LibraryThing, A Shorter Commentary on Romans, Karl Barth, SCM Press LTD, 56 Bloomsbury Street London 1959-English, 10.18.17

Theme: a commentary on Romans
Type: commentary
Value: 1-
Age: college
Interest: 2
Objectionable: universalism? Parts are difficult to understand (I skimmed)
Synopsis/Noteworthy:

Introduction and Summary
9 1.1 The Epistle to the Romans really is a letter—or rather an epistle—to the Christian Church in Rome, written in Greek by the Apostle Paul, whom we also know from the Acts of the Apostles and by a number of similar epistles.
11 It has often been compared to a catechism, or even a handbook of dogmatics, and for that reason the first systematic theologian of the Evangelical Church, Melanchthon, did in fact use it a pattern for a work of this kind. There is some truth in that impression, for the Epistle to the Romans does in fact contain a greater element of doctrine and a more systematic development and exposition of the Christian faith than any other writing of the NT. We ought however to bear in mind that it differs from a catechism or a manual of dogmatics. Its particular aim… is the one which Luther in his preface to the Epistle has marked with unerring precision: “That is why it appears as if in this Epistle St Paul desires to give a short summary of the whole of Christian and evangelical doctrine and provide an access to the whole of the OT. For there is no doubt that he who carries this Epistle in his heart carries the light and power of the OT with him. Every Christian ought therefore to know this Epistle and study it persistently.” …
151 1.2 The exhortation, some points of which will be clarified in the following, is that they ought to walk in this way because they are allowed to do so. In these last chapters there is on the whole no proper sequence of thought and therefore no particular arrangement.
The Apostolic Office and the Gospel 1.1-17
16 1.5 …to call them to that obedience which consists in faith, so that through their obedience his Name…may receive due honor.
17 1.7 In Jesus Christ grace and peace have become an event and are yet ever to be expected and therefore to be solicited from him who is the fountain of grace and peace:
18 1.11 …by passing on to them the gift of the Spirit bestowed on him. This particular gift of the Spirit is simply the Gospel, which according to 1:5 has been entrusted to him.
1.13 Whenever Paul speaks of Gentile nations and their being won for the Gospel, he always means some few people from those nations, as is very plain in this sentence.
19 1.14 ‘Hellenic’ was the embodiment of culture, ‘barbarian’ was the opposite.
1:16 The last phrases of the introduction give a definition (1:16-17) of what Paul means by the Gospel which he has just said once more he intends to preach in Rome (1:15). In these verses he begins to present the cause for which the Epistle was written.
20-21 1.16 …Rome especially, as the impressive center of the Gentile world, might not be equal to its encounter with the accumulated culture and vulgarity of the metropolis, that the spiritual and unspiritual powers, the culture and banality prevailing there… The reason why he is ‘shameless’, why he is not afraid of all Rome – and here he arrives at the cause which will be his sole concern till 15.13 – is because the Gospel itself is power; it is God’s power and therefore in every respect superior power.
We have already learned in 1.4 that the person of Jesus Christ is the content of the Gospel. The ancient copyist who inserted this name in the text has therefore not made any real alteration. Paul was of course thinking of this content and therefore of this person of the Gospel, when he called it God’s almighty power. Wherever Jesus Christ is the content, every form assumes his nature. But the nature of Jesus Christ is God’s omnipotence. That is how the Gospel came to be God’s omnipotence…So let us make a mental note that the Gospel is this almighty work of salvation.
21 1.17 Here as well as later in 1:18 Paul speaks in the present tense. We cannot look back on the revelation in the Gospel as on other historical events.
22 For this Man, Jesus Christ, is the content of the Gospel. He is revealed in the Gospel and God’s verdict is revealed in him.
23 His righteousness is that of the faithful God and therefore that of the man who trusts in him. And his life, saved from death, is the life promised to the man who has become righteous through him. The proclamation of this righteousness and this life, the proclamation of the faith which causes man to participate in this righteousness and this life, that is the apostolic office to which Paul has been appointed and in pursuit of which he wrote the epistle to the Romans.
The Gospel as God’s Condemnation of Man 1.18-3.20
42 For our salvation we are allowed and for our rich consolation we are bidden to submit to the divine condemnation. For it is the Gospel which reveals to us this wrath of God.
24 1.18 Does Paul mean a second or even a first revelation apart from the one mentioned in 1.17 when now he suddenly introduces a revelation of God’s wrath about all the ungodliness (irreverence) and iniquity (insubordination) of men, viz. of the Gentiles (1:18-32) and the Jews (2:1-3:20)?
25 The verdict of the faithful God on the whole world, which is revealed in Jesus Christ, has this side, this dark side as well: it is also the revelation of God’s wrath.
26 When God and man – the man of the metropolis Rome – meet, as happens in the preaching and hearing of the Gospel, then it is inevitable that the opposition between God and man becomes visible: God’s opposition to man’s opposition to God. Man’s attitude to God is shown up as being one of irreverence – this is the essence of all ungodliness – and of insubordination, of rebellion – this is the essence of all human iniquity. Then there is fire: the fire which consumes the impossible thing man has committed. This fire is God’s wrath.
30 1.24 All the allusions in these verses [1:24-31] are to be regarded as an illustration, admittedly terrible – but no more than an illustration – of the fundamental thesis that the Gentiles are irreverent and insubordinate, and subject to God’s wrath because they suppress the truth, because they exchange it for a lie, because they permit themselves and achieve that confusion between the Creator and the creature.
31 2.1 The content of all that follows in 2.1-3.20 can be summed up by saying that the condemnation of man, preached by the Gospel does in fact apply to all men. Everyone has every reason to apply to himself God’s wrath, in the way that it was kindled in the revelation of his very love. Note Paul’s own recapitulation and conclusion of the whole argument in 3.9 and 19.
46 3.25 What has happened? By shedding his blood as a man, and giving up his life, the Judge himself, before whom they have all been called to account, before whom they are all transgressors and lost, has (3.25) become the propitiatory sacrifice for the entire people of those who believe in him.
47 3.28 To the extent that he would want himself to satisfy the Law and to justify himself in this way he would be neglecting Jesus Christ, he would not believe and therefore not be justified. When Luther in 3.28 added the word ‘alone’ to the words ‘by faith’ he underlined exactly what Paul did in fact say without that word.
52 4.18 Faith consists in clinging to the word of this God. In this way Abraham believed. According to the Scriptures this faith was counted unto him for righteousness. In 4.18 we learn that contrary to all expectation, i.e. all the expectation that is humanly possible he had to expect the fulfilment of what God had promised him. Without the support of any humanly evident reality he had to accept that in God’s word he had been given hope. That he did.
The Gospel as the Divine Justification of Those Who Believe 3.21-4.25
56 5.1 This condition of our salvation (or positively: our life) has been fulfilled through God’s verdict, and that is the truly wonderful fact that continues to engage Paul in Chapter 5.
57-58 5.2 When God has justified us, we are acquitted of that enmity and placed in a state of peace, of agreement with him. In what sense? Paul is not referring to peaceful sentiments or emotions which may dominate us but to Jesus Christ as the One in whom has been completed not only (5.2) our access to God and our justification but also this making our peace with God, however things may look within us. Never mind about sentiments and emotions: the point at issue is the ‘peace of God which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4.7) so that we can be confident that we have made peace, we have peace with God. For what holds him in fact? A new feeling, willing and knowing? No, no matter whether he has much of it or not. What holds him is the objective power of the love which God has shown him by (5.5) placing him, in Jesus Christ, apart from and against all his feeling, willing and knowing, in a position where he is allowed to find himself in harmony with God.
The Gospel as Man’s Reconciliation with God 5.1-21
65 5.5 ‘The love of God has been poured out into our hearts,’ not in the form of particular sentiments and emotions, but in the form of a truly different existence, another, new constitution.
59-60 5.11 But this amazement [5:6-11] does not make him [Paul] doubt! We might doubt our Christian sentiments and emotions, and the conclusions we could draw from them. We might doubt everything that our human love produces in uplift and comfort. But that which God is and does: the verdict which as such is the manifestation of his love – the manifestation of his love which as such is his just verdict – that is so great, that is so much its own proof in its greatness, that it is not merely indubitable, but simply compels us to the certain knowledge that ‘In his blood we are saved by him from the threatening wrath of God’ (5:9). Our future is that we have been saved by him in his blood! And the prospect of the present is accordingly: God in his love of his enemies, the blood of his Son shed for us sinners, that is our future, our hope . . . And moreover: he has done this entirely without us and in spite of us, so that we cannot and need not now ask how it is possible from our side to have peace with God, that we can be reconciled with God in spite of everything we are and do! In him it became true that in spite of ourselves we are reconciled!
62 5.19 The disobedience of one man placed the many in the position of sinners before God, and the obedience again of one Man placed the many in the position of righteous men. In both cases there are the one and the many.
The Gospel as Man’s Sanctification 6.1-23
65 6.4 Rom. 6 does not say that we have to realize our sanctification by our obedience. How can we make it real? In the same way as our reconciliation it has been realized as our sanctification in Jesus Christ, once and for all, and therefore there is no need for reiteration or confirmation (6:10).
72 6.16 We are told in 6.16 that man has a lord, one way or the other. He is either a servant of sin, or a servant of obedience. Sin and obedience are therefore not in the first place our actions, but powers which have dominion over us.
The Gospel as Man’s Liberation 7.1-25
74 7.3 Chapter 7 produces a further, third explanation of the statement in 1.16 that the Gospel is God’s almighty work of salvation, to everyone who believes. It is a third explanation of the thesis in 1.17 that the man who by his faith is righteous before God shall live. We now learn that the Gospel is man’s liberation, i.e. his liberation from the law…It says there that we have been liberated from the ‘law of sin and death’ and if we want to understand Rom. 7, it should not be overlooked anywhere, that it is this law that is at issue and no other.
80 7.6 In the remaining larger part of Chapter7 Paul gives two elucidations of the main statement he has made in 7.1-6 concerning the law, that the law from which we have been liberated is the ‘law of sin and death’. Only on this assumption can there be any question of a liberation from the law. It is only from this law that the believer can be free. We know that Paul has no intention of annulling the Law, but of establishing it though the faith (3.31), through the proclamation of the Gospel. In the preceding chapter he certainly established the Law firmly enough! And in this chapter too he says that as far as the Law is concerned there is in this newly-gained freedom no question of lawlessness, but of service in a new condition (7.6). And at the end of the chapter he says emphatically that in his inner being he himself (as distinguished from his dead life in the flesh) is allowed to serve the Law of God and does in fact serve it (7.25). And later (8.2) he was to express himself even more strongly: that it is this very Law of God (‘the Law of Spirit and life’) that liberates man from the law of sin and death.
82-84 7.8 For in opposition to my own desire, and while the Law claims me for God, sin insinuates that I ought to satisfy the Law’s demands myself, that I ought to cleanse and justify and sanctify myself. It insinuates that I am too good for the grace offered to me in the Law, that I should refuse it and that instead of the faith demanded by the Law I should present to God my own work, my own religion and my own moral achievement and so make myself worthy before God. It insinuates that God could surely not have said that I cannot be equal to him and that I must be satisfied with his grace, but that he must have meant that I, a second god beside him, should do myself what he wants to do for me. . . All that God has forbidden has been forbidden because in its origin and its essence it is this one forbidden thing, the act of our hatred of God’s grace . . . It made me regard myself as fundamentally good and therefore able to help myself. It enticed me to do the very thing which the Law does not allow in apparent obedience to the Law: to try to make myself guiltless by my own goodness.
87 7.11 He who confesses Jesus Christ in particular will know that I shall never be able to leave sin behind by myself. I shall never leave behind the adulteration of the Law by sin. I shall never leave the existence of that queer saint who desires to be as God and who must therefore be dying alive, behind me. I am and live in the flesh, and therefore I am and remain subjected to the law of sin and death.
81 7.12 As a form of the Gospel, far from being sin, the Law is the form in which God’s grace is revealed. But the Law (and the Gospel in the form of the Law) is proclaimed in the realm of sin.
The Gospel as the Establishment of God’s Law 8.1-39
88-89 But 8.1 says that there is no condemnation for those who ‘are in Christ Jesus’. The whole of Chapter 8 will teach us how the condemnation of man has been abrogated. God meets that bending and breaking of his Law by establishing it anew and more than ever as his Law in Jesus Christ, by obtaining for it due respect and observance through Jesus Christ and thereby making his grace triumphant with and for everyone who believes in Jesus Christ. He therefore does not only liberate those who believe in Jesus Christ from the Law of sin and death but he also – as we shall hear in due course – positively sets them free for a life in obedience (8.12-16), hope (8.17-27) and innocence (8.28-39), in a word: for a life in the Spirit, under his will of grace. This is the fourth explanation of the thesis in 1.16 concerning God’s almighty work of salvation for everyone who believes, or of that in 1.17 that he who is righteous through his faith shall live because of that faith. This fourth and final explanation declares his Law by giving his Spirit to those who believe in Jesus Christ and, with the Spirit, already here and now that righteous, innocent and blessed life which as such has the promise of being life eternal. The justification of believers is authenticated and the reconciliation, sanctification and liberation of man is completed in the establishment of God’s Law, in the dominion of his Spirit.
89 8.2 But the ‘Law of the Spirit of life’ has liberated those who are in Christ Jesus. To ‘be in Christ Jesus’ is evidently the same as to be subject to this entirely different Law. And both together clearly point to that entirely new aspect, indeed that entirely new reality of human life to which reference was made in 7.1, and which will now be discussed at length. It is there in the fact that man need no longer start with ‘I’, with himself, but is allowed to start with Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ has made a fresh start with him. ‘To be in Christ Jesus’ means that he is a man to whom this has happened.
91 8.4 The fulfilment of the Law is therefore achieved in those who walk after the Spirit. For ‘to walk after the Spirit’ is nothing but to become obedient to ‘God’s grace which has appeared with compelling power in Jesus Christ. In all that follows and in the whole of this chapter we must remember that by the ‘Spirit’ Paul means nothing but the validity and the power of the Law of grace established by the sending of the Son of God over those who believe in him, because he has died and risen for them. Their flesh is still there, their human nature in which sin dwells, in which no good thing dwells. They still are and have an ego, the ‘I’ from which there is no way to liberation and life.
91 8.7 About the flesh no more can be said than that it is still there, a possibility which as such has not yet been abolished, a constant invitation to walk in the flesh and a constant danger of walking in it, of living in it, of doing what accords with its disposition, structure and inclination. And according to Chapter 7 that would mean again to hate and reject God’s grace, once more to want to justify and sanctify oneself. That is what the flesh always wants to do.
94-5 8.15 But they fulfil his will by crying to him. From and in the depth of the distress of their human existence they cry to him, but no longer ‘O wretched man that I am’ but ‘Abba, Father’. They cry to him as prodigal sons, lost children, but in their very state of lostness they have been told to call him Father, to cleave to him as the ‘Father of mercy’ and the ‘God of all consolation’ (II Cor. 1.3) – as Jesus did in fact instruct his people to do! In their very state of lostness they cannot help doing the one good work of crying out in this way and so performing the one act of obedience demanded by the Law. . .
(95) We, whose flesh is inhabited and dominated by sin. We who are selfish, rebellious and useless servants, are yet God’s children! This testimony, the testimony of the Holy Spirit is certainly needed before our own unholy spirit, under his impact and impulse, also testifies to this. We must be told, so that we can tell ourselves that we are God’s children! And it cannot fail to happen that from this source we are told again and again, and that consequently we may tell ourselves: we are God’s children!
(95) And again, it cannot fail to happen that we may and must enter into the good work of obedience which consists in our crying out ‘Abba! Father!’ We must observe that particularly at this culminating point of the Epistle to the Romans there is no mention of any other work of obedience of God’s children.
96 8.15 It is obvious that no other work of obedience can or shall be added to this. All acts of obedience ought obviously to be included in it. They ought to arise from it and in all circumstances they ought to have their root and archetype, their first and their last condition in it.
98 8.17? Therefore there follows no word of complaint that our life after the death of Jesus Christ is such that it can only develop in the shadow of his death, that it can consist only in having to suffer with him. . . We ought to bear in mind that this has nothing to do with idealism or optimism.
102 8.27 Those who are in Christ Jesus are not left to their own strength to be patient, to the ardor and enthusiasm of their hope. But while they are in the midst, and, like the rest of the world in the service of decay, and therefore together with all creation cannot stop groaning, the Spirit helps their infirmity. How? The important thing about continuing in hope, in patient expectation, is for us to continue, to carry on in that work of calling on God, of crying ‘Abba, Father!’ (8.15), in which grace is accepted as grace and the Law is fulfilled.
105 8.28 Let the bondage of sin and death be as it may! Let the fear in which, subjected to the law of sin and death, they doubt the sufficiency of God’s grace and let the pride which would ever want to substitute their own work for God’s grace be as great as it may!
148 According to 8.28ff and all that was said in Chapters 9-11 obedience to the Gospel is entirely dependent on God’s grace, which chooses freely.
The Gospel among the Jews 9.1-11.36
111 9.1 The last thing we heard was that those who are in Christ Jesus cannot be separated from God’s love. Surely the man who has dared to say this about himself will have to prove the truth of these words by the fact that even the sight of the disobedience which meets the Gospel, does not make him perplexed about his love of God, but can only stimulate him to praise and worship God. He will prove the truth of his words by not making his treatment of the problem a complaint about the bad character of man, but fashioning it into a glorification of God and his character. That is what Paul has done in these chapters.
113-114 None of the three [lines of thought] say that there is a damnation corresponding to this disobedience. They say that both this disobedience and the damnation that corresponds to it are encompassed by God’s way and work, by the way and work of his mercy – the same divine mercy in which those who are in Christ Jesus. . . . The God against whom they sin is the very God who has decided and is prepared, with his righteousness, to take the responsibility for their iniquity.
116 9.14 When Paul answers this question with that scandalized ‘Impossible!’, it is noteworthy that he does not say that God – by reason of his sovereignty – has the right in every case and with every man to do exactly as he pleases, for some reason only known to him. That is certainly the answer given by the Church’s later doctrine of predestination to the question of the justice of the divine election.
119 The fact that someone like Pharaoh is now only a witness to the impotence of all men, neither forces nor makes it legitimate for him to be and to remain one.
120 9.22 And in the same way 9.22 does not say that there are vessels of wrath, that God has prepared them to be such and has therefore prepared them for destruction, and not even that he has done so to show his wrath.
124-126 9.32 But according to 9.32a where Israel failed – and this is fundamental – is that it willed and ran to satisfy the Law by its own fulfilment of its works, and not in faith in the promise it had received. . . Instead, they seek to ‘establish their own righteousness’, i.e. to prove and certify themselves as men who are worthy of the promise and therefore entitled to its fulfilment. But exactly that is their rebellion, their disobedience to God’s righteousness. For the promise of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, given and known to them, is waiting for their faith. If faith is lacking, then the Law is broken in spite of all the zeal concerning its fulfilment – or rather, because of it. . . He will not argue as though the Law had had its time, he will argue from and with the Law, whose contents and everlasting validity have only now been properly revealed by Jesus Christ, who from the very beginning has been its content and its strength.
127 10.8b Which word? That very ‘word of faith’, that very Gospel that we, the Apostles, and the whole Church now preach to the world and therefore also to Israel.
131 10.16a The excuse that they were not able to believe and confess has been made vain. Their refusal to believe and to confess is therefore no accident, not inevitable. It is transgression of the Law, disobedience.
137 The remnant of Israel, kept by the election of grace, however large or small it may be, is in God’s sight all Israel.
138-139 11.11 After 11.11 and all that follows there this can certainly not mean that the others were abandoned by God. It certainly does mean that in and with the history of Israel which as such is a history of salvation, there always was and still is a history of disaster, a divine closing of men to God’s promises and favors. . . By calling and gathering the seven thousand God shows his grace – and so the basis and the final certainty of the election of Israel, which also includes those who are not among the seven thousand, so that it is their hope as well. . . No attentive reader of the OT – and to such readers Paul addresses himself – could be in any doubt, particularly bearing in mind the OT texts mentioned here, that the last work concerning those whom God has hardened has not been said by saying that they are hardened.
141 11.17 Admittedly there are broken-off branches which no longer share in its life: they are the many hardened Israelites –
143 11.22 Anti-semitism is a sin against the Holy Ghost, Paul in fact says in 11.19-22.
144 11.25 According to the clear statement of 11.25 the ‘mystery’ to which that verse refers does not consist in the fact that one day the obvious will happen, but in the fact that it has not yet happened, that Paul and the Church with him still have to grapple with the riddle that disobedience to the Gospel exists too, and that the extreme disobedience of the Jews in particular is still a fact.
147 11.32 And in Christ God has also destined them all to participate in his mercy and so to be free. That is the knowledge in which those who are now obedient ought to regard those who are now disobedient: in this knowledge they ought to think of their future. Any other answer could only be an unevangelical, an unchristian one.
The Gospel among the Christians 12.1-15.13
149 12.2 In Chapters 12-15 Paul writes to the Church in Rome telling them one or two things about the form of the Christian life. It is not a thing apart from obedience to the Gospel. It is simply the fact of man’s performing it; it is simply man’s continual confirmation and announcement that he believes, not just once but again and again, not with just one thought but with all his thoughts, not only with his mind but with his whole person.
152 . . .but these [chapters] are not a coherent whole, arranged according to a definite thought. As should be the case with genuine exhortations, these chapters speak of individual points and ought to be interpreted accordingly – always, of course, with that starting-point in 12.1-2 in mind, and in connection with the preaching of the Gospel on which they are based. . . That service is regulated by the fact that the one grace has been bestowed on the Church in the form of many gifts, which are not separate and competitive, but diverse . . .
155 The Christian however does not only live within the Church, but also outside in the world.
158-159 13:3-4 The Christian, the man who does the good and who carries the message of the triumph of good, certainly need not be afraid of the State’s authority and of those who represent it. He need not keep away from them: he will either recognize in their function the performing of a service to God. He would only need to be afraid and to keep at a distance if he were to let go of the grace that holds him: if he were to conform to the world and so do evil himself (13.3-4).
159-160 It means to be within and not outside here as well. Christians are here under the order of God—the order of the one God—just as they are in the Church, And in both places they are this completely, as people who have been sacrificed to God; in the former place in a different way from the latter, but in both completely: in the State as well as in the Church, because they are allowed, because they are kept and sustained by God’s grace.
164-165 14.1 They thought they ought to provide themselves with a mainstay and support for that ‘casting off the works of darkness’ (13.12) and, by means of certain measures chosen by themselves, ease for themselves the details of the great turning from the old to the new. . . Therefore Paul calls them – no insult is meant, he is just stating a fact – ‘weak in faith’.
168-170 14.23 But according to 14.14b there is a subjective need for such measures; when by doing something that is in itself clean a Christian does something which to him, personally, is not the service of the Lord, nor thanksgiving to God. If he cannot do it in faith, then it is, to him, unclean; it is sin (14.23). . . With all due honor to the objective cleanness of all things – with all due honor to his own cleanness in the use of all things – the ‘strong man’ has to honor, not the preconceived ideas, the prejudices or the fanaticism of the ‘weak’ man, but certainly the ‘weak’ man himself, i.e. his faith. . . We can (14.18-19) only serve Christ, we can only please God and we can only be useful amongst men by constantly causing and strengthening each other to seek that particular way, and then also to go along it, whether it is ours as well or not.
171 They are the strong inasmuch as a life without supports or principles or particular practices is certainly more in accordance with the intrinsic character of their faith as a relationship to Jesus Christ alone, than a life lived with the assistance of all kinds of self-chosen human possibilities, commandments or prohibitions. But this better life must not become the enemy of the good (15.2; cf.14.16).
The Apostle and the Church 15.14-16.27
174 16.1 The thing that makes this final part so important – in which we admittedly receive no further instruction on the main theme – is that we are made to realize once more that we are dealing with a letter, written in about AD 58 from Corinth to Rome, that we are dealing with the Apostle Paul at a particular stage of his life and with a particular Christian Church of the first period.
175 What demands were made on our ability and willingness to leave all the citadels and tents of freedom and slavery, of bourgeois and bohemian ways of life, of morality and amorality, of godliness and worldliness – and to keep up with the way of knowledge and confession which has been put forward here, always to follow round new corners!
176 15.15 If he has written ‘in part rather boldly’ (15.15) he has only done so to ‘give you a reminder’, and so to repeat what they already know, to put it new and fresh before their eyes. When he does this, that ‘boldness’ comes about. This simple repetition inevitably has the character of a revolution.
181 16.3 However that may be, it is remarkable that, by means of this list of greetings, the Epistle to the Romans, which is the most objective of all Paul’s letters, has at the same time received the most personal imprint.
183 16.16 Wherever the Gospel is preached evangelically, apostolically, the whole Church of all ages and all places greets the particular church which at that moment is called to hear it.
183 16.18 So the ‘belly’ stands for the man who lives for his own sake and realizes his own life fully.
Index of Scripture References