Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name’s Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with the amazing John Bytheway. Welcome, John.

John Bytheway: 00:11 Thank you. It’s good to be back.

Hank Smith: 00:13 Yeah. John, we are in the Book of Romans today. I know you have some experience in the Book of Romans of course. What are you looking forward to learning from Paul?

John Bytheway: 00:22 I was talking with my wife about this last night and I said, just at family prayer, “Somebody, Book of Romans, anything.” “I’m not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.” That’s what they all remembered, but there’s a lot of amazing teachings in here about how grace and works, I mean, all these things.

  00:38 There’s some wonderful stuff and so I’m so glad we’re going to talk about this today, because I want to feel more understanding about justification, sanctification, grace, works, merits, Christ, all of this. So really looking forward to it.

Hank Smith: 00:53 John, we have an expert joining us this week. He’s been with us before, Dr. Adam Miller. Adam, what do our listeners have to look forward to in these opening chapters of Romans?

Dr. Adam Miller: 01:02 There’s a lot to look forward to. I think Paul offers to us in these opening chapters of Romans, one of the best explanations of the gospel of Jesus Christ in all of scripture.

Hank Smith: 01:13 Wow. I’ve noticed with my friends who aren’t members of our church, but who are devout Christians, the Book of Romans is vitally important to them. Talking with them about religion, the Book of Romans frequently comes up.

  01:27 I was thinking last night as I was preparing, that perhaps it would be difficult for this little church, we don’t think of Christianity as a little church today, but this little group of Christians in a huge world of the center of the Roman Empire and what that would be like for them. I’m looking forward to this as well.

  01:44 John, why don’t you introduce to our listeners, Dr. Miller. Maybe they didn’t hear our awesome episode last year.

John Bytheway: 01:50 Yeah. And I’m sure they’ll be excited that we have Dr. Miller back again. I’m just going to read from the back flap of his book Original Grace, which is one of the things that we’ll be talking about today in the title of this book.

  02:02 But Dr. Adam S. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He earned a bachelor’s in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. The author of more than 10 books, including Letters to a Young Mormon, An Early Resurrection and Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction.

  02:26 He served his mission in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He and his wife Gwen, have three children, and as we were talking before, Hank, we had Dr. Miller when we did the Book of Job, and it was an amazing paradigm shifting episode that was so helpful and so beautiful, and I just love the beautiful way he expresses himself. No pressure, Adam, and so we’re really looking forward to this today.

Hank Smith: 02:53 Yeah. John, I specifically remember Dr. Miller saying something that shifted my point of view, and I’ve taught it differently ever since, is, “The commandments aren’t to avoid suffering, but the commandments are what you do in your suffering to keep you close to God.” To me, that was a life-changing moment and maybe our listeners are like, “Well, I knew that.” But I sure didn’t. I was excited about that.

  03:17 Adam, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Adam Miller: 03:19 I’m so glad to be back with you. It’s a real pleasure.

Hank Smith: 03:22 I hope everyone will go back and listen to that episode on Job, after they finish this episode, of course. I’m going to read the opening paragraph to the Come, Follow Me manual and then Adam, let’s turn it over to you and give us maybe some background on Romans and where we’re going to go.

  03:35 This is what the manual says. It says, “By the time Paul wrote his epistle to the Roman church members who were a diverse group of Jews and Gentiles, the church of Jesus Christ had grown far beyond a small band of believers from Galilee. About 20 years after the Savior’s Resurrection, there were congregations of Christians almost everywhere the apostles could reasonably travel, including Rome, the capital of a powerful empire. Still, compared to the vastness of the Roman Empire, the church was small and often the object of persecution. In such conditions, some might feel ashamed of the gospel of Christ, but of course not Paul, he knew and testified that true power, the power of God unto salvation is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.” So with that introduction, Adam, what do you want to do? How do you want to get started?

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:19 Let’s start with a couple of confessions, I think.

Hank Smith: 04:23 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:23 Set the table here. Confession number one. I’m not a New Testament scholar. That’s important. Confession number two…

Hank Smith: 04:30 Neither are John or I. I don’t know if we’ve confessed that, John. Maybe we’ve proven it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:36 Once the confessions get started, it’s hard to stop.

Hank Smith: 04:39 Yeah. It’s hard to stop back.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:41 And confession number two is that far from being a New Testament scholar, I’m a philosopher, which in some ways may be the opposite. I did write my dissertation and my first scholarly book in part about Romans, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but I wrote about how those epistles were being used in contemporary French philosophy. So again, that’s a very different cup of tea than the New Testament scholarship.

  05:07 Grace, though is my primary academic specialty, and I’ve even written and published a short paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans called Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan. That’s meant to make Paul a little more accessible for us here in the 21st century.

  05:25 So I’m not as a philosopher, I’m not primarily interested in Paul as a historical figure, rather, I’m much more interested in the really powerful description that Paul gives us of the experience. Number one, of what it’s like to be a sinner, and then of the experience of what it’s like to be saved, of what it’s like to be redeemed.

  05:47 And on a personal note, I mean though I’ve spent decades now with Paul as a scholar, his epistles, and this epistle in particular have changed my life. I owe them a deep, deep debt for helping me to become better acquainted with God and experience a deeper sort of conversion. I’m grateful to Paul. I feel a great deal of affection for him.

Hank Smith: 06:09 I haven’t seen the research on this, but I have an inkling that members of the church in general, me included, aren’t as familiar with the epistles of Paul as perhaps we are with the Book of Mormon, with the gospels. I personally don’t know them as well.

  06:27 John, I don’t know if you’d agree, but I don’t want to say we should. I’m not in charge, but I think it would be helpful for us to have a grasp on these epistles, especially Romans because it’s so important.

John Bytheway: 06:37 I think a lot of us, when we start Paul, in so many of our books and manuals, we have that statement from Peter. Paul’s hard to understand, so maybe we shy away from it. But anything that’s hard to understand brings also its rewards when you get closer to understanding. It’s like Isaiah, when you do have a moment of illumination, you’re like, “Oh.” And then you begin to love it, like you said, Adam, you love Romans now and feel a debt of gratitude for this text.

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:07 Pretty much.

Hank Smith: 07:08 All right, Adam, is that all the confessions or do you need to confess more? Because we’re here if you need to.

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:16 Those are all the confessions for now. We’ll see. We’ll see how it goes.

Hank Smith: 07:19 We’ll see if there’s more coming. If I’m doing my confessions, you’d ask if you want them in alphabetical order or chronological order.

  07:26 Should we jump into chapter one? Is there some background that we need to understand of why Paul is writing to these people? Does he know them? Has he met them?

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:34 I think it’s useful to remember that when we reach this point in the New Testament, we’re kind of shifting gears from stories and narratives as presented in the gospels and then in the book of Acts to collections of epistles, to letters that are written to specific people at specific times and places with specific problems. And those letters I think are of deeply general interest to all of us, but their specific contexts will always matter there too.

  08:03 Let’s note about Paul, that Paul in general, as Joseph Smith said of himself is kind of a rough stone rolling. Paul has lots of sharp edges that sometimes are helpful and sometimes are not. We don’t have to think that Paul is right about everything to all agree that Paul is an apostle and that Paul is a powerful witness of Jesus Christ.

Hank Smith: 08:27 Yeah. I’ve often wondered Adam, Paul doesn’t realize he’s writing scripture. I don’t think he thinks millions of people in the future or billions of people in the future are going to be reading these letters. Don’t you think he’s just, “I intended them for the people in Rome, that was my intended audience.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 08:43 That’s a great point. He did not intend for me and you to read them. He certainly did not intend for me to write a dissertation about them in the context of contemporary French philosophy.

John Bytheway: 08:54 But that being said, wouldn’t we say though that Romans has, haven’t we already said, kind of a really clear, a repetition of the gospel, kind of the doctrine of Christ?

Dr. Adam Miller: 09:05 Yeah. I think that’s true. And this, I think especially of all the letters, because of all Paul’s letters, this one is the least specific. He composes this letter sometime between 55 and 57 AD. He composes this letter probably as the last of the letters that we have, even though it comes here first in the presentation in the New Testament, because the letters are ordered by length, not by chronology.

  09:35 I mean, it comes first here even though it was written last because it’s the longest and this letter is an unusual one because unlike the others, Paul is writing here to a group of saints in Rome that he’s never met. The other letters that we have are letters that Paul wrote to people that he knew addressing very specific problems that they had.

Hank Smith: 09:56 And even individuals, right?

Dr. Adam Miller: 09:58 Yeah. But this letter he’s writing to the saints in Rome, to the church in Rome as a kind of introduction, as an introductory letter, meant to both introduce himself and introduce his understanding of the gospel.

  10:11 So he intends it more as a kind of explanation to be read by a broad audience than any of the other letters, and in that sense, it’s maybe even more valuable to you and I.

Hank Smith: 10:22 Great.

Dr. Adam Miller: 10:23 Two other notes in general, Romans is beautiful, powerful, and unusual. Paul is talking about the same thing as everybody else, all the other apostles, he’s talking about Christ and resurrection and redemption, and he is preaching the gospel. But he doesn’t always talk about it in the same way or use the same vocabulary as the other apostles.

  10:45 In some sense, Paul here is attempting, or at least he’s contributing to the creation of a kind of Christian vocabulary. Trying to talk about what the gospel is and reach people who especially didn’t grow up in the Jewish faith, and so it’s kind of a work in progress and that’s part of what I think makes it a little bit difficult, is the way that his approach and vocabulary are so unique and personal to him.

  11:09 The one other thing to note I think, has to do with the way that, in my opinion, the Book of Romans suffers more in the King James version than any other book of scripture. I think it suffers even more than Isaiah, when you attempt to read it in the King James translation.

  11:30 The King James translation is beautiful, but it is really pretty tortured and the King James English itself is old enough that I think it’s fair to say it hardly qualifies as English as you and I know it. That’s a pretty significant hurdle all by itself. Just in understanding Paul and I would strongly recommend that people seek out any number of contemporary translations of Paul’s Epistle and just get a feel for what it’s like to read Paul in English, which I think is very helpful, super-duper helpful, and then go back and worry about the King James.

Hank Smith: 12:02 If I remember right, Adam, last year you said you use an app called Blue Letter Bible, is that right?

Dr. Adam Miller: 12:07 Yeah. I do often use that. There’s a lot of great ones, a lot of great free translations. You can consult multiple translations here and that’ll make the work a whole lot easier, I think.

John Bytheway: 12:18 Here’s what I have. I found this at Deseret Industries.

Dr. Adam Miller: 12:21 Nice.

John Bytheway: 12:22 It’s a contemporary English translation. I think it’s called The Living Bible, but it has all sorts of little helps on the side.

Hank Smith: 12:30 Sometimes when I go to Bible Hub, I like the Good News Translation because it’s so simple. I know I’m probably missing some things, but at least I understand the chapter and then I can go back and read through the King James and say, “Oh, I get this now.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 12:45 Yeah. It can help quite a bit. Let me offer a kind of what I take to be a kind of interpretive key for reading Romans, and then we can dive in and look at some specific passages and see how that plays out.

  12:57 My preferred guide to reading the Book of Romans is Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount. I find myself increasingly convinced by this wild theory that Jesus’s own explanations of the gospel are the very best and that…

Hank Smith: 13:15 Wild theory.

Dr. Adam Miller: 13:16 Yes, wild and that his own very best explanations come in the Sermon on the Mount. There are three keys I want to borrow from the Sermon on the Mount, I think is the key to essential backdrop to making sense of what Paul is doing in his letter to the Romans.

  13:32 The first key is that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains that God does not hate his enemies. In fact, God loves his enemies. God doesn’t just love friends, he loves his enemies. Two in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus notes that we are also commanded like God to love our enemies and that in fact this is the very essence of the law as a whole. And three, Jesus argues quite sharply that loving our enemies doesn’t destroy the law. It’s the only thing that can fulfill the law.

  14:05 He acknowledges to his listeners that it may feel like he’s destroying the law when he tells them that they have to not love just friends but also their enemies, but that really it’s not the case, that this is the key to fulfilling it. That this is what the law itself commands. And that I think is the key to understanding everything that Paul was going to say about what sin is, about what grace is, and about why faith is crucial to our experience of redemptions.

  14:32 If we were going to print up some t-shirts to go with this podcast, you guys do as you please, I’ll leave that up to you.

Hank Smith: 14:40 followHIM clothing line.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:42 On the front of the t-shirt here for understanding the Book of Romans, I would want it to say, “Jesus was right.” And on the back I would want it to say, “Love is a law, not a reward.” Then I think it will be my kind of mantra for understanding what Paul is doing in the Book of Romans that love is always a commandment and never a reward. We’ll come back to that again and again.

Hank Smith: 15:07 Yeah. That was awesome. I love that idea Adam. Love is a law, not a reward. Okay, what’s next?

Dr. Adam Miller: 15:14 I think in lots of ways that’s the heart of the gospel. The idea that love is always a commandment and never a reward, especially as Jesus describes it in the Sermon on the Mount, and this I think is also at the heart of Paul’s own description of what it means to be a sinner, because Paul’s description of what it means to be a sinner is that as a sinner we get the whole thing backwards rather than obeying God’s command to love even our enemies.

  15:36 What we do as sinners is we try to use God’s law to earn or deserve God’s love as a kind of reward. We turn it around, we get it upside down, we get it inside out, we get the whole thing backwards. We try to use God’s law to be loved rather than to love, and that I think is a good description in general of what it’s like to be a sinner.

  16:00 A sinner is somebody who lives their life backwards in this way, looking for love, but trying to do it in this upside-down way where you want to be loved rather than doing the work of love. So you try to use the law here then as a way to earn or deserve love and be in charge of it, be in control of it because you are the one who’s earning or deserving it. You don’t have to depend on somebody else.

Hank Smith: 16:25 I’ve told my students before something that can be confusing to them. I think it’s similar to what you’re saying here. I told them I don’t keep the commandments so I can earn my way into heaven or I keep the commandments because I want to want heaven when the opportunity is presented to me, when Jesus says, “All right, it’s open to you. Do you want it? Do you want it? I made the way.” And do I desire that?

  16:52 The model you’re saying, “I’m going to earn something, I’m going to earn God’s, a reward from God.” Can be motivating but also incredibly discouraging and also frustrating and also exclusive. You can start saying, “I am one of those that’s earning. They’re not one of those that’s earning.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 17:13 That makes sense to me because the I’m a sinner and that’s how sinners think. That’s how I think all the time.

Hank Smith: 17:18 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 17:20 I think in this backwards way about myself, about other people, I think in this backwards way also in particular about God, is if God were waiting me to do something to prove that I deserved to be loved by him instead of waiting for me to join him in the work of loving others.

John Bytheway: 17:36 I think we’ve been treated by other humans in that, I’ve got to earn this approval type of way and sometimes we take some of humans’ worst attributes and apply those to God, which like you said is exactly backwards. We have to think in a whole new way about God is not using the worst attributes that humans have with each other. Sometimes we’ve got to earn or merit approval or love or we feel that way anyway.

Hank Smith: 18:04 And then we apply that to God.

John Bytheway: 18:06 We apply it to God, which we’re never told to do. He’s telling us all the time, the way he loves, but easy to do that.

Dr. Adam Miller: 18:13 Yeah. It’s a little hard to get our heads around, which is why we can read the Sermon on the Mount or we can read Paul’s letter to the Romans here and just not see what they’re doing or saying because it’s so counterintuitive. It runs so against the grain, right of our expectation is this natural men and women as sinners because we tend to look at the whole thing upside down and backwards.

  18:36 If you are anything like me, right then you may have spent the better part of your life trying to obey a commandment that God never gave. There is no commandment given in any scripture by any prophet, from any pulpit in any age to make myself into someone who is perfectly lovable.

  18:56 There is no such commandment. There is always and only and forever, the unconditional commandment to love even my enemies, even when my enemy is myself in the same way that God does and at the end of the day, a lot of what’s at stake in redemption is just about my learning to stop trying to keep a commandment that God never gave and learning to start trying to keep the commandment that God actually did give, so that I can understand him and join him in that work.

  19:24 This I think is what Paul means by grace, at the end of the day, is that grace is the revelation that love always was a law and it never was a reward in the first place.

Hank Smith: 19:35 That’s excellent. Always chasing after something that I already have. If I just stopped for a second then saw what the Lord is trying to teach me.

Dr. Adam Miller: 19:46 Yeah. And I think it fits nicely with the description you gave a couple minutes ago, Hank, of how the law really isn’t about trying to earn your way into heaven, but that obeying the law, that’s the thing that you’re looking for.

  20:00 The law isn’t a means to some other end. I don’t obey the law to get love. Obeying the law is the work of loving, and by loving I’ve found the thing that I’m looking for, but I can’t do it if I’m trying to be loved. That’s not the right project. I have to engage in it as the work of loving others and then I find it.

Hank Smith: 20:20 And how discouraging that is to think God will only love me if I behave a certain way. You might think, “Oh, that’s an excellent way to think. It will make my behavior stay in line.” But really there’s a fear there of, “I won’t be loved, I’ll do something wrong. I’ll break the law and then not only have I broken the law, but now I’ve lost the love.” That’s a heavy load to carry.

Dr. Adam Miller: 20:46 And this I think is one of the ways in which Paul is among the most accessible of the writers in our scriptures because nobody speaks more clearly or more personally than Paul does, about how painful and despairing it is to live in this way that treats love backwards, that treats the law as a way of earning love and how that inevitably leads into a kind of trap where we both condemn others and condemn ourselves and cut ourselves off from the very thing that we wanted in the first place.

Hank Smith: 21:18 Wow. And John we’re 20 minutes in and I am loving this.

John Bytheway: 21:21 Yeah, this is great.

Hank Smith: 21:22 This new way of thinking.

Dr. Adam Miller: 21:24 Well, it’s the gospel I think, or I’m trying.

John Bytheway: 21:27 Yeah. I think so too.

Dr. Adam Miller: 21:29 So I think the big picture structure of what Paul is saying in the Epistle to the Romans is essentially this, that as sinners what we do is that we suppress or hide the truth about God and his law by taking the whole thing backwards, especially taking it backwards out of fear, as Hank pointed out, right? That’s kind of our motivation for doing it, we’re afraid.

  21:55 And by taking the whole thing backwards, we suppress or hide the truth about God and that what God is doing through Christ’s atonement, through his death and resurrection is that Christ, that God is displaying the truth about himself and about his law, that he both loves his enemies and is willing to sacrifice everything to save his enemies, and that only that kind of love as law rather than reward. Only that kind of love, which is also what Paul calls grace can save us, especially given what it means to be a sinner in the first place.

  22:30 So that I think is the rough shape of his argument in general, as sinner as we hide the truth and God through Christ’s atonement reveals the truth about himself and his law, we could give one other image maybe to describe how this works.

  22:46 If you think about God’s law as a kind of tool or think about God’s law like a telescope, what we do as sinners is that we turn the telescope around backwards and instead of looking through it the right direction, we look through it in the direction that makes everything look small instead of the direction that makes everything look big.

Hank Smith: 23:06 Yeah. Farther away.

Dr. Adam Miller: 23:07 If the law is love, what we end up doing as sinners is that we use the law backwards in a way that makes love look very small and far away. It’s the same law, but we use it in such a way that it makes everything look small and far away instead, it makes God look very far away. It makes love look impossible.

  23:26 And what Jesus does when he comes to save us is that Jesus comes and he says, “Look, you lovable idiots. You’ve got the whole thing backwards.” And he takes the telescope from us and he shows us how to use it and he shows us how to love and sacrifice and he hands it back to us and he says, “Now this is how you use it.” And then when you look through it in the right direction, all of a sudden everything looks big and sharp and clear, and you can see God’s love everywhere, and in everything is maybe a nice little quasi-parable to describe what’s at stake here for Paul and his treatment of the gospel in the law.

Hank Smith: 24:00 Yeah. I like that. You’re not seeing it wrong, you’re just seeing it backwards.

Dr. Adam Miller: 24:05 Yeah, you’ve got the law. The law is right.

Hank Smith: 24:08 Yeah. You’ve got the right pieces.

Dr. Adam Miller: 24:09 But you’re doing the wrong thing with it.

Hank Smith: 24:13 That’s great.

Dr. Adam Miller: 24:13 Let’s try to take a look at some particular passages then here in Romans. Let’s start in Romans 1. I’m just going to use here for our listeners to give them a taste. I’m going to use the NET, the New English Translation of the Bible because it’s a kind of simple baseline accessible, I think trustworthy translation of the Greek. The NET tends to be my default, but people can choose whatever they please so long as it’s readable English, is the main thing to start and then worry about the details later.

  24:48 So I’m just going to give you citations from the NET here and if there are particular things that we want to talk about or note in the King James, we can do that too. So this is Romans 1:18-20, and I’m going to tack on verse 25 here, these verses go like this and you’ll see right away I think why as a philosopher these verses might stand out to me especially.

Hank Smith: 25:12 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 25:13 So they go like this, Romans 1:18. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness, because what can be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, they’ve been clearly seen because they’re understood through what has been made.” And then verse 25, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the creator who was blessed forever. Amen.”

  25:58 So that I think Paul, this is the first thing that Paul has to say in here in Romans 1. This is kind of the frame that he gives us for understanding the rest of the epistle is that sinners, the people who are unrighteous, these are the ones he says who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness.

  26:15 The King James here says, “Hold the truth in unrighteousness.” But I think that means hold down, because the Greek here is pretty clear. It’s kind of hiding or suppression of the truth is the sense that’s at stake, and then he goes on to say that there’s something about God that’s obvious, something about God that’s kind of hidden in plain sight, something about his nature, something about his eternal power, something about his attributes that we have been suppressing and hiding from ourselves. “We’ve exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” He says.

Hank Smith: 26:48 Suppressing the truth is that from ourselves? Because it sounds like, “Oh, I’m suppressing the truth from other people, but I’m kind of deceiving myself.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 26:57 Yeah. I think that’s right and I think that’s how Paul describes it here too. We’re not only deceiving ourselves about other people, but we’re deceiving ourselves about ourselves. Because I think, again, as you indicated earlier, a lot of our motivation here is that we’re afraid. A lot of the motivation at the root of every kind of sinfulness is fear that we’re not going to get what we want, that things aren’t, that we’re not going to be in control or whatever, and that fear leads us to hide something that should be obvious about God and about ourselves from ourselves.

  27:30 So we exchange the truth about God for a lie, and we take what should have been obvious and we turn it upside down and everything that should have been big and clear now looks small and far away.

Hank Smith: 27:40 Verse 25, Adam, you just quoted that. “Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature more than the creator.”

  27:48 Can you give that to me in simpler terms? In the verse, it kind of sounds like they knew what they were doing, they changed the truth of God into a lie like on purpose, but if I’m suppressing the truth from myself, this could be, I changed the truth of God into a lie and I didn’t even realize I did it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:06 Yeah. There’s both I think a dimension of self-deception here, but also a clear dimension of culpability. Nonetheless, we’re doing something that’s harming ourselves and other people and there’s a sense in which we don’t quite see how we’re doing it or why even though we still bear responsibility for having done it.

Hank Smith: 28:25 That’s what I was wondering. If you had to tell me, sorry to push you on this. If you had to tell me what the truth was and what the lie is, what would you say in this context?

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:37 That’s what I want to address in the next verse that we look at. I think the truth has to do with the nature of God in particular, and it has to do with whether or not God treats love as a law or as a reward.

Hank Smith: 28:50 So I’ve switched it to, it’s a reward, the truth is it’s a law. I’ve reversed those two we’ve been talking about.

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:58 Yeah. I think that’s right. What happens here, Paul says, they exchange the truth of God for a lie, they served the creation or the creature rather than the creator. We make the law about us and whether we are loved rather than about God and joining him in the work of love. It’s that kind of shift in the purpose of the law and what we use the law for that’s at stake in the lie that we’re telling ourselves.

Hank Smith: 29:24 And one, it sounds like to me from what you’ve talked about here, that one leads to a wonderful outcome and the other leads to discouragement, fear and excluding other people.

Dr. Adam Miller: 29:35 Exactly. And Paul will spell this out I think in great detail.

John Bytheway: 29:39 I had been trying to figure out what the creature meant, and I thought, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served, and my first thought was the creature was this lie, they created small c creature, the lie about God, they created more than the real creator. Is that another way to look at it, maybe? They serve this creation that they made more than the creator.

Dr. Adam Miller: 30:09 I like that. I think Paul mostly has in mind by the word creature here, just created things, by creatures, kind of King James language for the things that God created. There’s the creator and then there are the things that are created, and the things that are created are the “creatures”. That sounds a little funny to us 400 years later.

  30:30 But part of what’s at stake here and that difference between the creator and the creature is just also again, the question of grace. Because what’s at stake in creation is the gift of life and to acknowledge God as creator is to acknowledge that we are gifts to ourselves from God, that we aren’t in charge, we aren’t in control, God is, and that our lives are themselves a gift. A kind of original expression of God’s own love and to deny the creator is to deny the gift that He gave to us as His creation.

John Bytheway: 31:05 I guess when I saw verse 23, I thought, “Is he talking about idolatry?” They changed the glory of an uncorruptible God into an image made to corruptible man, birds, fourfooted beasts, creeping things.

Dr. Adam Miller: 31:19 Yes. So idolatry is the primary manifestation of this reversal. Instead of worshiping God, we end up worshiping some reflection of ourselves in the things that we want or the things that we make. We make the law about whether or not we are loved, rather than making the law about whether we love others.

Hank Smith: 31:37 I’m going to go worship this idol or whatever it is so I can have its love, so this God that I’m worshiping will love me, give me value.

Dr. Adam Miller: 31:47 That’s the very notion of idolatry then where my relationship with the God is about me getting what I want. That’s what makes it an idol. Whereas if my relationship to God is about doing what God commanded regardless of what I want, that’s actual worship, and again, you can see the same dynamic, where if my obedience is about me getting what I want, again, that’s about whether I’m loved rather than whether or not I love.

Hank Smith: 32:11 I really like this idea of God inviting us to become part of his work of love rather than do, do, do. Works, works, works until you feel like you’ve earned your value. “You can now feel valuable because of what you’ve done.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 32:25 Yeah. Where I think the kind of operative assumption here for Paul is that not only is it impossible for us to do that because we’re not good enough, it’s impossible for us to do that because that’s not what love even is. It isn’t even the kind of thing that you can get.

  32:40 Love is the thing that you join or do or share or make, but it’s not even the kind of thing that you could passively receive as a reward. It’s not even the kind of thing that you could deserve, and if you think that it is the kind of thing that you can deserve and spend your life trying to deserve it, you’ll never find it because that’s not even what it is.

John Bytheway: 32:58 Climb the ladder only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall.

Dr. Adam Miller: 33:03 Yeah, exactly. Then our lives trying to answer the wrong question and then wonder why we can’t get the right answer.

Hank Smith: 33:09 Yeah. And it comes into when difficult things happen, when trials hit, when something hard comes, you’re, “What did I do? What did I do to make you so angry at me that you allowed this thing to happen?” That’s our common way of thinking about it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 33:27 Yeah. And Paul again, I think is really good about this too. If I think that God’s law is all about deserving love, then when good things happen, I’ll own them and claim them and take credit for them and say that I deserve them, which will ruin them instead of treating them as a gift, but when also the flip side is when bad things happen, which also happens all the time. When bad things happen, I’ll assume it’s because I deserved that too, and if good things happen, I’ll think I’ll deserve it, and that ruins them.

  33:57 If bad things happen again, like Job, right? Then back to Job here, I’ll think that I deserved that as well, and both are a kind of trap that prevent me from responding to whatever comes with the love that God commands. If a friend comes, I’m commanded to love them. If an enemy comes, I’m commanded to love them. That’s the work, not the reward.

Hank Smith: 34:19 I like that.

John Bytheway: 34:20 It’s funny, I’m looking at this list, really, “Whoa!” Type sins, verse 29. “Fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whispers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things. Then disobedient to parents.” Just make me, I could read that to the kids. “See this one? This means it’s your turn to unload the dishwasher.” Just because it appears in a list doesn’t mean they’re all equal to each other, I suppose, but it just sounded, it was kind of made me smile when I saw it.

Hank Smith: 34:56 That is funny. And then Adam, it fits right with what you’re saying. Verse 31, without understanding it’s backwards.

Dr. Adam Miller: 35:04 Yeah. One of the predictable effects of using the law in this backwards way is that you end up creating little groups of insiders versus outsiders. And one of the main things that you need to do to create your group of insiders is you have to applaud one another for what you’re doing to make sure that everybody feels like they’re being recognized and they really are great and they really have earned it and they really do deserve it. That’s how you form the group.

Hank Smith: 35:30 And you keep each other in the group.

Dr. Adam Miller: 35:32 Self-congratulation society. That’s a real danger, right? I mean, it’s easy for church itself to devolve into self-congratulation society, though that’s a kind of constant temptation to watch out for.

Hank Smith: 35:46 Yeah. And that’s where we can be very hurtful to those who choose a different path or go in a different direction. We could, man, when someone leaves the group, you see it as a threat to yourself and so you lash out.

Dr. Adam Miller: 36:00 Yeah. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 36:01 The Rameumptom group was kind of a self, what’d you call it? Mutual congratulations’ society?

Dr. Adam Miller: 36:08 Yeah. You use the law to create the enemy. The enemy is not the people like us.

John Bytheway: 36:14 Those guys over there.

Dr. Adam Miller: 36:16 Yeah. Those guys over there who aren’t doing what we think they’re supposed to be doing. And then we use the law as an excuse not to love them rather than obeying the law as a command to love them.

Hank Smith: 36:26 Isn’t that what Alma does? He turns and says, “These are our brethren.”

John Bytheway: 36:30 Yeah. In his prayer, it’s a wonderful little moment because when he starts his prayer in Alma 31, he’s like, “How can we behold such gross wickedness?” And then at the end of the prayer he says, “Behold, oh Lord, their souls are precious and many of them are our brethren.” And it seems like there’s a softening during the prayer, which maybe was a revelatory experience for him. I like the way that prayer seems to soften.

Hank Smith: 36:59 It reminds me of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. Here’s this Pharisee. “I’m so grateful that I’m not as other men are.” He feels like he’s earned his reward. He’s earned God’s love.

Dr. Adam Miller: 37:13 Exactly. In which case he’s cut himself off from it. Let’s take a look at Romans 5 for a second. We’ll skip ahead a little bit.

Hank Smith: 37:20 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 37:21 If in Romans 1, what Paul does is defines sin as a suppression of the truth about God, about his nature, about his power, about his character, even about his law, then I think it’s in Romans 5 where we get the clearest connection to both the Sermon on the Mount and to Paul’s description then of what the truth is about God.

  37:45 What is it about God that we’ve been suppressing? What is it that we’ve been hiding from ourselves? So what are we afraid of? If we look at Romans 5 and pick up in verse 6, “While we were still helpless at the right time, God died for the ungodly. For rarely will anyone die for a righteous person though for a good person, perhaps someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son. How much more since we have been reconciled will we be saved by his life?”

  38:28 So this, I think may be Paul’s clearest description here of God’s character and attributes that what characterizes God as the fact that he loves his enemies. He doesn’t hate his enemies, he loves them and he demonstrates this love for them by sacrificing himself and his son. He gives what we need, before we deserved it, while we were still his enemies.

  38:51 This is both the expression of his grace and his own, and an expression of his own willingness to abide by that imperative to love friend and enemy. This, I think, this is the truth about God and this above all is what Christ’s atonement demonstrates God’s own character in this way.

John Bytheway: 39:11 In the King James version of Romans 5:11, “And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we now have received the atonement.” I didn’t know this, but one of the commentaries I was reading says, this is the only use of atonement in the New Testament of the King James version of the Bible. I just thought, “Wow.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 39:33 Good. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 39:35 It’s used a lot more in the Book of Mormon, but that’s an interesting point.

Dr. Adam Miller: 39:40 It’s a good clue to something we’re often not very sensitive to. It’s a good clue to the way that we’ve inherited 2000 years worth of assumptions from the broader Christian tradition about what the atonement is and about how it works.

  39:58 Where in the context of scripture itself, especially the New Testament, there’s very little explanation that lines up neatly with that larger 2000 year long tradition and the vocabulary itself is a work in progress in the New Testament, as the apostles and church leaders are attempting to work out powerful and effective ways of describing what Jesus did to a great variety of audiences. And the fact that the word atonement itself is only used one time in the King James New Testament is an astonishing and remarkable fact, isn’t it?

Hank Smith: 40:32 Yeah. Our religious world centers on that almost on that word, and yet only appears once.

Dr. Adam Miller: 40:39 Yeah. It’s interesting, right? To ask what words are they using. If that’s not the word that they use, what words are they using? What words are Paul using? What words are the gospels using to clearly describe this same thing to talk about what Jesus did if they’re not using that word? That’s a good question to ask ourselves.

Hank Smith: 40:56 In verse 7, Paul talks about human beings will rarely die for someone else, but Christ died for the ungodly. Can you clarify that to me and then can I ask a question too, which is Paul saying the fact that Christ performed this great service was a vote of confidence to what? That we would eventually get it and understand and join the work because if he didn’t think we would ever get it, he’d be like, “I don’t know if I die for someone who is probably never going to figure it out.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 41:32 Right. I think what we get here is another nice clear contrast between those two different ways of using God’s law. The way that normal people work, Paul says the way that most of us work most of the time is that maybe we’d be willing to die for a friend.

  41:52 If it’s a really, really good friend, maybe we’d do it, but even then, maybe not. Maybe not. That’s because we love our friends and if we love our friends, the more that we love them, the better they are to us, the more likely we might be willing to do that, but even in-

Hank Smith: 42:09 In sacrifice.

Dr. Adam Miller: 42:10 Yeah, even in those cases it’s still, he says unlikely, you’re still not going to be likely to die for a friend, even a friend, and then he contrasts that with the way that God works. God doesn’t weigh in the balance whether or not you’re a friend or an enemy in terms of whether or not he’s willing to die for you.

  42:26 In fact, God goes out of his way to do it for all of us who have positioned ourselves as his enemies by suppressing the truth about him, by worshiping the creature rather than the creator. So God does exactly the opposite. God doesn’t weigh in the balance, whether or not I’m going to respond the right way or whether or not I’m doing what he wants.

  42:46 I mean, I think he hopes, he trusts that his love for us can help save us, but I think it’s clear here that he would do it even if it didn’t save us because that’s who he is. That’s how he works, that’s what he does. God loves friend and enemy regardless of whether or not the outcome is what he hoped for.

John Bytheway: 43:05 That kind of goes back to the Sermon on the Mount. He sends his rain on the evil and on the good, on the just and on the unjust. I think a lot of times when we look at be ye therefore perfect, if we look at the context in Matthew not as much in 3 Nephi, but in Matthew, it sounds like it’s his perfectly loving nature, it’s talking about.

Dr. Adam Miller: 43:27 Exactly. Matthew 5:48 is not a commandment to make ourselves perfectly lovable. Matthew 5:48 is a commandment to join him in the work of loving perfectly and to the degree that I’m trying to do the first, then I am trying to keep a commandment he never gave, and I will fail at keeping the commandment he actually did give.

John Bytheway: 43:48 If you look at 46 and 47 before you get to Matthew 5:48, it’s, “For if you love them which love you, what reward have you? Do not even the publicans the same? If you salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Even the publicans do that. Be ye therefore perfect even as your father, which is in heaven.” And then you go, “Oh, he loves all of us. He sends his rain on the evil and on the good.” I mean that’s how I’ve always seen that is it’s more about being perfectly loving then…

Dr. Adam Miller: 44:18 That’s the only kind of perfection at stake. The perfection that comes from joining him in the work of love, God will never ever use his law to decide whether or not we deserve love because love is not a reward. It is a law.

Hank Smith: 44:32 I remember at a meeting years and years ago, Stephen Robinson from BYU was teaching and he said, “We earn things, don’t we?” So he had us look up earn in the topical guide, it’s not there. And then he said, “Oh, I must, I gave the wrong word.” So he said, “Deserve, let’s look up deserve in the topical guide.” It’s not there. And he said, “You know what? Here’s a better word, merit. That’s the word. We merit things.” So we looked up merit and it’s there, but it’s only we’re saved by the merits of Christ. We rely on the merits of Christ. There’s nothing about earned, deserve or merit about us trying to earn God’s love.

John Bytheway: 45:11 You may have heard me talk about this before Hank, but I had a long flight from Newark to Salt Lake City next to an evangelical minister, and it caused me to come home and I went through every reference to merits in the index of the topical guide, and it was wonderful.

  45:30 For me, it was, I’m smacking my head that I didn’t have those ready, but we rely wholy and solely upon the merits of Christ and I think the history that we come from, which is kind of funny, you use that word, is like merit badges. “If I earn enough of these, I will get my eagle, but I have to merit that reward.” When you use that scriptural context of merit, “We can’t merit anything of ourselves.” Lehi says.

Hank Smith: 46:00 Didn’t that minister say, “You believe in the gospel of something”? Is that the guy who said that?

John Bytheway: 46:04 Yeah. He said, “You believe in the Jesus of the gaps.” And the way my brain works is I thought, “Well, I don’t really know where Jesus shopped, but I don’t think it was the Gap.” And then he explained that idea of you think you do this much and Jesus makes up the gap, and that’s when I heard, “Oh, 2 Nephi 25. He thinks we after all we can do, here’s all this. He’s going to do this.” Which resulted in a great discussion and a great thing for me to go through those merit verses and it helped me tremendously to do what Stephen Robinson did to go through every reference to merits and see that we really can’t merit anything, but we rely on Christ who and his merits.

Dr. Adam Miller: 46:50 This is a good point in general I think for trying to read Paul’s Epistles is when we think of Paul’s Epistles, one of the first things that comes to mind for many of us is just these kind of traditional debates that we have with our Protestant friends about grace versus works.

  47:08 Though for me, I find those debates to be very frustrating because they tend to assume, as a matter of course, the debates do whichever side you take, they tend to assume that love is a kind of reward that you have to earn. The debate then is whether is about how you earn it. Do you earn it all by yourself with your own works or do you earn it in partnership with Jesus or do you earn it just by Jesus?

  47:34 And that’s a kind of spectrum of grace versus works debates. When for my part, those debates seem to meet to as the entire point of what Paul is saying, which is that love cannot be deserved. It is the law not a reward, and you join it or you don’t.

Hank Smith: 47:49 And the invitation to join is the reward itself. The work is the blessing.

Dr. Adam Miller: 47:54 Yeah. The means are the end here.

John Bytheway: 47:56 I sometimes feel like we look at things like they’re a formula for salvation when really they’re more of a fruit of salvation. The feelings of love and charity for others are kind of a fruit of coming to Christ, not a formula for coming to Christ. Did I say that right?

Dr. Adam Miller: 48:11 That’s good. I think getting the law backwards, I think means treating the law as a means to some other end, whereas treating the law as God does is to treat the law as an end in itself. And treating the law as an end in itself. That’s what you call grace. Grace is the law as an end in itself.

John Bytheway: 48:29 When King Benjamin says, “You will not have mind to injure one another but to live peaceably.” He’s not saying, “Do this so that you can be saved.” He’s saying, “After you’re saved, you’ll not have a mind to injure one another. You will live. It’s a fruit of coming to Christ.” He wasn’t giving a lecture on being kind. He was giving a lecture on coming to Christ and these things come after that. They flow from that.

Dr. Adam Miller: 48:53 Yeah. He is describing what happens when you look through the right end of the telescope. Everything looks different. The whole world looks different. Everybody looks like an occasion to love, not an occasion to judge.

Hank Smith: 49:04 And you’re right, it’s all too common. I’m feeling going, “Man, how many times have I got the telescope backwards?”

John Bytheway: 49:12 Well, that’s the way so many reward systems in the world work. Like I said, merit badges. “I got to merit this many so that I can get this reward.” And it doesn’t work theologically the way we’re talking right now though.

Hank Smith: 49:24 So Adam, as Paul is writing to these people, what’s his hope with all this? Is he saying, “Look, here’s who I am and here’s how the gospel works”? Is this him trying to clarify something that they maybe had questions about? It’s hard to tell.

Dr. Adam Miller: 49:41 My sense is that he means it as both an introduction of himself to the church in Rome, to the saints in Rome, but also as an introduction of his understanding of the gospel to the church at Rome, and that these two things are kind of part and parcel for Paul.

  50:01 He is the gospel. The gospel is Him. He’s died in Christ, and Christ is in him, and to be introduced to him is inevitably in Paul’s mind to simultaneously be introduced to Christ, and I think he’s trying to prepare the way for him to come and see them and put them in a position to understand what he’ll teach when he arrives and why they might welcome him.

Hank Smith: 50:22 Okay. Where do want to go next?

Dr. Adam Miller: 50:26 Let’s take a look at some very famous verses in Romans 3 then. So on the one hand, we started off with a couple verses in Romans 1, where Paul describes sin as the business of suppressing the truth about God. And then we looked, I think at a very clear passage in Romans 5, where Paul describes the truth about God that, “Though you and I would hardly die for a friend, God is willing to die for even his enemies.” And that’s how God works. That’s the truth about him, and it’s also the truth about his law in general, because his law commands us to love not just friends but enemies. This is what he’s inviting us to join.

  51:07 Then we get these verses in Romans 3, picking up around verse 23. In Romans 3:23, we’re going to go through 26. Paul famously says, right, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but,” This is one of the most important buts maybe in all of scripture, “but they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” And then we get this, “God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness, because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed.”

  51:55 Now, this is something that Paul does repeatedly in throughout Romans and in these verses in particular where when Paul describes the work that Christ’s atonement accomplishes, he likes to describe Christ’s atonement as a kind of revelation, that what the atonement does, as he says in verse 25, is that the atonement publicly displays God’s true nature. It publicly displays how he’s willing to sacrifice himself and present his death at the mercy seat, as a mercy seat even, that’s then accessible through faith.

  52:28 And this again, as he says in verse 25, was to demonstrate his righteousness. To show what it means to be righteous, to show how you go about fulfilling the law. This is what the atonement demonstrates because if the law commands us to love even our enemies, then this is God showing us how you do that.

  52:48 How do you love your enemies? You sacrifice yourself. You give yourself up. You allow yourself to be crucified on their behalf. You die for them. That’s what it looks like to fulfill the law. And in this way, the atonement saves us from the sin as a suppression of the truth by displaying, he says the truth, publicly displaying and demonstrating the truth about God.

Hank Smith: 53:11 Can you clarify? He gives himself up as a mercy seat, not giving himself up so we can go to the mercy seat, but he himself is the place we go to? Am I asking that correctly?

Dr. Adam Miller: 53:23 Yeah. The image here seems to be that God displays Christ at his death as the mercy seat, that’s accessible through faith. The mercy seat, of course, referring here to the Ark of the Covenant to that space on top of the Ark of the Covenant between the angels wings that are stretched across them, the top of the ark where God is, God’s enthroned, the presence of God is enthroned there on that mercy seat.

John Bytheway: 53:49 You’re still using that NET translation?

Dr. Adam Miller: 53:53 Yeah. That was the NET.

John Bytheway: 53:53 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 53:55 Verse 25 and King James says, “Whom God has set forth,” Set forth, displayed publicly, “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.”

Hank Smith: 54:04 It’s not a word I use every day.

Dr. Adam Miller: 54:07 Yeah. No.

John Bytheway: 54:08 The footnote on the word propitiation says Greek mercy seat. So that’s great. Glad you pointed that out.

Dr. Adam Miller: 54:15 And again, the purpose there is to declare God’s righteousness. So God is demonstrating here, I think what the law is and how it gets fulfilled. Because the law commands us to love our enemies, and this is what it looks like when you love your enemies. The Atonement.

  54:30 It’s probably also worth reflecting here for a moment on Paul’s use of the word, especially in the King James of justification. Paul talks about righteousness and justification and people being justified, and it’s a kind of bewildering array of terms here, I think in King James English.

John Bytheway: 54:53 Bewildering array of terms.

Dr. Adam Miller: 54:57 For what I think in the Greek is actually a pretty straightforward idea.

John Bytheway: 55:02 I agree. I’ve been bewildered of.

Dr. Adam Miller: 55:05 The nice thing about Paul’s own language is that in the original, those are all variations on the same word. Every time Paul says righteousness or he talks about the righteousness of God or about justice or justification or justifying in Greek, those are all just the variations on the very same word that just means essentially to make things right.

John Bytheway: 55:25 Reconciliation.

Dr. Adam Miller: 55:27 Reconciliation is nice, but I also just like the simplicity of God’s putting things right, with the emphasis on right here. Justifying things in the sense of when you’ve got a Word document, things are left justified or right justified or center justified, what they’re lined up with. In that sense, you’re setting them right in the sense that you’re lining them up properly. And this is what God does.

  55:52 God’s, the purpose of God’s law is to set things right, to set things right in relationship to the law, to set things right in relationship to Him, and to set us right in relationship to each other. And the only right relationship is love. When we’ve been justified, when we’ve been made right, this means that we are now in proper relationship to God and his law. We’re not doing it backwards anymore, but what was out of joint has been put back in place.

John Bytheway: 56:25 Please join us for part two of this podcast.