Paul Distilled

Gary W. Burnett

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725289826
  9781725289833
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725289840
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

What the apostle Paul has to say is transformative and utterly inspiring. But too often he is clouded in complicated explanations and murky misunderstandings. Paul Distilled gets to the essence of Paul, and uncovers what is at the heart of his thinking and why he's had such an impact on the world since the first century until today. Drawing on many years of teaching and study of Paul's writings, Gary Burnett explains the driving forces behind the apostle's thinking from the letters he wrote to groups of Jesus-followers dotted around the Roman empire, addressing the real issues they faced, and shows why this matters today. A study guide with each chapter will enable church groups to get to grips with the life-changing potential of understanding Paul better.

1

The World Changing Love of God

Super-conquerors—Really?

As we read Paul’s letters, we can’t help but be set back on our heels from time to time at some of his statements, which, quite frankly, to our modern ears, sound, well . . . outrageous. Because these are so familiar to many of us, we often read them on automatic pilot and the full force of them doesn’t hit us.

Take, for example, his statement toward the end of Romans 8, where he says, “in all these things, we are more than conquerors.” The word Paul uses here is a particularly strong one, which we could translate as “super-conquerors.” Which really makes it all the more outrageous, when we consider the difficulties of our own lives at times, and for sure, the very real suffering that is going on in our communities and in the wider world.

What on earth are we to make of this statement? Paul sounds like some sort of positive-thinking, self-help guru here with advice that takes no cognizance of the realities of life. It seems like an outrageous thing to say.

Hardship in Rome

Especially when we consider the situation of the Christians in Rome to whom Paul wrote his letter. They had very difficult lives, much more difficult than most of us. Rome was crowded, people lived in cramped apartments with no sanitation. The night soil was just tipped out the window. If you got sick, there were no doctors or medicine for you—the likelihood was you’d die. Children and mothers died in childbirth and infant mortality was high. Disease could spread rampantly through neighbourhoods. The social distancing we’ve become used to in the coronavirus pandemic was not an option. Death was an ever-present reality for everybody, and especially for the vast majority of people who lived from day to day, doing their best to survive.

If you have visited poor communities in developing world countries, in slums and rural villages, then that’s the sort of situation—and worse—that the first Christians lived in. Rubbish in the streets, vile smells and many people living in tiny rooms. So, in chapter 8 of his great letter to the Jesus-followers in Rome, when Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,” he’s not talking hypothetically, or about some minor inconveniences. People living in Rome had it tough. Just getting by was sometimes all you could do.

So, when Paul says, a few verses later, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” he’s not making up a list just to emphasize his point. When we read that, we kind of skim over each of the words Paul uses, because they’re not that relevant to us, really.

But when this letter was first read to the Christians in Rome, they recognized every one of these things:

•hardship: just being able to get enough money to sustain yourself and your family was a struggle for many of these people.

•distress: seeing your children get sick and die. 50 percent of children died before their 10th birthday in the first century.

•persecution: following Jesus and not honoring the gods which protected your neighborhood made you a person of suspicion, would make people not want to do business with you, and at times actively oppose you.

•famine: hunger was an on-going problem for ordinary people in Rome, many of whom depended on a grain dole by the authorities; Paul himself in 2 Corinthians 11 says he was “often without food.”

•peril: Rome was a city of great violence—it was a place where slaves were beaten and sexually exploited; where new-born babies were thrown away on rubbish heaps; where political and street mob violence was commonplace; and where the gladiatorial games preserved an atmosphere of violence.

•the sword: the sword was regularly used in Rome to enforce its laws and execute people. Actually, capital punishment frequently involved torture, flogging, crucifixion, dismemberment and more.

Paul knew precisely the sort of life-on-the-edge existence of the believers in Rome, and wanted them to know that none of these things, not the hardships of daily life, or even the threat of beatings, torture or execution, could separate them from the love of Christ.

So, don’t think for one minute Paul was being trite, or trying to keep his sunny side up, when he told the Jesus-followers in Rome that they are “more than conquerors.” He knew the very serious and difficult circumstances they found themselves in.

Actually, they’re not that different from the circumstances that Paul found himself in. Paul sought to support his life as a traveling evangelist by making tents and awnings, but an itinerant lifestyle made it difficult to establish a business in each new place and he found it hard to make ends meet. So, he was often “hungry and thirsty, often without food and naked” (2 Corinthians 11:27). On top of that he suffered beatings, imprisonments, and shipwrecks.

So, what does he mean, when, after listing all these hardships that he knew the Romans experienced, he says, “we are super-conquerors”? How can Paul say such a thing to people who were enduring so much? What would it mean to the abused slaves who had become Jesus-followers and part of a Christian community in Rome? Or to the day laborers who couldn’t be sure of their income from one day to the next? Or to the migrant workers who were separated from their families? These were all likely members of the little Jesus-following communities in the city.

And how can we, in the challenging circumstances we see all around us, find comfort and inspiration in what Paul has to say?

The Love of God

It all revolves around the subject of the love of God. Love is a major theme in Paul’s letters—he mentions love over one hundred times. God, he says, is the God of love and peace (2 Corinthians 13:11); God’s love has been poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5); and Christ’s love is beyond anything we think we know (Ephesians 3:19). Love was the be all and end all: the greatest thing in the world, for Paul, was love (1 Corinthians 13).

When Paul encountered the risen, living Messiah on the road to Damascus that fateful day, his life was changed. He had been a man so zealous for his ancestral traditions that he was prepared to pursue that zeal with an excess of violence. In fact, he was on his way to continue that onslaught of violence against the first Jesus-followers, when he was stopped dramatically in his tracks. He lost none of his passionate nature and was able to channel that into his new mission to spread the good news of Jesus the Messiah, but the violent, ruthless Paul was changed into a Paul motivated and shaped by his experience of the love of God. The idea that the Son of God loved him and had given himself for him controlled him and urged him on (Galatians 2:20 / 2 Corinthians 5:14). Paul knew above all else, deeply and personally, that God loved him and that nothing could ever separate him from that love.

Now the idea of God’s love was one that was part of Paul’s heritage as a first century Jew. God, essentially and profoundly, loved his people Israel through all their tortured history, their foolishness and unfaithfulness. Again and again, God had graciously intervened on behalf of his people, and prophets like Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah talk in quite emotional terms about God’s intense love for God’s people.

So, this idea of a God who loves, and loves again, and is utterly faithful in that love, despite the unfaithfulness and waywardness and sin of his people and the world, was one that Paul was very familiar with. But, crucially, when Paul encountered the living Christ and he realized how God’s love had been most powerfully revealed in Jesus, the sense of that love gripped him and became the driving force in his life. Here’s what he said about it:

Even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence . . . I received mercy and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus (1Timothy 1:13—14).

Paul’s scriptures had spoken to him of a God of love and faithfulness, but that love became grounded in a new and ultimate way in the person of Jesus. Jesus was the ultimate expression and embodiment of God’s complete and utterly self-giving love.

Christ’s death for us is the proof, the demonstration, of G...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The World Changing Love of God
• Chapter 2: Love is a Verb
• Chapter 3: The Gospel
• Chapter 4: The Cross-Shaped God
• Chapter 5: The Resurrection has Begun
• Chapter 6: The Life-Giving Spirit
• Chapter 7: Jesus, the World’s One True Lord
• Chapter 8: Being the Justice of God in the World
• Chapter 9: Radical Peacefulness
• Chapter 10: Remember the Poor
• Chapter 11: The Antidote for Anxiety
• Chapter 12: Paul’s Women Leaders
• Chapter 13: Changing the World Together
• Chapter 14: Bringing It All Back Home
• Thanks
• Bibliography