From his Jewish traditions, Paul insisted on the universality a deep spiritual disorder involving the whole universe, as well

To be a human being was to be a sinner, a rebel against God, traced the beginning of sin back to the rebellion of the first man, the ancestor of the human race. When the Law was given people, it was to show what wrongdoing was (Galatians 3: knowledge of the Law did not free anyone from sin. At the time Paul was a strict observer of the Law (Philippians 3:6), he had been fiercely opposed to Jesus Christ through whom reconciliation with God was made possible for all people. Paul shows us God's love for us in Romans 5:8-9. 'But God has shown how much he loves us- it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us! By his death we were put right with God.'

As Paul understood it, death entered the world because the sinned; death was a penalty of sin. In the resurrected Jesus Christ had been defeated, along with sin of which death was the consequence. For the believer who was in union with Jesus Christ, victory over sin and death in the believer's life was now made possible through the Spirit of Christ. This was the consequence of God's immeasurable Paul, from the Jewish Scriptures, knew of the great love of God for people, such as we find expressed in the book of Hosea, but it still Paul that the perfectly good and righteous God had taken the initiative through Jesus, to reconcile the human race with himself while all m were still in a state of sinful rebellion against him. The generosity of this kind of divine love went beyond human understanding.

In every letter that Paul wrote he refers to the grace of God or the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. The basic idea in the word 'grace' is absolutely free, undeserved gift, given with absolute generosity. It this way that Paul understood God's love, as revealed in Jesus Christ

The Return of Jesus Christ (The Parousia)

It was part of the kerygma of the early Church that Jesus Christ will return again as the Judge of mankind, and Paul frequently refers to this in his letters. Jesus himself had said that he would return in glory (Mark 13:26; 14:62) and that the present age would be brought to an end by God, but warned that no one could know when this would happen (Mark 13:32). His followers were told to be prepared at all times (Matthew 25; Mark 13:33-37). The idea of the Day of the Lord, the day of the intervention of God in the world, was familiar to the Jews from the Old Testament Scriptures (Isaiah 13:9; Joel I: 15; Joel 2:30, 31; Isaiah 13: 10, 13, 11, and other passages). Along with the idea of the present age being brought to a catastrophic end and to a great Judgment, there was also another powerful Old Testament idea that a new age would be brought in by God when God's rule would be manifested in the universe (Isaiah 25:8; Amos 9:13,14; Isaiah 51:3,11:6-9; Hosea 2:18). The corning of God's Messiah was also associated with the ending of the present age and the bringing in of the new age. These various ideas were found not only in the Old Testament but in other Jewish apocalyptic writings.

The ideas about the Day of the Lord, the end of the present age, the Day of Judgments, the bringing in of a new age by God, and the return of Jesus Christ in glory, were all taken up by the early Church and fused together. The return of Jesus Christ was expected very soon, and is assumed in Paul's letters (I Corinthians 7:29, 1:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:2, 1:7-10, 3:5; Philippians 4 :5, and other passages). In Paul's thought, the Return of Jesus Christ was one of the primary motives for living the Christian life, so that the Christian was prepared to meet the Lord who had saved him and with whom he would live a new life in glory, in the new age, the age of the resurrection of the righteous.

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