ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 84 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> But Paul tells him to believe. Paul says, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ." That's an action. Isn't Paul telling him to do something? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, if you recall our discussion earlier, Nick, we talk about how do you recognize law? And one of the possible signs that you've got law is if something is in an imperative. And sure enough, that's what we have here. Believe is an imperative. But I cautioned you at that time that not all imperatives are law. And so the way that you understand Paul's exhortation to the jailer, to believe depends a lot on whether you are thinking of Paul's proclamation as information or proclamation. Is Paul telling -- simply answering the question: What do I have to do? Here is what you have to do. Or is Paul actually preaching faith into the jailer's heart? And your view on how the word of God works here is going to drastically affect how you interpret this passage. Now, let me give you a reason or -- a scriptural reason to think that this kind of an imperative to believe can actually bring about what it says rather than just laying out the information that the jailer then has to act upon. And that is a passage that I would like to call your attention to in Ezekiel. This is Ezekiel Chapter 2 Verse 2. And here the passage says, "He said to me 'Son of Man,' stand up on your feet and I will speak to you. As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet. And I heard him speaking to me." So here you can -- it's kind of a similar situation. The message to Ezekiel is stand on your feet. Now, is that simply a command that Ezekiel has to fulfill? Well, no. Because then the second part of the passage says that "the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet." So when the Spirit works through the word, the word actually accomplishes what it says. It stands Ezekiel on his feet. And in the same way when Paul says to the jailer to believe, the word does what it says. It creates faith in the jailer's heart. And so that's how we would understand passages like this where there's imperatives to believe. That you have to take this in the context of the entirety of scripture and the way that God works. That God's word gives life. That God's word is creative. It's not inert information. But it does what it says. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***