If you think it affects your salvation, then you're lost. You're not saved. In other words, you're saved by theology because if you think works play a role, then you're not saved. So it's not really your faith that saves you; it's just your theology. Because you could have faith in Christ, but if you think you have to obey Christ, then you're out of the kingdom because your theology's wrong. Well, good morning. It's good to see so many visitors with us this morning. We want to extend a hearty welcome to you.
We've been, for the last several months, looking at the book of Romans, not every Sunday, but about once a month. We're in the third chapter right now. The last message, which was last month, we looked at Romans 3:1-19, and in those verses we were introduced to an objector. This is a fictional character that Paul creates to carry on a dialogue with, and you see it in a number of the chapters in Romans. He goes back to this style of writing where an objector is asking questions and he's answering the question.
Now, the objector is an unbelieving Jew who's finding fault with God because in chapter 2, Paul had said that essentially there is no difference between a Jew and a Gentile, that they're both saved on the same basis, and of course, no Jew is going to be happy hearing that. So the objector was saying, "Well, what about this then?
So what's the purpose of circumcision and these things?" He doesn't like that God is giving salvation to the Gentiles as a gift without their having to be circumcised and coming under the law. That's what we talked about last time. Now, like I say, we'll be coming back to this objector some more, and it's important to remember who he is. This is an unbelieving Jew, not a real person, but he's created this fictional character to dialogue with.
Because Luther, when we get to Martin Luther—and this is almost 1,500 years after Paul writes—he changes it where the objector is a Christian who is seeking to be saved by works, not by faith, and that that's who Paul is carrying on the dialogue with throughout Romans. And that's just totally made up. None of the early Christians, nobody for 1,500 years saw that in Romans.
So unless you want to believe the church was in utter darkness for 1,500 years, that Christ who said, "Lo, I am with you always until the end of the age," wasn't with the church, that they lost it all as soon as the apostles died, then it's Luther who's inventing something, which is certainly my point.
Paul's whole discussion throughout Romans is about Jews and Gentiles, not about Christians who believe Christ requires works or obedience from his followers, but that's what Luther turned it into and what we hear so much today. Now, this morning we're only going to be looking at one verse, Romans 3:20, and next week we will finish, hopefully, chapter 3. But I thought we might as well tackle some of these issues with this verse because they're going to keep coming up all throughout Romans.
We might as well get some of these things nailed down because Luther has been so influential. It is hard for a person nowadays to even pick up the book of Romans without hearing him in every page and not even realizing it. Most Christians have never read Martin Luther, and they don't realize this all started with him, and Augustine did his job as well as we'll be seeing later on.
So Romans 3:20, "Therefore by the works of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, for by the law is knowledge of sin." Now, in reality, this is a very simple verse. In it, Paul makes two basic assertions. No human can be justified by the works of the Mosaic Law, number one. Number two, by the law comes the knowledge of sin. If it wasn't for all of the mis-teaching out there, we could spend five minutes on this verse, three minutes, and move on. I mean, it's just a simple thing.
Now, the early Christians, they're having to fight the Gnostics. So when they get to this verse, they're having to answer all the things the Gnostics were saying. Today, we're having to answer all the things Augustine and Luther and Calvin were saying. So let's begin by talking about that first proposition, "No human can be justified by the works of the law," talking about the Mosaic Law. Now, do any of you remember—hopefully, all of you remember—what we mean by justify? What does that word mean?
Not a trick question. To be declared righteous. Very good. Okay. So it just means to be declared righteous. It was an ordinary term, not normally not a theological word. We think of it theologically today, but it was mainly used in courts and that, who was declared righteous in a criminal or a civil action. And yeah, for us to be declared righteous, Paul uses it quite a number of times. But what we want to focus on this morning is what does he mean by the works of the law?
No one will be justified by the works of the law. Well, the answer of what Paul is talking about, how the early Christians understood him, Paul means the ritualistic, dietary, and hygienic requirements of the law. That is, things like circumcision, keeping the Sabbath, the new moons, not eating pork, things like that. You can do all those things as much as you want. You can be as fastidious as you want on it. It's not going to do anything to make you righteous. Nothing.
It is a total waste of time as far as righteousness. Now, when God gave the law, God expected the Jews to obey it. I mean, it wasn't given just as a suggestion, but it had served its purpose. It wasn't going to make you righteous. But the Jews were having a hard time. And you can understand it. God gave them the law. It wasn't a man-made law. And now suddenly he's saying, "Okay, that's over with." Yeah, they didn't want to accept that. They were temporary regulations.
Paul says, I believe it's in Corinthians, that they served as a pedagogue or guardian. A pedagogue was normally a slave who would take children, would take them to school and keep an eye on them, take them back home. It was kind of the child's guardian, not like a legal guardian. He was serving under the parents. But a pedagogue—King James translates it as a tutor, but a tutor is a teacher. It may not have been in the days of King James. I don't know. That may have been a good translation in 1611.
But today, a tutor means a teacher, and that's not what a pedagogue was. Okay. So it was a guardian. It kept the Jews separate from the fallen, idol-worshiping mankind so that they were a special people. However, once Christ came, that purpose ended. It was to keep them separate, ready for the coming of Christ. All right. Martin Luther, how he changed this. He twisted Paul by saying that Paul was proclaiming that we cannot be justified by works, any kind of works, even obedience to Christ.
Works play no role in your salvation. Most of you have heard that. Some of you may believe that. I sat ten years under that teaching. Works, oh boy, I mean, it's almost a bad word in so many Protestant circles. You mention good works or something like that. And that started with Martin Luther. When I was in Germany on the Anabaptist Tour, whenever that was, 11 years ago, we visited a Lutheran church. And inside the church, it was interesting.
They had one of the pillars that was holding up the roof of the building, and they had made it ornate and all that. And they had little statues of all 12 apostles, except there were 13 statues. Guess who the 13th one was? Yeah, Martin Luther. And that's what they were saying in his day, that he was the 13th apostle.
And if what he was saying was true, I'd have to say, "Yeah." I mean, yeah, you're either inspired by God or you're a false teacher, one of the two, because you're bringing up something no one taught until you came along. So Luther changed Paul's conflict, which in Romans, what he's talking about, it's not the law, it's Jesus Christ, it's faith in Christ. It's the law versus Christ.
Luther says, "No, Paul is saying it's works versus faith, and we're saved by faith alone, not by works." Now, to do this, Luther used a logical fallacy. As you guys know, I like to point out fallacies. It's known as the fallacy of equivocation. I'm sorry it's a big word. I didn't make the word up. And this is what it is, okay? Equivocation, it means using a word that has a double meaning. And most words do have more than one meaning. You're using it in such a way as to misrepresent something or to mislead people.
In other words, the word means this, and you're taking that meaning and you're changing it to something else. And I'll give you some illustrations, okay? One example is when we take a word that a speaker uses in one sense and then we apply it in a different sense to misrepresent what the speaker is saying. Okay. For you children, and you may not even have heard of this character. I mean, have any of you heard of Superman? How many of you heard of Superman? Okay.
Well, I went back to my childhood fantasy days, so excuse me if it's not appropriate in a church. But anyway, he was a good guy. Okay. So on earth, nobody is stronger than Superman. For you Superman fans, all right? Okay. Nobody is stronger than Superman. Therefore, the strongest man on earth is nobody. Does that make sense? Let's go over that again. On earth, nobody is stronger than Superman. So the strongest man on earth is nobody because he's stronger than Superman. Okay. That's equivocation.
See, I've taken a word. What have I done? In the first one, nobody meant no one, the ordinary use of the word. And then I've changed nobody to being the name of somebody. Oh, nobody. He's stronger than Superman. Okay. See, that's equivocation, all right? It's obvious in this illustration. But Luther did the exact same thing with the word law.
Paul said, "No one is justified by the works of the law." And Luther changed this to, "No one is justified by works of law in general, any law, Christ's law, God's laws, any laws. You cannot be justified by obeying any commandments." In other words, works play no role in salvation. So he took—and we talked about this—I don't know if it was last month or the month before—that there was no way to capitalize words when they were writing ancient Greek. In fact, no language had capital letters at that time.
Or they had capital letters, but they didn't have rules of capitalization. So you couldn't distinguish a proper noun from an ordinary noun by capitalizing. And that wasn't even in effect in the days of King James. They didn't come along until 1700s, 1800s, where the modern rules of capitalization came in. So it was very easy to take that word law, talking about the Mosaic Law, and switching it. See, Paul says, "We can't be justified by works of the law." You're trying to follow Christ's law?
You're following commandments? Well, he says, "We can't be justified by that. You're not going to ever get to have an investment if you think that's going to help you." So that's what Luther did. I mean, it's very clever, very misleading, and it's pulled the whole church. If it was just a matter of theology, I wouldn't care. On Judgment Day, we're not going to be given this theological quiz, but it affects people's lives.
When you think God's commandments are not necessary, that they are suggestions, that we can choose to obey them or choose not to, and it's not going to affect our salvation, then that is a big issue. It's a life and death matter, eternal life and death. Well, how do we know Luther is wrong? Maybe he was right. Well, because Paul had just finished saying in the previous chapter, "Who," meaning God, "will render to every man according to his works." This is Paul saying this.
He's just gone through saying, "God is going to render to every man according to his works, eternal life to those who by perseverance in good work seek for glory, honor, and immortality." He didn't say it was just going to be extra rewards. He says, "Eternal life to those who by perseverance in good work." So it's a matter of all throughout your life.
But to those who are contentious—I think there he's maybe talking about the Jews who were fighting against Christ's teachings—and do not obey the truth but obey unrighteousness, there will be indignation and wrath. Yes, tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man who does evil, the Jew first and also the Gentile. But glory, honor, and peace to every man who works what is good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile." So Paul's against works?
I mean, he's just gone through saying that it's going to be by works on Judgment Day that's going to determine whether we get eternal life or not. Now, we talked about there are two phases of salvation. And initial salvation, we do not have to have works. That's not how we initially get saved. But once we are saved, once we are on the vine of Christ, once we're a branch on the vine, then Christ wants to see us produce fruit. And part of that fruit is obedience to his commandments.
James 2:24, "You see then that a man is justified." He uses that same word justified by works and not by faith alone. Now, if Paul were talking in Romans 3:20 about Christian works, he and James would be contradicting each other. And that was obvious to Luther. So what did he try to do? Let's get James taken out of the canon of Scripture. He tried. He didn't succeed, but he did succeed in labeling it as an epistle of straw. "Hey, don't pay too much attention to James.
You go to Romans, and then you try to conform James to Romans." But there is no contradiction. Paul is specifically talking about works of the law, the Mosaic Law. James is talking about godly works performed by baptized Christians after we have been saved. And he uses Abraham and Rahab as examples. Why does he choose them? Because their righteous works had no connection with the law. Abraham lived before the law. Rahab was not an Israelite. She was not under the law when she did her righteous deeds.
And that's why he used them as an example for us Christians, the role that works play in our salvation apart from the law. There's another way we know that Paul is not talking about Christian works, good works that we do in obedience to Christ. Because several years before writing Romans, Paul wrote a letter to the Galatians. And in there, it's interesting, he makes that exact same statement, "By the works of the law, no flesh will be justified." Okay. So what law is he talking about?
Is he talking about law in general? Well, the statement in Galatians contains additional contextual information that removes any doubt that he's talking about the Mosaic Law. It's crystal clear. To me, it's clear enough in Romans. But you go to Galatians, I don't know how you could argue against it. Now, Luther tried to argue against it. And we're going to read the setting, and then we'll get to the statement.
"Before certain men came from James, Cephas was eating with the Gentiles." Now, James is where the Jews were in Jerusalem. "But when they came, these Jews from Jerusalem, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party." So Cephas, who some early Christians say there was two Cephases—we assume it's Peter here. I guess it could be somebody else—but is like, "Okay. This is going to cause a big issue. These ones from Jerusalem are here.
It's better just I'm going to pull back until they go." "And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with them so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw"—this is Paul talking—"that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew'." In other words, you're not keeping the law yourself.
"How can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?" So that's the issue, is the Jews trying to force the Gentiles to become Jews. It wasn't enough just to be a Christian. You had to become a Jew. That's the whole issue. I mean, Paul makes it clear what he's talking about. "We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by the works of the law." That same statement he makes in Romans. Now, what law is he talking about here in Galatians?
I mean, it's obviously the law of Moses. I mean, that's what the whole issue is, "But through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by the works of the law, no one will be justified." Okay. So it is so clear. I mean, to me, you just don't want to see the truth if you're going to argue that Paul is saying that the works of obeying Jesus Christ play no role in salvation. And he's not talking about that.
He's talking about the law of Moses. Okay. So Paul was not reprimanding Christians for believing that obedience to Christ is essential for our ultimate salvation. That's not even the issue here, as Luther would have us believe that he was doing. I mean, look at the words of Scripture. Like the brother said in Sunday school, I appreciated his comment, that they were arguing about things instead of, "What do the Scripture say?" Look at the words of Scripture. Look at the context. Don't be led astray by a theologian.
Now, again, if there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Paul is talking about the law of Moses, we can go further in Galatians, the very next chapter. He first talks about Abraham, and then he says this, "And this I say, that the law, which was 430 years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.
For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise, but God gave it to Abraham by promise." Now, Paul identifies which law he's talking about. He says it came 430 years after the promise to Abraham. Can anyone tell me what law came into effect 430 years after Abraham? I think you all know it's the law of Moses. I mean, there isn't any other law that came in effect right then. So it's clear what his context is. But Luther took Galatians and, wow, tried—and he was successful in convincing everyone.
No, Paul's not talking about the law of Moses. He's talking about any law. You cannot be justified by obeying the commandments of Jesus Christ. That does not affect your salvation. If you think it affects your salvation, then you're lost. You're not saved. In other words, you're saved by theology because if you think works play a role, then you're not saved. So it's not really your faith that saves you.
It's just your theology because you could have faith in Christ, but if you think you have to obey Christ, then you're out of the kingdom because your theology's wrong. Okay. So that was the first part, that no one is justified by works of the law, and he's talking about the law of Moses. All right. The second proposition, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." Okay. Now, here are the early Christians. Boy, what we have to go through with Luther and Augustine, they're having to go through with the Gnostics.
The Gnostics were saying the law was not given by the God of the New Testament, by the Father of Jesus. The Mosaic Law was given by some other God. And they go back to that verse where Paul says, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." It said, "Aha. See, the law brought about sin. It was the cause of sin. It was obviously some wicked God who gave us the law, not the true God." And the early Christians are having to sit down and argue, "No, that is not what Paul is saying." And the Gnostics use Romans as their book.
I mean, like I said, the whole history of Christianity is a history of people taking Romans and coming up with some whole new theology from it. The Mosaic Law taught the Jews how they should live, and it condemned many practices as sin that the Gentiles didn't know about. As a result, the Jews were more aware of sin than were the Gentiles. "By the law came the knowledge of sin." They found out, "Oh, premarital sex is wrong. Abortion is wrong. Homosexuality is wrong.
Idolatry is wrong." All kinds of things that the Gentiles didn't know. They were doing these things. They didn't know these things were wrong. Now, some of the things they should have known, that they were violating natural law. But yeah, through the law came the knowledge of sin, the awareness that this is sin, this is sin, this is contrary to God.
Now, like I say, the works of the law that he's talking about, the regulations, they were sin only because God commanded the Jews to do them, and it was a sin to disobey God. But they weren't part of his eternal law of circumcision and not eating this meat and that meat and that sort of thing. Those were temporary regulations, but it was still sin to disobey them. But it made them aware of the things that are part of God's eternal morality, that these things are uncoveting.
I mean, a Gentile, it's wrong to covet something? I look at your house and think, "Boy, I wish I had that house." The Gentile would have had no idea that that was sin. The Jew did. So the knowledge of sin came through the law is what Paul is saying. He's saying it in a good sense. It served a purpose. Why God gave it? Now, Augustine had a very novel explanation of this verse. Okay. As probably most of you know, okay, Augustine taught that we humans are totally unable to do anything toward our salvation.
Not only can we not obey God's commandments, we cannot even have faith. If you have faith, it's because God put that faith in you. You do nothing. You absolutely nothing. You are totally unable. Another heresy, okay, taken from Romans, okay? But then the logical question, okay, if we can't do anything, if we're totally unable, totally depraved, why would God give the law to the Israelites if they were utterly unable to obey his commandments? Pretty logical question, right?
Why would he give a law if they can't obey the law? Augustine's, to me, absurd answer was that God gave the law merely to demonstrate to mankind that they're unable to obey his commandments. Now, you laugh, and you should laugh. Now, I have heard it preached—I was going to say from this pulpit, not from this one, the pulpit back at the SDH church, not from anyone in our congregation, by a visiting speaker. I sat there, and it's like, "Oh, what?
I can't believe you're saying this." Well, he thought that was true because he had heard it and didn't realize that goes back to Augustine because, yeah, if we can't obey anything, then he gives us a law just to show we can't obey it. Just pretty sad reasoning. Sadly, millions of Christians have accepted this explanation without reflecting on its absurdity. I have heard it so many times in my life.
"Oh, well, he just gave it to show we can't obey laws." To illustrate its absurdity, we only have to reflect on Romans 13. That's where God instructs Christians to obey the laws of human governments. All right. So if he says we have to obey the laws of Caesar, are we unable to obey Caesar's laws? I mean, if you run a stop sign and a police officer pulls you over, you think it's going to work to say, "Officer, I'm just totally unable to obey laws. You know how we humans are.
I assume the law is just there to show that we can't obey it, right?" You're wrong. Here's your ticket. No, we're supposed to obey Caesar's laws. Now, if we can obey Caesar's laws, now, why couldn't we obey God's laws? I mean, we're unable to not murder? We're unable not to steal? Really? I mean, Caesar says not to do those things. We can do it when Caesar says, but you're going to say we can't do it when God says not to do these things? I mean, it's just absurd logic.
I mean, sometimes I get so flustered, it's like, how could such aberrant ideas, such absurd ideas come into the church and then get adopted by everyone? And then you're having to fight against them like you're saying something strange, that God gave us laws because he wants us to obey the laws. Like, what? What kind of nonsense is that?
Point two, if God gave the Mosaic Law merely to demonstrate that humans are unable to obey commandments, then we would expect, okay, Jesus comes, and he would eliminate all commandments. It's like, you guys can't obey it. Okay. 1,500 years, my Father gave you a law to show you you can't keep laws. Okay. So no more laws. But we find the opposite. Now, be sure, Jesus eliminated all of the temporary regulations in the Mosaic Law, the things pertaining to circumcision, Sabbath, unclean meats, all of that.
He took all of that away. But then he added new commandments that go much deeper than the Mosaic Law. I mean, if we can't obey the Mosaic Law, how are we going to obey Jesus' Law? I mean, the law says, "Don't commit adultery." Jesus says, "Don't even look at a woman or a person of the opposite sex with lust. Not only don't murder, don't even hate your brother. Don't say anything bad about your brother." I mean, his law goes a lot deeper.
So if we can't obey laws, then it makes no sense Jesus would come and give us laws that are much harder than those in the Mosaic Law. Now, we're going to see as we go through Romans, we don't obey Jesus on our own strength or totally on our own strength. I mean, we have to do our part, but God gives us extra power. I mean, we're not out here on our own, but we're not there yet. That's later on in Romans.
Finally, Christians who adopt Augustine's explanation that, "Oh, God just gave these laws to show that you can't obey laws," they don't consider how it denigrates or makes the character of God look bad. I mean, what would you think of a human ruler who passed laws that were impossible to obey just to demonstrate to his citizens that they couldn't obey them? What would you think of a ruler like that? Give you an example. This nice guy. Okay.
Let's say he passed the law, "I forbid anyone to get sick." Like, okay, what are you supposed to do? If you do get sick, I guess you're going to try to stay home and hide it. And then at school, if this were North Korea, teachers would be saying, "Now, check and see your mommy and daddy. Do you see them coughing like that? You be sure to report it. That'll make you a good citizen." And so imagine a law like that, and all these people are put in jail, maybe put to death, they're fined, "You got sick.
Don't you know you're not allowed to get sick?" I mean, that's who we'd think would pass a law like that, this guy, Kim Jong. It's like, wow. It would take just a crazy despot to pass a law like that, to command people to do something they couldn't do. Okay. I mean, we see how absurd it is. Then we turn around and say, "Oh, that's what God did." Well, thankfully, that's not the God of our Bible. I mean, think about it. If that's why he gave the law for 1,500 years, it means that people were stoned to death.
They were imprisoned. They were fined. They were flogged because they didn't keep a law that God said, "Yeah, I know you couldn't keep it in the first place." And so you did all this stuff to us when you knew we couldn't obey it? I mean, again, you're making God back there like Kim. I mean, the same kind of person. I mean, I've quoted this before from Origen, that simple people, he says, think things about God that they wouldn't imagine about the worst human being possible and that they'll think that about God.
I mean, even Kim wouldn't have passed a law saying, "You're forbidden to get sick." I mean, he did pass laws that were maybe difficult, but people could obey them. And we're going to say God gives laws that it's impossible for us to obey. It's impossible for us to obey them perfectly, but that's a different matter. No, our God gave the Israelites the law to teach them his ways, to lead them to Christ, that they would have a knowledge of what sin is so they can avoid sin.
They would have a knowledge of what is good so they could do that. Clement of Alexandria writes, "How can the law..." And he's writing against the Gnostics. You were saying, "See, the law is bad." How can the law not be something good when it was given as a pedagogue to lead us to Christ? It corrected people through fear by way of discipline. This was to lead to the perfection that would come through Christ. So it was leading them along, preparing them for Christ.
Psalm 105, "He gave them the lands of the Gentiles, and they inherited the labor of the nations." Why? "That they might observe his statutes and keep his laws." Praise the Lord. That's what the psalmist says. He doesn't say so that they could see it was impossible to observe his statutes and impossible to keep his laws. No, he did this so that they would observe them and that they would keep them. William Law said this, "We cannot offer to God the service of angels.
We cannot obey him as man could when in a state of perfection. Nevertheless, fallen men can do their best." And this is the only perfection that is required of us. God only requires of us what a fallen human being can do. He knows we cannot keep his commandments perfectly. He doesn't require sinless perfection, but he does require our best. He knows our weaknesses, but he also knows what we are able to do. And that's all he expects of us. We have a loving, kind, merciful God.
The scriptures testify of Zacharias and Elizabeth. It says, "They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless." So now, if we can't keep his laws, how could they be walking in his commandments and ordinances blamelessly? I mean, they couldn't. I mean, like I say, it's an absurd statement to make. So the Israelites were able to obey God's commandments. God did not give his commandments for the vain purpose of showing them that they were powerless to obey them.
Now, were Zacharias and Elizabeth blameless in an absolute sense? Of course not. Nobody can meet the perfection of God. In other words, none of us can be righteous in comparison to God, but God overlooked their imperfections because they served him with a complete heart. That's what he's looking for from us. He knows we can't ever reach perfection the way God possesses it. We can't ever reach that kind of goodness, but we can reach what a fallen human is capable of doing.
As Paul demonstrates throughout Romans, even people like Zacharias and Elizabeth still need the salvation that comes through Christ. So I mean, Luther is correct in this. None of us could be saved by works, that we have to have the salvation that comes through Christ. But faith in Christ is in no way in opposition to obedience to Christ. The two go hand in hand. They're not in conflict with each other. All right. So next week, we're going to hopefully finish chapter three.
I wanted to get these bigger points down today, and then I think we can go through the rest of it fairly quickly. All right. Does anyone have any questions or response? Was Luther's comment, which you mentioned at the beginning of the talk, twisting the law? I can't remember exactly what was his comment. But my question was, is that something that shows up in his translation of the text, or is this just something that was in commentary? Oh, this is in his teaching. No, not in his translation. Yeah.
No, this is in his teaching. The only place I know of where he pulled, I would say, an unethical thing in his translation was he added where it says, "We're saved by faith." He put, "We're saved by faith alone," and alone's not in the text. Other than that, as far as I can tell, Luther's translation is a good translation. I'm not critical of his translation. No, his teaching is what I'm talking about. Thank you. Thank you.
I think about every tract I've read starts out with that thing of commandments and that we can't keep them. And this is kind of the whole thing that should lead us to this free gift of Christ because we can't keep the Ten Commandments or any of the commandments. And I always had this I always felt like something was wrong there. I always felt like there was just something really missing from that whole approach. And I thank you for I want to thank you for really bringing clarification to that. Right.
And again, and I think all of you know this, we've only seen half the gospel. Paul starts off with the part about works. He starts off talking about works in chapter two. But then when we get to the next chapter, chapter four, yeah, we're going to see that our initial salvation is through I'm not going to say faith alone because it's got to have repentance as well. But faith and repentance, we don't have to have works to get on the vine. So that's part of the gospel too.
If you left off that, then you'd still have only half the gospel. You got to put all of the parts of Romans together. It's not a book you can just start pulling verses here and there without misrepresenting what Paul is saying. So there's the two sides there. And so yeah, we don't have to first obey Christ to get saved, our initial salvation. It's after we have been saved, then we are required to walk faithfully. And I know you know that. Yes. Yes, Mike?
I really like how you show how ridiculous it is, the idea that the law was just given to show that you can't obey it. I guess somebody should have shown the martyrs that were held up in the Maccabees.
Somebody should have let them know that because they experienced this excruciating tortures rather than disobey the law by eating just one little morsel of pork, something that you would think, "Oh, well." Yeah, they wouldn't even do so much as taste some food that was forbidden them, and they held that up like, "Hey, we've kept this, and we don't want to violate it in any way." Yeah, somebody maybe should have told them, "No, it's fine. You can obey it." Yeah, you can't obey the law anyway.
So yeah, why are you going to be tortured instead of disobeying God? So yeah, very good point. I really appreciate your idea that we can obey government laws, but then we will go to God's, and all of a sudden, we can't. Somehow, it's not able, and it turns him into a despot. And I just really appreciate that because God is such a beautiful he wants to give such he wants to improve humanity, not the other way around. And that just has a way of turning God into this horrible God thing.
I think that's really important. We choose to go through the stop sign or not. We didn't. Yeah. It's amazing how these teachings come in, and it seems like false teaching I mean, the Gnostics, I mean, it's such a strange thing they were saying. You think, "Oh, man, if they got five followers, that they were doing good." They got thousands of people. It's like, why are people attracted to false teaching? I do not understand it because, like I say, the truth is a fairly simple gospel.
I mean, the early Christians, their statement of faith is so simple. I mean, it was a very simple faith. And yeah, it just got more and more complicated, people adding things and changing things as the centuries went by. And no one, it seems like, wants to go back and look at, "What did they believe in the beginning?" which to me is the most obvious thing of, "Wow." And when we get to I mean, we're in Romans, that we John probably wrote his last letter around AD 95.
We have a letter from the elders of the church in Rome dated AD 96, just one year later. It's not part of the New Testament. But we can see how they understood Romans just a year after John finished writing. Did they all have brain transplants and forget what had been taught them just a year later? I mean, it's so absurd. We can go back and see, how did they understand Romans? Not just any Christians, but the elders in Rome, the ones who got that letter.
I mean, are we to believe they had no tradition of what Paul was talking about in Romans? He spent two years in Rome. I mean, they could ask him every question about the book. And here we have it at our disposal. No, I don't want to see what they say. I want to see somebody in the 1500s, how did they understand this? Or what did Spurgeon say about this? I mean, it's just I don't get it. But that's the way life is.