Yeah, I know. It's a heckuva route to get to Rome. In the title, I'm referring to my Scriptural path to Paul's letter to the Romans.
For roughly the past six weeks or so, my personal Bible study has been in the Old Testament. I've studied Amos, the Prophet from Tekoa, and (as I'm sure you can see from my last post) Jeremiah. I've prayed a lot for guidance from the Holy Spirit. Honestly, y'all, when I finish a book of the Bible, I don't know where I'm going to turn next. I'm just going along with where the Holy Spirit is leading me, and I don't understand exactly why I'm being led by this particular route, and I don't feel like I have to know. I'm happily studying the Scriptures that the Lord is putting in front of me.
After finishing a study in Jeremiah, where I didn't actually complete the whole book, just a study of chapters 1-36, I was led to Ruth, and from there to I Samuel, II Samuel, and then to Daniel. I finished Daniel yesterday, and today I was led to Paul's Letter to the Romans.
Understand something, y'all. I'm not advocating that anyone else follow the same study path that I'm on. For well over a decade, I was away from the Church, and my feet had strayed so far away from God, and this personal journey through God's word is just that: PERSONAL. I've got a lot of catching up to do. Most of y'all who are reading this blog are probably far ahead of me in your personal transformation, and you should be studying in the way that the Holy Spirit leads you to do. I'm just recording my own study course in this blog because I've got to tell SOMEBODY about what I'm experiencing. I want to tell EVERYBODY, really, because every day's reading in Scripture is filling me with such awe and wonder that I'm going to explode if I don't share it.
Back to the Bible. What I'm seeing, and what I'm getting from this study, are several things. In studying the Prophets, we learn not only that God is a long-range planner, but we learn things about the Prophets as fellow humans. Amos, Jeremiah, Daniel.....they were as real as we are, and they had very personal feelings about the events that happened in their lives, and the words and visions that God revealed to them to tell to others. Personally, I'm learning a lot about obedience; unswerving, unquestioning obedience to the very omnipotent, omniscient God. I'm learning that God's plan is perfect, and that His faithfulness is perfect, and unswerving.
After completing Jeremiah, I detoured from the Prophet's writings to Ruth, which led to I and II Samuel, where the lineage of David and Christ is first recorded. I'm still processing a lot of what I read in those books, and will no doubt be going back to them again.
Daniel was mind-blowing to read as a complete book, rather than the way I read it in my youth. When I was younger, in Sunday School, I learned the miracles in the stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and of Daniel in the lion's den. Now that I'm older, and a little more learned in the history of the Middle East, the power and majesty of the visions that were revealed to Daniel hit me harder. In those visions, Daniel saw not only the destruction and partitioning of Babylon, but the coming of Christ and the Catholic Church and the Papacy. I didn't see or understand all that on my own. I have at hand Halley's Bible Handbook, 23rd Edition, Copyright 1962 from Zondervan Publishing House as a reference work.
As a famous comedian once said, "I told you all of that so I could tell you this." Today, I felt moved to open Romans. I've been avoiding studying Romans as a complete Book for a couple of years now, and some of you reading this blog will understand why. Romans is not only a long epistle, (16 Chapters in one letter!) but it's also one of the deepest books in the Bible, where Paul was trying to give his most complete testimony to a group of the faithful in Rome. When Paul wrote it, he was unsure if he'd ever get out of Jerusalem alive, and was desperate to communicate a message to a budding congregation in the most famous city in the ancient world.
Of course, I've read verses from Romans in the last few years, and have studied and reflected on short passages in it, but to make a study of the book as a complete work.....well, I just wasn't ready yet. I remember taking several months to get through it back in the 1980's in my Youth Bible Study at Eulaton First Baptist Church, but the lessons of Paul have dimmed through the years, and I think I'll understand things a little better now.
(Here's a short, funny story from my youth: There's a lot of talk of circumcision in Romans. I think I was probably fifteen years old or so, maybe sixteen, and I didn't know what circumcision was. Our Bible Study class was being led by our young, female Youth Minister, a lady by the name of Rachel. In the middle of the class one Sunday night, I finally blurted out, "what the heck is circumcision? I don't get it!" At which point, from the looks and blushes on everyone else' face, I realized that I was the only one in the room who didn't know. Without speaking a word, Rachel thumbed through the dictionary in the back of her Bible and handed it to me, to read the definition silently. Oh, my. At that point, my neck began turning red, and the flames went all the way up until I thought my ears were going to catch fire.)
Today I read the first five chapters of Romans, and came to a passage that blew me away. I'll provide a link here, so y'all can read it for yourselves from The Message version.
Yeah. One man, Adam, disobeyed God, and brought Sin to all mankind. One Man, God himself as Jesus Christ, came, and paid the price for the sins of all mankind. Think about that One. For some reason, that passage hit me really hard today, and both humbled me with awe, and filled me up with a joy that just can't be described to those who have no faith. It something you just gotta experience for yourself.
Sorry it took so many words to get to this point, but my skills as a writer are somewhat lacking, and brevity isn't in me. I hope y'all have a good day. Thanks for reading this far.
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