Tonight at the Roman’s study there was a question regarding Romans 4:15—why is it there?
The questioner was confused about the nature of violation of Law since this entire chapter doesn’t seem to be dealing with Law at all. After all, asked the student, isn’t the nature of Law to (1) prescribe and punish; and hasn’t Paul already established the (2) equality of Jew and Gentile to enter in by faith: why go back and deal with condemnation that comes about from Law breaking?
How would you fix things?
How would you go about addressing failing economy, the war, and jobs going overseas? Or how would you go about fixing the divided church, rampant error in the blogosphere and the constant temptation to become lax in your ways?
Ideas have consequences. It’s easy to say, slips stealthily across the typed keys, rings exceedingly true; and in the end it’s ignored. Paul pointed this out to the Church in Corinth when they tried to make their concept of the resurrection more palatable to foreign, and likely their own, ears.
People do it today. In an effort to make one of Christianity’s key doctrines more palatable to the public religious palette, some confessing Christians have taken to modifying the future resurrection of Christians. So instead of a future people getting up from the grave, we put off this flesh and are freed from it: we become happy Ghosts, “resurrected” on a cloud in heaven.
I’m reminded of Yoda, pinching Luke in disgust while talking about “This crude matter”.
I have taken it to heart to write to you, dear brother, what really happened and why it is important to our faith. Yes, I know you received two earlier letters but I have heard that you were confused by their content, thinking (somehow) as if those things of which I wrote, really occurred. Therefore, I have taken it to heart to write you these things, most excellent Theophilus, things I have researched so that you may fully understand.
We know this portion of Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 15: Paul answers the question about the resurrection of the dead. We hear it at funerals. We hear it at wakes. But what about the question of the resurrection of the dead? Well, the answer usually goes: they didn’t believe it.
Yet in what sense they didn’t believe it, I think, is pertinent to today. For today there are many people, even Bible believing people, that hold to a resurrection and a life that is so totally disconnected to this life and reality that it separates the two. A resurrection, they might say, is fine—just not the one that people keep talking about.