Chapter # 11 Paragraph # 5 Study # 6
October 13, 2009
Lincolnton, N.C.
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<536> Thesis:   Commanding our "feelings" is more about embracing Truth than it is about trying to guide our emotions into a "right" course. Introduction:   As we have been looking into Paul's instructions to the Romans in 11:16-24 we have seen that Paul is attempting to set the record straight for his readers about the way God's Large Plan is being worked out in the details of the flow of time and about the way those readers are supposed to respond to that record. In the Big Picture, God has always intended to bring this world to His Christ as a governable entity under the intermingled themes of "righteousness, peace, and joy". The process of God's Large Plan began with the creation of less than omniscient "persons" and the permission of their willfulness for the demonstration of the Death-impact of "ignorant willfulness". Once the Tower of Babel had generated a "peak" in that demonstration, God's Plan was revealed to involve the demonstration of a workable solution to that root of Death. This demonstration consisted of personal dealings with Abraham that were rooted in what the Bible calls "Promise" and its automatic corollary, "Faith". The large message of this demonstration "peaked" with Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac on the basis of the divine imperative under "Promise". Abraham's willingness revealed that God's method of dealing with willfulness is actually effective: Abraham submitted his "personhood" to His omniscient and loving Creator because he "believed" Him. From there God's Large Plan addressed the most problematical issue of fallen personhood: spiritual superiority on the basis of personal diligence. The period of the Law was intended to address the "superiority" issue by revealing the absence of "diligence". To do this, God chose a "showcase nation" by which He would demonstrate the fallacy of unbelieving pride. Once that task had been accomplished, He initiated another large movement in the Large Plan: the extension of the benefits of the "lessons of history" to all mankind in terms of "kindred", "tongue", "people", and "nations". This movement meant the "Promise" was going to break out of the dominant focus upon Israel so that every kind of men in every place on the planet could be brought into the "governable entity" that the Father intends to give to Christ. There is, in demonstrable history and biblical revelation, a major hindrance to this Large Plan when it gets down into the nitty-gritty of the particulars: individual human beings twisting their participation in the "fatness" of the Promise into a renunciation of the major hindrance as a hindrance. This renunciation is consistent through mankind's existence and, thus, is always sticking its head up no matter what God has said and demonstrated in the past. Therefore, in the text before us this evening we read of Paul's demand that we both address our tendency to participate in that renunciation and defeat it. Paul's demand is this: Do not boast against the pruned branches. This evening we are going to look into this demand by the apostle.