Paul for Everyone: Romans, part 1

Top Highlights

“The ‘good news’ is not, first and foremost, about something that can happen to us. What happens to us through the ‘gospel’ is indeed dramatic and exciting: God’s good news will catch us up and transform our lives and our hopes like nothing else. But the ‘good news’ which Paul announces is primarily good news about something that has happened, events through which the world is now a different place. It is about what God has done in Jesus, the Messiah, Israel’s true king, the world’s true Lord.” (Page 4)

“There is no condemnation, because the spirit-law has set you free from the sin-law, because God has acted in his son and his spirit to condemn sin and provide life, because there are two types of human beings and you are the spirit-type, because these two types are heading, respectively, for death and life. There is no condemnation, because of all this.” (Page 137)

“His answer is that in becoming a Christian you move from one type of humanity to the other, and you should never think of yourself in the original mode again.” (Page 101)

“His point is, ‘this is not what males and females were made for’.” (Page 22)

“His point is not ‘there are some exceptionally wicked people out there who do these revolting things’ but ‘the fact that such clear distortions of the creator’s male-plus-female intention occur in the world indicates that the human race as a whole is guilty of a character-twisting idolatry’. He sees the practice of same-sex relations as a sign that the human world in general is out of joint.” (Pages 22–23)