Ascending To Heaven

Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).

---

This podcast episode is based on Romans 10 but no transcript is available. However, we’ve provided a few quotes from the conversation below.

The conversation also includes:

• answering a question about the difference between our human ‘spirit’ and the Holy Spirit;
• whether all cultures are equally valuable; 
• the cultural arrogance of evangelism; and
• what happens to those who’ve never heard the gospel?

An exposition of Romans 10 can be found at 20. Israel’s Fault

The next episode in this series is God the Inscrutable. The previous episode is Is God God?

---

ASCENDING TO HEAVEN

Romans 10 and the one way we can all be saved

Some Quotes from the discussion:

PJ: In our world, hypocrisy is one of the most evil things. No one wants to be a hypocrite. Authenticity is one of the moral values of our society; both the modernists and the post modernists are very big on being authentic. Above all else, be true to thyself.

TP: You can’t judge me if I’m being true to myself.

---

PJ: Evangelism can be seen as a cultural arrogance, thinking my culture is better than yours—when we’re being told all cultures are of equal value. It’s a nonsense, of course, because all cultures are not of equal value. And it’s also nonsense, because sincerity, while it’s a good thing in itself, is not a good guide to the truth. 

We mustn’t confuse what I genuinely sincerely believe, and what is in fact, true. I can genuinely believe the world is flat, but that doesn’t make it flat. The truth is the truth whether I believe it or not. And so you can be sincerely wrong. And if you can be sincerely wrong, then it’s right that people try to correct you. If I’m sincerely wrong, I want people to correct me. 

TP: What do you mean when you say that all cultures are not of equal value?

PJ: Well, I’d say that the culture that burned widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands was wrong. And I don’t have much difficulty saying it’s wrong. I think it’s profoundly wrong. And I’m glad that other people have put a cultural stop to it. Offering up little children as a sacrifice to appease the gods and to get the sun to rise each morning—that is wrong. That is what I mean when I say all cultures are not of equal value.

---

PJ: God is the Sovereign Lord of all history, not just what we’d call the good happy things, but the bad, suffering, sad things too. He’s at work in everything for a purpose in our lives to make us like his Son. 

---

PJ: The human instinct is to justify ourselves as good. And this is where the gospel is just so radically different to every other way of thinking, so that often we just cannot hear it. We don’t get it, because it doesn’t fit in with our bias and prejudice. We think the way to heaven is by climbing the ladder. But God actually sends his Son down, not us climbing up. That’s the fundamental difference. 

If you obey the law, you’ve got to obey perfectly. We’re not good enough to obey perfectly. And perfection is far too great for us to ever reach. So do not think that you’re going to climb up. That not going to happen. But Christ has paid the penalty for the fact that we don’t keep the law. That’s what Christ has done.

---