No Barriers, Placerville (Christian Study Blog)

Romans Chapter 2 vs 1-29 We are getting into it now! Here again Paul is seeking to quell the potential division between Greek and Jew in the church in Rome. A warning against judging others. He doesn't immediately call them out on such a division, the point this warning goes beyond their church, but he does later (Verses 9-11) indicate something about God's judgement as it pertains to both Jew and Greek. The wrath and fury of God's judgement will the "anguish and distress for everyone who does evil", notice how this is followed immediately by "the Jew First and also the Greek" in verse 9? It is repeated in verse 10 when "glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good" is God's judgement for the righteous. First the Jew and then also the Greek, we might take this as to mean that the Jew comes before the Greek, but that is not it, otherwise the wrath would go first to the Greek and then the Jew. The Greek did not have the benefit of...

Romans Chapter 1 vs 18-32 In this block of verses "The Guilt of Humankind" Paul gets to the iniquities of humankind, that people are sinful and wicked, and without God we are lost. The power and presence of God is evident in creation all around humankind but humankind has turned away from such authority relying instead upon their own very flawed authority. Paul goes on to make a few jabs at pagans that revere nature and things in nature, and men such as Caesar but the focus is on what happens when humankind turns its back on God. In this Paul points to the evident example of humans sinning in the very city in which the church that this letter is addressed to resides. Specifically Paul identifies that have exchanged the glory of God for "images" of men and animals. Paul also dealt with such idolatry in Ephesus where some craftsmen made silver idols to a Greek Goddess. Notice how Paul does not illustrate God's wrath as some form of impending violent form of ju...

Romans 1.1-7 The letter of Paul to the Romans was written before Paul ever reached Rome (54-58AD), when we think he was in Corinth. This was a church that Paul did not start, it was founded by another, most likely Peter years before when he fled persecution in Judea. If we recall from Acts 12 that Herod killed Peter's brother James and arrested Peter. When Peter was in chains between guards an Angel of the Lord came and freed him, afterwards Peter left Jerusalem. The first seven verses of Paul's letter to the Church in Rome sets the tone for the rest of the epistle. To be clear it is the salutation customary to letters of the day, but Paul could have been much more brief. Instead, Paul includes a bit about the Gospel and indicates that not only is the Church in Rome called to be disciples, but that this 'good news' is for everyone. He also brings in the resurrection, reminding the Christians in Rome that death, the power of Caesar, has been defeated and that while Ne...

Part of being Christian is that one is to work in this world to better it. Feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, healing the sick, casting out demons. Doing God's will on Earth as it is in Heaven. The pit trap of New-Age spiritual paths is that they draw the person, the Mage, into oneself disengaging from the world outside. The world outside is scary, ugly, disenchanted, and unimaginative. This is not due because early Christianity drove out the enchantment of creation from the Pagans that enchant it. It is because we have evolved enough culturally and technologically that we can witness all the ugly as never before. Yes partly because the industrial revolution gave us the ability to communicate ever more rapidly and provided increasingly complex and effective tools of destruction. But nothing about human behavior has changed in the past several millennia. At least not in the respect that we do each other ill. The natural world holds less mystery than it used to, our perspective ...