Book of Romans - God's Governance of Man | The Law of Love, Pt. 3 (01/30/2022)

Romans 13 and the Law of Love

All right, well, let us go into Romans chapter 13 and we shall continue. Let's see, I think, Ben, you got everything? Dave, you got everything you need back there? Let's see if I can get my notes going here.

So we're on, there's about four main, to me, four main divisions in this chapter and we're on the third one, the law of love, the law of Jesus Christ. And it's really such a huge and important topic because I was talking to a lifelong friend of mine yesterday that grew up as young boys and went all the way through school together.

And he is a pastor and studied theology at a very good school, kind of a sister to Dallas Theological Seminary. And it's really sound in his doctrine and he's read a lot more theology than I have. He's read it in German.

But anyway, he has some close lifelong friends that have gotten into this legalism thing. And they were taught it by a person who claimed to be a Jewish believer. And they've gone just totally off, just totally off center of the scriptures and balance of the scriptures.

And it's sad, he struggles with it. And, but he said, I'm not gonna talk with them anymore. I'm done because they are given over to it. And it's really sad, but it's around and we need to know it. I mean, in your family and among your friends, business associates, you're going to run into this.

And they've tried to come into this church before. And it's interesting because the individual, I think that has an influence on these individuals, they live in the Hayek, was a member of this church for a while and introduced some of those concepts to me.

And so I know a couple of the concepts, I wrote 30 page papers to prove to the individual, that we got it right. We don't need to change this, such as do we believe in the Trinity? Did the Catholics invent that?

Those kinds of questions. And it's interesting because at the time, I just grew up believing that, so did you, right? And studied theology and it taught it, right? My mentors taught me and this individual questioned it and it made me have to think, okay, am I just believing that because I grew up believing it?

And I don't do that, do you? I don't do that anymore. I want to believe it if it's the truth, not because I grew up believing in it, right? So I studied it in honesty and integrity with this individual.

And the study came out quite frankly, showing that the Trinity is biblical. It's not Roman Catholic. It didn't come in because of Constantine and the Roman Catholics at all. It pre-existed that by over a hundred years.

And I told the individual, I knew I had read something of an early church father that lived at least a hundred years before Constantine who had talked about the Trinity. I said, well, if I can show you that, would you change your mind?

Because see, that would prove that the Catholics didn't invent it, wouldn't it? So he said, yes. Well, it took me, I don't know, might've been two months before I found it because I've got a big library.

I couldn't remember where I read it. I just knew I'd read it in my study. So finally I found it and I showed it to the gentleman and he said, hmm, and walked away and never changed his mind. Now to me, that's not an honest person.

So I sort of dissociated from the person pretty quickly after that. And I love the person. I genuinely do and miss the person and I'll see him in heaven, I hope in fellowship there. But other things too, other really legalistic things would try to be brought into this church.

But we, in this church, we like, if it ain't in the Bible and you can't back it up and you can't find any other brothers and sisters for 2000 years that agreed with your new thing, I mean, you got a problem there, right?

So you have to study, but those things are good. You think, well, that's terrible. Why does the Lord even allow false prophets to come into the church unawares as the scripture says? Well, it's so well studied, don't you think?

It causes us to be sharper. It's a part of God's work in our lives to never get lazy with the Bible or never just think we know all the Bible or to just keep studying. So it's sad, but it's kind of funny because this part of this message, I'm usually six weeks or two months ahead of where we are here in my study and for these sermons.

And a large part of this section, when we came to this verse, when we saw we were coming to this verse about that love is the fulfillment of the law, I said, well, we're gonna have to kind of talk about that a little because that's different than the Old Testament law, that's grace, right?

That's grace teaching. And so I knew I was gonna go into some of this about the difference and why God introduced the whole New Testament. He had the Old Testament, why did he do it? Why did God ordain it to be this way?

And so I went back to this, I don't know how many pages, anywhere between 30 and 60 page study that I did for this individual to show him that he was incorrect about the Trinity. And then there was another debate we had where he said, oh, well, there's a verse or two, he would agree with me that said that the Old Testament is just not as high as the New Testament in grace.

Law is not as high as that. I'd point that out to him and he'd say, yeah, but the law has been divided into three sections. The Jewish law is divided into three sections. And that's a fact, it is. But he said, it only applies to one of those three.

The other two are still in play. And that's what this group in Bahia believes and that's what they're teaching these people. So when he introduced that to me, there again, I'm thinking, okay, I grew up believing it just meant the whole Old Testament.

Maybe I'm wrong, I'll study it. So I did about a 40 page paper on that. And the paper was for me, not for him. I needed to know which is right. You can't both be right on that. And I'm interested in truth.

So as it turned out, I found scriptures through the Bible that nailed all three types of the Jewish law and said, all of them are abrogated. And I gave it to my friend. He never changed his mind as far as I know, which is weird to me, because I mean, if you show me something in context in the scripture, I will change what I believed.

And I hope you will too. Especially if you find other brothers and sisters for 2000 years, you can show that, well, they actually believed it this way and you kind of go in the wrong direction. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't we want to know the truth?

So anyway, some of this study comes from that. So maybe we wouldn't have this study if that hadn't happened. So I mean, I know it's irritating when you have family members or friends that want to argue with you about doctrine and you know with your heart that they are off in the wrong way, but you can't convince them.

How many of you have been there before, right? And boy, it just like, it just irritates you that they won't just believe like you do, right? How do I know that? Boy, that's me, right? But really when you think about it, and Charlotte showed me this beautiful passage, I've told you about it, but it affected my life.

I guess maybe two years ago now she showed it to me, but I relive it all the time where God made it so clear. He said, look, I may not change their mind. It's not your job to change their mind. It's your job just to meekly show them the truth and instruct them, it says, and I kind of like that word.

It doesn't say argue with them, it says instruct them. What does that mean? Just show them the truth. Don't worry about what they think about it or believe it or not. Just show them the truth in meekness.

And God says, maybe I'll change their mind. And that implies maybe I won't, right? So that's not for us to worry about, but that's hard to get used to, isn't it? This is gonna be good today because y 'all are in one of those kind of somber, quiet modes, like you could easily get sleepy.

And I had a talk with my scholarly friend yesterday that I was telling you about. And he said he found this magnificent new book and he reads lots of books. Theology. And I said, what's the book about?

He said, it's a dude that wrote a book that I told myself, I was gonna, I'm talking about him. My friend told himself he was gonna write the same book and he procrastinated, never did it. And someone did it.

Now he's mad at himself. He said, cause I had the idea that I was gonna start walking into Starbucks's. And what's the plural of Starbucks? Starbuck I? You should know, Katie. What is it? Is it Starbucks's?

He's gonna walk into Starbucks's, a couple of S's at the end, whatever. And on Sunday morning at 11, when they're full of people and my friend was gonna walk in and say, I'm doing a survey, which would be true cause he was gonna write a book about it.

I'm doing a survey, I'm doing research. Would you answer five questions for me? And one of the questions is gonna be, why are you not in church today, right now? Cause it was gonna be at church time when he does the interview.

Well, someone did the interview. And they've written a book about it, he tells me. And so I don't, he couldn't remember the name of the book. He just started reading it. And I said, well, man, just give me the bullet points and I don't have to read it.

And he said, well, I only remember one so far. And guess what the one was? Here's what they were saying. They said, we're tired of going to church and hearing a 45 minute lecture with no play with the people, no interaction with the people and then going home.

Tired of that. And I said, well, Terry, that's kind of what preaching in the Bible is. It's like, it's not a opinion thing where you share things back and forth. Preaching is like preaching. Now, maybe a Bible study, we can do that, right?

Where we share. And I said, and so he said, the man was talking about the Socratic method, which is what Otis used when he taught, right? He would teach by asking you a question that was hard to answer and you had to go study.

And it's a great way to teach. And I said, I'm not so sure that works with preaching, but yeah, for teaching, I would agree with it. And I said, think about this, Terry. Oh, I just told him the name of my friend.

It's okay. He doesn't care. There could be a thousand last names, but anyway. So Terry Acock told him, oops, I just said his last name. No, he says, no, I said to him, I said, now think about this, Terry.

What if you had 3000 to 15 ,000 people out there? How could you use that method? I mean, you'd have to just preach, right? And he said, yeah. And he said, that was the part of the, like little B of the same problem is they said they don't like mega churches because of that.

Isn't that interesting? So that's the first point in the book. I can't wait to hear some of the other points of things you don't like about church. Well, y 'all are here, but you may not like it either, right?

So I thought, well, I said, Terry, what's interesting about it, the size church we have, I can do that in the sermon. Well, I don't know if you noticed, but I do it sometimes anyway. I'll ask you a question and I won't keep going until someone answers it.

Have you ever noticed that? But I wasn't doing it on purpose, but it made me think probably preachers should, if they have a church of a size where it makes sense to do it. You know, you couldn't do it if you had 600 people.

You might could, but apparently people across the country are not going to church this morning. They're at Starbucks. They're out fishing. They're playing golf because the preachers aren't doing it right.

You think? Still interesting book though. So I may have some questions for you today. I may not, we'll see. All right, let's talk about this for a minute. Now, Romans chapter 13, verse nine, right there at the end of the verse, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

In verse 10 says, love works no ill to thy neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. That's kind of the crux of this idea. And we've asked ourselves, okay, how is that different than thinking you'd have to keep the law?

And how is it different than Old Testament? How is grace different than law and the prophets and so forth? We've been talking about that. So the last couple of Sundays, I would say if you want to jot down any key points, we're going to have a few of them, obviously.

The first one, I would put it something like this. If you want to keep notes, agape love, the very, you know, agape love can only come from God. It's not human. It's not natural man or women, men or women have it.

It's a God-like love because it's a love that is not based on the object of the love. It's based on the lover's heart. So like the person that's being loved can treat that person wrong. They can treat them right.

None of it matters. The love is the same. You see, that's God love there, isn't it? Like we treat God wrong. He loves us the same amount he does when we don't treat him wrong. And that comes from God.

So I would word it this way. The agape love of Jesus Christ is the fulfilling of the law. That's the first point. And that came from Romans 13, nine and 10. The next thing that we came to, oh, that's interesting because when it says fulfill, every time you see that little word in this chapter and these other chapters we go to in this study, it is the little Greek word, pleroma.

And it means, it literally means to fill full. It says fulfill is usually the word we translate it, but in the Greek it's to fill full. It's backwards instead of fulfill. You get that? It's hard to get, isn't it?

To fill full. It's hard for me to say, because it's backwards. It's to fill something entirely full. And you know, in grammar, like if you have a glass and you say, well, this one's more full than the other, that's incorrect grammar because full is full, right?

You can't be more full or less full. Now you can say it's more nearly full is the correct way to say that. I learned that from probably Ms. Harvey, Ms. Turner years ago in the sixth grade, but this means to be literally full.

So if you want to completely fulfill the law, the way it's done is by having agape love is what this verse says. Now that's a little different than what these legalizers will tell you, because what they'll tell you is if you love God, you will just work at a list of things you can and can't do, and you get really good at those.

How many of you think that would work very long? All right, the second point goes like this. And this was down around John chapter one, verses 135, when we brought that in. If you remember, it's talking about the word was with God and the word was God and in him was the life and the life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did what with it?

Comprehends it not. Now, let me give you, I don't think I gave you this definition. Let me give you the right definition for comprehend here in the Greek. It's a little different. It's using comprehend more like it meant in English in the 1600s.

So comprehend is a little different meaning now. So now it sort of just means to understand something, doesn't it? With knowledge, to really understand it and or to get it, to grab hold of it mentally and to understand it.

And it kind of has that same meaning, but I want to give you the old, the exact Greek word because Greek is kind of frozen. It doesn't change over time as much as English. So it comes from the word kata lambano and you can kind of tell that's two Greek words.

Most Greek words are put together that way. Kata is the first part of that. And that word, usually it can be, the most common translation is down, but it can also have the idea of opposition to something.

Like if you put kata in front of it, it's like, it means you're against whatever this next word is. Does that make sense? Like whatever you put there and you put kata in front of it. Like if you put, let's take the word Democrat, for example.

And you said kata, kata Democrat, it means I'm against Democrats. All right, that's just an example. You can say the same for Republicans. Now, so you kind of get the idea or it can mean, it can add intensity to the whole lot.

It can have the idea of intensity with it. Like I'm strongly, nevermind, I won't say that. Okay, now the next word is lambano, which means to take something. But literally, if you look at the construction of the word, it just means to get hold of something, to really get hold of something.

All right, so if you put kata in front of that, it's like, you don't get hold of it. Like you can't, you cannot grasp it. You can't grab hold of it. So when you look at, Jesus says he is the word and he comes into the world and he's the light or the understanding and knowledge of all things.

And yet the darkness cannot get hold of it with intensity. It really, really, really can't get hold of it. Does that make sense? At least like it cannot, it's actually opposed to getting hold of it is another way you could translate that.

So when you look at that and you understand it, that's the state of the natural world, men, women, boys, and girls, when they come into this life, then how can you take a group of rules and give that to such a person and expect them to reach God with that?

I mean, they can't even understand the rules, let alone keep them. And if they could keep them, they don't understand them and they're not getting it. And they, with great intensity, they resist it anyway.

That's what this word means. So I would say the second thing we've learned is natural man's depravity prevents him from getting hold of the truth. You cannot be saved by the law, in other words. If you can't comprehend it and get hold of it, it can't save you, can it?

You see my point? So that's the second point. All right. I think the third great point that we saw was in Matthew 12 where Jesus had healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath and they got upset with him.

And then right on down in that same context, it says that it might be fulfilled which is spoken of Isaiah, behold, this is my son in whom I'm well pleased. It's the same thing that God the Father said at the transfiguration, but it was prophesied in Isaiah that he would say it.

Remember, we talked about that for a while. And from that little passage, this third point is this, the law and the prophets, because you remember, in fact, you were speaking of it in Sunday school, I believe this morning where he wanted to build Peter, because you're talking about Peter.

And he said, there's one thing he didn't mention here. Remember that? Because he didn't want to bring that up again, right? He was saying this I remember, and he just left this part out. And Bill said, it's good that he did probably.

But he left the part out that he wanted to build a tabernacle for Moses, tabernacle for Elijah, and then one for Jesus and kind of put them on the same level. And God the Father came back and rebuked him and said, no, this is my son and him, I'm well pleased, hear him.

And don't build these tabernacles at all, because they're not on the same level. Do you see that? So to me, the third point is the law. Now see, Moses typified the law, Elijah typified the prophets. That is the whole Old Testament.

I guess we left out the Psalms, but it's pretty much, but they have a lot of prophecy, so it didn't leave them out. It's pretty much the whole Old Testament. So the law and the prophets, in other words, the entire Old Testament is not to be placed at the same level with grace, which comes by Jesus Christ.

So that's the third big point we've been talking about. And I should be asking you these points if I was gonna do the Socratic method. But anyway, all right, what's the fourth point? Well, turn to Matthew chapter five, verse 17.

And let's take a look, because we haven't covered this yet. So it's, starts out, it says, think not that I am come to destroy the law, Jesus says. Now this almost seems to contradict what we're studying, but let's read the whole thing, all right?

Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. Now we're here, we have this same Greek word that means to fill up full, to totally fill something full.

And what's interesting about it, the Greeks would often use it to mean like to fill a fishing net full, which is kind of pretty when you think about the fact that Jesus and the apostles often fished, but it had a great meaning to these folks because they could picture that.

So it means to totally be full, like a net completely brimming full of fish. The little word be in front of this, where he goes on and he says, for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass from the law till all be fulfilled.

That little word be in the Greek is a little more important than it is in the English, because in the Greek, it literally is the word genomai, which means to cause something to come into being as in Genesis 1 .1 or the whole chapter, first two or three chapters of Genesis, to cause things to come into being that didn't exist previous to that.

So when you think of it this way, Jesus is saying, look, there's not one little, not only the little words are important, but the cross of the T and the dot of the I, if you put it in English, none of it, all of that will put it in the positive.

All of that will be fulfilled and none of it will pass away till it's all fulfilled. In fact, it'll never pass away. And Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, we know that. He just got through saying, I came not to destroy it, but to fulfill it and not one cross of the T or dot of the I will in no wise pass from the law until all be fulfilled.

So until all of the law, all of the prophets, everything that the Bible has said will come to pass until all of it comes past, which takes you all the way out and even beyond the millennial kingdom in our future, the thousand year millennial kingdom, even beyond that to where it says that the earth and the environment, the atmosphere was destroyed with a loud noise and God rebuilds it.

It's like he raptures the earth, kind of like he's gonna do us. He totally puts it back together with no sin in it. The Bible gives us that information about the future. And then it goes on out and says that there will be age unto age.

Well, an age is like the millennial kingdom, that's an age, right? The church age, we're in approximately 2000 year age now. Millennial kingdom is another thousand, but there'll be age upon age beyond that where God works with us and with the angels and with the universe.

So you gotta go all the way out to the end of that. And none of this Bible will cease to stop working and be true down to the cross of the T and the dot of the I until all of that's finished. Jesus said all that in two sentences, a preacher can't possibly do it in two sentences, but Jesus did.

So that's just what he said. And the idea is he says, I am the fulfillment of the law. So my first point, and we get it from this verse we're looking at this morning is Jesus Christ himself is the fulfillment of the law.

So now if you take the idea of Romans 13, verse eight, nine, and 10, where it says, agape is the fulfillment of the law. You do understand the Bible teaches in other places, it doesn't say that God does love or that he loves people.

What it says is he what? He is love, right? So if you say God is love, and this is math here, but they're logic. You say God is love, and you say love is the fulfillment of the law, then saying Jesus is the fulfillment of the law is the same thing, because Jesus is love and love is Jesus.

And it's the same thing. So this is just reemphasizing the same point is that you can't have a group of men get together in seminary and make up some points that we have to follow to be a good Christian and then follow those points to get to heaven, because that's not the fulfilling of the law, because you're gonna miss at least one of those at one point in the Bible says you missed them all when you miss one of them.

So that's not the fulfilling of the law. You can't get a group of Jews together, a group of Mormons together, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses together, a group of fundamental independent Baptists together.

You can't hate to put them in that group. They're not quite that bad, right? Or Seventh-day Adventists, you gotta worship only on Saturday. You can't get a group of any of them together and have any of them fulfill the law, but they'll come into this church and tell you if you don't do their stuff, then you haven't fulfilled the law.

That's contradictory to scripture because the scripture says there's only one who fulfill the law, and that is love, and that is God. And here we see it. It's Jesus Christ, and he has already done it.

It is not something that needs to be done. It's something that's been done, and there we have it. Now, if we go into Romans chapter four, go back a little bit, verse eight, we've covered this in our studies of Roman already, of course, but look what it says.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Now, this is being quoted from Old Testament, but it's New Testament as well. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Cometh this blessedness then upon the Jew only?

It says the circumcision only. That means, does that only happen to the Jew, where it says he's blessed if God does not impute the sin to him? Or is this also true of the uncircumcision, the Gentile? Paul asked, and that's a rhetorical question because we know Paul says there's neither Jew nor Gentile under grace, right?

So he says, for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham now was Abraham a Jew or a Gentile? That's what I'm gonna have you answer. There's only one right answer, that was it. Yes, I can't believe you did that.

I figured it'd be you that did that. Yes is the answer because he was the Gentile before he was a Jew, wasn't he? He was a Gentile from a pagan world and God called him out of darkness into light and changed his name to Abraham, right?

So he was first Jew, but he was Gentile before that. And the beautiful thing about it is that the covenant of grace, the Abrahamic covenant was given to him while he was yet Gentile. Isn't that interesting?

So as we understand from this is, so Abraham becomes the father of all God's saved people, both Jew and Gentile, because he was both and the promise was given to him and to us through him, according to the book of Galatians in the New Testament.

By faith, we are milled together with Abraham and all of our Jewish brothers and sisters, all of our Gentile Christian brothers and sisters, and we're all saved by the promise, the same one promise. And that promise happened prior to Judaism and the law.

So think about that, it predates the law by 400 years. And so my dear friends who claim to be Jews and they're gonna teach us a better way and bring the law in, this predates the law. The law didn't exist yet.

And you can't abrogate that, the Bible says, you can't abrogate this with Abraham that happened 400 years previous. You don't make that go away with the law. It's still there and it precedes it and it's of a higher order actually.

So it's interesting to see. So we see Paul talking about this under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Romans 4 .9. He goes on and he says, for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness or as if it were his righteousness.

And that is the doctrine of imputation, isn't it? After all, what does it mean again? It's an accounting term. God took your sins and placed them in Jesus's account and he died with them. And he took Jesus's righteousness and beauty and perfection and placed it in your account as if it's yours.

And that's why you and I are saved and that's why Abraham was saved. And Abraham's first one that is recorded that that was done to, but I mean, it's a picture of all of God's people, both Old and New Testament.

So here we see that because of faith, it was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness. So whose faith was that that saved Abraham? Was it Abraham's faith? Whose faith was that? Who can tell me? It was the Lord's faith.

Jesus's faith, the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ, the faith of Christ. Because if you think about it, Abraham didn't have any faith. He was a pagan. He was called out of darkness into light. He didn't, he's no way that he could have received, had faith in Jesus if God hadn't give the faith of Jesus to him first.

And that's the way it works. But so few people in America know that today because the modern English versions changed the Greek where it doesn't say faith of Jesus anymore. It says faith in everywhere throughout.

Just check it out. You'll see. People pick on me sometimes because they say I'm too picky on which version you should read. But it's because the other versions don't carry the proper Greek in the New Testament case.

So it's just, it's sad. So here we go. How was it then reckoned? How did God do this with Abraham? Was it reckoned when he was a Jew or was it reckoned to him when he was a Gentile, uncircumcised? Not when he was a Jew, but when he was Gentile, the scripture says.

So that's why he becomes the father of faith for every one of God's children throughout time. So the doctrine of imputation is discussed here in Romans chapter four, but it's also alluded to in everything we're studying here is this great doctrine of imputation.

It goes, it's higher than the law. It's higher than the Old Testament law. It both predated it by 400 years and then it post dated it by 300 years. Because 300 years after the last book of the Jewish Old Testament, Zechariah was completed, 300 years go by and Jesus Christ is born.

Give you goosebumps, it kind of does me, but there you see that it surrounds the law is before it and after it, and it's higher on both ends than the law. And yet people want to bring legalism into the church.

It just doesn't work if you know anything about the Bible. And so many people don't, that they're able to bring it into people that don't know. So the doctrine of imputation, which the beautiful place, if you want to jot this down, you've been going here very long, you know it already, 2 Corinthians 5 .21 and 1 Peter 2 .24, and you put those two together, 2 Corinthians 5 .21, 1 Peter 2 .24, you put those two together, you literally have the entire doctrine of imputation.

I mean, this part in Romans four, eight, nine, and 10, add that to it because it talks about it, but there is where it talks about how God the father transcended time and took the sins of all of his people and put it on the body of Jesus in his account.

And he died for those sins in the place of those people. And then he took his righteousness and imputed that to all of God's people so that when the father looks at us, he sees no sin, even right now, that's hard for us to believe.

And that's why we have to know these doctrines because when Satan comes to you and says, you can't even be real, look what you just did. A true Christian wouldn't do that. Or like the billboard coming back from Dallas, true Christians obey Jesus Christ as if you obey him all the time.

And then you think, well, maybe I'm not really saved. That's the harm of a thing like that. So, when you look at all of this as it really is, my sins have already died on the cross and been paid for entirely.

I can't change that with what I do or don't do. And his righteousness has been placed on me. And I can't change that. This is called positional truth. It's not experiential. It's not something I did. It's something I received as a gift and it's free and I've got it and I have it for all eternity.

And when you know that, then when Satan comes to pick on us, you can rebuke him with it. I like to ask the Lord to rebuke him. I don't like to ever rebuke him. Jesus, please remind Satan I don't belong to him and that I don't have any sin on me.