Robb Schiller

Every Tues­day evening I get to hang out with some of the coolest peo­ple around. We make din­ner together and then jump into scrip­ture all the juice we can muster. Last night this time was espe­cially awesome.

We have been going through Gala­tians and read chap­ter 2 last night. It was so incred­i­ble to make some par­al­lels to Gal 2 and Romans 3/end of 2. I can’t even imag­ine the incred­i­ble level of ten­sion going on over the needed unity of the early church, and its two most notable leaders.

Gal 2

Paul Con­fronts Peter
11 But when Peter came to Anti­och, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. 12 When he first arrived, he ate with the Gen­tile Chris­tians, who were not cir­cum­cised. But after­ward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gen­tiles any­more. He was afraid of crit­i­cism from these peo­ple who insisted on the neces­sity of cir­cum­ci­sion. 13 As a result, other Jew­ish Chris­tians fol­lowed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barn­abas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

14 When I saw that they were not fol­low­ing the truth of the gospel mes­sage, I said to Peter in front of all the oth­ers, “Since you, a Jew by birth, have dis­carded the Jew­ish laws and are liv­ing like a Gen­tile, why are you now try­ing to make these Gen­tiles fol­low the Jew­ish traditions?

15 “You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sin­ners’ like the Gen­tiles. 16 Yet we know that a per­son is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obey­ing the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obey­ing the law.”

We were blow­ing up inside at how crazy deep this issue had to run for Peter and Paul.  The Jew­ish tra­di­tions of the time were so gar­gan­tu­anly huge of a thing to totally tear down. Let alone that Jesus him­self grew up in the Jew­ish traditions.

Then Tim brought up the last lit­tle bit of Romans 2 and the begin­ning of 3.

Rom 2/3

²⁸A man is not a Jew if he is only one out­wardly, nor is cir­cum­ci­sion merely out­ward and phys­i­cal. ²⁹No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and cir­cum­ci­sion is cir­cum­ci­sion of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the writ­ten code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.

God’s Faithfulness(Romans 3)

¹What advan­tage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in cir­cum­ci­sion? ²Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God.

³What if some did not have faith? Will their lack of faith nul­lify God’s faith­ful­ness? ⁴Not at all! Let God be true, and every man a liar. As it is writ­ten:
“So that you may be proved right when you speak
and pre­vail when you judge.”

⁵But if our unright­eous­ness brings out God’s right­eous­ness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bring­ing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argu­ment.) ⁶Cer­tainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world? ⁷Some­one might argue, “If my false­hood enhances God’s truth­ful­ness and so increases his glory, why am I still con­demned as a sin­ner?” ⁸Why not say—as we are being slan­der­ously reported as say­ing and as some claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their con­dem­na­tion is deserved.

The ques­tion we closed with, as we chal­lenged each other to mem­o­rize Gal 2:19–21, is How is the free­dom Christ gave us at the cross affect­ing the way were liv­ing?  Pretty tough to answer, and it’s def­i­nitely going to be stir­ring in my heart the rest of this week.

Too many words, so here’s a pic­ture, some­thing that reminds me of freedom.