors here, a threefold doctrine of imputation, a threefold doctrine of imputation.

Now, what is imputation, class? Yes, you're right, but what is the word impute, what does that mean? Not quite substitute, substitute is in there, but that's the word imputation means to charge to someone's account, to place something into someone's account.

So for instance, if Daisy with all her millions of dollars decided she wanted to make me a millionaire, she could go to her bank and she could take a check for her millions and she could charge that to my account, she could impute that into my account and then I would be just as rich as Daisy.

I'm trying to get her to smile, she's not smiling. Okay, that is the picture of imputing to put something in to an account, okay? Now, how this relates to justification is three ways. Three imputations, the first is Adam.

Adam sins and he becomes a sinner and the guilt of his sin is charged to all of us. We receive the imputation of Adam's sin and that is why we say every man is born a sinner. Adam did not just sin on his own behalf, Adam sinned as the representative of all mankind and therefore we all bear the guilt of his sin.