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 go ahead and get started, and in just a moment when we get started, we're picking up,

as I mentioned in Romans 8 verse 28 to quickly kind of get us caught up, and it's kind of important that we can get caught up on the earlier part of Chapter 8, because as we get into here the second half of chapter 8 and then into chapter 9 and chapter 10 and chapter 11,

as I mentioned before we started recording, these are passages about which Calvinists get very excited.

And part of the reason they get excited is that they have an interpretation of

these passages. That's sort of the basis for their whole thing. And it's not just these passages.

They will take you, it's called the Romans Road in Calvinist circles. They will sort of hop

skip through the book of Romans. You generally do one through three, and then the first half of chapter five, and then chapters eight through 11.

And if you read those chunks, along a certain trajectory, you can kind of get Calvinism out of them.

Now, an obvious problem there already is that

there are certain parts we're skipping and ignoring and not focusing on which means we're

taking the passages we are reading sort of out of context and so that's why it's important that

we set this second half of chapter eight here in terms of the first half of chapter 8, right?

The lead-in, the themes that St. Paul has already been talking about before he gets to what he's going to talk about here in the second half, so that we can understand sort of the flow, the flow of his overall

argument and not take anything out of context. So St. Paul began chapter 8 by making a contrast

between people walking according to the flesh and walking according to the spirit. And we talked about

how flesh and body, even though we would use those interchangeably, refer to two different things

in St. Paul. And when St. Paul talks about our body, he's talking about our physical body. And that is

something which, as he said earlier in chapter 8, is going to be redeemed when Christ returns.

...