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Romans, Part 30

(NOTE: The essay this week goes back to chapter 10. We will continue with chapter 12 in the next essay, but I have been thinking much about the concept presented in this paper, and I feel it is important enough to stress before we go on. We pay lip service to God's grace, but then we return to dependence upon our correct obedience for our justification, just as the Jews did. That is the point Paul is making in chapter 10, and the difference is really important. I hope you will read with care the following, and pardon me for interrupting our sequence to go back and reemphasize this point. Not my perfect obedience but my faith is what God wants. It was incorporated in the first commandment, it was the problem in Eden, it was what justified sinners like Abraham and David, it is the central doctrine of the New Testament, and there has never been a time when it needed to be stressed more than in our Godless world today.)

You Don't Achieve It, You Accept It

I should have taken more time to explore this when I was writing the essay on chapter 10, but I have thought much about it since then, and I feel compelled to go back for a moment to stress what I feel is the essence of what Paul is saying. I do this because I feel it is so applicable to our concept of what God really wants of us, and because I feel it has been misunderstood more often than not.

Christian teachers are so prone to criticize the Jews to whom Paul refers, because they depended on the Law of Moses, and rejected Jesus Christ. They are saying the Jews were accepting the Law of Moses instead of the law of Christ. However, a careful examination of the facts might cast a different light on the situation; a light that also could be shining on us, just as it did on them.

When Paul said they "went about to establish their own righteousness and did not submit themselves to the righteousness of God", let us look at what they were really doing. Establishing their own righteousness did not mean they had erected a new code of conduct, or were changing the moral and religious rules of God. They were strictly following His law. No one could have more assiduously kept the rules of the Law than they did. It was not a new and strange form of righteousness that they were substituting. 

The problem was that they were depending upon their obedience to make them righteous. Their own righteousness was not something they invented. It was something they depended upon...their own goodness...their own correct behavior...their own piety, to make them acceptable and righteous. Paul is saying that that won't work. We can't be obedient enough, or pious enough, or good enough to be righteous. Therefore, we have to depend on God to give us righteousness, and that He did, when He gave us Jesus Christ. Believing and accepting Him, instead of depending on our own obedience to make us righteous, is what Paul is talking about, and it applies to those who call themselves Christians just as much as it did to those who called themselves Jews.

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I have heard many a harsh sermon on obedience. I have witnessed many religious debates over the correct rules to be followed, and the way they should be obeyed. If an individual obeys a different interpretation of the rules from what I believe, that does not mean he is substituting his righteousness for the correct righteousness. If both of us are depending on our correct interpretation and obedience for our justification, then we are both substituting our righteousness for the righteousness of God, no matter which one has the correct interpretation.

Finally. It is not how strictly and correctly you obey. It is upon what do you depend. Your goodness won't do it. His righteousness, offered through Jesus Christ, will, and nothing else will. 

I am not an antinomian. I do not believe we have no law, nor that it is unimportant how we interpret the law and how we obey it. But there are too many people who pride themselves on having the right baptism, being in the right church, interpreting all the scriptures correctly, and having the truth, but who ignore the place of Jesus Christ in their daily lives, and in their relationship to other people. I should never be proud of my religious correctness, but humbled by my inability to live up to His sacrifice. The truly penitent follower of Christ never sits in judgment on another's faith, lest his own failures mock his efforts. All of your religious acts may be correct, but if you don't accept Christ as the Lord of your life, and strive to imitate Him, then you are substituting your own righteousness for the righteousness of God, and it will fail. The Jews were not the only ones who failed at this point.

Substituting my righteousness is not preaching a different gospel. It is depending on my keeping His laws well enough to be righteous, instead of accepting His grace in the free gift of His Son, and depending on that for my justification. It may seem a fine line of difference, but the difference is eternal! "Not of yourselves, it is the gift of God...lest any man should boast." That's where your faith must rest, and "The just shall live by faith."

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