What Shall We Say, Then?
How are we to make sense of Israel’s choice not to believe in Jesus, and their nearly universal rejection of him as their Messiah? Listen to Pastor Jim’s sermon here, or read it below.
Israel’s Unbelief & The Message Of Salvation To All
What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written,
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim) because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
Last week and the week before that, we looked at three revealing questions that Paul has been asking here in chapter 9 regarding the paradox of Israel’s privilege set over against their religious prejudice. Paul is outlining his answer to an underlying question of how we are to make sense of Israel’s near-total rejection of the gospel and choice not to believe in Jesus as their Messiah. Those first three questions were:
Has the word of God failed? (9:1-13) Is God unfaithful to his promises?
Is God unjust? (9:14-18) Is God’s hardening of some and having mercy on others compatible with his justice?
Why does he still find fault? Who can resist his will? (9:19-29) Is it fair of God to hold us accountable to him, when he is in sovereign control of the universe and of our individual lives?
They Stumbled Over The Stumbling Stone
Today we come to the fourth question in verses 30-33: What shall we say, then? What are we to conclude?
What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written,
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
When I read what Paul writes here in verses 30-32 about the upside-down religious situation of the day, a truly painful memory from our honeymoon comes to mind. To know me is to know that I love the game of backgammon. And to have known me 40 years ago would be to know that I was intensely competitive. Someone had given us a backgammon game as a wedding present, and so I brought it along for us to play on our honeymoon. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Without a great deal of knowledge of the game, and without extensive experience playing the game, Marcie kept winning without really trying very hard. Being so competitive, I wanted to keep playing until I won. But try as I might to win, she just kept beating me handily. It was a great blow to my young, immature, newly-married male ego, and it left me in a rather bad mood.
How does that relate to this text? Notice what he says,
Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but…Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law.
Without knowledge of Judaism, without ceremony, without circumcision, quite apart from the stringent requirements of the Law of Moses, Gentiles who did not pursue the righteousness of God obtained it. They did it without even trying. But the Jews who spared no effort, in their attempts to obtain righteousness by fanatically keeping the law, did not.
Why did they NOT obtain it? Because they were pursuing an impossible goal. They didn’t pursue God’s righteousness by faith, as did the Gentiles who chose to believe in Jesus, but as if the accumulation of works of the law was the way to salvation. But try as they might, they did not succeed. As Paul reminded us earlier in Romans 3:
By works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.
Winston Churchill wrote:
“A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.”
In their fanatical pursuit of a righteousness based on strict adherence to the law of Moses, Paul said of them, “They stumbled over the stumbling stone.”
They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
Paul weaves together two verses from the prophet Isaiah here in verse 33. In doing so, Paul affirms that it was God himself who laid down this stone over which Israel stumbled. And notice that Isaiah referred to that rock as “him.” It is clear that he was speaking of a person, and that person, that rock, that stone of stumbling, is Jesus Christ.
Quoting verse 22 of Psalm 118, Jesus applied this imagery to himself in a conversation with a group of scribes and Pharisees. It’s recorded in Mark 12:10.
Have you not read this Scripture: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”?
Paul also used this same imagery elsewhere. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, he calls his proclamation of the crucified Christ “a stumbling block to Jews.”
We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews
1 Corinthians 1:23
To the churches of Galatia, Paul wrote regarding the “offense” (same word, skandalon) of the cross:
If I, brothers, still preach circumcision…the offense of the cross has been removed.
Again, Paul wrote to the Galatians, saying:
If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
If you and I could gain a righteous standing before God by our own obedience to the law, the cross would be unnecessary. If we could save ourselves, the Son of God didn’t have to endure scorn, torment, pain and death. His death would have been redundant and meaningless. But the fact that Christ died for our sins is proof positive that we cannot save ourselves. And to make this humiliating confession is an intolerable offense to our pride. It undermines our self-righteousness. So instead of getting humble, we stumble, over the stumbling stone.
Everybody has to decide how to relate to this rock that God has laid down. There are only two possibilities:
One is to put our trust in Him, to take him as the foundation of our lives and build our lives upon that rock.
The other is to scrape our shins against him, to trip, stumble and fall.
Since we’ve come to the end of chapter 9, before moving on, let’s review chapter 9, and recap Paul’s answer to the question, “How can Israel’s unbelief be explained?”
It’s not because God is unfaithful to His promises. He has kept his word in relation to “the Israel within Israel”—the Israel of faith within the Israel of ethnicity.
It’s not because He’s unjust in exercising his purpose of election. Neither his having mercy on some nor his hardening others is incompatible or inconsistent with his justice.
It’s not because God is unfair to blame Israel or hold human beings accountable. The creation should not protest the actions of the Creator. And for that matter, he has nevertheless acted in keeping with his own character and with His word through the Old Testament prophets.
Israel’s failure to perceive their Messiah and believe in Him IS, instead, because of Israel’s pride that led them to pursue righteousness by works—through keeping the law—rather than by faith, so that they stumbled over the cross.
They Did Not Submit To God’s Righteousness & Believe In Jesus
In 10:1, Paul again reminds us that all of this weighs heavily on his own heart and mind. It’s not a mere intellectual matter or just a theological issue that needs explaining. He’s emotionally involved because the ones doing the stumbling are his own people, his family, his friends. His mind is engaged, to be sure, but his heart is also breaking.
Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
Notice, first of all, that because Paul believes the truth about God, because He is not ashamed of the Gospel, and because he cares deeply about those around him, he prays. He pairs his heart’s desire with prayer.
Our prayer lives—whether we pray, what we pray, how often we pray—tend to expose what is really going on in our hearts and minds. Some of you have loved ones whom you long to see come to faith and believe in Jesus to be saved. You need to pray. We together as a church exist to help people find and follow Jesus. So we need to commit ourselves to prayer. Why? Because no one comes to God except through Christ, and no one comes to Christ unless the Father draws them to Him.
And the reason that he prays is that they have a zeal for God, but it isn’t matched with knowledge. Proverbs 19:2 says, “Zeal without knowledge is not good.” And that’s a complete repudiation of one of the common proverbs of our time, which says, “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere.”
Paul said of Israel, “Oh, they’re sincere alright, but they’re dead wrong in what they believe.” Zeal without knowledge can at least make you terribly annoying, certainly dangerous and potentially deadly.
Imagine the woman who really cares about her neighbor, and to express her feelings takes her a huge bouquet of flowers, never bothering to find out that her neighbor is terribly allergic!
Or imagine a guy who sincerely believes that ingesting a poison solution won’t actually kill him. If he goes ahead and drinks it, he’ll still be dead. His zeal, his sincerity, didn’t help him. It helped him die.
That’s the deadly problem with the relativistic belief of our time that everyone has their own truth. Implicit to the word “truth” is the notion that there is also “falsehood.” But if we actually are foolish enough to believe that everyone’s truth is equally valid, then our naivete will be shattered when we finally see that some people’s truth claims prove to be false, bring about consequences they never bargained for, take them to places they never wanted to go.
Paul wants us to understand that the problem of the Jews is that they lacked knowledge. So why blame them if they simply didn’t know? Here’s why: because their ignorance was vincible ignorance.
What is “vincible” ignorance? It’s ignorance that can be overcome.
Notice what Paul is saying:
For being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.
They had zeal. They didn’t lack enthusiasm. But they didn’t stay ignorant because information was unavailable. They stayed ignorant because it suited them to do so. They refused to submit to God’s righteousness and sought to establish their own.
Israel should have known better and were without excuse for two simple reasons:
First, because their Messiah had come
Second, because long before he came, the law and the prophets had said in a thousand different ways and with vivid detail that he would
Everyone who knows that God is righteous, and they are not, naturally look around for something that might fit them to stand in God’s presence. The essence of righteousness is to be in a right relationship with God. So two possible options present themselves.
The first is to attempt to establish our own righteousness by our good works or religious activity. But this is doomed to failure, because as God said through the prophet Isaiah, “All our righteousness is like filthy rags.”
The other option is to submit to God’s righteousness by receiving it from him as a free gift through simple, personal faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. In verses 5-6 Paul calls the first option, “The righteousness that is based on the law” and the second “The righteousness based on faith.”
Because, as Paul writes in verse 4, Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
What is he saying? He is not saying that the law is no longer binding in the sense that obeying the law pleases God. What he is saying is what he has been saying all along in this letter, that Christ has put an end to the law as a means of righteousness, as a way of earning God’s favor, as a system of salvation. More than that, Paul is saying that Christ’s work shows that the law as a way of righteousness is ended so that faith may now be understood as the way to righteousness.
It is a very human temptation to put our faith in Christ, but then to hedge our bets by adding a measure of works-based righteousness into the mix. But with respect to our salvation, Christ and the law are incompatible alternatives:
If salvation is by the law, then it is not by Christ.
If salvation is by faith in Christ, then it is not by the law.
Now that Christ, through his death and resurrection, has accomplished our salvation, he has eliminated any possibility of law-keeping as an alternate option.
“Once we grasp the decisive nature of Christ’s saving work, we see the irrelevance of legalism.”
The Righteousness Based On Faith
In chapter 10, verses 5-10, Paul quotes from two Old Testament passages to distinguish the righteousness based on the law from the righteousness based on faith.
For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim) because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
In verse 5, Paul quotes Leviticus 18:5, where God said:
You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.
On the surface, at first reading, it sounds like God is presenting law-keeping as a means to salvation. But let’s look at it again. Can we keep God’s law? James, the brother of Jesus, told us:
Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.
So all Moses was saying to Israel was, “If you could obey the law at a 100% rate of perfection (which you can’t), then you would receive eternal life.”
Then in verses 6-7, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 30.
To fully understand Paul’s argument, you have to understand the whole of the first 14 verses of the chapter. He actually only quotes verse 14, but he alludes to the whole passage.
In verses 1-2, Moses alludes to the fact that Israel will stray from God and bring curses upon themselves.
Then in verse 6 he says, “The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts so that you may love him with all your heart and soul, and live.”
Then in verses 11-14, he says, “What I am telling you is not impossible to do. You don’t have to go to heaven or over the sea to do it!”
So back here in Romans 10:6-7, Paul quotes Deuteronomy 30:14 to show what faith knows, which is that we don’t have to do anything to receive God’s righteousness. We don’t need to scale heaven (Christ has already come down from there), or deal with your own sins in death (Christ has already done that for us). You see, Paul knew that something other than law-keeping was required, and God had done it all through the life, death, burial and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ.
It’s in verse 8 that Paul quotes verse 14 of Deuteronomy 30:
But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
The righteousness that comes as a gift of God through personal faith is neither far away nor unavailable. It is as close as your own mouth and your own heart choosing to believe in Jesus.
The Two-Part Truth That Must Be Known
What is that word that is near you? It is first a two-part truth that must be known.
The first is part of that truth is that Jesus is Lord. The Greek word that Paul uses for Lord is Kurios. In the Greek Old Testament, that word was the translation for God’s personal name in Hebrew, Yahweh. To say that Jesus is Kurios is to say first that he is God, and second to acknowledge His supreme authority over all creation.
The second part of that two-part truth has to do with Jesus’ work: “God raised him from the dead.” And so we believe that he died, and we believe that God accepted the sacrifice of Christ for all of our sin and indicated His acceptance by raising him from the dead.
There are so many religions whose operative word is, “Do.” They teach that it is through endless, unrelenting effort that you enter into a right relationship with God and through endless, unrelenting effort you stay there. But in biblical Christianity, the operative word is “Done.” Everything that is necessary for our eternal salvation has been accomplished. That’s why Jesus’ final words on the cross were “It is finished.”
And so Paul concludes with this simple yet powerful statement:
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Confessing with your mouth and believing in your heart are not separate actions. They are two sides of the same coin of real faith. They both mean to profess faith in Christ. The mouth speaks what the heart believes.
I’d like to invite you today to accept what God has accomplished for you through Jesus Christ, and by faith to confess Him as your Lord and Savior.
For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
This post is based on the transcript of Pastor Jim Hays’ sermon on September 15, 2019. Due to the nature of oral sermons, it may include thoughts and ideas from outside sources beyond those explicitly cited. If you have any questions or would like to know more about what he’s shared, please contact us or visit us this coming Sunday!