gty.org/resources/sermons/42-225
Well it was a number of years ago that I was preaching through the book of Romans here at the church and I came to romans chapter 9, 10 and 11 and I was determined that I wanted to be careful and precise and patient in going through those chapters because they are a battleground among theologians. Romans 9, 10 and 11 deal with the future of Israel and you take them at face value, they tell us there is a future salvation for the nation Israel, but there is a large element in evangelical Christianity historically and in the present that denies that hope for national Israel. So, I felt that in order to really understand that passage and unfold it verse by verse and word by word very carefully...I needed to go slowly. And so, not realizing just how slowly I'd go, it took me one entire year to go through Romans 9, 10 and 11. And I would say, honestly, about three months in the people were saying, "We get it, we give, please..." They were pleading for a therefore...the therefore comes in chapter 12 verse 1, "Therefore..." they wanted me to get to that therefore so badly. It just was a necessary exercise because there were so many issues related to the future of national Israel and to the prophetic promises of God laid out in the Old Testament, reiterated in the New Testament as well, regarding the future salvation of that covenant people of God. And I needed to deal with it in great detail and with great precision, knowing not only did we need to know it, but it needed to be set down for the record on tape and CD and also needed to show up in the commentary because that's such an important part of this great Roman epistle.
And so there are times when we come to texts of Scripture that we have to slow down a little bit and capture something and understand that we're dealing with something that may be a bit controversial and requires us to have great clarity on it. I feel a little bit like that going through Luke 17, however, it's not going to take us a year, it's just going to be this message and one more, so you'll have really nothing to complain about, but we have slowed down a little bit and we have done, I think, a handful of messages on this text, and could do, frankly, a lot more. And I am aware that when you get into prophetic passages, and we're talking here about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, that you get into things that are controversial, you get into things where people disagree. And the way you deal with that, first of all, is to apply to the text of Scripture the very same principles of interpretation that you would apply to any text, whether it's prophetic or whether it's narrative, or whether it's historical, or whether it's doctrinal, or whether it's polemical, whatever it is. Whether it's prose or poetry, whether it's an analogy, whether it's a parable, whatever it is, you interpret using the same principles of interpretation, you use the same principles of understanding language no matter what form or genre the text of Scripture takes. And so, the way you approach a passage that is prophetic that deals with the future, particularly in this case the Second Coming of Christ, is to apply the same principles of interpretation....