Paul's Letter to the Romans
Doug held a series of weekly Bible Study sessions with officers and employees of the U.S. Air Force at Pentagon. The second series of these Bible studies was on Paul's Letter to the Romans. Here we present the Bible Study notes used for the series for the benefit of visitors of our web site.
Introduction
Apostle Paul wrote this letter from Corinth during his third missionary journey. The time period of writing this letter is not exactly known but sometime before his return to Jerusalem, from where he was sentenced to appear before the Emperor in Rome. Paul's escorted journey by sea occurred sometime about 61-62 AD. So this letter could have been written during the period of 59-61 AD. Although he had never been to Rome, he knew many Christians in Rome through his prior ministry years in numerous locations in Palestine, Turkey and Greece, where these locales were referred otherwise in the first century. The purpose of this epistle was to clearly expound on the doctrine of truth in Jesus Christ so that the Christians in Rome, though they had accepted Jesus as their Messiah, might be firmly rooted on the foundation of God's truth, especially in the face of a significant influence of certain Jewish Christians, who believed that both Jews and non-Jewish Christians had to comply with the Mosaic Law to be saved, thus causing much confusion and dissension in the infantile Christian church of the first century.
By studying this epistle of apostle Paul we can also become certain of what we believe in, how God planned the human salvation through full participation of His Son, and how the Son of God died so that we might be brought into God's grace and love, and how the Old Testament law played a temporary part in this grand plan. We encourage you to launch into the study of this epistle with a prayerful and humble spirit, seeking God to instruct you and help you through His Spirit. The study guides presented here provide only some guidelines and the Spirit's guidance and help are essential for this study as well as other Scripture studies.