Greetings
Romans 16:1-16
Let’s talk a
little bit about going on in Houston. In case you haven’t been caught up on
this, there are really two issues. Issue number one is the HERO ordinance which is really a misnomer but that’s the
acronym they set up for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance which was attempted
to be passed by our mayor.
I heard today
from an associate member of this congregation who knows one of the homosexual
transvestite activists who really put forth this agenda and gave it to the
mayor. His name is Ray Hill, I believe. Ray’s understanding of this law is a
perfect illustration of when you suppress the truth in unrighteousness and God
gives you over to three different stages that we read about in Romans 1. It
says God gave them over to lusts in their eyes and all the different stages of
deterioration there and then you can’t think clearly any more. When he reads
what this ordinance says and when he explained it to the guy who called me
today, his understanding is not what it says. They just distort it. They look at
data and it’s reinterpreted through their epistemological grid.
I want to talk
a little bit tonight about this before we get into our chapter. Maybe we won’t
get into our chapter. Something else happened. This morning I got another
e-mail with a question that brings all of this to bear. But first, to finish
covering the history of this ordinance the ordinance was passed by a large
majority of the Houston city council. According to the city charter of Houston
there are 30 days to respond to it or it’s just too late. The way to respond is
to collect signatures for a petition to call for a referendum that it be put on
the ballot. That is the focal point here.
The point of
that petition was not to, in and of itself, turn over the ordinance but to put
it on the ballot. The whole thing was that the people of Houston ought to have
a say in this because it is apparent from many polls that the people of Houston
do not support this ordinance. It’s about voting rights. It’s about the freedom
of Houston citizens to be involved politically in this decision and not to have
it jammed and rammed down their throats by the city council and the mayor. It
is not a homophobic issue, per se. It is not an issue related to that.
Fundamentally it’s an issue of voter rights.
The petitions
were put out and many pastors and churches and a number of other people took
those petitions, went around, and collected signatures and did the best they
could to validate those signatures. They were presented in a timely manner to
the city at the end of June, somewhere around June 28 or 29, according to the
standards and the city charter. The signed petitions went to Anna Russell who
is the city secretary. She’s been the city secretary since the last decent
mayor of Houston, Louie Welch, back in the 70s. At least that’s what I think. I
may be mistaken there. Anyway, she’s been around a very, very long time. She’s
had a lot of experience in city government.
She was deposed
last week and she said what happened was she needed to validate 18,200 signatures.
I read someone who said it was 17,200 but it’s around that. What she did was
she validated 600 more than needed so she validated approximately 18,800
signatures. She looked at only 19,200 to get the ones she needed so that means
she had a 98% authentication rate which shows that the people who collected the
signatures before they presented them did their homework and validated and
authenticated as many as they could. They turned in these petitions that were
properly authenticated. They didn’t have bogus names or bad names. Anna Russell
wrote a letter to the mayor, outlining what she had found, coming to the
conclusion that there were yes, indeed, enough signatures on the petitions to
put this on the ballot on the next city election.
There are
copies of that letter. She’s been deposed. It’s in the deposition and over that
particular weekend which is the first weekend in August the mayor and the city
attorney got together and said, “We can’t let this stand. We’ve got to do
something to fight this.” The city attorney looked at all those signatures.
They went through a process saying that if you printed out the name, such as
Robert Lewis Dean, Jr., and then you looked at the signature and it’s wasn’t
legible then it was invalidated. Oliver Pennington, who is one of the city
councilmen who signed the signature, his signature is Oli and then just
scribbles off. His signature was invalidated. There are a lot of doctors and
college-educated people who take a lot of notes, especially if you go to
seminary or medical school or law school, your penmanship is the first thing to
go. Many people just have a signature that’s maybe a “Z” for Zorro but when you
look at that “Z” you know what it stands for. It doesn’t have the whole name
there.
What happened
was that they invalidated so many signatures and even invalidated the whole
sheet if one signature was illegible, that the city attorney came back and said
they only came up with about 13,000 signatures so there’s not enough to qualify
and they quashed it. There were various maneuvers that were made.
The head lawyer
on that case is Andy Taylor. He’s one of the foremost attorneys. He was
interviewed this morning on the Michael Berry radio show. I listened to him
when I was out running. The lawyer went through the whole thing and described
all the point-by-point material. He’s one of the top lawyers on elections in
the state of Texas. So they went back and forth on this. Finally it was taken
to court. The judge set a court date in early January when they’re going to
hear both sides. The major issue at that time was to halt the application of
that ordinance until it finally goes to court which I
believe they got. It’s been put on hold until that happens.
All of that
happened and now they’re in the process of deposing various witnesses. A suit
has been brought against the city of Houston and what is typical in a legal
case is that they get to depose the people who are involved. But the pastors
are not part of that group that is bringing the lawsuit. It’s not coming from
the pastors or from those individuals. I forget who is actually bringing that.
What you hear from some people, in fact American Vision which
is a post-millennial reconstruction group, which is pretty good on some
conservative issues said, “This is typical of depositions. They want to collect
materials.” That’s true. During discovery they collect materials on both sides.
This morning
the e-mail I got was related to that. The person asked me to explain what I
understood because she had gotten information from a lawyer she was familiar
with whose name I’m not mentioning and who is running for judge in Harris
County on the Democratic ticket. He wrote this. I thought this would be a good
teaching tool for everybody in terms of how we, as believers, ought to think.
My study of the
Word particularly over the last ten years has brought me to the conclusion that
probably the most significant verse in the Bible related to the role of the
church, the role of the educational philosophy of the church is Romans 12:2,
“Don’t be conformed to the world.” The word there is AIONOS, which is frequently translated zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the
thinking of the age. It’s similar to KOSMOS, which focuses on the orderly arrangement of the
thoughts. AIONOS locates that
within a time period or an age.
As we go
through the history of ideas, every culture goes through these various periods
where thought systems change. When thought systems change, everything changes.
Your view of music changes; your view of art changes; your view of politics and
law changes. Within 20 years of the founding of this country we started going
through a major shift in the thought form of this country into what is known as
modernism. In the early part of the twentieth century we started shifting into
something frequently referred to as post-modernism. Everyone who grows up in a
non-theistic culture grows up thinking within the framework of this kind of a
thought system. They grow up thinking like a modernist and a post-modernist. Most
of you think more like a modernist than you do like a biblical Christian.
That’s always the problem. That’s what I’m talking about tonight. Some of you
have been around a long time and you’ve made tremendous headway in that but
this is one of the battles we have to fight.
Romans 12:2 says, “Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed
by the renewing of your thinking.” It’s not easy to renew our thinking. I want
to give you a mental picture to think about. I want you to picture building a
house. Most of you are used to the house-building analogy in Matthew where the
wise man builds on a rock foundation and the foolish man builds on a foundation
of sand that can shift. When the storms of life come, the house that’s built on
the sand falls down and the house that’s built on the rock stands up.
A lot of
Christians still have a sandy soil in their mentality. They still think like a
pagan. They may have adopted a lot of establishment truth. They may have
adopted a lot of Biblical vocabulary that has entered into their foundation but
their foundation hasn’t shifted to the rocky, firm foundation of the Word of
God. The foundations are your presuppositions.
Shifting
metaphors now to a medical metaphor we could say that presupposition has to do
with your mental immune system. If your foundation is still based to some
degree on paganism then you’ve got a compromised immune system and you’re going
to get sucked into a lot of this thinking no matter how Biblical or doctrinal
you think you are. This is what happens here with this woman who e-mailed me.
She is a woman who grew up in a church where I grew up and many of you have
gone where the Word of God was taught very faithfully and very well, but a lot
of people didn’t get it.
It’s not unique
to that congregation. More people don’t get it in a lot of other churches. One
of the problems with modern evangelicalism is that they have built their
Biblical framework in the above-ground foundational
thought system in the soil that they had when they were unbelievers. They never
changed at the presuppositional level. They still think in terms of being an
unbeliever so when the pressure really comes their default is to be like an
unbeliever.
What this
lawyer wrote illustrates this. This is a guy that sat under the teaching of the
Word of God for probably twenty or thirty years. I’ve run into this kind of
stuff all my life. He says, “The facts on this issue as I understand it are
that the pastors were told by a flyer of a lawsuit how to properly fill out the
petitions.” I don’t know what he means by this flyer but we got information one
way or another on how to address the petitions, the correct way to do it so
they would be legal. That much is correct.
He goes on to
say, “That means the sermons are relevant to that issue.” Wait a minute, the
verbiage in the subpoena is that all the sermons, all the text messages, all
the iMessages, all the chats, all the e-mails, all of the communications of the
pastors in relation to homosexuality are included. How many years do you want
to go back? Ed Young’s been teaching a long time. I’ve been teaching a long
time. A lot of the pastors have been teaching a long time. Homosexuality is a
big issue but the issue on the petitions had nothing to do with the issue of
the HERO ordinance. They had to do with whether the petitions were valid.
The mayor wants
everything ever said or taught about homosexuality, anything they’ve ever said
about her, anything ever said about the HERO ordinance, and everything ever
said about the petition. They basically put this out there.
What the
response is from the other side is that they farmed their defense out to pro
bono lawyers. The Biblical word for that is skybalon. Andy Taylor was saying that when he went
to court in August and is representing the “good guys,” the city lawyer, David
Feldman, came in with 15 pro bono lawyers. So it’s basically sixteen to one in
the courtroom. The guy who is sitting second chair for Feldman is one of the
top lawyers for one of the biggest, most powerful law firms in the city. I’m
not going to mention names. Every one of those pro bono lawyers represented one
of the top law firms in this country.
Michael Berry
made a good point about that. He used to be a city councilman. He knows the
intricacies of how all these systems work. When you and I hear pro bono we
think it’s a second rate lawyer who just has to do a charity deal and he’s not
putting everything in to it. Michael Berry says that is a complete
misunderstanding how the system works. These lawyers are in there donating
their time because they are going to get on David Feldman’s good side. He’s the
city attorney and the responsibility of the city attorney is to determine what
law firms get the contracts to handle the legal work for the city. So it’s
tit-for-tat. If you go in there and donate your time and you do a really
bang-up time for the city, then you’re going to get multi-million dollar
contracts for your law firm. This is how this system works. They may be pro bono
lawyers but let me tell you they’re some of the best lawyers in the country.
What the mayor
is trying to say is “Well, I never read it.” Feldman is saying that he never
read them either, that the subpoena is too broadly worded. Garbage. Skybalon.
That is just bold-faced lying. A tweet from the mayor, Annise Parker, which I
actually saw on ABC-13 News this morning, said, “If the five pastors used
pulpits for politics their sermons are fair game. Were instructions given on
filling out the anti-HERO petition?” She knows that all of these things were
asked for in the subpoena and she’s just trying to back-pedal. They’re lying
through their teeth. They’re lying to the citizens of Houston and their
ultimate game is that the homosexual-gay-lesbian-transgender agenda is to stop
anyone, whether you’re an orthodox Jew, whether you’re a Christian, whether
you’re just someone with good sense or whether you’re a Moslem, all of these
people who stand against this ordinance. The mayor wants to silence anyone who
has a system of morality that doesn’t approve of their
behavior. They do not want them to be able to say anything. The bottom line is
they want to remove the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran from having any
influence on the ethics or the thinking of people.
Back to what
this lawyer is saying. He’s validating the assumption that it’s a legitimate
request to ask for all the sermons related to all those topics. There are about
six or seven other topics that they listed in the wording of the subpoena. So
he says, “The lawyers and judge will work out the scope of the request. The
mayor’s office will issue a statement, which I shared with a previous post.
Meanwhile, not widely known, many pastors who want to challenge the Johnson
amendment…”
Here’s this guy
spreading a lie. This is not true. About this time of year there is a Sunday
called Freedom Pulpit Sermon when a lot of pastors will preach on politics
specifically and some of them send all their messages from that Sunday to the
IRS. Many do not. It’s a small number of white churches who
do this. There’s a study indicating this. There are studies saying that about
70% of black churches endorse individual candidates from the pulpit and only
about 17% of white churches endorse specific candidates.
Some of you
have seen the clips I have shown from the rally I was at on the steps of city
council, as well as when they were in the city council chambers and you saw
there were a number of black pastors who were speaking but not one black pastor
was named in the subpoena. Now I think that’s kind of racist. They don’t want
to anger the black community but there were a number of black pastors who were
up on the stand today when Ted Cruz had a press conference at First Baptist. I
was there but I didn’t get the word early enough to stand on the platform with
all the other pastors. I was in the back of the room which
may be good because when they’re all in jail I’ll be the only one preaching the
Word.
I was glad to
see that two of my former students from WHW were up there on the platform. Of the 36 pastors who
were on the platform I counted 7 or 8 who were black. That’s almost 25%. That’s
a higher demographic percentage than the black representation of the city so I
was very glad to see that. The city has avoided that.
Anyway, the
city lawyer goes on to blame the pastors that they’re making a big deal out of
this and that it’s really not a First Amendment issue at all, when it is. Let
me tell you why he’s gotten confused in his thinking. Let’s go back to the
analogy of the two houses. On one side there’s the thinking of the unbeliever;
on the other, is the thinking of a weak believer. The unbeliever on the left’s
foundation is that there’s no God. Whatever he’s coming out of, whether it’s
atheism or Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness or any other religious system where’s
there’s a distortion he doesn’t have a Biblical God as his foundation. That’s
what philosophers call “metaphysics”. Everything comes
out of your view of metaphysics but no one ever talks about it anymore.
People get involved
with debates about behavior, law, politics, and policy and they fight at this
level but they never talk about the foundation. This is all underground. Your
view of God is going to influence your view of knowledge, which is called
epistemology, your view of truth and your view of authority. How do you know
something is true? What’s your authority for saying x, y, and z is true? That’s
what connects what you say is true to the foundation. Your authority is what
you think the ultimate reality is but if the ultimate reality is just matter
then there’s nothing to go to.
If your
ultimate reality is impersonal there’s nothing to appeal to and you become the
ultimate reality. This is what we see in Judges. Since there was no belief in
God in Israel everyone “did what was right in his own eyes”. So you become your
own authority and it is out of that you develop your values. You develop what’s
right, what’s wrong and what your norms and standards are, what your ethics
are; all of that flows out of your understanding of knowledge and truth and
authority. If you’re an unbeliever, it’s going to be consistent with your view
that there’s no Biblical God. Then your behavior, your practice, what you do,
the laws that you sign on to practice, your political theories, and your
policies all flow out of your values, your norms, and your ethics.
What we do so
often when we talk to people we just argue at the level of behavior, law,
politics, and policy. We never get to the real issue. If someone is consistent
as an unbeliever, they’re going to end up way out in left field. Many times
I’ve mentioned Thomas Sowell’s book Conflict of Vision where he points out that
liberalism is grounded on a utopic view that man is basically good whereas
conservatism is based on a realistic view that man is basically evil. That
defines the difference between the two views.
The liberal
view sees everything as perfectible and the conservative view just sees you can
make things more orderly but you can’t perfect them. So they’re not trying to
get engaged in social activism and progressivism, which characterizes almost
everyone who’s a thoughtful Democrat. About a third of the Republican Party is
based on a view that we can bring in some kind of utopic state and we should be
engaged in social activism.
If you become a
believer, then all of a sudden your foundation is no longer no Biblical God but
you have a diluted view of God. You now say that you believe in a Triune God,
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit but if you’re a baby
believer you really don’t have a clue what that means or how that impacts your
understanding of knowledge and truth. Now if you hang around for a while you’re
going to start picking up some biblical knowledge, which may be exchanged for
the knowledge you had before. You’re going to at least superficially think
you’re under the authority of the Word of God but because you really don’t have
a well-grounded theology proper where you understand God and His essence and
His plan and His purpose, then your view of authority is going to be diluted.
Sometimes
you’re going to base your decisions on experience, reason, and mysticism rather
than exclusively on the Word of God. The Word of God is not the sole and
exclusive authority in your life. It takes a long time for a baby believer to
get to the point where he understands how exclusive that authority is, in every
area of thinking. Then that changes his values.
An immature
believer can have a lot of values change at a surface level but as Jesus points
out, when the storm comes, when you come under the peer pressure of society or
when you’re involved in certain professions and you work for certain companies
and your human resources people come down and say you have to validate same sex
marriage and you have to do other things, then what will you do? Or you work
for a company that says various other social engineering schemes are handed
down from the government or from various legislative decisions have to be implemented and you have to implement them. Then
as an immature believer without enough confidence in the Lord you say, “Well,
I’ve got to keep my job. I’ve got to be able to work here. I’ve got to provide
an income for my family and this really isn’t going to hurt too much. I just
have to do what my boss says. I don’t really have to believe this but it’s my
job.”
Usually it’s
not that much of a compromise at first. But it’s increased more and more over
the last thirty years. I had a situation in Dallas about 25 years ago when I
had a man in my church who worked for what was then
Southwestern Bell. They were required to go to sensitivity training and
basically New Age mysticism, guided imagery, and all of these kinds of things.
He said absolutely not, along with other Christians. They got away with it. You
couldn’t get away with that today. What happened is that too few people raised
objections to that so now they’ve compromised and compromised and compromised.
We have a
generation that those who are under 35 just don’t understand why these old
fogies who are Christians are making such a big deal about this. Then you hear
the Libertarian crowd come in and they say they just want to be economic
conservatives. They think the Republican Party cannot survive with these
Christians in here because it’s the social issues that are dividing the
country. Well, you can’t do that. You’re a fool Biblically if you think that if
this HERO ordinance goes into effect, it won’t matter. What do you think the
economic consequences will be? It’s going to be huge. It’s going to force every
business in this city to have a third restroom for those who are gender
confused. It’s going to have all kinds of legal cases that are going to come up
where people are going to be fined. It’s going to have all kind of economic
consequences throughout business.
You can’t make
a social decision that doesn’t have economic decisions. It’s clearly
illustrated in the Mosaic Law. God said that if the Israelites gave themselves
over to idolatry and perversion and disobedience there will be certain
consequences. Now you can’t go into a laboratory and say there’s a direct
correlation between the fact that if you go into immorality then a drought is
going to start and your crops are going to fail and you’re going to have
depression and you’re going to fall apart militarily. You can’t draw a
one-to-one correlation unless you have the God of the Bible who is controlling
both aspects.
If you have an
impotent picture of the God of the Bible and you don’t believe He’s controlling
both sides, then you have nothing. The reason bad social decisions impact
economics negatively isn’t because it’s a direct correlation but it’s an
indirect correlation because God’s in control of both. People don’t understand
that and they think they can play with that.
This is what’s
eviscerating constitutional conservatives in this country. They have
compromised their thinking at a foundational level. They are thinking like
pragmatists and relativists, presuppositionally. You can’t even talk to most
Christians about this because they can’t think their way through it. They
haven’t been taught enough to be able to understand these kinds of issues. Many
people believe they have to do these things to get along. People who are on
faculties sometimes fight these things and they win. It’s not pleasant. There
are a lot of people who aren’t fighters. They’re not going to fight and die on
these hills. The problem is that for every hill you don’t fight and die on
sooner or later you’ve lost a lot of hills. You’re in trouble. You have to make
judgment calls. I know there are a few people here who never saw a hill small
enough they wouldn’t fight and die for.
We have to make
good decisions. This is one that’s important. What’s at stake here is the First
Amendment. A problem you see is that a lot of Christians don’t understand it
because they don’t want to think about it. They just want to be about their
business. They’re working for some law firm and as part of their responsibility
for the firm they have to go and defend a lot of clients that are engaged in
unethical conduct and they have to compromise. Or they’re working as a teacher
or a professor somewhere and they have material they have to communicate in
their curriculum that is contrary to the Bible.
People don’t
make compromises in one big jump. They compromise one small step at a time. The
next thing they do is they look around and all of a sudden they find that
they’ve shifted from claiming to be a conservative Bible-believing Christian to
being someone who’s not convinced about the Bible and has joined the other
side. After explaining some of that to the person who sent that to me, a person
who spent years under sound doctrinal teaching, but he never made it is because
of a term I love. It’s a term 99% of the people who heard this term never
understood it. It’s epistemological rehabilitation. Epistemological
rehabilitation isn’t changing what’s at the surface level. It’s hard. It takes
place at the foundation. The problem is most Christians never change those
basic presuppositions that they pick up when they were growing up, when they
were being influenced by their peers, when they were being brain-washed by the
secular school system, and being brain-washed by atheist college professors.
As a result
they’ve got a split personality almost. They have inclinations at their
foundation that are pagan. They know they ought to think like Christians and
they don’t know why they have this conflict. When the pressure comes and when
the culture starts really putting pressure on them through their jobs, their
careers, and their retirement they think, “Wait a minute. I just can’t go
there. I don’t want to raise my head up. I don’t want anyone to notice me. I
just have to make it. I’m not going to get into a fight because…”
What they’ve
done is they’ve compromised and compromised and compromised. They didn’t even
know it. It wasn’t something big. There were no big red flags. They just didn’t
know how to think Biblically and they got snookered by the
cosmic system again and again and again until they’re basically a wolf
in sheep’s clothing.
There’s a
problem. It’s the job of the pastor and I’m concerned because not enough
pastors are showing up at these things and it’s the job of the pastor both to
teach the Word of God and to protect the sheep that are in his sheepfold. Part
of my job is that I need to protect you and at times that means I need to go
out into the civic world and be involved in protecting us so that we can have a
ministry that is not being interfered with by the government.
This is what
gave the foundation to the United States, the pastors that took their stand
during the American War for Independence. One of my favorite stories is about
Peter Muhlenberg and his brother, Augustus. He was a well-known lieutenant
colonel taking his commission in the Continental Army. He stood up in the
pulpit of his Lutheran church. His father was a major preacher in the First
Enlightenment. Peter stood up and pulled off his clerical robes and underneath
was his lieutenant-colonel’s uniform. He basically
asked who was going to follow him into battle. He recruited his battalion from
his congregation and off he went. One of his most vocal critics was his
brother, Augustus. Augustus was a pastor in New York. Augustus told Peter he
was wrong, that it’s not the role of the pastor to be involved in civic
affairs. That it’s not the role of the pastor to be involved in politics or in
the fight.
That was
Augustus Muhlenberg’s point until the British captured New York. The British
knew that the greatest enemy they had in the colonies were the pastors so they
burned the churches. They burned Augustus Muhlenberg’s church. Boy did he
repent. Later he became the first Speaker of the House. We have to understand
there’s a time when we just stick to our knitting but part of our knitting as
pastors involves protecting the congregation and being out there and making our
voice heard.
People in the
congregation need to hear that. This is such a battle. It’s not one I wanted.
I’m much happier staying in my study and working through a lot of Greek and
Hebrew and studying the text but if I’m going to continue that in ten, fifteen,
twenty years and if I’m going to continue to teach men who can teach your
children and your grandchildren then we have to have the freedom to do it. If
this doesn’t change, we’re not going to have the freedom to do it. What we do
in terms of Bible study and Bible teaching today without being involved in
these situations and trying to correct them then we won’t have a future and we
won’t have the opportunity to teach the Word of God because there will be
government officials not allowing it.
Now this is
just one battle. There are going to be a hundred battles like this. It’s very
possible that the mayor is going to be forced to back down and they’re going to
restrict this and they shouldn’t be coming after anything that a pastor says.
That’s the church’s intellectual property and it should be completely
off-limits according to the First Amendment. But they’re going to try to back
off of this and come out with a lot of rationalizations. They may end up being
completely defeated on the issue because there’s been an enormous hue and cry
raised against the mayor and the city council.
This is only
the first shot across the bow. This is just the beginning. This is a long war.
The war started about a hundred years ago. For a lot of people they’re just
waking up to the fact that there’s something going on. The war’s been going on
since progressivism reared its ugly head in the beginning of the 20th
century. So we need to learn that this is part of the angelic conflict. It’s
part of our spiritual warfare and it’s part of the battle, whether we like it
or not. When 9/11 occurred, one of my first thoughts was, “Oh no, I’m going to
have to study Islam. I hate studying Islam. I’m going to have to become an
expert on Islam.” But that’s where the battle is today. Martin Luther
said that if we don’t reinforce and fight the battle at the point at which the
fortress is being attacked then we’re going to lose the battle. We don’t get to
choose where the enemy attacks us. This is where we are being attacked. We have
to fortify ourselves. The only way we can do that is with the Word of God.
Now let’s get
into the opening part of Romans 16. I’ve always thought Romans 16 is unusual.
This is the longest closing of any of Paul’s epistles. It contains a lot of
personal information and a lot of personal greetings. There are a huge number
of names here that are unfamiliar to everyone. They’re not mentioned anywhere
else so they’re virtually unknown. There are a few that are known but most of
them we don’t know anything about.
We can learn
some things just by way of overview. One of the first things we see here is that
Paul had a wide variety of colleagues and friends and associates and people who
loved him. He was very much a personal person. What you see so often in
psychological characterizations of the Apostle Paul is that he is this
obsessive, detailed-oriented theologian that’s more concerned with truth than
with people. That’s how the modern mindset wants to approach the Bible. Here we
see that Paul is very personal.
Another thing
that you often hear from liberal and neo-liberal and neo-orthodox and
neo-evangelical [how’s that for a lot of neos?] individuals is
that Paul was a misogynist, that he hated women. Yet what we see here is that
Paul mentions a number of women and praises them for of their involvement in
the ministry and the local church. Paul clearly recognizes that there are role
distinctions between men and women but there are no equality distinctions
between them. They are equally in the image of God but God designed men and
male souls for one purpose and women and feminine souls for another reason.
Another thing
we should note here is that God the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve these names
down through 2000 years of church history and on into eternity. If every word of the Bible is inspired by God, and it is, then there’s
a reason for this and we ought to spend some time trying to think through why
this is important. I think part of this is because it shows us the kind of
people who are involved in the congregation in Rome. There are probably other
reasons, some of which we’ll see when we go through this chapter.
Paul is writing
to the Romans. We’ve gone through a lot of what people would consider to be
heavy theology and doctrine. Paul wasn’t writing to Dr. Dean or to Dr. Ice or
to Dr. Walvoord or to Dr. Ryrie. He’s writing to Bill and Sue and Mary and
Jane. The names in this chapter are the common names in Rome. Some of these are
considered to be predominant names you would find among slaves, according to
certain scholars. I think that’s a certain amount speculative but that’s the
conclusions that many have reached. They’re people who have come from the whole
spectrum of life, some of them are servants, some are slaves, some are in the
military, some are merchants, some are community leaders but they’re the everyday
people of the Roman Empire. They’re not Bible scholars. They’re not
professional theologians.
Paul expects
all of these everyday people to fully comprehend and understand and implement
what he has written in Romans. It gives us a little bit of a picture of the
people that Paul is writing to and ministering to. He starts off in Romans 16:1
with a commendation for Phoebe. The word that is used here is a word that is
used in two or three other places. For example 2 Corinthians 3:1 has a similar
word and Romans 3:5 talking about a recommendation of an individual to the
congregation.
He identifies
her as Phoebe, our sister. She’s not a biological sister but she’s a fellow
member in the body of Christ, the royal family of God. He refers to her as a
sister just as he referred to other male believers as brothers. We are all in
the body of Christ if we are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We don’t know a
lot about her. The name is a pagan name. It’s the feminine form of the Greek
word PHOIBE which was one of the alternate names for Apollo. It means
the bright one. Apollo was this sun god in the Greek pantheon. Such names were
often given to the slaves who of course retained them even if they were set
free. Phoebe was more likely a free woman.
She is called a
“servant of the church” which has caused a lot of
discussion. It is the feminine form of the word DIAKONOS from which we get our English word “deacon”. There
are a number of people who have sought to establish a doctrine on this and say
that the apostolic church had an office of deaconesses. There’s absolutely no
support for that anywhere in the New Testament. There are only a few verses
that people go to to support that. This is one of them. The other one comes up
a little further down in verse 2 and later on in verse 7 where it will come up
again.
Paul talks
about her as one who has been a helper of many and of myself also. We’ll talk
about that word in just a minute. This word refers to someone who functions as
a servant. Now in the early church, you basically had two offices. You had the
pastor who is sometimes called an elder and sometimes called an overseer,
depending upon his function. The pastor focuses on leadership and the fact that
he’s an elder focuses on his spiritual maturity, the
fact that he’s called an overseer emphasizes the fact of his oversight over the
congregation. Then you had deacons. Deacons were responsible for carrying out
various day-to-day functions in any local church or any kind of organization.
They didn’t have a “board” like we have. We think of the board of deacons who
meet once a month. There’s a treasurer and different offices on our boards.
That’s sort of an outgrowth and development from the development of
corporations in western civilization. In the early church we think the model
was closer to this.
I think the
Word of God is broad enough and flexible enough to be adapted to a lot of
different cultures but the primary leader of the congregation is the pastor.
He’s the one who has the spiritual gift. He’s not a lone ranger. He doesn’t run
it all himself and he has help. They had deacons. You look around a church and
you have someone who needs to take care of the money so the pastor would
appoint someone who was trustworthy and had integrity who
would function like a treasurer. Then you’d have someone else who might need to
take care of the distribution of the money to the widows and the orphans so
that person would be qualified spiritually and would be a deacon. You might
have someone else who would take care of the physical facilities. There might
be two or three other responsibilities and so the pastor would appoint men to
carry out those responsibilities. So they would carry out those
responsibilities and report to the pastor. That was the rudimentary structure
in the early church.
Now if there was a deaconess, it would be a woman who was appointed to
carry out responsibilities to women and needs that were particularly associated
with women in the congregation. I don’t have a problem with that but there’s no
evidence until the late 2nd century or the 3rd century
that the deaconess idea is an office. Certainly a woman did not have the
authority over anyone, any man, especially, and was not allowed to teach. That
wasn’t a part of the role. It was simply to carry out certain responsibilities.
I can think of
some things in this church that are comparable. Ann does a wonderful job as a
church hostess. That would be that kind of a position. Judy does a great job in
terms of the nursery and some other things in the kitchen. That would be that
kind of a job. That would be what a deaconess did. It wasn’t something that was
an official leadership type of position. There’s no evidence in Scripture that
it was anything official and I think the word would best be translated servant.
She served the church in Romans 16:2 as “helper of many” and Paul says, “Of
myself also.”
The word that’s
used here is the feminine singular of PROSTATIS. Notice that the last two letters are “is”. The
masculine form of the noun ends in “es” and that would indicate something
completely different. In fact, in a study of the word, the word PROSTATES has the idea of a leader or a chief or a ruler. I’m
quoting from John Murray who was head of the seminary at Westminster from his
commentary on Romans. He said, “The feminine form PROSTATIS related to the masculine PROSTATES as a guardian or defender. The masculine is not used
of Phoebe as one who rules. In Jewish literature the masculine word took on the
meaning of the feminine which meant patroness or helper so in Jewish literature
whether it’s masculine or feminine it picked up this idea of a patroness or
someone who helped someone.”
In a pagan
context the masculine had the idea of a ruler of a leader but that meaning is
completely foreign here so she apparently was an independent businesswoman. She
had some financial resources and was able to help the Apostle Paul and other
believers financially. She is coming to Rome so Paul recommends her to them and
encourages them to receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints. In
other words be gracious and kind to her. Show her every bit of hospitality. She
has need of you because she has been a helper of many, including myself. So
he’s encouraging that.
That’s
something that should be a part of any congregation, to help those who are
traveling through. We had an example of that last summer where a family from Cornerstone Bible Church up in Lubbock were
down here. The woman was fighting cancer and she had to go through a bone
marrow transplant several different congregations organized to provide meals
for them. That is a tremendous function of the local church. It shows grace
orientation and it shows the function of the body of Christ in ministering to
one another. There are a lot of different ways that can take place. That was
the role of Phoebe.
Next time when
we come back I’m going to talk about the next couple who
are mentioned here. We do know a little more about them. They’re Priscilla and
Aquila. This gets us into another little issue related to the role of women in
ministry that we need to talk about because this example is
often given by people. They say that Priscilla taught and that means
Paul was not consistent in 1 Timothy 2:8-12 when he talks about not allowing
women to teach. Priscilla and Aquila, people say, shared the gospel and
straightened out Apollos. They insist that’s an example of a teacher. But
that’s just such a perverted way of understanding and reading Scripture. I’m
just amazed that people do that but when you don’t have a foundation, when you
haven’t completely developed a solid foundation of Biblical truth as your
authority, then you’re always going to be swayed and compromised by the culture
around you. It will destroy your spiritual life and you will become completely
ineffective in it. Next time we’ll come back and talk about that.