Romans No.23 The Two Ways

In chapter 9, let's just try to calm our thoughts so we can absorb the Word of God. The most important thing is that we latch on to what the Bible is saying, not my comments. Hopefully they may be helpful, but the inspiration is of far lower quality than Scripture, because Scripture is God's Word.

So here is Paul, he's got himself in an interesting situation, having been speaking about predestination, but in no way will he let the Jewish people, nor the Gentiles for that matter, off the hook. Despite the sovereignty of God and the way that he works out his purposes, human responsibility is the most important part in Paul's assessment of the whole working through of God's plan in this world. So Romans 9 verse 30, why they didn't start the chapter there, I don't know, but the chapters were not inspired in terms of divisions.

In fact, when they were broken up, sometimes men were travelling at the time, and now again, I think they had a jolt on the horse and broke into the argument at the ridiculous point. What then shall we say? That the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have obtained it. A righteousness that is by faith, but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it.

Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith, but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, see I lay in Zion, a stone that causes men to stumble, and a rock that makes them fall. The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.

Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved, for I can testify about them that they are zealous for God. But their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

Christ is the end of the law, so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law. The man who does these things will live by them, but the righteousness that is by 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 deep, that is to bring Christ up from the dead.

But what does it say? The word is near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith we are proclaiming, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

As the scripture says, anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame, for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, the same Lord is Lord of all. And richly blessed is all who call on him, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Well those are glorious verses of scripture and particularly the last three or four which you probably knew off by heart.

Good to see you all here this evening and a special warm welcome to David Cottrell. We're looking at Romans 9 and then into the 10th chapter. Father will you bless your word as we look at it together, we thank you for it.

We come to a passage of scripture which becomes much plainer at the end than it does at the beginning, so give us particular gifts of concentration to understand, to grasp what it is that you want us to learn from these opening verses, and then warm our hearts as we come to territory that's more familiar to us. In the name of the Savior, Amen. A man who made an impression on my life earlier on, when I was just David's age, having also been at his college some years before, was a fellow called Billy Richards.

He was a most interesting, dynamic, in the classic sense of the word charismatic fellow, and he found himself in the in the city of Slough. This was just after the war. He believed that God had told him to go there to establish a church, and he managed to secure the use of a clapped-out scout hall in the middle of a derelict site, and there in those unpretentious circumstances he encouraged the good citizens of Slough to come and listen to him preach.

He didn't do very well to start with, but what I do recall about his testimony in the church eventually grew to one of the largest Assemblies of God churches in the country. What I do recall him saying was how he used to go around the streets of Slough at night through midnight into the early hours of the morning, pleading with God that he would deliver up from that city those who must be saved, and that they'd congregate together in a church that he could pastor and continue to do the work of an evangelist. Now the reason why I lead off my remarks with that particular illustration is because when you read through the 9th through to the 11th chapters of Romans, and especially when your eyes alight on the opening verse of each chapter, you come very much to the conviction, even if you haven't had it before, and there would have just been justification for you to presume this already, that Paul is a man who has a passion for souls.

Verse 1 of chapter 9, I speak the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. And then in the 11th chapter, he confirms in his own thinking that God has not cast away his ancient people.

Did God reject his people? By no means, I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin, and so forth. And in the first verse of the 10th chapter, brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved, for I can testify about them that they're zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Paul, as you know, was the apostle to the Gentiles, but he never forgot his origins.

He was always deeply committed to the conversion of his own race, to the extent that he daringly prayed in that first reference that if it were possible for the Jews to secure eternal salvation, then he'd put his own relationship with the Lord on the line. Of course, that was a nonsense statement, but it does indicate the passion that Paul had for the evangelism of Gentiles, and particularly in this connection for Jews. Now, you see, the reason why he's saying these things, as he begins to major his argument now, line his argument up from the position of human responsibility, is that previously in the 9th chapter, he's been talking about God's predetermination, his predestination, the way that God works all things out according to his own good pleasure, to quote a phrase from the epistle to the Ephesians.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that Jews and Gentiles are bereft of responsibility. If the Jews did not believe the gospel in Paul's day, if they don't believe the gospel today, then the responsibility is theirs. And the apostle makes it very plain that when the Gentiles exchanged the truth of God for a lie, as he argued in the 24th verse of the first chapter, so it would be true to say that the Jews had exchanged the righteousness of God for a system.

They depended to the Ten Commandments, various subsidiary laws. They were and are in Paul's day in the same state as the apostle was before he was converted. Look at verse 2 of the 10th chapter.

They're zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. They had an understanding of the law of God, but they did not fully comprehend that the righteousness that the law would produce was a righteousness that they were incapable of giving to God. Submission to an observance of the law of God to obtain God's favor was a good objective to have.

But unfortunately, the Jews were not able to deliver the goods. Do you remember how our Lord Jesus on one occasion criticizes the Pharisees, the teachers in his day, because he says that they have bound upon the people a burden that is too heavy for them to bear? They couldn't keep the Ten Commandments, let alone all the subsidiary laws. So this is the great problem of the Jewish nation.

They've got a zeal, but it's not according to knowledge. Paul sees them as he used to be. You remember the catalog of little phrases that he uses when he's writing to the Philippians when he talks about himself as being of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee, one of the most illustrious men in Judaism.

But as far as the true righteousness was concerned, he was as distant from it as the Gentiles were. Well, here you see is the nature of the difficulty of the Jews. And you can only blame them.

You can't blame God, because in one sense the Jews have been more advantaged than the Gentiles, have they not? They've had a special revelation from the Lord. The Gentiles have only got the revelation of God in conscience and in nature, but to the Jews has been communicated the law and the Old Testament books. And yet, the fact of the matter is, as Paul tells you in the 30th verse of the preceding chapter, the 9th chapter, the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith.

But Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. The reason being, because the Jews themselves would not receive what God wanted to show them time and time again, and especially in the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ, that the faith righteousness that our Lord came to offer is the only righteousness that can really bring about a man's eternal redemption. There's nothing amatuer with the law.

Paul told them that many, many times in the opening chapters. The problem wasn't with the law. The problem was with them.

They couldn't keep the essential law that God gave to Moses, let alone all the little subsidiary laws that they worked out themselves. Jewish hopes to comply with the total requirements of the law were dashed on the rocks of their own inability. Do you remember one of the hymns that we sing sometimes at the tab? Not the labor of my hands could fulfill thy law's demands.

You know that yourself, don't you? I mean, some of you were good, moral people before you came to the Lord. I use that in a general sense. Not everyone has mugged, not everyone has raped, not everyone has done these bestial crimes that sometimes fill our newspapers.

But you knew, as Paul knew, as Gentiles made sensitive to the gospel knew, that all your righteousness is as filthy rags. And the way of the law, though a good way if kept in its entirety, could never bring the Jews to an experience of righteousness because all of them at some point failed to keep the commandments laid down. So it seems as though the Gentiles then have an advantage over the Jews, doesn't it? Because the Gentiles appear to be more receptive to the gospel than the Jews were.

That's basically what Paul is saying. Not so in that 30th and 31st verse. The Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith.

But Israel, they're in great difficulty. Now why are they in such difficulty? Well, they stumbled over something. What did they stumble over? Well, you know when the apostle makes reference in Corinthians to the ministry and to the end of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he highlights the cross and he speaks about the cross.

And he says as far as the Greeks, the Gentiles are concerned, the cross is by and large foolishness to them. Not all the Gentiles believe, though some did, more than the Jews. But when Paul talks about the cross and the Jews, he said that the cross becomes a stumbling block to them.

They can't accept that what they couldn't do for themselves, keeping the law, God in Christ has done for them. And the prize of law-keeping, Jesus by grace, by favour, has made over to all those who trust him as Lord and Saviour. So it's this stumbling block of the Jews that the apostle identifies and makes comment on as being the reason why they don't know the full salvation that he wants them to know.

The reason why his heart is heavy because they've not responded to what Jesus has done for them. The same applies today, doesn't it, as far as the Jews are concerned? Some of you may have seen the most remarkable programme on television late last Sunday evening talking about the right-wing religious political parties that are scattered amongst the Jews to this very day, especially in America, and how the Jew is still, like the Muslim, trying to fulfil the law of God. And any notion that Messiah was Jesus Christ is utterly unacceptable to them.

So when you talk, as I mentioned in my notes, about the suffering servant, about a crucified Messiah, about the Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world, these lovely terms, a blessing to you, they are still offensive to the Jew. Expressed in a colloquial fashion, the Jew is off course. He's on the wrong track.

And he's not just on the wrong track, he's on an impossible track. Look at verse 5 of the 10th chapter. Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law.

Now Paul is here quoting Moses from the book of Leviticus. The man who does these things will live by them. But as we've said two or three times already, this is sheer activism.

Nothing a matter with the advice of Moses. But the Jew was not able to get life, the Jew was not able to get life through law keeping because he fell short at some stage or another. Judaism and activism, I say in number two on your notes, Judaism and activism are almost synonymous.

The one leads to the other. But failure to deliver what I've called the whole goods means that all that is offered becomes an unacceptable sacrifice to the Lord. Incidentally, have you appreciated that Islam and Jewish theology have a great deal in common at this particular juncture? A great deal in common.

You see, the Muslim, he too is concerned in keeping the law of Allah. He works under a bondage for this capricious God, hoping that somehow, if fate smiles upon him, he will be saved. There's quite a common denominator between Judaism and Islam in this respect, working for one's salvation.

Now that common denominator, you can pick out and you can apply to the sects. Jehovah's Witness, Mormons, the Unification Church, they all have this almost as a creedal statement that you've got to do. You've got to be active.

It's a Jewish heresy, or perhaps the word heresy is too strong, applying it to the Jews. It is the distortion that the Jews had in their attitude to the law, which has been taken up by the great world religions and by the sects and been fashioned into a creedal statement. The problem for Israel and the reason for the breaking of the heart of Paul was that his own people had opted for an impossible course.

They were trying to follow the way of legal righteousness, righteousness as a result of law keeping, instead of responding to the righteousness that is offered through faith in Jesus. Now it is possible, of course, for both Jew and Gentile to reroute his life by God's grace. It seems to me that this is what the apostle is trying to say.

Not just trying, he's saying it most successfully from the sixth verse and onwards. But the righteousness that is by faith says, do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven to bring Christ down? Or who will descend into the deep to bring Christ up? But what does it say? The word is near you. What is the apostle trying to tell us here? Well, look, he's doing a contrast, isn't he? He's contrasting this little statement that is taken from the law of Moses, the book of Leviticus.

The man who does these things will live by them. He's contrasting this activism with a sincere believism, which acknowledges in faith that God actually has made it possible for men and women to be saved. Not because of anything they have done, not because of anything that they have cajoled others to do, but because of what God has done for them in Christ.

Now, it's most interesting, as you will discover if you look very carefully, that when the apostle is speaking in the sixth verse, he's quoting, actually, the language of Moses. Who will ascend into heaven? You'll find the reference in the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy and the 14th verse and onwards. But the apostle is using the context of Moses's final sermon to the Jewish people, and he's Christianizing it.

You see, Moses is speaking about certain ethical points, certain revelations that he's had from the Lord as to how the Jews ought to live their own lives. And he's telling them that it's simple for them to understand this, because this has been given to them. Moses has been the one who's communicated from the Lord, that they don't have to ascend into heaven.

No great feat to understand this revelation. It's there. No great depths they have to tunnel down to in order to discover how God would have them live.

God has spoken. Now, as far as eternal salvation is concerned, so God has done it all. You don't have to go into heaven to discover the way of eternal life.

God has sent Jesus down. You don't have to go subterranean to try and discover it, for God has brought Jesus Christ up from the dead. Paul daringly uses Moses's language, and he Christianizes it.

He brings it into a theological context that you and I can understand. Now, verse 8, but what does it say? The word is near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart.

Again, he's quoting Moses. You see, he's given the word to the people. They don't have to seek here and there for it.

They've got it. Now, God has given his word to us, his blessed son, the gospel of reconciliation, and it's there for taking. It's there for receiving.

The word is near you. It's in your mouth. It's in your heart.

Why are you Jews so blind? Why can't you understand what is so obvious? So you see how the apostle contextualizes Moses and places his teaching in a Christian category and outlines the simplicity of what it really means to become a Christian, a follower of the Lord Jesus. What do you have to do to be a Christian? Well, now we're getting onto familiar territory. What do you have to do? You have to confess, verse 9. You have to confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you will be saved.

That's a grand declaration, isn't it? It's equivalent to John 3, 16. It's equivalent to what Paul has to say in his opening chapter in the 16th verse of the first chapter. Confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord.

Believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead and you will be saved. Many Gentiles were accepting this, but not Jews. Let's go over the verse again, shall we, because it's most important that we understand what Paul isn't saying as well as for us to grasp what he is saying.

He's not just concerned about parrot fashion, repetition. There was a lot of that in Paul's day. He went into the pagan gods, filled with noise, constant repetition, as today in the temples that I've been in India, Shane temples and Buddhist temples and so forth.

But it's not just a confession at lip level. It's not just saying when they ask you what your religion is, Church of England. It's not just saying like mindless football supporters, we are the champions.

To confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to reach out to that which is near you, to partake of the benefits of the Christian gospel, means a wholehearted commitment from the depths of your being. Jesus is Lord. What must I do to be saved? You remember the cry that came from the lips of the Philippian jailer as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles? Paul says, believe, believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.

You remember how I taught the other Sunday evening in a somewhat impromptu address, that the Hebrew word for believe is the word cling. It's the wrapping of the vine around the tree. The vine cannot stand on its own.

It needs a tree for support. It needs a wall to go up. You never find, I say a vine, really I'm trying to say an ivy, though to some degree it applies to the vine, you never find the ivy being able to support itself.

It needs something else. And that's what it means when you declare that Jesus is Lord. It's intertwining the whole of your personality around the Lord Jesus.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, there must be an essential commitment to the historic fact of the death of Jesus. That's presupposed in the resurrection. Obviously there must have been a death before there can be a resurrection.

Paul is praising. He's encapsuled the whole of the end of the life of our Lord Jesus and the mighty event that followed that in these words. God has raised him from the dead.

It's most important that we appreciate that. Why? Well you see earlier on the apostle Paul has said that Jesus is the end of the law. Did he not? Then in the fourth verse, Christ is the end of the law.

The law will chase you to Calvary, but it can't chase you beyond. You see Jesus has fulfilled the requirements of the law. That doesn't mean to say that the law now no longer exists.

What it means to say is this, that Jesus has fulfilled all that the law stood for and he has purchased your redemption and through the release of his spirit he enables you to live to the requirements of the law. The law will chase you to the gospel. It will chase you to the cross and then the law will teach you how to live having been to the cross.

Jesus never came to annul the law. He came to fulfill it and to release in your life the power to be able to live according to the law of God and to receive forgiveness when time comes when you let the Lord down by breaking it. So the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus are vital aspects of Christian doctrine.

The old Bishop of Durham when he talks about the resurrection in such terms as the conjuring with old bones in Palestine has really put himself beyond the pale of Christianity. You must believe in the historic resurrection of Jesus to be a biblical Christian. The apostle puts it on the line, if Christ be not raised from the dead our faith is vain.

The word means hollow, it means empty, it means getting that clanging gong, getting that tingling cymbal. There's nothing to it at all. There's substance in the faith of the Christian church which believes that God raised Jesus from the dead and gave him the name Lord and Christian people are those who by the power of the Spirit who make that confession.

Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Now put the two together you see, confessing that Jesus is Lord, verse 9, believing in your heart that God raised him from the dead, the middle of verse 9, and the conclusion is you will be saved. But the apostle doesn't finish there does he? He does a little bit of repetition.

You see he's very concerned that those who have confessed Jesus as Lord and believe that God has raised him from the dead do so publicly. It's with your heart you believe and are justified, it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Basic to Paul's thinking here I believe is the whole sacrament of baptism.

Never understand Christians who go for many years and are not baptised. I've known some daft excuses for not being baptised. You never come across an unbaptised Christian in the Acts of the Apostles.

In fact I go so far as to guess that you never came across an unbaptised Christian in the first century, the breed didn't exist. No it's not that the apostle is teaching here or elsewhere that baptism is essential to salvation. Jesus did it all.

Baptism is essential to obedience. You see when you became a Christian in those days it was a costly business. As today it is in Nepal but not in England.

It doesn't cost you so much here does it? It may cost you a bit but not in comparison. And so having confessed that Jesus is Lord, having made that confession from your mouth, having received the truth in your heart, it was expected of you and in one sense you rushed to do this. To make a public announcement to everyone that Jesus indeed was your Lord.

To confess to everybody that this was the case and it would happen in the public sacrament of immersing you in water. Now when you confess the Lord Jesus on earth he says he'll confess you before his Father in heaven, not so? So verse 11, as the scripture says anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame. Eternally there is no shame that awaits the Christian because his sins have been forgiven by the blood of our Lord Jesus.

Now this gospel that the apostle has so winsomely declared, defined for us, this gospel is available. It's available for everyone. Paul's done a circular tour in his argument.

He's come back to his starting point. It's available to the Jew. It's available to the Gentile.

How do we know? Well, Paul tells us by just dipping into the Old Testament scriptures, the prophecy of Joel, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. In summary, the apostle looks upon the Jews and the Gentiles as being faced with two paths. As far as the Jews are concerned, there is a path of the law that ultimately will lead them to destruction.

There is a path of faith righteousness which will lead them to eternal salvation. And though he would have expressed it differently, in some senses the principle is the same for the Gentiles. And the fact of the matter is, as far as Paul's experience was concerned, there were more Gentiles who were taking the path of faith righteousness than Jews.

And that was breaking Paul's heart in his day. And for us today, my final thought we should have heartbreak when we see people who don't respond to this gospel. We should perhaps occasionally pound the streets of Worthing late at night or early in the morning and bring the inhabitants of our town to the Lord.

And we must have a heart for Jewish people and their salvation. Because Paul makes it plain, the gospel was first directed to the Jew and then to the Gentile. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.

And we say to the Apostle Paul, Amen. That's our desire too. Let's pray.

Father, our study has been a little hurried this evening. But that doesn't matter, provided we've managed to extract from it what you wanted to. Focus our attention on, not everyone will have taken everything in, but there was something for all.

Seal in our minds what is new. Or the reaffirmation of that which is old. And help us to be more committed to getting the gospel out and to living lives that please you.

Those who stumble today, Lord, Jews and Gentiles, because the old rugged cross to them is an offence, a complete enigma, something worse that perhaps a number of them mock. Lord, show them that that old rugged cross is the only hope for lost humanity. Amen.