Righteousness through Faith

Righteousness through Faith

Romans Chapter 3

Faithfulness

Paul’s literary style in Chapter 3 is a bit difficult to follow, as he raises question after question and supplies his own answers, sometimes supplying answers that he intends for us to understand are obviously wrong.

In verses 1-4, Paul begins with the question of faithfulness, and asks if our unfaithfulness with nullify God’s faithfulness. Why would such a question even occur to Paul? How could our actions have any affect on the actions of God? In this section, Paul is arguing the importance of the law, and we read in Deuteronomy 5:1-3 that the law was given to the people as a part of their covenant relationship with God. Paul reasonably asks would happen if the people were not faithful to the covenant relationship.

Paul was a good Old Testament scholar. He knew that the people could break the covenant, and that they would suffer for it, but that God would remain faithful. As God told the people through the prophet Jeremiah: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” (Jeremiah 31:3)

Let Us Do Evil that Good May Result

In verses 5-8, Paul asks a very difficult question. If God is always willing to forgive us (That is God’s nature) and we are always in need of forgiveness (that is our nature) how can God judge us? Are we not doing God a favor by giving him an opportunity to do good?

We have many ways of justifying ourselves. We say that we are choosing the lesser of two evils. We say that we are making the best of a bad situation. We say that the end justifies the means. They are all ways of trying to make the wrong thing look right.

Not Righteous

In verses 9-20, Paul uses a rabbinic technique called “stringing pearls”, quoting passage after passage to underscore his point that no one can achieve righteousness. We know that the law was given as a part of the covenant relationship with God, to show us how to live. Paul says that the law makes us conscious of our inadequacies. There is no way we can live up to the law.

Again, we have to ask the question how God can judge us. If we are made to fail, how can we be held accountable?

Righteousness through Faith

In verses 21-31, Paul responds to the justice of this situation. Though we have never been able to obtain righteousness, righteousness has been granted to us. Paul says we have nothing to boast about, because it is not our doing: this righteousness is nothing we can achieve, and we must remember that, because we try to make faith a work of its own. We make faith a thing to be achieved, measured, and compared among the saints. But though our faith is necessary, it is not an act, or a work, but a surrender. Our righteousness is achieved, not by our actions, but by the grace of God.

This is God’s justice, that though we do not appear worthy, God makes us worthy. Though we were made in such a way that we could not achieve perfection, we were made to be perfect.

Circumcision of the Heart

Circumcision of the Heart

Romans Chapter 2

Judge Not

Having just taken the Greeks to task in the previous chapter, Paul begins Chapter 2, in verses 1-4, by saying that the Jews have no right to judge. First, he said, the Jews were no better behaved than the Greeks. Considering the impressive catalog of immorality Paul attributed to the Greeks in 1:26-32, this must have had the Jews frothing at the mouth. Probably, they loudly objected, demanding to know how Paul dared to say they had behaved like these amoral Greeks.

I do not know what their actual behavior was, perhaps they were good people, but Jesus had already explained that the rules for keeping score were not what they had been thinking. The scribes and Pharisees brought Jesus a woman caught “in the very act” of adultery, and continually pestered Jesus, saying that the law required her to be stoned. Jesus, famously replied “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” and they all went away, one by one (John 8:4-11). What were there sins? Maybe they had already heard Jesus say: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28) Jesus told them that the commandments are not for accusing one another, but that they are about how we feel as well as act towards one another.

Paul goes on to say that only God’s judgment is righteous, and we, who are subject to his righteousness, have instead been shown kindness. If we do not extend kindness, tolerance, and patience to others, then Paul says we show contempt for the kindness God shows to us.

Doing Good

In verses 5-11, Paul continues with his theme of equality of Jew and Gentile, but along the way he touches on another subject that is worth close attention. Let us begin by noticing that the passage is filled with Old Testament terminology. Even the term “repent” in New Testament times (which I suppose extend to our day) has largely been replaced. In our day we have the great promise that “whosoever believeth” shall be saved, and so we have a general call to belief, instead of a call to repentance. Why then, does Paul call us to repentance, and to a life of good works?

We do have that great promise of salvation, and it can never fail, and can never be taken away from us. The same Christ though whom that great promise was made gave us very clear statements about the living of our lives. There are a handful of them, and they are all very similar.

Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:31)

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. (John 13:34).

So, Jesus had very definite ideas about how we are to live our lives. Is it a part of salvation, or a separate thing? We are saved by faith, but Paul and James want to know if faith can be separated from works. The question is an interesting bookend to Christ’s interpretation of the commandments. If I can break the command against murder, for example, by keeping hate in my heart, can I keep the commandment to love my neighbor only in my heart? If I see my neighbor sick, or in prison, or in poverty, can I simply feel love in my heart, where Jesus says the commandments must be kept, or is there something I must do? I need to know the answer, because, if it is the latter, there is quite a lot of something that needs to be done.

A Law unto Themselves

Before reading verses 12-16, we need to remind ourselves that Paul dictated his letters, and did so in the days before word processors, or even cheap pen and paper, so very little editing went on. As we have been noting, Paul has been switching back and forth between addressing the Jews and the Greeks (or gentiles) and at the same time developing a summary of the gospel. If you can imagine the scene as Paul paces back and forth before Tertius (we meet him in 16:22) getting more and more excited about his various trains of thought, but each one taking him further from his central thought. In these verses, it begins to break down, and either Paul or Tertius, or both, begin to have trouble keeping up.

It will help us to read it to note that verses 14 and 15 are an extended parenthetical remark. If we read 12, 13, and 15, we see that Paul is saying that law or no law, we will be judged by our behavior. Those who do what is right will be judged righteous, and those who do not will perish. How do we know what is right? That is where the parenthetical remark comes in. Paul says that the Jews have the law, so they have no excuse. But the gentiles, even without the law, know what is right. It is written on their hearts, Paul says.

After all, how mysterious is “love your neighbor as yourself”?

You Call Yourself a Jew?

In verses 17-24, Paul really lays into the Jews, because they should have been an example to all the other nations, a priestly nation of ambassadors for their God. Instead, they set themselves up as better than the other nations, and in the name of their God, proclaimed the other nations beneath contempt. One of the nice things about reading Paul, though, is that he is always talking about the law, or circumcision, or some problems in some little church somewhere, and never has anything to say about us.

There is a fancy word: “syncretization”. It means to bring together different ideas or philosophies. Paul spent so much of his effort syncretizing the Jewish religion and the Christian faith that we have to spend some effort syncretizing at least Paul’s terminology with ours. Paul talked about what it meant to be Jewish, about the importance of the law, and about circumcision all in a way that are foreign to modern Christians.

It is hard for us to identify with everything it meant to be Jewish, but it certainly meant to be the people of God. Paul asks them what they had accomplished with their special status as a people of faith: had they been a priestly nation, leading others to the Lord, or had they instead been a poor example, preaching their own importance, rather than the love of God. When we understand the words Paul was using, the message hits closer to home.

Circumcision of the Heart

In the final verses of the chapter, verses 25-29, Paul continues to talk about being a Jew, being circumcised, and keeping the law. In reading these verses, we have to keep in mind the previous verses where Paul has already established that it is not the hearing of the law, but the keeping of the law that matters, and that the gentiles know right from wrong by their very nature as creatures of God (a very different idea of human nature than we often assume).

In these passages, Paul addresses another Jewish idea: that the gentiles cannot have a relationship with God simply because they are gentiles. After all, God chose the Jews and God gave them circumcision as the special mark of his covenant. We can almost hear them say “We do not judge the gentiles, God does.” Again, it is so good that Paul is talking to some thick-headed Jews from centuries ago, and not to us.

But Paul says that what God really wants is a circumcised heart. The Jews knew all about circumcision. They had Mohels who were trained, and they knew all the rituals. But how do you circumcise a heart? And then Paul goes further with a little pun that is lost in our translation. He says of a man with a circumcised heart that his “praise is not from men, but of God.” This is a strange statement, on the face of it. There are places in the Bible where God has positive things to say about individuals, but not praise, exactly. But, here is the pun. The word “Jew” is derived from the word “Judah”, which itself means “praised”. Paul says that those who are circumcised in heart are made “Jews” by God.

The idea of circumcised hearts is not Paul’s, by the way; it is the Lord’s himself. He says, for example, in Deuteronomy 30:6 that he will circumcise our hearts that we may love him with all our hearts and all our souls, and live.

Paul, on good Biblical basis, says that we cannot judge others – not on their actions, race, or creed. But we do know right from wrong, and we must repent of our evil ways. To repent means to change and Paul says that this change does come from a statement of faith, or from baptism, or from dressing up and going to church on Sunday, or from any other external act. Paul says it requires inward change. He calls it “circumcision of the heart”. This change cannot be performed by any ritual or tested against any code or human standard. It is performed by the grace of God and tested by his love.

The Wrath of God Revealed

The Wrath of God Revealed

Romans 1:18-32

Men Are without Excuse

In verses 18-20 of Chapter 1, Paul says that men are without excuse. I think he is wrong in this. The men and women that I deal with on a day today basis have many excuses. There is an excuse for why my car is not ready when it was promised, for why I was given soup when I ordered salad, why the contracted task was not completed even though the money was spent, and so on. I never want to hear them, because they are never helpful, and they often insinuate that the whole thing was my fault in the fist place. But Paul was wrong; men (and women) have plenty of excuses.

What he meant, of course, was that we have no legitimate excuse, and I would be with him there, because I have certainly not heard one lately, but what he says is astounding. He says that the divine nature of God is revealed through creation; the invisible nature of God is revealed through the visible nature. This kind of talk must have upset Paul’s traditional Jewish friends, who believed that God revealed himself through the prophets, and were just getting used to the idea that he had revealed himself through a son. We too think we have a handle on God’s revelation. We tend to think that it is a thing of the past, all completely recorded for us in the Bible. In fact, the last book of the Bible is called “Revelation” and that seems to help neatly sum it up for us. Paul tells us that God uses every means to reveal himself, and his revelation is his choosing, not ours.

The Truth and the Lie

In verses 21-25, Paul continues with his claim that the Truth of God was available to men, but goes further to say that they exchanged it for a lie; they claimed to be wise, but they became fools. Among men, Westerners in particular, the Greeks had just cause to call themselves wise. They were not all great philosophers, but they valued thought, and the value they placed on it gave rise to great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

But two things happened. The first is common, sordid tale of the failure of society. It is distressing to think about, but we can look throughout history and see how easily society fails under stress. It fails when times are hard and people become scared, angry savages. It fails when things go too well and people become too lazy to care. Greco-Roman society expanded at an amazing rate, and the rich people became amazingly rich. They began to believe that acquiring and having were what life was all about, and they were very good at it, so they would be fine. But it was a lie, and it did not last very long.

The second thing that happened was that the great thinkers quickly discovered what fools we all are, although maybe they did not quite see it that way. Plato is credited with the first description of our limits of understanding. Is the table I see before me real, or is it an example of “tableness”, the true reality? Do you and I experience the table in the same way? How can we know? In our own time we have had Heisenberg, who has explored the limits of what we can know about the physical world, and Gödel, who has demonstrated the limits of logical and philosophical systems.

If these philosophers found limits to what they could explore, did they abandon them and look elsewhere for answers? No, they were proud of their findings; and I suppose justifiably so. As a tool, science is powerful, it makes crops grow where there were none, it brings clean water into peoples homes, and it saves lives. But as a belief system, it is a lie.

Like the Greeks, we think we are smart, we think we are rich, and we think we are strong. In the ways of the world, these words are just lies. You are never smart enough, or rich enough, or strong enough.

God Gave Them Over

The final verses of the chapter, verses 26-32, contain a laundry-list of sin and wickedness. Paul begins (even in verses 24) with sexual immorality, possibly because it was a class of sin for which the Greeks were well known, and which the Romans had assimilated along with the rest of Greek culture, but the rest of the list seems to be everything Paul can think of off the top of his head. In fact, he says “they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.”

Paul says this happens to us as a direct result of exchanging the Truth of God for our own lies. Further, Paul says of these unnamed men “God gave them over.” What does that mean? Why would God give anyone over?

The single word used here is used in many other places in the New Testament. Whenever the King James uses the word “betray” in reference to the Son of Man, it is translating this same word. The one who would betray him would “give him over” to those who had him crucified. It is also used, for example, in the parable of the unmerciful servant, when the master gives him over to the jailer (Matthew 18:32-34).

Paul says that man rejected God to pursue our own pathetic, unhealthy desires and in judgment, God has given us over to those desires.

The Wrath of God Revealed

In the first verse of this section (verses 18) Paul says the wrath of God is being revealed. Right away, there are problems. How can a loving God even have wrath? How can an all-powerful, loving God take out his wrath on his helpless creation?

We know from science that cold is not a force. There is energy in heat, but not in cold; cold is the absence of heat. But, if we were to switch off the sun, it would get very cold; the cold seem like a terrible, unconquerable force. If we switched off the sun by choice, we would be choosing our own death.

Paul has already established (in verses 16-17) the life-giving power of the gospel of God’s love. In these verses, Paul says we have control of the switch.

Not Ashamed of the Gospel

Not Ashamed of the Gospel

Romans 1:1-17

Paul

In verses 1-5 of Chapter 1, Paul introduces himself as an apostle and servant of Christ Jesus and says that he is set apart for the gospel of God. The term “apostle” means “one who is sent” and its use in Christendom originated with the twelve that Jesus selected and sent out. Paul resolutely claimed the title for himself after his conversion experience. We know of this Damascus road experience from Acts, where it is told three times: once by the narrator of Acts (9:1-19) and twice by Paul himself (22:3-16, 26:4-18). Paul does not recount this experience in any of the letters which now exist. Instead, he says only that he saw the Lord (1 Corinthians 9:1, for example).

We do know something about the life of Paul (or “Saul”) before his conversion, as he himself tells us he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5) and Acts reports that how zealously he pursued the Christian church. We do not know, however, what eventually became of him.

The story in Acts makes it sound as though he was released from one imprisonment in Rome and went on another missionary journey before ending up, at the end of Acts, in a rather comfortable house arrest. This second imprisonment is not supported by the letters, however, and from the letters, 2 Timothy in particular, we have that heart-wrenching call to “come before winter” (2 Timothy 4:21) from a Paul who is deserted by his friends (only Luke is with him) has fought the good fight, and is ready to leave this world.

Romans

In verses 8-15, Paul addresses his audience: the church at Rome. This is a very unusual letter for Paul for, as he says in this greeting, he had never met the church. Because Paul had never met his audience, the nature of the letter is somewhat different. First, the letter is less personal. This is true not only in the sense that there are fewer personal greetings, but in the sense that Paul is not writing in regard to problems within the church about which he has personal knowledge. Instead, the letter is a more general summary of Paul’s theology than we find in any of his other letters.

It is not known who founded the church at Rome. Later content of the letter seems to assume that the congregation has some familiarity with Jewish law, yet in this section Paul says that he wants to minister to the church at Rome just as he has among the “other gentiles”. Perhaps, if there were Jews at the church, there were both Jews and gentiles.

As an aside, this passage contains two examples of complete ethnocentrism. There is the Jew/gentile divide and the Greek/barbarian divide. For a Jew, you were either a Jew (one of God’s chosen) or you were not – you were gentile, and therefore completely without value. From the Jew’s prospective, God chose the Jews and did not value a gentile. We know that is completely wrong, of course, but it surprising how easy it is to put a label on a group of people, for whatever reason, and come to that conclusion again today. The Greeks as a nation had been overrun by the Romans, but the Greek culture flourished under Roman rule. For a Greek, you were either Greek, or you were not – you were barbarian. This word meant to have no culture, and it meant, literally, to say “bar bar”, because the Greeks could not understand the language of the people around them, and assumed it was nonsense.

Paul came into to this divide between Jew and gentile and between Greek and barbarian with the Gospel of God which is for everyone.

The Just Shall Live by Faith

These next two verses, 16 & 17, are jam-packed. Paul is definitely through with preliminaries at this point, and getting down to business.

Here, Paul speaks of the gospel as being the power of God. The word “gospel” comes (somehow) from the Greek evangelion, which means “good news”. It became a Christian word after Jesus announced his ministry in the temple in Nazareth by reading from Isaiah (Luke 4:16-21). So, it was associated both with the good news that Jesus preached, and the good news of Jesus Christ himself.

Paul says this power is a power for salvation for all who believe. Our Lord called this power “love” when he said “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3: 16) Paul, too, says this gospel gives life. “The just shall life by faith,” he says, quoting Habakkuk 2:4.

Most of us (and when I use a phrase like that I am almost always admitting my guilt and hoping that there is someone else out there like me) well remember that brief passage of scripture “The just shall live by faith.” Though, we certainly remember it from Paul, and not from Habakkuk. And, while we remember John 3:16, we tend not to remember 3:17, which says: “For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” But, those two verses in John say just what these two verses Romans say, using somewhat different words.

Jesus says that God sent his son. That is certainly the gospel, or “good news”. It was God acting out of love: the power of God. Paul (as he is translated) uses both “believe” and “faith”, but these are the same word: to believe is to have faith. Jesus says we are not condemned but are saved, Paul says we are made righteous. Jesus says we will have everlasting life, Paul says we will live.

Not Ashamed of the Gospel

Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel, and why should he be? It sounds like wonderful, powerful, life-giving stuff. But it is not the power of this world. The power of this world lets me draw a dividing line between me and mine and all the rest of you. If I am very powerful, I can draw that line pretty much where I want. The power of this world divides between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. It divides between Jew and gentile, and between Greek and barbarian. We have the power to make those divisions and we want the power to make the division between the just and the unjust. Sometimes I find myself like Jonah (Jonah 4:1-3) not proud of the gospel, but angry at the God who wants to share it with the whole world.

Why are we like that? Why are we so intent on condemning others, rather than sharing the gospel? Is it because we know we do not deserve the gospel ourselves. That when Paul (or Habakkuk) says “The just shall live by faith” it secretly makes us worry, and to hide our secret, we lash out against others?

The Good News is that God wants to save us, not condemn us, not because we deserve us, but because it is in his power – his loving nature – to do so, and not just us, but the whole world, too. And our world needs saving.