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.

And when we get started, in just a moment, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans Chapter 15, and we will most likely be finishing up.

Romans tonight, a lot of Chapter 16 is St. Paul sending his various greetings that we'll discuss

briefly, but will not be subject to the same level of, but inquiry as some of the other

passages we've covered. So just as a catch-up, back at the beginning of chapter 12, we saw that

there was sort of this transition. We talked about how there's that transition in all of St. Paul's

epistles, where there's usually marked by the word therefore, where St. Paul finishes having

sort of laid out the theological points that he wants to make,

and then he gets to directly applying them to the people to whom he's writing.

Here's why I've been telling you all this.

Because as we said way back in the long ago time on the first Bible study on the St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,

contrary to what some of particularly our Protestant friends would say St. Paul's letters are letters, they're occasional documents.

They're not just him sitting down to write a treatise on theology.

Treatises existed in the ancient world. We've got lots of them.

Oh, yeah. Right. By pagan philosophers, by Christians, by all kinds of people, you know, on fill in the topic, right? On the soul, on the resurrection, on whatever.

Philo of Alexandria, who lived a little bit before St. Paul was a

Jewish author who wrote a number of treatises on topics like that he would write a treatise

you know on on the decalogue on the Ten Commandments on the sacrifices of the

temple on so St. Paul, if he had

...