Romans – The Play Part 4

I’m going to do something a little different. I’m not going to bring anything on Romans 8 tonight; I’m going to bring something to prepare you for Romans 8. Now let me explain to you why. I was looking today at this book. Now here is a book (Romans) deliberately written, perhaps like no other book among the thirteen epistles, a book deliberately written to make a full statement from chapter 1 through chapter 16. It’s not personal like Philippians is, or Philemon. It’s a statement. And it starts with all of us as unsaved people standing before God and discovering that none of us are righteous. Now we, different segments of us in the Christian faith, have our little pet words we like to use, our little pet doctrines. I am fascinated that the word Spirit has virtually not appeared in this book up until now. We’re on the threshold of Romans 8. I believe you will discover that word was used three times up until now, in the opening and in one or two other places, not in a great crescendo, but almost in passing; and I don’t like to use that term, but almost in passing. You do not find the Spirit central up until now. But we stand at the beginning of Romans 8 and discover this is the place where we begin learning to go beyond our righteousness in Christ, go beyond our justification in Christ, and begin to walk. It’s like we’re walking away from the experience of salvation and going forward in the Christian world.

We’re leaving behind, I hope you don’t misunderstand me, but we’re leaving that moment of conversion. I was converted in a graveyard. A lot of things happened to me that day, but I got up and began my Christian walk. Romans 7 sort of begins my Christian walk. Romans 8. And when I get to Romans 8, suddenly new terms are coming out of everywhere. Just every verse has got a new term. In fact, the passage that we read just a moment ago, you probably didn’t notice; you might want to go back and notice. In that little brief segment right there, it says the Father dwells in you, the Son dwells in you, and the Spirit dwells in you. Which means, of course, you have three gods in you.

Now you only have one Lord, one God in you. And yet just like this, he’s speaking of these things. And here comes the law of the flesh, the law of the Spirit. Walking in the Spirit of the law, of Christ Jesus. And suddenly we’re just overwhelmed by all sorts of new terms. And I just have a burden. Now, maybe nothing I say to you tonight will be new, but I’ve got to put a peg down before we go any further. I said this to you before, but it’s become so pertinent as we come to Romans 8. And this is what I want to talk about to you.

I want to talk to you about the unseen realm. And I just am so burdened that you get a sense that it’s there. Like living in Europe in 1491. Boy, if you could have gotten in a Jeep in 1492, or a terrain vehicle, or maybe a nice big tank with a boat stuck on top of it, and you could have toured this realm that no one had ever seen. No one even knew it was there; no one dreamed of it in a dream. North and South America. I want you to consider that there is a realm so vast and so real and so living. The other realm, the unseen realm, from which so much of… I’ll use the word vocabulary first. Our vocabulary comes from, but not just our vocabulary, our experience.  Saints, it’s not just our experience but our life. And not only our life, but our engine comes from that other realm. Do you understand what I mean when I say our engine? It’s a perfectly good term. The word is very old. It did not come into existence with the gasoline motor. It’s a good word. It’s been around for hundreds of years in the English language.

The engine, the impulse, the power, the drive, that which conveys the engine of the Christian life, comes from that other realm. Because we more or less got stuck in our theology with the Reformation 400 years ago, we tend to neglect that which was not covered in the Reformation. And one of the things that was not touched in the Reformation, for it was basically an intellectual and theological upheaval, much more than it was a revival, except among the Anabaptists, who weren’t paying any attention to all of those things. They were just having fun. This whole vein of the other realm and the spirit was just not touched and still isn’t. I spoke to one of the professors who taught me theology in the seminary hundreds of years ago (joke) at Southwestern Seminary, and I asked him, Do you ever, as professors of theology, get off on this subject? Do you ever get off on this subject? Do you ever get off on this subject? And his answer was, No, we don’t usually cover those things. ‘No, I don’t know of a paper that’s been written on that, recently, in fact,’ is was what he said to me.

And this is one of those things that doesn’t get touched on. We have bordered it off with heaven. When I die, I’m going to go to heaven. And that’s our touch with the other realm. When I die someday, I’m going to go to heaven. Until then, I’m cut off. And here I am, boy, it’s going to be gut, groan, gumption, and grit. And I’m just going to grunt it out. I’m going to live the Christian life here. And yet here comes Paul using all these terms here in Romans 8, suddenly, as though everybody understood this.  And I want you to know I was out of the 10 seminary years. I didn’t understand Romans, all this flood of vocabulary, so common to the Christians of the first century.

The other realm and some points that go with the other realm. Alright, it’s there. That’s the first thing I want you to know: it’s there. You hear me? It’s there. Now, listen to me, Andy. It’s there. Ruth, it’s there. Mable, it’s there. That’s the first thing you need to establish. It really exists. It’s there. And I’m going to tell you later; it is a realm of the spirit. It is a spiritual realm. It’s the realm of the spirituals. Those are important words to you and to me as a Christian. The spiritual things do not belong to this realm.

This is the material realm. Abraham actually saw that realm. He actually saw it with his own eyes. A door opened, and he saw it. It’s a very incredible passage of scripture. He met a man from that other realm. All right, Penny, who was the person he met from that other realm? Well, what was the fellow’s name? He met Melchizedek, the man who had no beginning and had no end. I don’t know. I haven’t bumped into him lately. But you’d run across a guy like that who had no beginning and no end, would you not? He stepped out of another realm. He met the Lord. He met someone from the other realm.

Moses had many encounters with the other realm. Once he saw a temple or a city, or a something in the other realm, and actually in his mind copied what was there and tried to depict it in a desert. An incredible architectural feat to figuratively present in a desert, where there were virtually no natural resources to depict in figurative terms what he actually saw in another realm.

On a mountain with 72 people, he went into the other realm. He went there. It is there. It is a realm of the spirit. Balaam bumped straight into it. Bumped right into it. Actually, it was the nose of his donkey that bumped into it. He could not see the unseen. His donkey was smarter than he was. He had better spiritual eyes than his master. His master could not see the unseen. But that donkey saw an angel with a drawn sword, and the donkey had enough sense to do something. Balaam didn’t; he had enough sense to stop. He saw someone from the unseen realm.

David saw the other realm; he saw the same building that Moses saw. And passed the pattern of it owned his son. I have the impression that that building, that city, that temple had grown since Moses had seen it. Certainly, the figure grew bigger, for Solomon’s temple is a mite bigger and more glorious than the tabernacle built out in the desert.