July - August 2004

A refugee brother being stopped and questioned on the street in Kabul, Afghanistan. Please pray for him!

The Peace Makers

In the year 63BC the Roman armies under Pompey captured Jerusalem making it part of the Roman Empire. In those turbulent times many Jews were taken to Rome as slaves and thus it was that when Paul was writing his epistle to the Romans about eighty years later, there was a large Jewish community living in Rome and the ecclesia, too, seems to have had many Jewish brethren as well as gentile Roman brethren. Human nature being what it is there was trouble between the two groups. It is not difficult to imagine the situation; the Jewish brethren were descendants of Abraham, the scriptures had been revealed to them, Jesus himself was of the tribe of Judah and Jews traditionally looked down on gentiles as “dogs”. The Roman brethren would deeply resent this attitude, they would remember that they were the master race of the day and that the Jews in their midst were descendants of slaves. So there was strife in the ecclesia.

One of Paul’s objectives in writing to the Romans, therefore, was to try to bring peace, love and harmony to a divided ecclesia. He was to be Paul the Peacemaker.

 Paul set about his task very cleverly; he identified himself with both factions of the ecclesia...

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