Fr. Stephen De Young: And when we get started, we’re going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter four. As I always say at the beginning of these, by the time people are hearing this online, though a long time from now in the real world, the first Bible study on Romans will be posted online, so you can listen to the introduction to the book, or listen to it again.

To get us sort of caught up to where we are right now, I’m going to start a little earlier in my—what should I call it?—catch-up here than I normally do, in that, rather than running through Romans 1-3, because we’re about to talk about Abraham, we’re about to talk about Adam, we’re about to talk about a lot of Old Testament folks, I’m going to quickly summarize the Old Testament to sort of set the stage for what we’re going to talk about, because we have to have at least a little bit of background to understand the points that St. Paul is going to make. [Laughter]

But before I do that, I will quickly talk about what we’ve already seen in Romans. Remember, St. Paul is writing this epistle to the Church at Rome. He hasn’t actually physically been there yet, but, because of the Emperor Claudius having expelled the Jewish community from Rome and now that Jewish community having come back, St. Paul has a concern that, because there’s been this separation due to the imperial edict, that there might end up being two different churches in Rome; there might be sort of a Jewish Christian church and then a Gentile Christian church, and he doesn’t want to see that happen. He doesn’t want to see the Church kind of splinter into these ethnic groups; he wants them all to be one Church. So he’s set out sort of making that argument.

As we saw, he started out making a historical argument, that both the Gentiles and the Jews were in the same predicament, and when I do my Old Testament summary I’ll touch on that a little more. And now in chapter three he’s sort of summarized that, and he’s turned to talking about the law, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, and what the purpose of that was and is. And a lot of that has surrounded the term—we’ve seen “justification” and “righteousness” and these are all the same complex of words in Greek, even though they’re translated differently in English. As we said, what’s at stake there, as St. Paul said, he’s talking about when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, there are going to be the righteous who are on his right hand, who are vindicated; there are going to be the wicked who are on his left hand, who are going to be condemned. Everyone’s going to receive what’s due to them.

So the question here is: who is it who’s going to be on that righteous side, because that, of course, is where we want to be. And one version of that within the Jewish community at the time, and likely still now in certain segments of Rabbinic Judaism, is that, well, the Jewish people are on the righteous side, and everybody else, the Gentiles, are on the wicked side, and maybe there’s a few Gentiles who have sort of come around and worshiped the God of Israel and have been friends to Israel who might manage to get on the right-hand side, too, but for the most part it’s them who are there. And there are going to be a whole list of ways in which they argue that. As we have seen and will continue to see, St. Paul is kind of dismantling each of those, one at a time.

One of those, as we say, was, well, they’re the ones who received the Torah, they’re the ones who received— The word torah— “Law” is not a great translation of that. Torah in Hebrew means more “teaching,” so it’s God’s teaching. That includes moral teaching and how to order society, but it includes a lot of other things, too. It includes God telling them who he is, for example. The Greek word, nomos, which is what gets translated as “law,” really includes a lot more, too. Nomos includes everything about a people—their laws, their customs, their culture, their religious beliefs—all of that is sort of included in the term nomos. Unfortunately for us— It wasn’t a bad translation at the time, but unfortunately for us, St. Jerome chose to translate that as lex, which is where we get the English word “law,” and so it kind of got boiled down to this idea of just law, which is purely commandments. It’s this legal structure.

Q1: Well, that’s a huge difference, because Paul talks about “the law” all the time. I’ve always interpreted it as rules.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that’s why I— That’s why “works of law” makes sense. [Laughter] Works of the Torah: that’s the works commanded by the Torah. So, yeah, that’s why I try to say “Torah.” After I read “law,” I’ll say “Torah,” because we need to think about the first five books of the Bible. That includes the book of Genesis, for example. So this isn’t all… There’s a lot of narrative stories in there. That’s what he’s talking about, and he made the point that, first of all, just having received the Torah and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. If you don’t keep it, if you don’t believe what’s in it, if you don’t accept the teaching, if you don’t practice— put it into practice, then just having received it, all that does is condemn you, because God revealed all this to you and you ignored it. So he’s made that argument.

We talked a little bit last time at the end, and this’ll help me segue into my summary about the Old Testament, about what the Torah was actually for. So, as the Torah itself begins, in the book of Genesis, we read about the creation of the world. God creates Adam, he creates Woman to be the side, and her name doesn’t become Eve until after the fall. But the plan, the commandment that God gives them—so this is the first commandment in the Bible; it even comes before the tree—that the commandment to them is that they be fruitful— It’s usually translated in English: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.” The idea there is God has planted this garden, Eden, and this is a place for him to live and to dwell in alongside his human creations. So if humans had done what God wanted them to do, they would have lots of kids, grown in number, and gone out and spread throughout the earth, and spread Eden through the whole world, so that the whole world would be full of God’s presence with people. As we know, they did the opposite.

So when we get to Romans 5, St. Paul’s going to talk about how, instead of spreading the presence of the knowledge of God, they spread sin and death to the whole creation; through our actions we’ve done this. From that perspective, the story of Christ is then Christ coming to succeed where Adam failed and to begin that process of turning the entire world, the whole cosmos, into the place where God’s presence is. This is why at the end of the book of Revelation—spoilers—it says there’s no temple, because God is everywhere, not just in one place; he’s throughout the whole world. As Isaiah says in his prophecy, the knowledge of God will cover the earth the way the waters cover the sea. It’s just everywhere.

So in between, before Christ comes, we have this basic problem, that the whole earth has been corrupted by sin, including people, and people are continuing to sin and corrupt the world and fill the world with death and violence. So this reaches a climax in Genesis 6 and there’s the flood where it all gets washed clean to start over. It happens again, Tower of Babel, because after the flood, God gives the same commandment to Noah: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it,” and what do they do? “No, let’s all stay here and build a big city.” And the Tower of Babel’s a ziggurat. “And let’s build a ziggurat, a temple, so we can pull God down from heaven and get him to do what we want him to do, instead of doing what he has commanded us to do.” So God kind of scatters and disperses them by force out into the world. And, as we’ve talked about a couple of times, in Deuteronomy 32 it talks more about this, that all the nations get assigned to these sort of angelic beings instead of to God himself; he just throws them all out there. Most of those angelic beings end up falling and becoming wicked. These are the powers and principalities that St. Paul talks about. When we get to him talking about that, we’ll talk more about that. But there’s still this problem—

Q1: These are the pagan gods, aren’t they?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, these are the pagan gods. That’s why you get: “All the gods of the nations are demons.”

So we still have this problem. God then creates a people for himself. He grabs Abraham out of Ur, who’s just in one of those nations—grabs him, pulls him out, makes these promises to him. We have the exodus. We have the creation of the people of Israel. And so now God wants to dwell with his newly-created people of Israel. Well, what’s our basic problem here? They’re just as sinful and wicked as everybody else. And this is what St. Paul’s been arguing here in Romans: they’re just as sinful and wicked as everybody else, just as corrupt. So how can God come and live among them without them being destroyed, his holiness coming into their presence?

Well, this is what the Torah is about. This is what the Law is about. It’s this system for managing sin and managing corruption, so that God can come and dwell among his people. So you’ve got the tabernacle first and then later the Temple, sort of in the midst of his people, which is this place that’s kept holy and set apart for God to dwell in. Every year they have to have the day of atonement, where they come and they offer sacrifices. There’s the two goats on the day of atonement: the one goat takes the sins of the people outside the camp, takes the sin away; the second one is sacrificed, and the blood is used to purify and cleanse everything from the stain that’s left from the people’s sins that year. But this has to keep happening year in and year out and year in—because it’s just managing the problem so that God doesn’t either have to leave or wipe everybody out, which are sort of the two options.

So it’s just this management system. It was never there to make people righteous. If you keep the whole Torah perfectly—and St. Paul later is going to say that he did, make no mistake: he was going to say he was blameless in terms of the Torah, back when he was a Pharisee. He’s going to say, “I kept all the rules, kept them all perfectly.” There’s no credit to that. You’ve done the minimum that’s required by God to not be a wicked person. [Laughter] So it was never about making people righteous; it was about managing this until the time when Christ came. And we’re going to see this theme over and over again, all through St. Paul’s epistles, including Hebrews. This is the major theme of Hebrews, is how we don’t need those sacrifices from the old covenant any more, because they were just management, and they had to happen every year. And the high priest had to first go and offer a sacrifice for his own sins so that he could even walk into the Temple to offer the sacrifice for everybody else’s sins. So now Christ has come and offered himself as a perfect sacrifice, and so we don’t need the management system any more, because the problem’s been solved in Christ.

This is the understanding that St. Paul is arguing for here. And so he’s gone through— In chapter one, he’s gone through how the Gentiles, following the Tower of Babel, all went astray. They had the knowledge of God—they’re all descended from Noah, so they all had— At one point in the distant past, they had the knowledge of God, but they turned away and went a different direction. And he talked about how, even though they had that knowledge, they suppressed it. Instead of offering praise and glory to God, they offered praise and glory to other things, to other things that were not—gods, to themselves—and became thoroughly corrupt.

Then he turns to the Jewish people. He says, “God gave you this as this management system, and look what you did. You didn’t even follow that.” Because what happens, ultimately, in the Old Testament? Ultimately in the Old Testament, the people haven’t kept it. They haven’t followed it, and so the whole land has become corrupt. So God leaves the Temple. It’s in Ezekiel. He gets up and leaves, and as soon as he gets up and leaves, that’s it: Babylon comes in and wipes it out and takes them into exile.

So this is St. Paul’s understanding, and this is what leads us up to where we are now. He’s said to them, “All functionally the Torah does for you when you keep bringing it up— It never was intended to or would have or could have made you righteous people, made you able to stand at the right hand of God at the judgment. In fact, quite the opposite. The fact that you received this knowledge now makes you more subject to judgment because you haven’t followed it.” He even says, remember, at one point, “There are Gentiles out there who have done a better job of following it without having it than you have with all of this knowledge.” [Laughter]

This culminated at the end of chapter three with him talking about— He sort of narrowed his focus to circumcision, which is one part, of course, of the Torah; it’s one part of the teaching. This is especially important because this is— In the view of the Jewish people at this time, this is sort of the physical emblem of the fact that they’re separated from the rest of the nations, that they have this special status. And they’re relying on this special status when the day comes when God is going to judge the earth. “Well, we’ve got this special status, so we’re going to be fine. We’re the ones that he loves, and he hates all those other people, because we’re the circumcised.”

And remember at the very end he points out, “Look. God is the God of the whole cosmos.” They can’t argue with that, which means he’s not just the God of the Jews; he’s also the God of the Gentiles: he’s everyone’s God. And that’s why he’s going to judge everyone. He says, “So since there’s only one God who will justified the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith…” So he says— He’s already argued— Remember, “faith” is the same word as the word “believe.” And we’ve talked about already how “belief” doesn’t just mean the true/false test. “Yeah, okay, I agree.” We’re going to get an example here in chapter four.

But he’s saying, “Look, the people who are going to stand on the right hand of God are going to be the people who have been faithful, who have been loyal, who have been true to the knowledge that God has given them.” So the uncircumcised people, the Gentiles out there, who have been faithful and true to what God has given them, they’re going to be the ones on the right; and the people who are circumcised, the Jewish people, who have been faithful and loyal to God and done what is right are going to be the ones who are standing on God’s right hand. So the dividing line isn’t circumcision or any other part of the Torah, whether you eat gator or not, whether you showed up at the right new moon festival or not—that’s not what does it; that’s not what decides. It’s this faithfulness and loyalty, which can be expressed through keeping the Torah, but it’s not the same thing as keeping the Torah.

Let me give you a more modern example of that for us. We express our faith and our belief and our trust and our faithfulness to God by coming to church on Sunday, but if you’re going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and say, “Well, yeah, but I went to church every Sunday!”—that’s not going to cut it. [Laughter] That’s not going to cut it. So it’s the same thing with the Torah. The Jewish people who received the Torah, for them part of their faithfulness to God was keeping it, but just having received it or just going through the motions—having the tassles on your garment, doing those things—standing in front of Christ on the day of judgment and saying, “Well, yeah, but I never ate shellfish!” [Laughter] That’s not going to do it.

Q1: I’m so glad that’s not a—

Fr. Stephen: We’d be in real trouble down here, yeah. So unless there are any questions or comments or rumors or innuendoes or anything, we’ll go ahead and get started in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter four, verse one.

“What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh?” That’s kind of a weird way of ordering that sentence here in the New King James. [Laughter] It should be: “What then shall we say that Abraham our father, according to the flesh, has found?” The idea is that St. Paul is saying “we, our”: he’s still talking to Jewish people. So, according to the flesh, Abraham is their father.

Q1: Is their fleshly father.

Fr. Stephen: Linear descent, right. And he’s going to— And that language is important because, as we’ve already seen in St. John’s gospel, for example, Christ made a point about who was really the child of Abraham. Is it the one who is like Abraham and does what Abraham does, or is it the one who just happens to be descended from him? St. Paul’s going to make a similar point coming up here in Romans. So he’s at least, minimally, if he’s talking to Jewish people: Abraham his their father according to the flesh.

So what has he found? “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.” He’s saying if Abraham ended up being on that right side, if Abraham— In our modern language, if Abraham became a saint, by just what he did—he earned it—then he’d have something to brag about, logically. [Laughter] If I go and accomplish something, then I at least theoretically can brag about it. I did the hard work, and I accomplished this.

“For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.” So he says, “Look, if you go out and earn something—” If I work a certain number of hours, my employer gives me my paycheck. That’s not a gift. [Laughter] The check isn’t a gift. I don’t say, “Oh, thank you for giving me this money!” Because I’ve earned it. And so he says, “Well, that’s not what the Scriptures say.”

Now, remember what we’ve said about Old Testament quotes. They didn’t have chapters and verses for another 1440 years yet after St. Paul is writing this, so when they quote one verse, they want us to understand the whole section. It’s not just, “Oh, well, here’s the— Well, hey, see this verse I found?”

Q1: Prooftext.

Fr. Stephen: Right? Yeah, prooftexting. And where this comes, this statement, Abraham has believed something in particular. God has come to Abraham and made these promises to him. He’s come to Abraham and said, “You’re going to be the father of whole nations, plural. You’re going to be the father of whole nations. I’m going to make you great people, and I’m going to give to your seed this land, over on the other side of the world from where you live now,” because he lived in Ur which is what’s now Iraq, and the land he was giving him was Palestine. So he says, “I’m giving this to you.”

Now, obviously, Abram at the time—he wasn’t even named Abraham yet—didn’t earn that. God just comes to him and makes this promise. It wasn’t that: “For 40 years of faithful service, I’m going to give you this land.” God just comes and says, “I’m doing this.” So that’s grace. We talked about it. That’s what grace is; it’s God acting. As we’ve said when I was summarizing the Old Testament, God decides, “I’m going to make this people for myself,” and he goes and he chooses Abraham to do it.

But then we’re told Abraham’s response, which is that he believes God. So, first of all, he believes that that promise is true, even though he’s already an old man. He’s in his 70s when he leaves Ur. By the time he has a kid, he’s 100, but God comes to this guy in his 70s and says, “Whole nations are going to be descended from you! And I’m going to give you this land.” [Laughter] But he believes God.

Now, one interpretation that our Protestant friends use in this passage is they’ll say, “Oh, well, see, look: if you work, then it’s wages; it’s not a gift. So St. Paul’s saying Abraham didn’t do anything.” Now, he said he didn’t do anything to earn the promise, but did he really not do anything? No! He got up and got his whole family and traveled—

Q1: He acted on the promise.

Fr. Stephen: —hundreds of miles across the whole Fertile Crescent to get over there to that land that God had promised him because he believed. So you can’t separate his belief from the actions he took. If he had just sat there in Ur and said, “Oh, yeah, God, I believe you,” and then went back to work the next day at whatever he was doing in Ur, that wouldn’t be the same thing! [Laughter] Belief required him to do something, so it’s not just belief in the sense of checking a box: “Oh, yeah, I believe you.” It includes faithfulness. So he went and did something.

St. Paul isn’t saying, “Abraham didn’t do anything, and God just said, “Oh, you’re righteous because I told you this and you said okay.” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying because Abraham responded to God’s promise in a certain way, which included both belief and action, God considered him to be a righteous man. He’s on the right side. This is how he becomes a saint. This is how he becomes one of the holy ones: by his response to God’s promise.

Q1: With the Protestant interpretation theoretically, he could have believed it and sat there and said, “Okay, I can’t wait to watch this happen.”

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Q1: Because he would think that God would make it come true…

Fr. Stephen: Just make it happen, yeah. [Laughter] So he had to— He did something. He didn’t do anything to earn the promise, but he received the promise. He was a righteous man because of what he did based on his belief, based on his faith.

And there are plenty of other examples of the opposite in the Old Testament. One of the really obvious ones: God comes to David when David is made king, and he says, “If you follow all of my ways and keep all of my commandments, you keep the Torah, you follow the Torah, I will make your descendants— I will make a descendent of yours rule on the throne forever.” And so we’re told that David did, which tells us something about repentance being included in the Torah, because he committed plenty of sins, but he repented of those sins. And so the Messiah is ultimately born from his line.

But what fewer people remember is that after his son Solomon was judged and the kingdom of Israel gets split into two parts, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, so one of David’s descendants continues to reign over Judah in the south, which is much smaller. The bigger kingdom in the north gets given first to Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. And when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, becomes king of the northern kingdom of Israel, God comes to him and says, “If you follow all my ways, keep all my commandments, a descendent of yours will sit on the throne of this kingdom in Israel forever.” It’s the same promise he made to David, but Jeroboam doesn’t do that. He sets up idols, he breaks off everything, disregards God. And so his son ends up getting assassinated, and the new king who assassinated him comes, and guess what? God goes to him and makes the same promise.

So at least hypothetically— Now, of course, God knows everything in his providence, but for the sake of a hypothetical thought-experiment, what if Abraham had said, “You’re crazy. I’ve got things good here in Ur. I’m pretty well off. I’m 75 years old. I ain’t having any kids”? Well, going by what happened with Jeroboam, God would have gone to someone else and made the same promise. We’ve got to remember this response.

We talk about this dynamic again a lot around the Annunciation, because God comes to the Theotokos. He comes to her and he says, “You’re going to have a Child.” And what’s her response? “Let it be to me according to your will.” She says yes; she accepts it. So St. Paul is not arguing that God does everything here, but he’s arguing that God comes to us first. As we’ve talked about before, God didn’t wait for the people of Israel in Egypt in slavery, saying, “Okay, when you guys get— I’m going to give you the Torah now, and when you guys get your act together and you all follow this perfectly, then I’ll deliver you from Egypt and take you to the land.” He doesn’t. He takes them out of Egypt, he takes them to the land, but then he gives them the Torah, and he says, “Follow this.” And their initial response is, “Oh, yes!” at Mount Sinai. It’s, “Oh, sure, yeah! We’re going to do all of this.” And they don’t. But there’s always these—

And St. Paul isn’t arguing against that. He’s talking about— that God has moved first. Of course, the paradigm of that is that—and he’s going to say this explicitly in a little bit—Christ came before everyone in this room was born, and died to save us from our sins, died to give us eternal life, before we existed. So we didn’t move first. [Laughter] God moves first, but then we respond. We respond in faith or we don’t. And faith isn’t just “Yeah, sounds good!” Faith involves then doing something. If you really believe—in our case. For Abraham, the promise was about his descendants and this land; for us the promise is that Christ is returning to judge the living and the dead, and that we’re going to have to give an account for all of our actions. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, yeah, I believe that,” but if we really believe it, that’s going to change how we live our life; that’s going to change how we look at the sin in our life and repentance if we really believe this is going to happen. It’s the same kind of thing. Faith and response can’t be separated from each other.

And St. Paul isn’t doing that here, but he’s making the point— Remember, one of the big arguments of the Pharisees—we talked about this when we were going through the gospels—was it was apparent to everyone in the Jewish people that even though they had rebuilt the Temple and even though a good chunk of them had come back from exile and were now living in Judea, they were still under the Romans, God’s presence hadn’t returned to the Temple the way he had been present in the Temple before—so something was still wrong.

Q1: How did they know that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because they read in the Scriptures what happened when the tabernacle was dedicated and the presence of God filled it and there was fire and light and a cloud… Same thing happened when the Temple was dedicated, and Ezekiel then has this vision of God’s presence leaving the Temple before it was destroyed. When they rebuilt the Temple…

Q1: That didn’t happen.

Fr. Stephen: And it didn’t happen. And so in their minds they’re still in exile and they have to figure out why. The primary answer the Pharisees gave for why was: “Well, look, we got sent into exile because we didn’t keep the Torah. So the way to end the exile is for all of us to keep the Torah. And once we all get it right and we’re all living these pure and holy lives, then God will send the Messiah to kick the Romans out and redeem us, and he’ll return to his Temple and everything will be okay again.”

Q1: A Jewish rabbi told me that they believe that if all the Jews kept the Torah for one day, the Messiah would come.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s exactly it. That’s where it comes from. So this is their idea, and this is why, as we see in the gospels, the Pharisees so hated tax-collectors and sinners and these people. It wasn’t just that they were sort of “holier than thou,” it’s that these people are the ones who are keeping us under the Roman boot; they’re keeping God from returning to our Temple; they’re destroying our whole community. And so they want to be rid of them, including killing them.

And this is what motivated St. Paul, back when he was Saul and he was persecuting the Church, because he said, “These crazy heretics think the Messiah has already come. They’re leading people astray, so I need to go and put an end to them.” And then of course he got massively corrected by Christ himself and becomes St. Paul. But so this, when he’s arguing against— Talking about works and earning things, this is what he’s talking about. He’s talking about this idea. He’s saying, “Okay, you think that the way you’re going to make now as a Jewish Christian, the way you’re going to make Christ return to judge the living and the dead, and you’re going to be one of the righteous—the way you’re going to do that is by earning it, by following all of this perfectly.” And so he’s saying, “Is that how Abraham got into that category? Was he just leading this perfect life according to Torah that hadn’t been given yet in Ur? Or did God just come to him, and he responded with faithfulness and loyalty and trust, and he acted upon that?”

And so St. Paul is saying it’s the same thing in the Church. The Gospel has come to you. Whether you’re a Jew or you’re a Gentile, you’ve heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached to you. If you respond with faithfulness, with trust, with belief, if you act, if you change your life in accordance with the fact that you believe in that, then you are one of the righteous. You don’t have to do this other stuff besides, because that’s not what this other stuff was ever for anyway. That was for something else. So he continues:

But to him who does not work but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness, just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works:

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.

Q1: Okay, you’re going to have to— All your explanation… I don’t follow and understand that paragraph—

Fr. Stephen: That I just read?

Q1: Well, up to the point of the quotation.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I’m about to— [Laughter] Part of our problem here is, even in the Orthodox Study Bible, they’re using the New King James version, which was translated by our Protestant friends. This is not— I’m not— There’s nothing nefarious here. They’re not deliberately trying to skew— “Oh, we’re going to mess with this so it supports our views.” [Laughter] It’s not like that. These are the views they have, so when they read the text, this is how they read it naturally.

I’m going to go through it now, but I’m going to start— The reason I read as far as I did is, again, I want to start with the Scripture quote, because “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute (or reckon) sin.” So our Protestant friends who have read that first paragraph want to say, “Okay, see, look, St. Paul is quoting David. He’s talking about God just forgives people’s sins: no work, no action required.”

This is Psalm 32 (or 31 in the Greek numbering), and these are the first two verses that St. Paul quotes:

Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not take into account and in whose mouth there is no deceit.

Let me continue with the next few verses.

Because I kept silent, my bones grew old, from my groaning all the day long; for day and night your hand was heavy upon me; I became miserable when the thorn pierced me. I made known my sin, and I did not hide my transgression; I said, “I will confess my transgression to the Lord,” and you forgave the ungodliness of my sin.

So did this person do nothing?

Q1: No.

Fr. Stephen: This person didn’t do nothing. David’s talking about himself. He repented of his sins; he confessed them. He said, “When I was silent, I felt God’s wrath. It was horrible; it was like my bones were breaking.” It’s this image. “When I confessed my sin, then how good it felt, and how blessed I was that my sins were forgiven and they were covered, because I confessed them, because I repented of them.”

So if St. Paul were trying to argue that people’s sins are forgiven without them doing anything, he picked a lousy passage to quote, because that’s not what the passage said. [Laughter] And St. Paul was a highly trained rabbi, so he knew what the psalm said. He’s not trying to— And his readers knew what the psalm said; he’s not trying to put one over on them.

So with that taken into account, the work that it’s talking about here is, again, before the fact. We don’t earn forgiveness of sins. God doesn’t look at us and say, “Well, your record so far has been so great that I’ll just overlook this one. You know, everybody messes up once in a while, but you’re doing such a great job, we’ll just let this one slide.” The fact that God comes and offers us forgiveness of sins if we repent is grace. He doesn’t have to do that! He doesn’t have to forgive us. We could say, “I’m so sorry!” And he could say, “Too bad. What you did was terrible.” [Laughter] I mean, he would be within his rights. You knew better! You did it deliberately. So the fact that God has offered us forgiveness of sins— Remember, this is how the Gospel is described in Acts, that repentance and forgiveness of sins were preached in the name of Jesus Christ. That’s how the gospels describe it.

So that God has made this path for us, that Christ has died for our sins, has given us this way to have our sins covered: God did that before we were born. We didn’t earn that. But is that the same thing as saying it doesn’t require us to do anything? God comes to us again with a promise. To quote 1 John, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” He makes us that promise. But for us to receive that promise, number one, we have to believe that it’s true, that he will forgive them if we confess, and then we have to actually confess them; we have to actually repent; we have to actually change our life and try and do differently and do better. So the promise is something we haven’t earned. God doesn’t owe us forgiveness. There’s nothing mechanical about it, where if we repent he has to. [Laughter] That’s just the way things work. But he’s made us this promise, and so if we do it, he is faithful and he is just, and so God always keeps his promises once he’s made them.

Q1: I’ve forgotten for sure, but I think I may know who said, “God will forgive me. It’s his job.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is not the case. [Laughter]

Q1: No.

Fr. Stephen: Which is not the case!

Q1: This was not held up to me as a great example to follow, but it was— I think it was King Charles II; I’m not sure.

Fr. Stephen: And remember, the same thing is true of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just God saying, “Okay, yeah. Okay, I won’t smack you for that one later.” Forgiveness is God actually healing, actually cleansing, actually purifying us. So he does something.

Q1: And isn’t it conditional on our forgiving others as well?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah! [Laughter] That’s part of that repentance aspect. We just read about Zacchaeus on Sunday. When he repented, it wasn’t just like: “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry about all that stealing and extortion I did,” and Jesus said, “Ah, it’s all right.” [Laughter] That’s not what happens in the Gospel. What happens is Zacchaeus stands up and says, “I’m going to give half of what I have to the poor, and I’m going to give back— Everyone I stole money from, I’m going to give them four times what I stole from them.” And after he says that, Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house,” because that’s what repentance is. That’s what repentance is.

And we have the parable of the unmerciful servant, remember, where he gets forgiven this huge debt, the equivalent of millions of dollars, and then he’s walking out and he runs into a guy who owes him five bucks, and he grabs him and starts choking him and says, “Where’s my money!?” [Laughter] And the point is not that: “Oh, hey, God’ll let you slide on this stuff as long as you meet these requirements”; it’s that that showed he hadn’t repented. He had no idea the depths of the forgiveness he had just received, because if he had, if he did understand that, there’s no way he’d go and rough a guy up for five bucks after he just got forgiven a multi-million dollar debt. He would be going around forgiving everybody. He’d be tearing up all his creditors if he really understood.

So this is what’s important. Because, remember, look, St. Paul says, “Just as David also describes.” So if you’re going to argue that what he’s saying is different than what David’s saying, you’re going to have a problem. So the point St. Paul is making, once again: God doesn’t owe us forgiveness either, but he’s promised it to us; we haven’t earned it. But in order to receive that promise, it requires from us belief, faith, and that expresses itself in actions. That expresses itself in actual actions, in this case with forgiveness of sins, repentance; in Abraham’s case to receive the promise, picking up your family and traveling hundreds of miles.

Q2: But at the time of St. Paul, what are the actions based on? Did they follow exactly what Jesus asked them to do that was part of the Old Testament instructions? What were those actions for that time?

Fr. Stephen: Well, in a lot of cases— Well, for example, Zacchaeus, the giving back four times what he stole actually comes from the Torah. That’s what you were supposed to do if you were a thief. So he was doing it voluntarily. But the part about giving half of his possessions to the poor was beyond—was beyond what was required in the Torah in the Old Testament. So there’s not a list of actions, like “Okay, I’ve done this and I’ve done this, so I’m forgiven.” [Laughter]

Q2: What is the component to—?

Fr. Stephen: There’s a whole— It’s a whole transformation of your life, and when we get toward the end of Romans, St. Paul’s going to start laying that out at the end. All of his epistles are in two parts. There’s a part where he talks about theology, and then he says, “Therefore, because all these things are true, therefore this is what you need to do.” And he lays out what you need to do, but even those aren’t just a list of things, like you need to have tassels on your robe and you need to not eat this and eat that instead; it’s you need to love your neighbor, you need to give freely of what you have, you need to repent when you have sinned and try to make things right with your brother. All of these things: you have to practice self-control, you need to— All of these things that aren’t just things you can check off, like: “Oh, yeah, I practiced self-control today, check.” [Laughter] Or “I was loving today, check!” They’re all-encompassing.

Q1: Would this add up to the teachings of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount?

Fr. Stephen: Sermon on the Mount, yeah. I mean, this is going to stand parallel, or the Sermon on the Plain in St. Luke’s gospel, all of these things. These are the ways of expressing the fact that you actually believe.

Q2: Where did St. Paul get his information about those three years of Jesus’ ministry?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he— In his own argument, he got it from Christ himself.

Q2: So he could just know all those teachings?

Fr. Stephen: I mean, Christ appeared to him not just on the road to Damascus, but multiple times. But also, they’re not radically different than what’s in the Old Testament.

Q2: They are.

Fr. Stephen: I disagree. When Christ says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” which summarizes all those things in the Sermon on the Mount—I mean, if you really love your neighbor and stuff—those are both quotes from the book of Leviticus. He’s explaining—

Q2: But the definition of neighbor was different.

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s not! He’s explaining what that really meant.

Q2: The teachers in the Old Testament understood it in a different way.

Fr. Stephen: No, no, no. That’s how the Pharisees understood it. The Pharisees understood it, had boiled it down to this checklist, where— “Well, what does it mean to work on the sabbath?” “Well, you can only walk so far, and you can only—” That’s not what the Old Testament said! They had done that. That’s why Christ says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven,” because that’s not what it was about. He’s explaining what it really always meant. He’s not changing it. He’s explaining what it always meant.

Q2: Turning the other cheek in the Old Testament—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, showing mercy. Yeah! “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful” is a quote from the Old Testament.

Q1: But it had been obscured and is still obscured.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he was explaining the practical level, what these things mean, what they really should have been doing, because they became obsessed with “Do I eat shellfish or not? Do I have tassels on my garments?” This is what St. Paul’s arguing against. They thought that was what made them righteous people. And St. Paul says that’s not what the Torah was ever about! That’s not what makes you a righteous person. That’s not what makes you a righteous person. You can do all that and still be horrifically sinful and wicked in your heart. But God said that in Deuteronomy; in Deuteronomy, he said, “It’s not important that you circumcise your flesh; it’s important that you circumcise your heart.”

Q2: In Deuteronomy, this—?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but they didn’t understand that. Their whole focus was on the flesh part and not on their heart. And so that’s what Christ was trying to explain in the Sermon on the Mount. That’s why he said, “You say, ‘Oh, well, don’t commit adultery.’ ” He says, “Well, if you’re married and you’re looking at other women with lust in your heart, you’ve already broken that commandment in your heart. It’s not just what you do externally, outside, but it’s what’s in your heart.” But that’s coming from— I mean, that’s in Deuteronomy: it’s in your heart is what’s important. They just had lost sight of that. So it’s the same God and he’s teaching the same thing; they just hadn’t followed it, and so Christ is coming to really explain what it means so that they would repent— And then part of repentance is changing your life and how you live.

But there’s all kinds of— You know, in the Torah, every 50 years all property was supposed to revert to the original families that owned it. In Deuteronomy there’s a commandment: “There shall be no poor among you.” So he says if there’s a poor person in Israel, you are all sinning. That’s in Deuteronomy. If there were rich and poor— So the things Christ says, he’s getting back to the original meaning and really applying it. And we’re going to see St. Paul ultimately does that, too. But it’s important that we not read this as saying, “You don’t have to do anything,” which is how some of our Protestant friends read it: “It just matters what you believe in your head or what you believe in your heart; it doesn’t matter what you do,” whereas St. Paul is clearly saying that the things that you do reflect what is in your head and in your heart. You may claim something else is in your heart, but what you do shows what’s really there, shows what you really value and what you really think is important.

So he’s trying to get at just that, that what matters is responding to God in faith and repentance, not keeping a list of rules as you’ve defined them that somehow earn your way to being a righteous person or earn you the promises of God or earn you God’s forgiveness. God offers it, and it’s how you respond to his action and grace, whether you cooperate with it or whether you reject it.