There is no doubt in Paul’s mind as he writes to the Church at Rome, that the Jews are pre-eminent in God’s sight. He makes it clear in 1:16 that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Mind you he uses the same hierarchy in ch 2:9 when he describes the judgement that God is going to bring on all people, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So the Jews come first in God’s plan and in Paul’s thinking about the gospel. But the problem is, as he points out in this section here, they’ve somehow missed the point.
In fact there are 6 areas in which they’ve got it wrong. Let’s look at the passage and see what these 6 mistakes are:
1 They rely too much on the law
There’s no doubt that the knowledge of God’s law is the Jews greatest asset. No other nation, no other religion, has had God’s will explained to them in such detail. If, as I’ve mentioned the last couple of weeks, there’s a desire on the part of human beings to know how to be right with God, then the Jews are greatly privileged. They have God’s law in written form. They don’t have to wonder how to please God. He’s told them in great detail. But the trouble is that they seem to think, some of them at least, that just having the law makes the difference. That this position of privilege they have is enough. But relying on the fact that they have God’s law in written form isn’t enough, as we’ll see in a moment. Nor is it enough to be confident that you’re the chosen people of God. Their second mistake you see is that:
2 They’re over confident in their status of being the people of God.
He points out how they boast of their relation to God. The Jews have this position of being the chosen people of God. God had said to them on a number of occasions, "You will be my people and I will be your God." Of all the nations on earth only they could claim this relationship with God. But the mistake they make, again, is to boast of the relationship but not live out the responsibilities that go with that relationship.
3 They have a sense of superiority as those who have been instructed in what God wants
Next, because they’ve been instructed in the will of God and know what is the right thing to do, they have this sense of superiority. They think that just because they’ve been educated they must be better than those who are ignorant of God’s law.
Of course that’s an attitude that we recognise well in our own culture. There’s often a sense of superiority that accompanies education. We explain the foolishness of certain people by their ignorance. We look down on those who are ignorant as though they’re lesser beings than we are. And that attitude leads to the next mistake the Jews have made:
4 They glory in being able to teach those who are ignorant
This comes back to something I talked about a couple of weeks ago. When we look at someone else and discover how ignorant they are by comparison to ourselves, it makes us feel superior, like when we look at the sinfulness of some people and think how much more righteous we are. Paternalism and that sense of superiority are age old foibles of the educated.
And of course in the case of those who have received God’s word, well, doesn’t it talk about God’s word being a lamp to our feet and a light to our path? So when we teach God’s word to those who are in darkness, we feel good that we’re able to lead those who are blind into the light. We love being able to correct the foolish, as though they were little children, and feel superior to them, just because we were taught the law first. But the trouble is:
5 They’re unable to keep the law themselves
He lists a whole range of laws that they preach about, yet are unable to keep themselves. Now whether these are literal examples he’s giving or whether this is simply hyperbole isn’t clear. Perhaps he’s thinking of the teaching of Jesus in the sermon on the mount where he expands the meaning of the law to include not just the literal infringement but the mental, inward infringement as well.
In our first reading today we read how Jesus took the law against murder and expanded it to cover not just murder but anger and hatred, a desire to do away with a person even metaphorically speaking. He took the law on adultery and showed how even to think of someone else in a lustful way was tantamount to committing adultery with them. Elsewhere he condemns the Pharisees for the way they twist the law about the tithe in such a way that they can escape their responsibility of supporting the temple, and so in a sense are robbing the temple.
You see it isn’t enough that they know what God’s law is. They also have to keep it. And not just for the sake of their own righteousness, notice: v23: He says: "You that boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?"
Now this has relevance for us as well doesn’t it? One of the things we’ve talked about from time to time is the way people look at us as a church and judge Christianity and, therefore, in a sense, God, by what they see. If what they see is glorifying to God, then it promotes the gospel. People are attracted to God by the way we as a church behave. But when the way we behave is contrary to God’s will, it sets back the cause of the gospel. I think it was Ghandi who said that the greatest problem facing Christianity is Christians themselves. One of the most common excuses people use for not becoming Christians, or not getting involved in the church is the way Christians have behaved in the past. That’s one reason why something like the child abuse scandals involving church leaders that continue to erupt in the media are such a problem for us. Apart from the obvious moral, ethical and pastoral issues for the individuals involved, the wider effect on the credibility of Christianity is enormous. The fact that church leaders in the past have sought to cover up this sort of thing or pretend it hadn’t happened is as much a scandal for the church as the offences themselves.
You see, our integrity as individuals who profess Christ affects not only how people see us, but also how they see God and his church. That’s a fairly sobering thought isn’t it? Think about these words: They’re pretty terrible aren’t they: ’as it is written, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."’
He sums most of this up by reminding them that "Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision." In other words it’s no good boasting in having the law, or thinking that you’re better than someone else because you’ve been chosen by God and have been shown how he wants you to live, if in the end it makes no difference to how you live. It isn’t knowing the law that matters, but whether or not you do it. In fact there are those who don’t have the law, he says, who are better at keeping it than you are.
I guess we all know people who live outside the people of God, who are great at doing good works; who are the first to help when someone needs a hand; who seem to exemplify everything that the law requires of us. There’s a sense in which they’re closer to being a people that God desires than those in the Church who fail to obey God.
In fact there are those in the church today who take the attitude that as long as they go to church each week, and confess their sins it doesn’t matter how they live in between. But that’s to make the same mistake that the Jews made. This is the 6th mistake that Paul points out.
6 They misunderstand what is the essence of being a Jew
An inward state
He points out that being a Jew, that is, being one of God’s own people, has to do more with the inward state of a person, not some outward manifestation. "Real circumcision is a matter of the heart -- it is spiritual and not literal." So a person who is circumcised in the heart, rather than physically, receives praise from God rather than from others. Numbers of times God warned his people that while humans look at the outward manifestation of righteousness, or status, or power, God looks on the heart. It’s the righteous heart that God is looking for.
Sadly, he’s about to go on in the next section to remind them that in fact no-one is righteous. No-one has a heart that’s completely right with God. All have turned away from the truth at one point or another. No-one does what is right. They lie and slander. They kill and wage war. So when God looks on the heart it doesn’t, in the end, make a difference whether they’re Jews or Gentiles. All are in the same difficulty.
But then, if that’s the case, he asks, what benefit is there to being a Jew. What advantage do they have as the chosen people of God? Well, he says, they still have a great advantage. Being a Jew brings with it a great privilege.
A great privilege
In fact they enjoy two great privileges:
having God’s word
The Jews have been entrusted with the oracles of God. As I said earlier, no other nation, no other religion has been given the revelation of God that the Jews have been given. Everyone has the revelation of God as we find it in the creation, the wonder and complexity, and all that. But only the Jews have received God’s word directly. Only they have had revealed to them God’s redemptive purpose for the world.
You see, this is where Judaism and Christianity differ from all the other religions of the world. All the other religions have an awareness of the God of Creation. They have some sort of understanding of a transcendent God, of a creator God, even of the moral laws of the world. But only in Judaism and Christianity do we discover a God who redeems his people. Only here do we discover a God who takes the sins of his people and covers them over, deals with them in a such a way that they are removed forever. Only as we read the Scriptures that have been entrusted to God’s chosen people do we discover God’s plan to bring the whole creation back to him under the headship of Jesus Christ.
You see the Old Testament Scriptures that were entrusted to the care of the people of Israel contained the truth of God’s grace to be shown to all people through the Messiah, Jesus Christ. So the Jews had a great advantage. And that advantage included the privilege of being first to receive the grace of God.
of being first to receive the grace of God
You see the grace of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ is not a new thing. This is simply the final unravelling of the revelation of God’s grace that began with the promise to Abraham to make of him a great nation, a nation that would bring blessing to all the nations on earth.
From the very start God’s grace has been revealed in his dealings with the people of Israel. As we’ll see next week, the very fact that he forgave their sins when they offered sacrifices of mere animals, was a sign of his grace and mercy towards them. And if in the process they were unfaithful, it doesn’t in any way nullify his faithfulness. In fact it enhances it. The enormity of God’s grace is highlighted by the fact that even when the people of Israel rebelled against him time and time again, God remained faithful to his promise to Abraham. Even when his patience ran out and he judged their rebellion by sending them into exile, he remained true to his promise and in his graciousness, preserved a remnant who would eventually return to Jerusalem to pick up the pieces and begin again.
Not that God’s grace and faithfulness should be seen as any sort of excuse for those who sin. That’s perhaps one of those excuses that people try on. "It’s OK if I do something wrong, because it just lets God show how great his grace towards me is. It just shows up how great God’s love is."
In fact it seems that Paul’s opponents were accusing him of using just such an excuse. They were suggesting that he was pushing the grace of God because it let him get out of the requirement to keep the law. As though he was suggesting that the more we sin, the more God is able to show his grace and glory by forgiving us. Well, that’s a ridiculous and spurious argument and he’ll refute it fully when we get to ch6. For now suffice to say that those who think like that will get what they deserve.
Now before we finish, we need to move briefly from the immediate context of Romans, of a church made up of Jews and Gentiles, to our modern context. In most places the residue of Jewish culture and religion doesn’t really impact on the church any more. Our modern day church is almost entirely a Gentile church. Yet some of the attitudes, some of the mistakes that Paul highlights here are still being made by Christians today.
There are still those who take for granted their status as God’s chosen people. There are still those who are over confident in that status, who think that they can do nothing wrong just because God has called them. There are still those who have a sense of superiority because they’ve received the revelation of God; who look down on others because they’re ignorant of the things of God; who glory in being able to teach the ignorant. But the reality is that none of us is any more able to fulfill the law by ourselves than the Jews of Paul’s day were. We’re all totally dependent on the grace of God the same as people have always been. If we’re called to be the people of God, then we should treat that as a great privilege that carries with it an equally great responsibility - a responsibility to show by our lives the way God’s grace has impacted on us, and the humility that comes from knowing that it’s only by God’s grace that we can stand before God unashamed.
For now, we’ve come to the point in the letter where it’s clear that no-one is able to please God by themselves, no-one is any better than anyone else. All need God’s grace in equal measure. Next week we’ll discover just how God has brought about a righteousness that is available to all through faith in Jesus Christ.
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