Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so I will get started here in just a minute.

When we get started, we're going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul's

Epistle to the Romans chapter 11.

So, but since we have had a little bit of a break, first I will get us sort of caught up by running real quickly through

sort of this section of Romans really begins in chapter 8. And so we'll sort of go from

real quickly through 8, 9, and 10 before we start into 11. So we're not sort of starting in the

middle. So in chapter 8, St. Paul

talked about the theme of us becoming sons of God. And we talked about how sons of God was

actually a reference to a particular rank or type of angels in the Old Testament.

And so that this is talking about, this isn't just talking about sort of a nice, God's our dad, right, kind of thing,

but that God's family is a royal family, right?

And so becoming Sons of God means we become heirs,. The language uses heirs along with Christ to the kingdom.

Because as you imagine, the children of the king, right, you have one heir on earth.

And St. Paul has set up Christ as the heir, right? He's the firstborn of all things. But we, by becoming

sons of God, become heirs along with Christ of the kingdom. And not only does that mean that

we inherit the kingdom, but that God shares with us in ruling over it. We talked about some

of the other passages in the Gospels that also

talk about that. And that's the reason he uses the language sons, instead of children,

...