Hope Blog

▶ 1:19:38

Matt set aside what he had planned. “This was kind of like — they don’t tell you to
do this at preacher school,” he said, and then opened with something sad in the hope it would
land as an encouragement.

When the person who ministered to you turns out to be false

▶ 1:21:04

Mandy had brought him the news about another prominent Christian leader: Philip Yancey, who
had acknowledged a long affair. Matt admitted the name had not meant much to him — “I think he
wrote some books,” he would have said — and then he googled it. “Boy did he write books,” and
widely read ones. It is not an isolated case: Matt went on to name Ravi Zacharias and Mike
Bickle, and noted that the pattern runs well past the famous. People make a profession and then
live another way, and it is depressing.

He raised it for the sake of anyone tempted to go jaded about their own history: God did
something in me through that man’s ministry — was any of it real?

▶ 1:22:15

It is an old question with a settled answer. In the fourth century the church argued about
clergy who had handed over the scriptures or informed on believers under persecution. Was my
baptism fake because he was fake? Am I actually married? “I’m not saying it came to blows,” Matt
said, “but it came to books.”

▶ 1:23:22

Augustine gave the church a way through: it is the grace of Jesus, not that man. Your baptism
is legitimate because of Christ. Someone in the room called out the obvious precedent — Judas
baptized. Judas laid hands on the sick and they recovered. There is no passage carving out an
exception for him.

▶ 1:24:29

Two things follow. Don’t idolize the people up front — and don’t assume this is a problem for
authors. Matt read Paul’s charge as addressed to the room:

And if the objection is that God should not use imperfect people — “who would be left? If he
didn’t use imperfect sinful people, who would minister? Who would preach the gospel?” The person
still answers to God. You still stay vigilant. But what God did, God did.

“To fulfill all righteousness”

▶ 1:26:45

That turned the message toward Jesus at the Jordan. Imagine being John the Baptist, who had
already identified him as the Lamb of God, and now being asked to baptize God in the flesh. He
objected; Jesus overruled him — “it
is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”

▶ 1:27:43

Matt thinks this is the piece we drop because it confuses us. Forgiveness of sin is no small
thing, but the gift is more than a blank slate and a neutral standing. “It’s not just those last
hours of Christ’s life that he lived for us. He lived an entire life of obedience to the Father.”
Last week Paul used Abraham as the analogy
(Romans 4);
this week it is Adam.

Justified by faith, and a hope worth suffering for

▶ 1:28:50

To be justified is to be made righteous — not by circumcision, not by works of the
law, but by trusting that God does what he promised. The result is no hostility with God: peace,
access, and a
standing in grace from which we rejoice in hope of glory.

▶ 1:30:33

Which is what makes the next line survivable:
suffering
produces endurance, endurance character, character hope. In the middle of it, suffering feels
endless. The rejoicing is not in the pain but in what it is producing.

▶ 1:32:02

Matt stopped to correct the vocabulary. In American English, “I hope so” usually means there is
no evidence and it would just be nice — “I hope I win the lottery. I don’t even buy tickets.” Paul
means the opposite: “a hope of glory, not a ‘gosh, it’d be nice, probably won’t.’” Biblical hope
is assurance standing on testimony and a down payment — the resurrection, the Spirit given to us.

He died for the bad guys

▶ 1:33:23

People do die for other people, and when you ask them why, they say it was the right thing to
do — usually to save the good guys from the bad guys. This is a different category. “God’s doing
no community service. He’s not trying to catch up on his taxes.” He is the best, and he is dying
for the worst.

Then the argument runs from lesser to greater
(Romans 5:9–11).
If he did that for enemies, how much more will he follow through for children already grafted in?
Matt noticed the couplets: justified by his blood, reconciled by his death — then saved by
him, saved by his life. That last phrase is the hinge of the whole message.

Getting the Adam story right

▶ 1:36:32

The analogy at
Romans
5:12–14 only works if we read Genesis accurately, so Matt backed up. Adam is made from the
dirt — adamah, a pun on his name — and Eve is made from him, which means every later
human descends from Adam. There is one humanity, and it comes from one man
(Genesis 2–3).

▶ 1:38:53

Here is where the retelling usually goes wrong, “by people just like me,” he warned. Many
assume they were expelled from God’s presence. There is no evidence of that — Cain is still
complaining about being driven from God’s presence in
Genesis 4,
which he could hardly do if his parents had already lost it. “Do you think God was trapped in the
garden?”

▶ 1:39:51

You do not have to guess at the punishment. God states it:

The Hebrew sentence does not even finish. They are put outside so they cannot reach the tree of
life; what they lose is their potential immortality, and every child born after them is born
without access to it. Because of one man’s trespass, all die.

In Adam’s loins

▶ 1:41:33

Paul calls Adam a type — a template that sets up a later fulfillment. To show how much
weight that carries, Matt borrowed a maneuver from
Hebrews 7:9,
where Levi is said to have paid tithes to Melchizedek — through Abraham, generations before Levi
was born, because he was still in his ancestor’s loins.

▶ 1:43:22

Apply that to Romans 5:12 and the sentence changes. Adam’s sin is not merely similar to ours.
“When Adam took that fruit and ate it, we took that fruit and ate it. When Adam was kicked out of
the garden, we were kicked out of the garden.” Matt could feel the room resisting: “Kind of
embrace the bummer. Just embrace it, because you want that. You’re going to super duper want it
in a minute.” Without that participation, the analogy is shallow and hollow — and Paul does not
make shallow analogies.

▶ 1:45:07

The two halves are not symmetrical, and that is the point of
Romans
5:15–17. Adam had to fail once. Jesus covered countless generations of sin — orders of
magnitude harder, and so much more powerful.

▶ 1:46:14

Now the payoff. In Christ — who lived a perfect life of obedience to the Father without a
break — we are not merely returned to neutral with the debts paid off. His righteousness is ours
on exactly the terms by which Adam’s sin was ours.

▶ 1:48:33

Two words got weighed. First, “act” in verse 18 is supplied by the ESV and the NIV; the Greek
reads through one righteousness. Matt takes it as a who rather than a what — the King
James has it, “by the righteousness of one came the free gift” — which fits what Paul just said
about being saved by his life. Second, Paul had a perfectly good word available for
reckoned; he used it of Abraham a chapter earlier. Here he chose a word that means
made. “We’re not just thought of as sinners. We are made righteous.”

So what do you do with a gift like that?

▶ 1:50:12

The first casualty is bragging. “So what if you legalistically did a bunch of stuff great this
week? What is that compared to a life of obedience to the Father in every way?” And it answers the
question of why Jesus was baptized at all, why he was a baby — “why couldn’t he have just showed
up the day of his death, fully grown, ready to die?”

▶ 1:51:40

The second question is the one Paul anticipates himself: why not keep sinning, since the game
is already won? Matt reached ahead to
Romans 12:1
and to the word behind “sacrifice.” We tend to read every Old Testament sacrifice as a sin
offering; many were offerings of honor, respect, devotion, and the Greek translators had a
distinct word for those. That is the word Paul uses about your life.

▶ 1:52:55

“You are not paying off a backload of debt. You’re not trying to get his attention. You’re
already at the table, seated in heavenly places. What you can do is give yourself for honor — your
affection, your devotion, your loyalty to the one who super duper duper deserves it. We’re not
buying anything. There’s nothing left to sell. It’s all given in Christ.”

The message ended in silence rather than application, with the congregation asked to let the
Spirit say how to live it out, and a prayer: “I think we need your help receiving from you.”

▶ 1:05:04

Romans 4 can read like Paul filling pages until he gets back to the good stuff.
Matt opened by insisting this is the good stuff, and then handed the room the history
that makes it obvious. Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome in AD 49; Paul writes in the
50s. For roughly a decade, every leadership seat in that church held by a Jewish believer sat
empty, and Roman Gentiles led, reached their fellow Romans, and grew a congregation that became —
in Matt’s word — “very gentiley.” Then the Jews were allowed back, and went home to their home
church.

1. The question underneath the letter

▶ 1:08:14

Walk back into that room. Nobody is keeping the festivals. Nobody is circumcising their kids.
Does anyone here even read the Torah? “What does it mean to be a Christian?” Matt asked, standing
in their shoes. “How do you become a true authentic Christian? Is it more Christian to join into
the tribe of Israel?” And Paul has to answer without telling Jewish believers that their heritage
was nothing. His move is to retell Abraham’s story — reading it, as Matt kept putting it, “through
Jesus glasses.” God never wanted to be God to Israel only. He also never stopped wanting to be God
to Israel. So the Jews don’t have to become un-Jewish and the Gentiles don’t have to become
Jewish, because the whole time it was for every tribe and every family.

2. “All” is a room, not a mirror

▶ 1:09:54

Paul starts bluntly: “Are
we Jews any better off? No, not at all.” Matt’s question about that “we” is the interesting
one — it is entirely possible some Roman Christians had begun identifying as Jewish in order to
feel more authentically Christian. “Are you now a hundred percent more Christian? Are you like
maybe an extra ten percent Christian?” We read the “all” of these chapters individualistically,
each little person on the planet. Paul’s first meaning is the two groups sitting in front of him.
Both are under sin. And the law was never the fix, because
through
the law comes knowledge of sin — a diagnosis, not a cure.

3. A gift, or wages

▶ 1:12:08

▶ 1:14:27

How badly did people want to sort this out? Gentiles in the ancient world were getting
circumcised to belong, and circumcised Jews were seeking surgery to reverse it. Both directions,
both real. Meanwhile people were asking Jesus the same question — what must we do to be doing the
works of God — and getting an answer that sounds scandalous and is simply true:
“This
is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

▶ 1:16:29

Then comes the fancy word: God put Jesus forward as a
propitiation
— “making things right between us and God by his blood, to be received by faith, not by law or
circumcision.” Matt flagged the ambiguity in the Greek of verse 26: “the one who has faith in
Jesus” could also be rendered “those of the faith of Jesus.” Both are in play, and the second
points forward — those whose identity is defined by the faithfulness of Jesus himself. Which is
exactly the parallel he is about to draw. Abraham’s faith produced a body of people who by all
rights should not exist; Jesus’ faithful obedience did the same, on a scale beyond counting.

▶ 1:17:29

So boasting
is excluded — there is no way to brag that you are a better kind of Christian, because the
finish line was never reached by human effort. And then Paul does arithmetic: if you are a
monotheist, if there is only one God, how could he be the God of one tribe only? “There’s no other
gods left,” Matt said. “That’s bad luck for them.” He never wanted to be a tribal deity.

4. Before the law, a promise

▶ 1:19:11

Some were accusing Paul of nullifying the Old Testament. His answer:
“By
no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law.” It is still true, still scripture, still real
history — and it has a purpose that sits inside a larger story. Before Sinai, before Moses, before
there was a nation with ordinances, there was a Chaldean named Abram living in Ur, uncircumcised,
who was told in Genesis
15 that his children would be like the stars and that in his seed all the families of the
earth would be blessed.

▶ 1:21:54

Years passed and no child came. So Sarah offered her servant, and legally the child would count
as theirs — a reasonable plan, Matt allowed, and “it’s not like we can judge. We’ve done way
dumber things than that.” Ishmael was born. Years later God came back and specified: you
and Sarah. Ishmael was the fruit of Abraham’s effort. Isaac was the fruit of God’s
promise. Hold onto that, because the rest of the chapter runs on it.

5. What Abraham discovered

▶ 1:24:29

In Paul’s day the standard telling ran the other way: Abraham was counted righteous because he
obeyed. So when Paul quotes
“Abraham
believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” and pointedly leaves the obedience
out, it is a dramatic omission — bothersome, if not quite fighting words. Matt also noted that the
verb in verse 1 is closer to discovered than the ESV’s “gained”: what did Abraham find
out according to the flesh? What his own hands produced was Ishmael, and to Ishmael came no land,
no inheritance, no blessing for all the tribes of the world.

▶ 1:26:24

Then the wage-and-gift line: to the one who works, pay is not a gift but a due
(Romans
4:4–5). Grace has to be free in order to be grace. And to make sure nobody thinks he is
cherry-picking one patriarch, Paul brings in a second witness everybody respects —
David
on the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.

6. The order of the story is the argument

▶ 1:27:59

Here Paul slows down and walks it chronologically, which was not how it was usually told. Was
Abraham counted righteous before or after he was circumcised?

Abraham is not Adam; he is not the ancestor of everyone everywhere. But Paul is describing a
wider family than his bloodline — one, as Matt put it with a preacher’s grin at his own line,
“defined by promise, not performance.” That family includes the circumcised too, so long as they
also walk in the footsteps of the faith Abraham had
before
he was circumcised.

▶ 1:31:16

And the inheritance never came through the law, which had not yet been given
(Romans
4:13–15). If only law-keepers are heirs, then faith is empty and the promise is void — “do you
really want to go down that road? Does the Bible start at Mount Sinai?” Back in
Romans
2 the Jews had the Torah and the Gentiles had conscience and creation; here the promise rests
on grace precisely so that it can be
guaranteed
to all his offspring.

7. Faith in a God who raises the dead

▶ 1:32:27

“It was not like a vague faith that God’s kind of out there,” Matt said. “He probably listens.
He’s probably — I don’t know.” Abraham’s faith had content. It was that if God said it, he could
have a child with Sarah.

▶ 1:33:34

Which explains “in hope he believed against hope.” It is not two hopes in him wrestling for the
win. Look at what happens when God asks for Isaac back: Abraham tells his servants
“we
will come again to you.” Spared, or raised — he did not know which, and he said we
either way. Life from the dead because of God’s promise and not human effort: Matt let the room
hear the figure that casts the shadow, and reached back to
Romans
1:5 — the obedience of faith among all nations, “including you.” He is talking to insecure
Gentiles. All along, God wanted this.

▶ 1:37:20

One last look at the Greek, which Matt promised twice would be the last: the word for “as good
as dead” is one you use of corpses, not of the elderly.

Impossible plus impossible. And the counting was never only about him:

So Roman Christians do not merely imitate Abraham’s faith. They are participating in it, as his
children by promise. The birth of Isaac and the birth of the church work the same way.

8. So what does it mean to be a Christian?

▶ 1:41:05

Here the message came home, and Matt was cheerfully willing to make the room squirm. If Jesus
and the promises of God are for all tribes, what would it look like for Saudis to belong to Jesus
as Saudis — Arabic, Saudi music, Saudi clothing? Do they have to swap the clothes for jeans? Do
they have to start listening to K-LOVE and watching The Chosen? “That’s how we do it.
That’s just how we do it.”

▶ 1:42:43

He kept widening it past ethnicity — Swifties taking down the poster, New Yorkers with beanies
and kombucha, South Dakota guys with the hats and the trucks and Morgan Wallen — and then turned
it on the room’s own checklist. Plaid, boots, loose-fit jeans, K-LOVE, The Chosen, voted
the right way, therefore Christian. “Don’t drink, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.” The
point is not that any of it is wrong. The point is what happens when it becomes the definition:
you can double down on the cultural apparatus to the point that the actual promise is forgotten or
confused. Even a building. “I put my body in a car, and then I get out of my car and I get in this
building for an hour and a half on Sundays. So I’m a Christian.”

▶ 1:45:52

Yes, the gospel takes many cultural expressions among many peoples — and yes, it is important
to know what it is underneath them. God’s promise for all people is through the work of Jesus
Christ, and trusting him for salvation and forgiveness. After that, boots or no boots, hat or no
hat. The question is whether there is an actual relationship there.

Where it landed

▶ 1:47:24

The call, Matt said, is for you and for your neighbors of whatever culture: believe in Jesus,
and see the people who look and act and dress differently than you as people God jealously wants.
He wants them. He closed by admitting he never quite knows how to end a sermon, so he prayed
instead — that we would get fresh vision and fresh energy, and grace to see the people around us
the way God does.