Episode 46
Two Letters, One Gospel: Romans & Hebrews Frontlines
What happens when two powerful letters confront the pressures of empire and old religion in the first-century church? This episode explores Romans and Hebrews as bookends for understanding how early believers navigated the clash between Rome’s kingdom and the temple system, each letter addressing the unique struggles of Gentile and Jewish audiences. Discover how the same gospel spoke to two very different front lines—and why reading these letters in context changes everything. If you’ve ever wondered about the roots of faith and how history shapes belief, this conversation will challenge and inspire you.
"Romans and Hebrews are not two random books—they are the gospel speaking into two pressures, two battlefronts." - Tim Winders
Access all show and episode resources HERE.
Episode Resources:
- NT90 Hub – This is the central website for the 90-day New Testament reading plan, with downloadable, printable plans, background information, and links to all episodes and resources.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Two Letters One Gospel
00:45 Why Read In Order
03:56 Episode Focus Romans Hebrews
06:21 Two Kingdom Pressures
10:41 Dating Authors Audiences
15:06 Rome Church Backstory
18:08 Romans Unites Jew Gentile
19:37 Abraham Olive Tree Argument
23:51 Romans 16 Mixed Family
24:58 Hebrews Era Rising Persecution
26:34 Temple Looks Safer
28:21 Who Wrote Hebrews
28:57 Rome Destination Clues
31:21 Jesus Is Better
33:09 Severe Warning Passages
34:36 Faith Heroes Context
36:30 Two Letters Two Fronts
39:03 Common Anchor Faith
42:44 Modern Misreadings
44:45 Four Lenses Today
48:10 One Gospel Takeaway
48:56 Next Episodes Preview
50:31 Reading Plan Sendoff
Transcript
Two letters, one gospel, same generation, same spirit, same kingdom,
Speaker:completely different audiences.
Speaker:One wrestled with how outsiders come in, the other wrestled with
Speaker:how insiders keep going out.
Speaker:The first century church was pressed by two kingdoms, Rome on one side,
Speaker:the temple system on the other.
Speaker:Honestly, if you wanted to know what the gospel meant to those who first heard it,
Speaker:these two letters might be all you need
Speaker:Hello, everyone.
Speaker:Welcome to Seek Go Create.
Speaker:I am Tim Winders, and as we've been doing in this series, I've been
Speaker:telling folks recently went through reading the entire New Testament,
Speaker:did it in a 90-day timeframe.
Speaker:It's been a few months out now because I've been working on going
Speaker:through all these topics that came up while I was doing it,
Speaker:but still deep into those topics.
Speaker:I did it in the order that those New Testament books and letters were written.
Speaker:Not the order in your Bible, the order that the letters actually went out.
Speaker:And it was really surprising to me the things that I was able to see, the
Speaker:context, the understanding that I had.
Speaker:It just, it really challenged me.
Speaker:It opened up doors that I had never seen before, and I really appreciated the way
Speaker:it helped me to understand scripture.
Speaker:This series, this kinda extra episodes that I've added onto and
Speaker:just kinda continued going, is really where I share those discoveries.
Speaker:It's kinda self-discovery for me, kinda sharing those discoveries.
Speaker:Not necessarily me saying, "This is the doctrine, this is theology." Many
Speaker:times I am probably pointing out that I thought it meant this when I read it in
Speaker:order in context, it actually meant this.
Speaker:So I am highlighting that, so be prepared for that if you're going through this
Speaker:process or going through listening to this, as we go along with it.
Speaker:But what I really would love for you to do is get in and
Speaker:dig and study it on your own.
Speaker:Kind of interesting, I'm recording this on a Sunday.
Speaker:I have a FaceTime conversation with my mother every Sunday morning who's well
Speaker:into her 80s, and, one of the things this morning she said, "You know, you need to
Speaker:do a class for me to explain to me all the things you've been talking about."
Speaker:She sees clips on Instagram and social media, I guess.
Speaker:And I told her, I said, "You don't need a class.
Speaker:You just need to read through the New Testament in order, and you'll
Speaker:start getting some of this." She goes, "Oh, I don't have time for that.
Speaker:I, I can't read real well.
Speaker:My eyes bother me." So anyway, my point, and I'm not
Speaker:It's gonna sound like I'm throwing my mother under the bus,
Speaker:but I'm not really doing that.
Speaker:My point is, what I really want you to do is not just listen to me and
Speaker:start creating theology or arguing with me or agreeing with me or whatever.
Speaker:I just really want you to read it on your own, and that's what really
Speaker:this is all about, is to get you intrigued, curious, mad, whatever,
Speaker:so that you read it on your own, come up with your own kind of conclusions.
Speaker:If you wanna do that, the reading plan is free.
Speaker:Go to k2m.foundation/nt90 and, just download it and read it on your own.
Speaker:I do recommend, you know, I kind of would say do it on your own pace, but I actually
Speaker:do think there's value to compressing it and doing it in a short timeframe.
Speaker:90 days is pretty aggressive.
Speaker:I'll tell you, there's a lot there, but see what you find.
Speaker:The link is down in the show notes.
Speaker:Go get it.
Speaker:Read through it on your own.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:What we're doing here in this episode is we're gonna be talking about
Speaker:two letters, two audiences, kind of one story, Romans and Hebrews.
Speaker:And they are two power-packed, a bunch of stuff, a bunch of depth in these letters.
Speaker:As I went through that New Testament in order, most of the letters
Speaker:were kind of short, practical.
Speaker:You could pull out a few things from it, and you got some context.
Speaker:You would learn about, you know, Paul making a correction or what
Speaker:was going on with Luke when he was doing his gospel and Acts.
Speaker:And you know, even James and Peter and some of the things, they were, they
Speaker:were kind of focused to the point.
Speaker:They, they had depth, and there's things that we may or may not understand real
Speaker:well, but that's what many of them were.
Speaker:Of course, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and John were a little bit different.
Speaker:You know, they were quick instructions really to specific churches.
Speaker:Many of them were.
Speaker:Then I got to these two.
Speaker:Romans and Hebrews just seem different.
Speaker:Big, big theology in both.
Speaker:Deep.
Speaker:They're very easy to get lost in.
Speaker:They can, they can kind of create some confusion because of their depth.
Speaker:The power and the context of them really hit me as I read, and, and I started
Speaker:seeing these as sort of bookends.
Speaker:And, and if you kind of put them side by side, they give us some of the
Speaker:richest, deepest theology in the whole New Testament, even more so than the
Speaker:Gospels because they are somewhat explaining some of the things that are,
Speaker:you know, 20 years earlier and what has occurred and what is about to occur.
Speaker:That is part of why they get their own episode here with
Speaker:what, with what we're doing.
Speaker:The last two episodes that we did that just released, they were sort of personal.
Speaker:Uh, they were Paul writing from prison, once from a rented house and then
Speaker:from a dungeon, and they were letters to people that he knew by name This
Speaker:episode's a little bit different.
Speaker:We're gonna pull back, look at a little bit of a bigger picture, and we're
Speaker:gonna name the message, and here it is.
Speaker:The first-century church faced pressure from basically two kingdoms, okay?
Speaker:There was overlap, and there were other things going on, but this
Speaker:is kind of the big-picture thing.
Speaker:This is kind of what I have looked at as I've stepped back and looked at
Speaker:the first century, and I've studied Rome, studied the temple system,
Speaker:studied the New Testament scriptures and the things that led up to it.
Speaker:And there's basically two kingdoms that the Kingdom of God
Speaker:stepped into, that Jesus Christ brought into that first century.
Speaker:The empire, Rome, was on one side, and then the old religion or
Speaker:the old system was on the other.
Speaker:And the two letters from that same generation stand up and
Speaker:speak the gospel into both.
Speaker:Romans speaks into the Rome environment or the Rome face, and
Speaker:Hebrews speaks into the temple face.
Speaker:It's the same gospel, same perspective, but two different, I guess, frontlines or,
Speaker:or battlefronts that they're going into.
Speaker:and I mentioned it earlier, I really kind of look at this as
Speaker:two bookends of the same story.
Speaker:And when you take them and either compare them or merge them together like we're
Speaker:about to do in this episode, it gives us so much insight into, number one,
Speaker:the gospel, number two, the system that it came into, and also how people in
Speaker:that first century were dealing with issues that we can learn from, but we
Speaker:have to remember that it's different than what we're dealing with today.
Speaker:Some are the same.
Speaker:We'll look at that, but some of it's different.
Speaker:And if we don't understand that difference, then it's very likely that
Speaker:we could take the sc- these scriptures, we could pluck things out, we could take
Speaker:the whole book and take it out of context and make it mean something different
Speaker:than it meant in the first century.
Speaker:So we read them together.
Speaker:We let Romans do its work.
Speaker:We let Hebrews do its work.
Speaker:And then next week, what we're gonna do is we're gonna step into Hebrews itself
Speaker:and follow the thread into that old system arc. I'm kind of doing something
Speaker:here over the next three to four episodes that are gonna … They'll stand alone,
Speaker:but they're going to fit together.
Speaker:You know that what I've been looking to do with all of this is to be
Speaker:in as much context and be in the first-century mindset as much as we
Speaker:possibly can so that we can grasp and understand what was going on.
Speaker:We are now with Romans in the late 50s of the first century, and with Hebrews,
Speaker:we're going to be in the early 60s.
Speaker:The New Testament was being written in real time.
Speaker:It was being experienced, written, and then shared as we are reading through
Speaker:these, books, letters, et cetera.
Speaker:Paul was traveling.
Speaker:Churches were growing.
Speaker:The temple was still standing.
Speaker:Jerusalem and Rome were the two centers of gravity.
Speaker:They were the two things, like I said earlier, that really pulled
Speaker:on and impacted this first-century church that we're really
Speaker:learning about and experiencing.
Speaker:The question on every believer's mind was sort of the same.
Speaker:We'll kind of group this together.
Speaker:What does it mean to be the people of God now, to be in God's kingdom, the,
Speaker:the kingdom that Jesus spoke about?
Speaker:Now that Jesus has died, risen, and ascended, now that Gentiles are flooding
Speaker:in, now that the temple is still operating in Jerusalem but the cross
Speaker:has already been planted in history, how do we live, function, and operate now?
Speaker:And then also, there was this imminent event that seemed to be coming up, the
Speaker:end of the age, the end of times, the final judgment that was spoken about
Speaker:in all of these books and definitely heavy in Romans and also in Hebrews.
Speaker:Two letters answered that question for the two very different audiences.
Speaker:Romans was written first around AD 57, is the timestamp we put on it.
Speaker:From Corinth, Paul was preparing to take a relief offering to Jerusalem,
Speaker:then he was going to sail west to Spain.
Speaker:Now, we know that those plans were changed and he had a, a little bit of a
Speaker:He caused a ruckus when he got to Jerusalem that led to a few years
Speaker:of, being in captivity, and then also a few years of being transported
Speaker:to Rome and being in prison there.
Speaker:So he didn't make it to Spain that time.
Speaker:We think he may have made it later.
Speaker:He stopped to dictate the most comprehensive theological
Speaker:letter he ever wrote.
Speaker:It wasn't necessarily corrective or do this, don't do that like we had
Speaker:seen in other letters, Galatians, Thessalonians, and things like that.
Speaker:The carrier, which we've talked about before, was Phoebe.
Speaker:I'm fascinated with the character of Phoebe.
Speaker:She was a deacon of the church in Cenchrea.
Speaker:She walked or carried, whatever she did, I guess, Romans across the empire, and
Speaker:we're pretty convinced, as is the case in most of these early letters, that
Speaker:she would've been the one to have read it to a church that Paul had never met.
Speaker:He had never been to Rome.
Speaker:He gets there later.
Speaker:Again, we've already seen that in his prison letters of, the episode we
Speaker:did, the first part of Paul in prison.
Speaker:Hebrews came about six years later, around AD 63.
Speaker:The author is unnamed.
Speaker:Some traditions point to Paul, others point to Apollos.
Speaker:I gotta tell you, though, when you are reading through the New Testament in
Speaker:order and context, and you read a lot of Paul, and then you get to Hebrews,
Speaker:it just doesn't read like Paul's stuff.
Speaker:I mean, Paul is wordy.
Speaker:He's got super long sentences.
Speaker:They run on and on and on.
Speaker:Hebrews is clear, concise, to the point.
Speaker:It just reads differently.
Speaker:So after reading in context, I'm just not a big believer that Paul was the author.
Speaker:He could have had some influence over it.
Speaker:He could have been around, but I don't think so.
Speaker:Some people say Apollos, maybe.
Speaker:We don't have any other, other things to compare that to.
Speaker:Others point to Priscilla.
Speaker:In a previous episode, I kind of made that case.
Speaker:That's kind of where I lean.
Speaker:Some point to Barnabas.
Speaker:The letter itself does not say.
Speaker:We can't say definitively who wrote it.
Speaker:The most intriguing modern case, though, to me, is Priscilla, a teacher who knew
Speaker:Paul and the scriptures well though that evidence is still circumstantial.
Speaker:Either way, again, not gonna nail that down.
Speaker:I'm not gonna die on that hill, so to speak.
Speaker:Either way, the audience matters more than the author here.
Speaker:What we know is that the audience was Jewish.
Speaker:They knew Levitical priesthood, Day of Atonement, ritual cleansing,
Speaker:sacrificial system, which is one of the reasons why many of us in our modern
Speaker:day when we start reading Hebrews, we don't necessarily get it in the
Speaker:context, and we actually can twist it.
Speaker:But, they could still walk to a working temple during that time
Speaker:and see the smoke rising out of the temple from the sacrifices.
Speaker:And many of them, it's obvious in the messaging of Hebrews, many of them were
Speaker:thinking about going back to that system.
Speaker:So we've got two letters about six years apart.
Speaker:One sent into a Gentile majority church in the imperial capital, Rome.
Speaker:The other sent into a Jewish congregation watching the old world end.
Speaker:They knew it was ending, but they may not have realized it at that time.
Speaker:And if it was written in 63, we now know that it was seven years later that that
Speaker:temple system was destroyed and ended.
Speaker:So it's bookends Or different tellings of the same story.
Speaker:So let's take a look at Romans and kind of get a context of what was going on there.
Speaker:Rome in the 50s was a complicated place for the church.
Speaker:I mean, it was a big city, a lot going on.
Speaker:In 49 AD, so about eight years before this letter would have arrived, Emperor
Speaker:Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome.
Speaker:The Roman historian Suetonius said the trouble was caused by riots over Chrestus.
Speaker:That's spelled in our language, or our translations, C-H-R-E-S-T-U-S.
Speaker:Many scholars, most scholars in fact, believe that is a
Speaker:garbled reference to Christ.
Speaker:Christian preaching had reached the synagogues, and the resulting tension
Speaker:or fights between Jews who believed and the Jews who did not kind of got loud
Speaker:enough that Claudius kind of got tired of it and told them to just get out.
Speaker:It, it appears that during the 40s and the 50s that the Roman Empire didn't
Speaker:have the ability to separate out the temple system with this new sect, which,
Speaker:which was now being called Christians.
Speaker:So they were just all lumped together.
Speaker:So they were fighting.
Speaker:Just get out of Rome.
Speaker:We're tired of the fights.
Speaker:Get out of here.
Speaker:That seems to be what Claudius did at that time.
Speaker:So for five years while that occurred, the Roman church became
Speaker:a Gentile church by default.
Speaker:So the church was still there, this Christian church, house churches,
Speaker:but the Jews were thrown out.
Speaker:The Jewish members were gone.
Speaker:So the Gentile members sort of ran the meeting, set the
Speaker:patterns, made the decisions.
Speaker:Then when Claudius died in AD 54, about five years later, Nero took the throne.
Speaker:Now we're gonna hear about Nero later as we get into the 60s, but Nero was
Speaker:young at the time, and what really happened was the expulsion was lifted
Speaker:and the Jewish believers came home.
Speaker:They came back into Rome, and they walked into a church that no
Speaker:longer looked the way they left it.
Speaker:New leaders, new customs, new language.
Speaker:Suddenly the question was not necessarily theoretical.
Speaker:There were some practical things.
Speaker:Who belongs here?
Speaker:That is the setting that Paul writes into, and he actually was very strategic.
Speaker:Paul saw this occurring, and he sent leaders back into Rome to begin
Speaker:reestablishing, I, I guess the The, the leadership and also the message
Speaker:that was going out from Rome, this city that was incredibly important to
Speaker:getting the gospel and the message out.
Speaker:So Ro- so Paul had sent people in, and now he was sending a follow-up letter in to
Speaker:make sure that things were understood, to make sure that things were, were clear.
Speaker:That's the setting that Paul writes into.
Speaker:Romans is not a generic theology textbook.
Speaker:It is a letter to a specific church with a specific tension going on.
Speaker:The first 11 chapters are not random doctrine.
Speaker:They're an argument designed to put Jew and Gentile back in the same room without
Speaker:one group lording it over the other.
Speaker:We've seen this before.
Speaker:There's this kind of delicate balance between the Gentiles and those that are
Speaker:coming out of the Jewish temple system.
Speaker:You know, we saw it in the 40s, that there was an argument over, you know,
Speaker:them needing to get circumcised.
Speaker:You know, Gentiles come in, they now have to adhere to the law,
Speaker:and we saw that, that argument and the, settling of that occur.
Speaker:Well, that continues to go on well into the 50s and the 60s,
Speaker:and we're gonna talk about this later over the next few episodes.
Speaker:It continues today even, with many churches trying to put
Speaker:that religious legal system over people that are believers.
Speaker:Paul says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for
Speaker:salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the
Speaker:Greek." That's Romans 1:16, sort of in that introduction part of Romans.
Speaker:That single sentence sets the agenda.
Speaker:To the Jew first and also to the Greek.
Speaker:Both.
Speaker:Equally, the middle of the letter takes Abraham as the test case.
Speaker:Paul reaches into Genesis and reminds the Roman church that Abraham
Speaker:was declared righteous before he was circumcised, Romans 4:9-12.
Speaker:Faith first, the mark of covenant came later, which means Abraham is not
Speaker:the father of the circumcised only.
Speaker:He is the father of everyone who shares his faith.
Speaker:And then Paul also says, "He is the father of all who believe without
Speaker:being circumcised," Romans 4:11.
Speaker:That line dismantles, breaks down, and destroys the wall between the two.
Speaker:Then chapters 9 through 12 turn to the painful question, what about Israel?
Speaker:What about the people that God called first?
Speaker:Paul refuses to write them off.
Speaker:He says, "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I
Speaker:could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake
Speaker:of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh." That's Romans 9:2-3.
Speaker:He calls them his kinsmen.
Speaker:He uses the image of the olive tree, the natural branches and the wild branches.
Speaker:The wild branches were grafted in.
Speaker:The natural branches were never the enemy And then he says in Romans 11:18, "Do
Speaker:not be arrogant toward the branches." It's almost like we have this natural
Speaker:fleshly thing that we want to do, is we want it to be like an us and them,
Speaker:and we naturally wanna separate out.
Speaker:We s- we've seen that throughout history, and Paul is addressing it.
Speaker:There is no difference here.
Speaker:He's putting them together in the same room where this letter is arriving.
Speaker:Don't separate out.
Speaker:Don't have the Gentile church here and then the former, you
Speaker:know, Jewish church over here.
Speaker:We are one.
Speaker:We are together.
Speaker:That warning is to the Gentile readers, the ones who had been running the church
Speaker:for five years while the Jews were gone.
Speaker:Don't get cocky.
Speaker:I love the, the line from Star Wars where Harrison Ford, um, says, "Hey
Speaker:kid, don't get cocky." Um, and I always think about, don't get cocky.
Speaker:Don't forget the root that holds you up.
Speaker:That is that Jewish system, that old covenant system
Speaker:that's been there all along.
Speaker:And notice what Paul does not do.
Speaker:He never hands Israel a separate path.
Speaker:This is real important.
Speaker:He guards their place in the story without granting them a private door.
Speaker:There is no separate dispensation for Israel.
Speaker:It's not there.
Speaker:There's dispensationalism that tries to say that Israel has this separate path.
Speaker:That isn't in the text.
Speaker:People are making that up.
Speaker:Many readers wanna claim a unique track for Israel, one gospel for
Speaker:them, another one for everyone else.
Speaker:Romans does not allow that, and definitely Hebrews doesn't either,
Speaker:but definitely Romans doesn't.
Speaker:The branches that were broken off get grafted back the same way the
Speaker:wild branches came in, by faith, into the same tree, one root, one door.
Speaker:No side entrance or side story for other people.
Speaker:Romans is the door in, the door for the Gentiles to enter what
Speaker:God has been doing through Israel without first becoming Jewish.
Speaker:The door for the church to include both groups without one despising the other.
Speaker:They come together.
Speaker:The door for the gospel to reach the empire is together,
Speaker:Jews and Gentiles alike.
Speaker:Paul ends the letter with a list of names.
Speaker:Romans 16.
Speaker:26 people, I think, maybe 28 people greeted by name.
Speaker:Men and women, slaves and free, Jews and Gentiles.
Speaker:House church leaders.
Speaker:A woman named Junia, who Paul calls outstanding among the apostles.
Speaker:Phoebe, the courier herself, named first.
Speaker:The list is the proof of the argument He's not separating them out.
Speaker:He's putting them all together at the end of this letter.
Speaker:Those names, there's, there's Gentile names, there's Jewish names.
Speaker:They're all together.
Speaker:The door is open, the room is mixed.
Speaker:That is what the Kingdom of God looks like.
Speaker:It looks like this last chapter of Romans.
Speaker:This is the gospel facing the Rome side of the pressure, the empire, the capital,
Speaker:the mixed church trying not to fracture.
Speaker:Romans is how the gospel speaks into that front line.
Speaker:Now, let's jump ahead about six years.
Speaker:Let's get some context.
Speaker:James, the brother of Jesus, has been murdered, martyred
Speaker:in Jerusalem just last year.
Speaker:So if we're in AD 63, we believe that that occurred in 62.
Speaker:And I'm sure that that sent a ripple throughout those that were
Speaker:operating within the Kingdom of God, within that kingdom that didn't fit
Speaker:in the other two kingdoms, and it probably definitely had an impact.
Speaker:That was just a year ago.
Speaker:He was actually thrown from the temple wall and beaten to death
Speaker:by the same religious authorities who had handed Jesus to Rome.
Speaker:The message was unmistakable: return to the synagogue or face the consequences.
Speaker:Nero is on the throne at this time.
Speaker:The empire is restless.
Speaker:There's pressure on the Christian movement.
Speaker:It's rising.
Speaker:It's bubbling.
Speaker:You can almost feel it when you read the history of things that
Speaker:are kind of building up then.
Speaker:A- and it's also pretty powerful when you read the New Testament
Speaker:in the order that it was written.
Speaker:You can almost sense that rising pressure.
Speaker:But the fire that will burn Rome, there's a fire coming.
Speaker:It's still a year away.
Speaker:The systematic persecution that will follow is still ahead.
Speaker:Peter is still alive at this time, but not for much longer.
Speaker:We believe that Peter was martyred or crucified upside down in Rome a few
Speaker:years, about a year or so after this.
Speaker:Paul has been released from his first imprisonment, and he's back on the
Speaker:road, possibly traveling to Spain.
Speaker:We're not sure, but we think that may be the case.
Speaker:The first generation of leaders, they're aging, and you can feel it.
:4 puts the moment in one line: "You have not yet resisted to
:the point of shedding blood." Not yet.
:Not sure if that was prophetic, because we know it's coming now, and
:looking back, we know it's coming, but the worst is still coming.
:And in Jerusalem, the temple is still standing.
:The sacrifices are still being offered.
:The priests are still working their courses.
:To the Jewish believer watching the threat build, that temple Sort of looked
:like the safe place to be every day.
:Maybe if you wanted to play it safe, you might wanna go back.
:Going back to the old system was not just nostalgia.
:It might have been a survival strategy.
:Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire.
:Christianity was not.
:If you walked back to the synagogue, you walked out of the line of fire.
:The letter to the Hebrews was written into that decision, into that tension,
:into all of that that was going on.
:That is what is going on when Hebrews was written, and we need to understand that
:and not take it as something that totally applies to what we've got going on today.
:We've got to understand that context first, then we can learn
:from it and apply it to us.
:So with that said, we don't know the author.
:Letter doesn't say.
:It reads like a sermon really more than a letter.
:It carries the weight of someone who knew that Levitical system.
:They knew what was going on with that system from the inside.
:We also cannot really prove who it was sent to, but there's a strong
:case, speculative and not settled, that the destination was Rome itself.
:So similar to Romans that we just saw from Paul, this letter very well
:could have been to the same group.
:The letter ends with a line that kind of cuts two ways.
:"Those who come from Italy send you greetings." That's in Hebrews 13:24.
:Many modern scholars read that as Italian believers abroad sending
:greetings back home to fellow believers in Italy Not the other way around, like
:it was somebody in Italy sending out.
:But, you know, we could add that to the fact that the earliest
:external use of Hebrews that we're aware of comes from Rome.
:Clement of Rome quotes the letter heavily around AD 95, so about 30 years
:after we're looking at the context of the letter first being written.
:And the persecution profile fits Rome.
:32-34 describes a community that has endured public reproach,
:imprisonment, and seized property.
:And we know Paul was in prison there.
:We know some things that had gone on earlier.
:4 says, "They have not yet resisted to the point of shedding
:blood." That profile lines up with Roman Jewish believers between the
:Claudius expulsion in AD 49 and the worst of Ne- Nero's persecution that,
:that will occur later after AD 64.
:Jerusalem kind of does not fit.
:They were already shedding blood.
:We heard that earlier.
:James experienced that, and I'm sure there were others.
:None of this is proof, though.
:Remember that.
:I'm kind of giving you some speculative things just to attempt to get us
:a perspective and, and context of what was going on with Hebrews.
:Hebrews could have been written to Jerusalem, to Alexandria, to Antioch,
:or to another diaspora community.
:But if the destination was Rome, then the bookend really gets sharp.
:If Romans was going into Rome, if Hebrews was also going into Rome, and they're
:coming together just six years later, it does kind of read in an interesting way.
:Romans came in, like I said, around AD 57, saying, "The door is open."
:Hebrews about six years later saying, "The door is still forward." Same
:city, same church network, possibly even some of the same house churches.
:Two crisis, two letters, two bookends.
:But the argument in Hebrews really is one word, and that word is better.
:Better.
:Jesus is better than angels from Hebrews 1.
:Jesus is better than Moses in Hebrews 3.
:Jesus is a better high priest than Aaron, Hebrews 4 through 5.
:Jesus is in the order of Melchizedek, a priesthood that predates
:the entire Levitical system.
:That's in Hebrews 7.
:Jesus mediates a better covenant, Hebrews 8.
:Jesus offered a better sacrifice once and for all in Hebrews 9 through 10.
:The writer is not insulting the old system.
:The system was real.
:It was God-given.
:It pointed forward, but it was always temporary, a shadow.
:The substance has come.
:It has arrived, and it is better.
:For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been
:no occasion to look for a second.
:That is Hebrews 8:7.
:Then a long quote from Jeremiah 31, the new covenant prophecy, quote, "I will put
:my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts." That's in Hebrews 8:10.
:The writer is showing his Jewish, his or her, Jewish readers that their own
:scriptures predicted this transition.
:Going back is not faithfulness.
:Going back is refusing the very thing the prophets pointed to and promised.
:And then the warnings start.
:These get strong.
:The hardest warnings in the New Testament.
:How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?
:That's Hebrews 2:3.
:Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, Hebrews 3:15.
:It is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been
:enlightened and then have fallen away, Hebrews 6:4-6 And then, "For
:if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of
:the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins," Hebrews 10:26.
:These verses will often get ripped from their context all the time.
:And listen, this is very important.
:These verses are not about a Christian losing their salvation in
:the modern sense 2,000 years later.
:They are about a Jewish believer walking out of the new covenant that
:they had been in and back into a sacrificial system that is about to end.
:The writer is saying that the temple cannot save you anymore.
:It never could, and warning, warning, warning, it is about to be gone.
:Hebrews 11 is the famous chapter that we all pull from.
:It's the list of faith heroes.
:But we often take it out of context.
:It doesn't stand alone.
:It comes right after the most severe warning in the letter.
:Do not shrink back in Hebrews 10:39.
:Then we get to chapter 11.
:All these people kept going.
:They didn't stop.
:They didn't go back.
:Abraham, Moses, Rahab, the prophets, they did not see the fulfillment.
:It was hundreds, if not a thousand years before They did not see the fulfillment
:that the listener or the audience saw.
:These people have seen the fulfillment, so keep going.
:Don't go back.
:Chapter 12 puts the cap on it.
:"Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us." They
:were close to the finish line.
:"Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith," Hebrews 12:1-2.
:Hebrews is the door forward, the door for Jewish believers to move out of
:a system that was always shadow into the substance that it pointed to.
:The door for the church to leave the temple behind, not because the temple was
:bad, but because Jesus had finished what it could only picture and foreshadow.
:This is the gospel that's facing the temple side of the pressure.
:The old religion, the old religious system, the legal off-ramp, the
:community tempted to retreat.
:Hebrews is how the gospel speaks into that front line, into that battle front.
:Now, this is the message from those.
:Stay with it.
:Two letters, two audiences, two opposite problems, two bookends of the same story.
:We can step back from both letters and look at the first-century church.
:There were two kingdoms pressing in, two powers asking the church to bend to their
:will, two front lines where the gospel had to hold its ground, two battle fronts.
:On one side, Rome, the empire, Caesar worship, the political
:and cultural pressure of a mixed church in a pagan capital trying
:not to fracture along ethnic lines.
:On the other side, the temple system, the old covenant, Levitical
:priesthood, daily sacrifices, comfort.
:The comfort of that religious system for some that had been in it for years.
:They still had family there.
:The pull of an ancient, ordered, legally protected religion.
:They were part of Rome because they had worked a deal.
:The temptation to retreat back into a system that felt safer
:than what went on with the cross.
:Romans and Hebrews are not two random books that ended up
:near each other in our Bibles.
:They are the gospel speaking into those two pressures, those two battle fronts.
:One letter for each front line.
:Same generation, same spirit Same kingdom.
:Romans is the gospel addressed to the Rome face of the question: how do
:Gentiles enter what God is doing through Israel without first becoming Jewish?
:And how does a mixed church stop fracturing?
:How does the gospel travel into the imperial capital
:without losing its center?
:Paul writes the answer.
:There's definitely things we can learn from that.
:Hebrews is the gospel addressed to the temple face of the question: how
:do Jewish believers keep going when the old religion still has a working
:temple, working priesthood, legal status under Rome, and a much easier way out?
:The religious system.
:We can learn from that because that religious system in many ways has moved
:forward throughout the last 2,000 years.
:Seems comfortable, seems the way we should be doing it, but that's not the way.
:The writer of Hebrews writes the answer.
:Romans says, "Do not stay out.
:You belong." Hebrews says, "Do not go back.
:You belong." Same gospel, two front lines, two bookends, and under
:both letters, the same anchor.
:Both letters reach back to Abraham.
:Romans 4, faith credited as righteousness before circumcision was even a thing.
:Hebrews 11, faith that left home and trusted a promise.
:Same patriarch, two different angles.
:Both letters say faith is the thread.
:holds Both letters also quote the same line from Habakkuk 2:4, "The righteous
:shall live by faith," Romans 1:17, and then, "My righteous one shall live
:by faith." That's in Hebrews 10:38.
:Go take a look at those.
:Two different rooms, two different audiences, but the same answer.
:The righteous shall live by faith, and my righteous one shall live by faith.
:Both letters refuse to let the law function as the path to righteousness.
:It's not works, it's faith.
:Both letters refuse to let ethnicity decide who belongs.
:Both letters anchor on the same finished work.
:and resurrection of Christ.
:Two pressures, two front lines, two bookends, only one gospel.
:Now, the questions were the same, the audiences were different, so the
:letters sorta can land in different places, and we can learn from that.
:Romans builds with arguments.
:Hebrews builds with comparisons.
:Romans uses Abraham as the father of all.
:We just talked about that.
:Hebrews uses Abraham as the prototype of perseverance.
:Romans is structured around a courtroom, justification,
:righteousness, no condemnation.
:Probably Paul's legal background helped and went into that, writing.
:Hebrews is structured around a temple, priest, sacrifice, sanctuary, blood.
:Romans ends with a list of names.
:Hebrews ends with an exhortation to endure, finish the race.
:Rome's is-- Romans is calm and theological.
:Hebrews is urgent.
:I mean, it is urgent if you read through it in context, and
:warning heavy, don't go back.
:Different problems, different tones.
:Still though, same gospel.
:We can learn about that gospel from reading those two What it
:meant then and what it means now.
:Both letters were addressed to a real audience in a real
:decade facing real problems.
:That's why the context is important.
:Romans went to a fractured congregation trying to figure out if Jew and Gentile
:could share a room or if they needed to separate out and worship differently.
:They didn't wanna argue over the music, the loud music or the soft music
:as we have a tendency to do today.
:They were possibly trying to separate out then.
:They needed to share the room, and in many ways we need to share
:the room in our worship today.
:Hebrews went to Jewish believers under pressure, watching the old
:religion still operating and wondering if going back was the safer move.
:Now let's look at possibly how we can misread that text today.
:We will often read Romans as a personal salvation manual.
:We've heard about the Romans Road.
:You know, we pick a verse and we talk about the Romans Road.
:We even, when someone becomes a Christian, we say, "You need to read
:Romans first because it gives you the instructions on what you need to
:think and how you need to believe."
:I'm not so sure that I agree with that.
:I'm not gonna argue it.
:I mean, it's a good place to go, but, you know, pick a verse, Romans
:Road, plug it into a checklist.
:But Paul really wasn't building a checklist.
:He was building a bridge between two communities.
:The personal application is real.
:The personal application, though, is not the whole point.
:I think sometimes we take that out of context.
:We read Hebrews as a warning that you can lose your salvation.
:We kind of get into the once saved, always saved, how people can go back, how you
:can backslide, drift away, get cut off.
:We use it to scare each other at times, but the writer was not warning Christians
:of today about a moment of weak faith.
:The writer was warning Jewish believers during that time about going back to
:a sacrificial system that was about to be judged, was about to collapse.
:It was about to disappear, about to be destroyed.
:The original warning is sharper than the modern one, and it
:doesn't really transfer cleanly.
:We can learn from it But it's not the same as backsliding and
:losing your faith, so to speak.
:Both misreads come from ignoring the audience and taking it out of
:context that I've been talking about.
:I've been hammering that over and over during this series.
:But I think we do need to look at what it still means for us today.
:We can apply that context-first reading to four lenses, I believe, maybe more, but
:I'm just gonna kinda group it into these.
:First of all, how we treat people and each other.
:Romans says no one is too far outside the gospel.
:Hebrew says no one is too settled to need to keep going.
:Together, they make a community where the door is always open and the call
:is always moving forward, running the race, moving towards that end.
:How do, how we do religion and church also plays into what we can learn from these.
:Romans warns Gentile believers not to look down on Jewish believers.
:Don't get cocky, kid.
:As, um, as Harrison Ford, again, told Luke, "Don't get cocky, kid." Uh, don't
:get cocky, Gentile believers, when you're looking down on Jewish believers.
:Hebrews warns Jewish believers not to drag the old system into the new community.
:We do both today.
:We look down on the people who are not like us, who are outside of our
:system, not in our church, not in our denomination, not in our church group
:You know, we even look down on people that may not, have a lifestyle or
:adhere to certain things that we believe are legalistic within our structures.
:We drag old systems back in.
:Both letters say, "Stop. Don't do that." And then, hate to do this, but
:we need to bring our politics into this.
:Romans 13 says, "Honor the governing authorities." Doesn't
:say necessarily go in and try to change them, just says honor them.
:Read in context, Paul is writing to a church under Nero, urging
:them not to fuel a rebellion.
:And, and he's probably about to see some ugly stuff happen.
:He's not writing a permanent endorsement of every state.
:Hebrews 11 names heroes who defied kings and refused to bow.
:Read together, the two letters sort of hold attention there.
:Honor the state.
:It exists.
:It's there.
:That kingdom is gonna be there, and it's gonna keep on being there.
:We know now, 2,000 years later, that world system, that Rome system, that
:Babylonian system is still there.
:Honor it, but don't worship it.
:And then let's talk about business and work, the place where most of us spend
:a good c- a good deal of our time.
:Both letters end with practical exhortation.
:Romans 12 and Hebrews 13.
:Show hospitality, serve, use the gifts you have, do good.
:The kingdom is lived in the ordinary places.
:Letters to whole communities still come down to how you treat the people
:in front of you, how we treat each other, how we do church, how we hold
:our politics and keep that in the proper place, not making it the thing,
:but just being part of kinda how we function and operate, how we do our work.
:Two letters speak into all four with one gospel and one kingdom Two
:letters, two pressures, one gospel.
:That's the message.
:It's one gospel.
:It's not two different gospels.
:It's not a legal structure and a legal system.
:It's still one gospel.
:Read Romans with the empire pressing on the church.
:Read Hebrews with the old religion pulling at the church, telling people to go back.
:Romans, kind of a peace treaty.
:Hebrews, kind of an alarm bell.
:Read them like that, and the verses you have heard 100
:times start to sound different.
:And here's what matters going forward.
:Everything that we're gonna be doing in these next few episodes unpacks
:what is already in these two letters.
:Next week, we're gonna take the Hebrews half and press in.
:What was the old system?
:What did Jesus finish?
:What did we rebuild anyway?
:What did we hold onto over the last few thousand years that maybe was
:done and should've been left behind?
:That one is gonna be called New Wine.
:Then the week after, we walk the harder half, and that is what the church started
:rebuilding or keeping anyway, and we're gonna call that episode Old Wineskins.
:And then a few episodes on, we're gonna turn back to the Romans
:half and press in there too.
:We're gonna call it Religion is Not God's Kingdom, Neither is Rome.
:We're gonna have fun with these next few episodes.
:So we've got the seed right here with this episode.
:Two letters from one generation speaking the gospel into the powers
:pressing on the first-century church.
:We need to read it that way first, then we can apply and pull some things
:into our world 2,000 years later.
:The rest of this season or the rest of these groupings of
:episode, episodes is gonna be that seed growing up and building.
:Don't forget, the reading plan is at k2m.foundation/nt90.
:It is the foundation and the, I guess, what has really spawned all of this.
:Go read it yourself.
:Please don't just listen to me and either argue with me or agree with me.
:Please go read it yourself.
:Download it.
:Start, just start doing it.
:Try to do it quickly, like I mentioned.
:But if what you were taught, if some belief systems you have don't line
:up with what you read, I believe that we should trust the text first.
:This is Tim Winders.
:As we say in this podcast title, seek, go, create.
:Keep seeking, keep digging, keep learning.
:We'll see you in the next one.
