Unto Righteousness

It is those who believe the gospel and confess the Lord Jesus Christ who are saved. So Paul taught us in the passage we examined yesterday, Romans 10:8–9. In today’s verse, he reiterates and expands this teaching. In essence, Paul is telling us what it means to be a Christian. Interestingly, he now reverses the order of the two activities, placing heart belief before mouth confession, which seems to be the more logical order. In all likelihood, Paul simply mentioned the mouth before the heart in verse 9 because that was the order Moses used in Deuteronomy 30:14, which Paul quoted in verse 8.

First, Paul says, “With the heart one believes unto righteousness.” We usually think of the mind as the part of our nature that handles “believing,” while the heart deals with emotions. But when Paul speaks of “believing” here, he is speaking of faith. Of course, the mind plays a role in faith: We must understand the facts of the gospel message before we can act on them. But knowledge alone is not true biblical faith—it must provoke a heart response. Only then does the will respond with a commitment, the act of trusting Christ as Savior. The presence of such full-orbed faith, as we already have seen in Romans, results in justification, a divine declaration that we are righteous in God’s eyes. Thus, when Paul says we believe “unto righteousness,” he is telling us that justification is the result of faith. Second, Paul says, “with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” As we saw yesterday, “confessing” Jesus means acknowledging His Lordship openly. And that manifests itself in all sorts of ways, as Dr. James M. Boice notes. We confess Christ as we worship Him, as we identify with God’s people, as we spread the good news, and in other ways. Simply put, we are to acknowledge that He has become our Master (Rom. 6:18–22), having delivered us from slavery to sin. Such confession indicates the presence of true faith.

Boice notes that this verse is not an either-or proposition. Rather, both faith and confession are essential. He writes: “When Paul says we must believe with our hearts and confess with our mouths, he is saying that we must do both and that it is the presence of both together—faith leading to confession and confession proving the reality of faith—that leads to ‘righteousness’ and ‘salvation.’ ”