Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
In last month’s issue, I suggested that modern Christians sometimes have a “God who is too small.” This month, I want to argue that Christians also can have a vision of God’s purposes that is far too narrow.
Paul suggests this problem as he deals with the failure of Israel in Romans 9:30–10:4. In these verses, Paul attacks a perplexing problem. Salvation history has taken a strange turn. Gentiles, who never were told about God’s righteousness, are turning to Christ and receiving His righteousness (9:30). But Jews, who were given the details of God’s plan in the Old Testament, for the most part have not responded to Christ and therefore have missed out on His righteousness (9:31; 10:3). In 9:6–29, Paul suggests one important reason for this unexpected turn of events: God’s sovereign plan of election. But in 9:30–10:4, Paul sets forth another reason for this situation: Israel’s preoccupation with the law.
Paul mentions the law in two key verses: 9:31 and 10:4. In the former, the appearance of the word law is somewhat unexpected. In verse 30, Paul asserts that “Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith.” To preserve the parallelism, we would expect verse 31 to read, “But Israel, pursuing righteousness, has not attained to righteousness.” Instead, Paul says, “But Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness.” Paul makes clear that the “law” has something to do with Israel’s problem. But what is this “law”?
A few commentators think the word may mean “principle.” In this case, the word would have no more than a “formal” significance and would not really introduce a new idea into the verse. But Paul usually uses the word law (Greek, nomos) to refer to the law of Moses. And the context seems to confirm this reference. In Romans 10:5, for instance, the phrase “the righteousness which is of the law” seems to allude back to 9:31; and “law” in 10:5 is certainly the law of Moses.
The phrase “righteousness which is of the law” in 10:5 makes good sense: Paul refers to the attempt to base one’s right standing with God on doing the law. But what does the reverse of that phrase, “the law of righteousness,” in 9:31 mean? Paul probably introduces the word law because he wants to bring to the forefront the problem with Israel’s pursuit of righteousness. The Jews focused on the law as a means to righteousness. But because they failed to fulfill that law, they inevitably fell short of the righteousness they thought that it promised. Paul alludes to this problem in verse 32, where he scolds the Jews for seeking righteousness on the basis of works rather than through faith. Focused on the law, the Jews missed Christ and the righteousness He brings: they “stumbled at that stumbling stone” (v. 32b; cf. v. 33).
Paul makes a similar point about the failure of the Jews in 10:1–4. Again, he suggests that they were so preoccupied with the pursuit of “their own righteousness” that they missed “the righteousness of God” available in Christ (v. 3). And verse 4 explains more clearly just what mistake they made: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” The key word in this verse is end. The Greek word lying behind this translation (telos) often has the nuance of “goal”; we get our word telic from it. And the context suggests that the word here probably has this sense of “goal” as well as “end.” For the language of “pursuing” and “attaining” in 9:30–31 is race-course imagery. We are to picture an athlete running toward the finish line in order to be the first one across. Paul probably intends to picture the “end” in verse 4 as the finish line of the race. With the coming of Christ, Paul suggests, the era of the Mosaic law has come to both its goal and to its end. The whole Mosaic age pointed forward to Christ, its goal; and now that the goal has been reached, that age has come to an end.
The Jews, then, have made the mistake of focusing so much on the race that they have missed the fact that the finish line has been crossed. They are still myopically concentrating on observance of the law, failing to recognize that the ultimate purpose of that law, the revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ, has been attained.
We can learn an important lesson from the failure of the Jews at the time of Christ. For all their zeal (10:2), they missed the significance of what God was doing because they were looking inward rather than outward. Their concern with fulfilling the stipulations of the law—no bad thing in itself!—blinded them to the need to depend wholly upon God for the provision of their spiritual need. The “righteousness of God” (10:3) is a gift He gives to His people; it is not something a person can ever earn. And because it is a gift, it is faith, and faith alone, that can secure that righteousness. In faith we open our hands to receive the gift that God offers us. We look to God, not to ourselves. Yet, like the Jews of old, we are constantly tempted to develop a tunnel vision that focuses on our own obedience and neglects the grace and gifts of God. Our very zeal to lead a life pleasing to God can turn into “moralism,” focusing upon rules and right behavior so much that we forget the only possible basis for our hope of glory, the grace God constantly offers us through the ministry of His Son.
May our zeal to do God’s will always be accompanied by the knowledge that only God’s grace in Christ can enable us to stand before Him on the last day.