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.

We'll go ahead and get started when we get started in just a minute.

Here we'll be picking up in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans chapter 2 verse 1.

We finished the first chapter last week.

As usual, for you folks almost a year from now but for anyone hearing this on the internet already available is the introduction to the

book of Romans available via the internet if you want to go back and listen to that,

to get us cut up to where we are in Romans 1 last time,

we saw how St. Paul picking up on a lot of the themes that we saw back in Acts 17, his

sermon in Athens, spoke primarily to the Gentiles in his audience first. Remember, he's writing now to the church in Rome.

This community is sort of now coming back together after the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under Claudius.

And so now the Gentile portion of the community has been sort of operating as a Christian community for a couple of years on its own.

And all of the Jews, whether they had accepted Jesus as the Messiah or not, were expelled and are coming back in.

That means synagogues are now sort of

being reconstituted in that sort of thing. But also there's now an increasing sense, as you

might imagine, after that happens, of Jewish identity versus Gentile identity.

And so St. Paul is concerned about the potential for their developing two different communities,

sort of a Jewish Christian community and a Gentile Christian community, and them not coming back together.

And so to prevent that as one of the primary motive St. Paul has for writing this letter in the first place.

And so after his introduction, we saw how he starts out talking to the Gentile members of the community,

...