Everybody, what is going on? You know what time it is. You're listening to join the Journey podcast with your host, Emma, daughter. Thanks for joining. Today, I've got our diva writer, Nathan Wagner, here in the studio. I'm here. He's here. You asked me to be here, and I'm here. I'm so glad. Thank you. Yeah, it's my privilege.

I mean, I'm about to be blessed.

Romans 9, what you got for us?

Yeah, so really quickly, when people come to this passage, the biggest difficulty that people

run into is they come to the passage asking the wrong questions.

So Aristotle said in his book,

metaphysics, that if anybody wants to succeed, that person has to ask the right preliminary questions. So if you're, if we're, and this is just a basic cardinal rule of, of Bible study

methodology. Like if you're going to interpret a text correctly, you have to figure out

what questions the Bible is attempting to answer. And then you need to ask those questions.

So never more is it more pertinent that we do that than in Romans 9. So Romans 1 through 8, Paul is

establishing the sinfulness of all mankind. He's establishing the way that God has chosen to

move and save in history. But the primary thing that Paul is addressing in Romans, and frankly,

the early church was grappling with, is what do you do with Jews and Gentiles? Like, do Gentiles have to become Jews in order to become Christians?

And so they're wrestling with this, because the Jews all along are thinking of themselves as, hey, we're the people of God.

Like, ethnically, we were born Jews, and because we were born Jews, that makes us the people of God.

And except there's this inconvenient fact that Jesus shows up and the Jews kill him.

So that's a problem.

That's confusing.

You're right.

And so what happens is Paul comes along.

He has this encounter with Jesus.

And now God is coming in a way that is completely unorthodox to

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