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.

When we start here in just a moment, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's Episible, the Romans Chapter 4 verse 13. We left off sort of in the middle of Chapter 4. We're kind of in the thick of it.

So the first half of chapter four got a little

bit thick. To kind of catch us up a little, even though we're not far in, as I mentioned,

St. Paul is fairly thick reading. So it isn't the kind of thing that you can just sort of read casually once over and get everything.

He's trying to communicate.

Now, I mean, we have to remember that at the time, these were being read to the church by someone

who had been sent by St. Paul there to read it publicly and to answer questions.

So there was already that interactive element.

It wasn't expected that they necessarily understand the whole thing immediately upon first hearing.

But also part of the reason why it takes a little longer for us is we have to play catch up a little bit to where ancient people were,

both in the sense of, you know, St. Paul is referring to sometimes to cultural things, to Jewish

cultural things that they were very aware of, and it was very obvious to them, that aren't as

obvious to us as 21st century Americans in the state of Louisiana. And so we have to play a little

bit of catch-up there. As we've also seen as we've been going through and done some flipping back and forth into

the Old Testament, these folks also had an incredible grasp of the Old Testament so that when St.

Paul just makes an illusion or quotes one line, they get this whole vast amount of information call to my.

All the time we spend accidentally memorizing songs on the radio and TV show themes,

they spent reading the Bible.

...