Sinclair Ferguson: Romans in 40 Minutes

[Music] well welcome on behalf of the banner of truth to the event this morning I'm John Rawlinson on the general manager of the banner at the end today there is a book that is lined up at the back for you if you're not a student we'd ask you to please wait and just hold battled a bit I want to make sure all the students get a copy of the book many of you I'm sure will know of dr. Martin lloyd-jones and what we've what we're giving to you today is one of the volumes out of his series on Romans so don't leave this morning before you've got that we'll also be giving a little a handout the men on the front is not the new banner logo you'll see when you get it so we'll give a little handout that has an outline of what dr. Ferguson is talking to us about this morning so on behalf of the banner then welcome this morning dr. Lawson is going to do the introduction to dr. Ferguson at his his request so there you go yes this is a new ministry I travel with dr. Ferguson and I introduced him in in meetings I write endorsements for his books and so this is a wonderful ministry that I have dr. Ferguson lives in Carnoustie Scotland and as you know you know who he is he's been a professor for many years at Westminster Theological Seminary he's Chancellor's professor now at Reformed Theological Seminary I served with him on the board of Ligonier ministries he's a teaching fellow with me at Ligonier ministries he's chairman of the board of banner of truth he's married to Dorothy and we heard him preach yesterday and he is a man who knows Scripture and he knows theology and those come together wonderfully under his ministry so he has 40 minutes to cover Romans so I'm not going to take any more of his precious time let us pray father as our friend dr. Ferguson now gives us the overview of Romans we pray that you will so work through his mind draw upon his many years open our eyes open our hearts even to a more succinct understanding of Paul's magnum opus and so help us to use this time wisely thank you for bringing dr. Ferguson all the way across the ocean this is a precious moment for each one of us to be able to learn from him so we commit this time to you now in him to your service to us in Christ's name Amen ladies and gentlemen dr. Ferguson please please don't don't live under the delusion that stevelawson and I are actually friends well I you know I know you're really here because the word would have got out from last year or the year before the year before there will be a free book so it's um it's worth an G either enduring or thinking Steve Lawson is sitting there at the front thinking this guy's a real huckster if he thinks he can get through romans and 40 minutes but a I was asked to do this and B I'm glad to do it in order simply to say to you that when the time comes as God granted a will come for you when you do take on the task of climbing the New Testaments Mount Everest it really is an occasion and you should you should seize the occasion I have a advocate of long history with Roman sets it's gone on for over 50 years I suppose I or in maybe a hundred and twenty commentaries on Romans you know some people collect baseball cards and other people collect commentaries on Romans and when I was student I think I was maybe just turned 18 at the time I was in my second year at university I know exactly where I was sitting I was in room C three seven and Johnson Hall in the university and it dawned on me that although I understood the all Scripture is breathed out by God but not everything in Scripture is as fundamental to its structure or to the structure of the gospel as everything else and it was a very big moment in my life because it caused me to think I must really give myself first of all to the study of the foundational books they architectonic books in Scripture and that had a knock-on effect in the sense that it led to a decision to do the same with a the works of the Christian Church and I ought therefore be willing to put up with the embarrassment of being asked if I'd read the latest thing by saying no I haven't read it and that I would then give myself to the books that really had made a difference and to me that was that was a huge and significant moment in my life then the rest of my story is as a student I led a Bible study on Romans in my ministry I the only occasion I preached through Romans was sometime in the early 2000s maybe the Kazakh convention in England which is very different from the Kazakh convention now if there still is one in the United States I don't think I managed to finish the book but the only I've only once taken a congregation through Paul's letter to the Romans and it was a huge occasion for me because I had lived with Rome and so to be honest it's never been my favorite book in the Bible but I'd lived with it for a long time and I think I realized being taken through Romans as a congregational experience is for most people going to be maximum twice in a life and actually for most Christian if they're lucky as that old version of the scripture says Joseph was a lucky man if they're lucky in that sense someone will take them through Romans once in their life and I did this in our evening congregation I'm profoundly committed to evening worship I think people need more of the Word of God than they get in most churches and I did it in 18 months at a very deliberate reason for doing it in 18 months and it became a journey for us so at the end I was thinking and people were saying you know could you not just preach a verse by verse through chapter 16 you know do little studies of all these people because we did not want it to finish and the reason why this little fellow is on the front is in our church we had a weekly newspaper open out to everybody in the congregation and at certain point I said to my secretary do you have any Roman soldiers in that box of tricks you have and she she gave me this Roman soldier and I said I want a quarter page in in the church paper with that Roman soldier and the ones underneath Romans coming and the only time in my life I've ever marketed a book of the Bible but the next week it was like more Romans coming and then it was Romans coming to Colombia where we were and then eventually the the secret was was revealed so I know it you know the the banner of truth would never hire me as the marketing manager but I really wanted our people to sense that if God was with us in this this would be something we would never forget and so I want to go through Romans with you in 40 minutes which is two and a half minutes per chapter and in a way you could get this in the first few pages in any decent commentary on Romans but I think it's worth us trying to do it together because the book is source sniff account so just want to walk you through the outline that you'll find in your hand now say some very obvious things clearly this letter is written by the Apostle Paul as a servant of Jesus Christ it's written in the context of his own ministry and just as in other books often you need to look first at the back of the book in order to discover what's going on at the front of the book is by and large later on in the book that we discover where Paul is situated and why it is that he is writing this letter it's part of the fun of doing that kind of background study that you do some detective work that you discover from some of the names who are mentioned there the fact that Phoebe is involved in this book that it's possible to locate pretty certainly where Paul was and when it was that he was writing this letter around 55 to 57 ad and he is our purpose in doing it and of course as always it's always an important question to ask the purpose of person has in writing a letter will actually give you some clues as to how you should read the letter it's not just an amorphous stream of thought that Paul has and there are there are at least three clues he gives us first of all he wants to command Phoebe that's not entirely clear exactly why he wants to command Phoebe is Phoebe the carrier of his letter to the Romans he seems to want to commend her for for some particular service so she has a purpose in going and he wants to command her and that's that's just a little footnote but secondly it becomes clear that he has a special reason for sending this letter to the Romans he has been engaged in bringing together the collection which as you know is a big issue for him because he is concerned about the the genuine transcultural and international unity of the christian church and so there is this Gentile offering to jewish believers to give testimony to the world that in Jesus Christ Jew and Gentile believers are united he is also completed some sense of the burden he has heard you know what it is to go and preach somewhere and it if you if you drive or fly the feeling of going and the feeling of returning are different that the burden is off you and there is a burden from which Paul has been released and he now wants to move westwards he wants to preach the gospel in Spain and it rather looks to me as though what he's after is that just as say the Christians in Antioch have been his equipping Church he's looking to the Roman Church to help equip him provide for him support him pray for him perhaps even send him in this development of the apostolic mission to Spain and so one of the things he has to do because he has never seen them although knows a great deal about them is he's got to place before them his credentials and there are little hints aren't there the reason he feels the need to do that to present to them what he calls my gospel a very unique phrase isn't my gospel that does not mean just the gospel that means how Paul understands and preaches the gospel and he feels the need to do this to strangers because there are rumors spreading about him among them there are rumors that he is actually either a closeted antinomian or a real antinomian and so he wants to expand the gospel to them he's also conscious partly because he is known Aquila and Priscilla of the the situation that had arisen in Rome where the Jews and Jewish Christians had been banished from Rome he's also conscious I think pretty clearly that now the door is open for them they have returned like a you know a missionary goes away for five years and he comes back to his home church and he realizes they've removed the organ and there's herself drums in the corner and there are issues in the church and there is this sense isn't there that there that there is there's a tension a church that was Jew and Gentile has kind of become a Gentile church but now that Jewish believers have returned and there are these tensions that he feels he needs to deal with and he does this doesn't he in Romans 14 1 2 15 13 and all of this helps us to flavor our understanding of the profound logic of what Paul is doing there is an intense logic in what he's doing very clearly but there's also a pastoral atmosphere it's actually a very interesting illustration of being able to preach the gospel to people you don't personally know you understand there are undergirding structures that will lead to specific applications and we find that here very evidently I think in Romans so he begins his introduction in chapter 1 verses 1 through 15 as you know expressing his concern for them his desire to preach the gospel his desire that they would share together in mutual benefit and then he turns to the central theme in chapter 1 verses 16 and 17 the fact that he is not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of God the saving power of God for those who believe because in it the righteousness of God has been revealed for Jew and Gentile and if we've caught hold by reading the book backwards if we've caught hold of the context then we understand that that Jew and Gentile is not it's not simply uh a theological proposition up there in the sky but actually this is so endemic to his understanding of the gospel but it has an immediate application to this group of people in Rome who are the first hearers or readers of his Lantern and so this is an announcement of the theme and from one point of view superficial though it may be it's in those terms that is fairly easy to divide the logic that runs through the latter and so as I've divided it you'll notice that the the leading word that unites everything he says is that he sees the gospel as a manifestation of the righteousness of God first of all a manifestation of the righteousness of God for salvation because righteousness is lacking universally the wrath of God is already poured out on unbelief and I think it's significant against this background the way in which he is one might say very even-handed in dealing with those who of a Gentile background and those who of a Jewish background I think I would say a chapter 118 to the end of verse 32 is a section of Scripture that we need to immerse ourselves and remember a number of years ago in a British university some students produced Romans 1:18 to 320 as a pamphlet not just as just as a pamphlet and they were hauled before the university Sanitas and because of this explosive piece of literature that they had written and the senators demanded that they bring the off with them which says a tremendous amount a about the ignorance of intellectuals and B about the power of the message and so he's dealing here with universal sinfulness the way in which in the wrath of God that's already revealed men and women have been handed over by God and it's such a telling piece of illumination because we live in a world in which people despise the wrath of God they go their own way they flaunt the law of God and one of the things they often say is there are no Thunderbolts if you've told us that God is against these things and and we're going on our merry way and Paul makes very clear that is the evidence that you're under the wrath of God that he is no longer preventing you he is permitting you and then he turns in chapter two as some people think to religious people are more inclined to think that this is the introduction to the whole sweep of what he is going to say about Jewish people in particular to deal with the the specific manifestations of alienation from God in those who have been reared in the in the Jewish community remember how in in Ephesians 2 he refers to himself and he says we were without God not just you Ephesian Gentiles but we were we were without God and he demonstrates this godlessness in the distinctive Jewish ways in which the Jewish people are under the judgment of God not because as well they are Jewish people and God is against Jews but because they have their distinctive manifestation of the sinfulness of their heart over against Paul's understanding the revelation that they have had which he will list later on of course and what he says later on about the privileges of the Jewish people needs to be borne in mind when we're expounding what he says about the Jewish people that these are these are sins against mighty privileges and it leads as he says to the judgment of God he gives us very sobering analysis of the grounds on which God hands us over God judges us and his conclusion of course is of universal sinfulness we have all sinned and I believe the way he finishes that statement is immensely significant for understanding Paul's gospel I Ferguson I would write we've all sinned and fallen short of the law of God that would be true but it's not the whole truth it's not the maximal truth and it's not the ultimate tragedy the ultimate tragedy is we were made as the image of God to reflect the glory of God to enjoy the glory of God and we have perverted that that's this point in 118 to 32 and so there is not just condemnation when he comes to say we have all sinned there there is this tremendous overpowering sense of the awful tragedy of the human situation so that statement as seems to me is not only that's that's not a statement merely of condemnation that's a statement of majestic compassion because he sees that man that man was not just made to function as an automaton keeping the law of God but that there is a there is an infinite grace in the way in which God has created man as his image for his glory and the tragedy is that we have lost our destiny and of course this is such a powerful apologetic in a secular humanist world where secular humanism dehumanizes man by the rejection of God once you've rejected God you cannot have a concept of man made us the image of God and you must never operate with a concept that man is less than that so it's the humanists who dehumanizes it's the gospel that re humanizes and it should not surprise us against the background of what policy in this opening section of Romans but the greatest issue of the Western world in the 21st century is the issue of personal identity that manifests itself in so many ways why should that happen because once we've lost the understanding that we're made as the image of God we've lost ourselves and we've fallen short of the glory so we mustn't read these opening sections of Romans simply as you know Paul and nasty reformed Christian getting his own back on sinners but a man who understands the destiny for which we were created the tragedy of the fall and the awfulness of our condemnation and of course it's only when lattice is in place that the message of the provision of righteousness in Jesus Christ is such a glorious one these two things just always go together an increasing sense of the sinfulness of sin that provides the the dark sky against which the gospel shines out so clearly so if he begins with introducing the righteousness of God as his theme righteousness lacking in Jew and Gentile then from chapter 3 verse 21 through to 5:21 I recognize the place you divide this as a little tricky that is righteousness provided now in Jesus Christ in in that gray section with which this whole passage begins where he he lords all the big words of salvation in the propitiation that Jesus Christ has made in the redemption that is provided for us in Jesus Christ there is the forgiveness of sins and the prospect of new life and I may say this again but it's worth just pausing to notice that Paul is in the indicative mood all the way along so he's now he is now reached into chapter three and he's not issuing imperatives and we should learn something from that especially if we are a kind of imperative or kind of personality but the gospel is soaked in indicative and it's only when we have held up the power of those indicative stew people that we can release the thunderstorm of imperatives that will follow and we understand that we're able to do both if we understand the gospel and so he expands this gospel justification by faith in Jesus Christ proved chapter four by the example of Abraham bringing in a little David of course saw that in the mouth of two witnesses from the Old Testament Scriptures the doctrine of justification by faith may be established leading to the blessings that flow in chapter 5 verses 1 to 11 Christ has been put to death for our trespasses he is raised again for our justification and in this risen Christ and it's very interesting the language he uses here although difficult for our translators to to express the nuance that we that we glory in the flesh but now there is no room for glorying because we've fallen short of God's glory but now we boast in the gospel we exalt in the gospel because the gospel brings us back to glory and so 5 1-3 11s held together by this notion of the gospel brings us to the glory of God we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God so if we've missed the fact that we've fallen short of the glory we'll miss the fact that the gospel brings us back to glory and this is true even of our sufferings so that tribulation works patience and patience eventually works hope hope and what hope in the glory of God and then eventually in 5:11 they the amazing statement but those who are justified by faith exult in God himself in God and His glory now my one view I'm not sure this is entirely idiosyncratic but my own view is that that the connection between 511 and 512 is this me when I'm done to 511 I think I'll start on 6 1 okay get into 6 1 2 2 859 you know like this Adam and Christ parallel seems to come out of the stratosphere so what is Paul doing here I think this is in some ways this is the central passage in Romans because of what it's what links what he has said about human sinfulness and what he is now going to say about the working of the grace of God in his theology of the two atoms so Adam the first undergirds what he is said of sinfulness and Adam ii undergirds what he has said about salvation through Jesus Christ and it also then undergirds what he is about to say about the application of that redemption in our Christian experience so there is righteousness lacking that is righteousness provided and there is simply to satisfy stevelawson righteousness reigning righteousness reigning remember how Paul ends v that grace reigns through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ and chapter 6 verse 1 to chapter 8 verse 39 is that for about the reign of righteousness through the reign of grace and I think if we if we see what Paul has done we we catch what he does in these three chapters these three chapters should not I think be viewed at chronologically in terms of the logic these three chapters should be viewed synchronously in terms of their logic he is working out the significance essentially of one statement but all we need for salvation is to be found in Jesus Christ he had said that at the we we rejoice in God himself through our Lord Jesus Christ grace reigns through righteousness in our Lord Jesus Christ so how does that work out for those who are in Christ he raises the the the the question of course and in 6:1 if if the more send the more gray should we not go on sinning and his answer essentially is you have not understood what it means to be in Christ and in six and seven and eight he is explicate it means to be in Christ in a three-fold contact context number one in chapter six is that in Christ the Dominion of sin the reign of sin over the individual has been radically broken yet the individual while radically delivered from the Dominion of sin is not yet delivered from the presence of sin and that for the indicative you have died to sin you've been raised to newness of life gives rise to the exhortations in 11 through 14 that since you have been delivered from sins reign do not let sin reign over you you are now no longer a servant of sin and unrighteousness but a servant of Christ and righteousness chapter 7 in Jesus Christ you have not only died to the Dominion of sin but you have died to the condemnation of the law but just as there is an already and are not yet in chapter 6 so in chapter 7 you have died to the condemnation of the law but you are not yet made perfect according to the standards of the law and at least in my own view that's the key to understanding 7 14 to 25 if I'm delivered from the condemnation of the law in Christ but not yet perfected according to the standards of the law that deliverance from its condemnation is going to produce in me a deep sensitivity to the ways in which my life still does not perfectly conform to that law but Jesus Christ will deliver me so I'm no longer under the Dominion of sin but sin has not been banished from my life but one day it will be I'm no longer under the Dominion of the law I'm not perfect according to its standard but thank God one day I will be and then in in chapter 8 I'm no longer in the flesh in the sense of being dominated by the flesh I'm in the spirit but my life lived in this world does not yet perfectly conform to the life of the Spirit but one day it will and so there are these groanings the groaning of creation the groaning of the believer the the groaning of the spirit ministering within us there is the vastness of what is already ours because we've been delivered from the flesh and and now in the spirit and if anyone doesn't have the spirit they don't have Christ and are none of his but if we have Christ we have the Spirit delivered from the rain of the flesh but not yet delivered from the presence of the flesh and in a world that has been dominated by the flesh and so Paul gives us this this wonderful expression that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the redemption of our bodies we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the consummation of the adoption to which the Spirit bears witness and if that is true the end of Romans chapter 8 because think of the connection between 8:32 and Jesus teaching and the gospel your heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit his best gift to those who ask him if God did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all then he will freely through the spirit give us all things and that leads interesting at the end to that series of questions which interestingly are put in the personal forum not what is going to separate me but who will separate me I think it's actually I think is actually now as aware in the back ground revisiting the story of Adam and Eve that lies behind much in chapters one eighteen through two five twenty one and T realizes that there is another dimension to this and we still have an enemy but he cannot separate us he cannot condemn us his accusations fall short and so we triumph that is the triumph of grace in the righteousness of Jesus Christ and it's that high point it seems to me is that high point but psychologically now sometimes it's difficult to answer the question why does his mind move from eight thirty nine to nine one it's okay to say the Holy Spirit inspired honor still doesn't answer the question what is going on in his mind and I think what's going on is minders we have reached the apex here we want to conclude here but there is another element to the already of the gospel and the not yet and that is his own people the Jews and so nine to eleven he deals again with the righteousness of God in history God's righteousness rejected by his own people and yet ultimately vindicated in the way in which the gospel will work through history and so in Chapter nine God's righteousness established in history where he vindicates the righteousness of God chapter 10 God's righteousness received only by faith and then in chapter 11 God's righteousness revealed in Jew and Gentile in chapter 11 verses 1 through 36 that in a sense now brings him to a parallel conclusion to the conclusion he had reached at the end of chapter 8 end of chapter a he's thinking about the Laureus way in which the righteousness of God is vindicated in the salvation of his people and then in that paean of praise in eleven 33 to 36 the way the righteousness of God which we experience individually and as the church in our salvation will be expressed as it were that cosmically expressed in God's purposes consummated in history and the fact that I've dealt with Romans nine to eleven and Freeman it should not be taken as an indication that they are insignificant words at all but then step back and think we've now we have known eleven chapters and there is hardly an imperative I was once actually taken into a room at conference I was speaking on and given a doing over by the leaders of the conference for having given two of the four addresses they'd asked me to give on knowing Christ and they ate me up because I had not yet told them anything that they had to do and I you know I'm a mild-mannered Scot introverted I sat they are humiliated but the bubble above my head was you don't even begin to understand how the gospel works if you're saying these things you're making up your own gospel they're standing the gospel and its head and and there is there has been in I think in the evangelical culture broadly a tremendous emphasis on imperatives because they're so much easier to preach just as it's so much easier to preach about sinner sinfulness because you know about other than is this preach about Jesus glory about which we know so little and so there's a huge lesson to be learned from Paul here in the way he embeds their thinking in the great indicative of the gospel but then the floodgates open and this great fifth sec from chapter 12 verse 1 to 1513 in which the righteousness of God that has revealed and the gospel lacking in sinners provided in Jesus Christ vindicated in history is manifested in his people and he deals with us the response to the gospel in Chapter 12 verses 1 and 2 the way in which this works out how the gospel works out in the body of Christ these marvelous ways in which he deals with that notion and then of course for these Roman Christians and the realities of political and social life and 13 1 through 14 and then a very significant way in the in the the very subtle way he deals with the issue of the weak and the strong and in essence he makes several points one of the most interesting points he makes is that the people he calls the weak are actually the people with who regard themselves as having strong conscience --is how can it be that a person with a strong conscience is actually weak and you meet you will meet these people you know these people you may surely be these people they pride themselves on their strong consciences so you should follow conscience shouldn't you well yes but conscience is not Scripture conscience needs to be educated it's one of the most fatal mistakes Christian makes to think that because they're regenerated that consciences have been well instructed in Scripture and so Paul deals with this how do those who have entered into a new sense of Liberty how do they have fellowship with those who are perhaps condemning them and he it is a very wonderfully he says to the those who who have Liberty he says you need you need to understand this principle this is the essence of it and this I think this is a wire for it for I'm sure it's not a special word here but I think it's a word for our generation the proof that you have real Christian Liberty in respect to something that someone else may feel bound is that you do not need to exercise that Liberty and you never flaunt it and you know I'm an old man now I've I've seen too much younger Liberty flaunting that Liberty in the face of others and Paul says essentially the moment you need to act the moment you need to exercise your Liberty I've got to exercise my Liberty unless you're dealing with fantasies whose teeth you should kick in according to Calvin the moment you the moment you need to exercise that Liberty may be the moment that you're in bondage all over again and you see how this ministers to the unity of the Fellowship and that brings them to his conclusion fifteen fourteen to sixteen twenty seven his vision for his future ministry his excitement about visiting Rome his greetings to the Christians chapter sixteen one to sixteen his warning against enemies his confidence and here you can you again see the extent to which somewhere playing in the background this Li is the symphony of the opening chapters of the Bible but the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly it's a great promise to be given in the gospel and then the way in which he sends the greetings of his companions was really striking about chapter 16 is the number of people Paul knows and loves and this is just a fragment of his huge apostolic heart that leads eventually to the Apostolic doxology of chapter 16 five through 27 while my stopwatch didn't work I have no idea whether that was 40 minutes or not enjoy my little soldier I should say to you if if this is twittered faxed emailed the little soldier actually will come out of the page and and he will he'll put his you'll put his little thing right through your belly so this is this is exclusively for us we are the Romans and 40 minutes people so god bless you if the day comes when you feel that you're in the foothills of the Himalayas and Europe you're about to climb this mountain and I certainly just as a testimony I am it was it was really a challenge to me in my I was certainly in mine I was in my early 60s with all these commentaries on Romans it was a tremendous challenge to preach on it but I must say having thought this should be a whole congregation experience we're on a great journey I should not minimize the fruit of this I kind of look back on it and I think it was you know it was just one it was run the greatest 18 months and my life and and I think by God's grace and in the life of our people so even if you love John's gospel more than your love Romans don't forget Romans and thanks for coming and you can now get the what you really came for [Applause] well I'm sure you'd all want me to thank dr. Sinclair Ferguson most warmly for his time this morning I think keep this in your Bible one of the reasons we did this is a fairly small little thing is it will stick in your Bible it can stay there and when you finally get to the point in your ministries where you feel that you understand enough of Romans and that might be when you're 60 years old to preach through the book of Romans then hopefully this will still be there to give you some help when you start to look at the structure of the book we're a little bit out of time so we're not going to take any questions but used to remind you pick a book up as you leave if you want to come and have a look at other books of the banner of truth we have tables in the book tent so do please visit us there hopefully we haven't been washed away I notice the river was starting to run through there this morning I hope we haven't washed away so do come and have a look and so as we close our time I'd just like to read to you that doxology at the end of Romans so Romans 16 verse 25 to 27 now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed now through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations according to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith to the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ amen thank you [Music]

Channel: Banner of Truth

Views: 42,136

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Keywords: sinclair ferguson, romans, christianity, steve lawson, martyn lloyd-jones, shepherd's conference, grace community church, masters' seminary

Id: TZvvz_S9xuk

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019