Studying His Word and His Works

Listen to the study here: Romans 10:16-21

Read here: Romans 10

Review

• Calvin on the theme of Romans: “Man’s only righteousness is the mercy of God in Christ, when it is offered by the Gospel and received by faith.” Romans 1:17 and elsewhere.
• IMPORTANT: Paul wrote the letter to the saints (1:7), and the letter is about the gospel, which is a reminder we need to preach the gospel to ourselves daily. 
• Luther: Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner! Romans 3:23-25
• In Ch. 1-3 Paul shows us our unrighteousness, and God’s wrath against that, and then switches to Christ’s righteousness as our covering, the propitiation of our sins (Romans 3:25) as the final sacrifice for sin, fulfilling the promise to Abraham, who had faith before any works
• Faith being “counted” or “credited to our account” as righteousness is mentioned 11 times in Chapter 4! If “none are righteous” as Paul wrote in Romans 3:10, then this saving faith must be a gift from God.
• Ch. 5, We now have peace with God, access to God, and hope, because of what Christ did for us while we were weak(v. 6), sinners (v. 8), and enemies (v. 10). Christ did this “at the right time,” (v. 6), connecting Christ’s work on the cross and God’s plan of redemption to real history (not just a myth or legend).
  • Atonement(5:6-11): Jesus satisfying God’s wrath for us through His sacrificial death on the cross.
• Ch. 5 and 6 describe federalism, this idea of one man making a difference, for righteousness (Jesus) or wickedness (Adam). 
• Ch 6 ended with lots of words pointing to the new road we are now on with Christ, the sanctification road.
  • Service is the key word, “slaves” used 8 times
  • “Present yourselves”(5), “Leads to”(5)
• Sproul: “our regeneration, our rebirth was the work of one Person, God. It was not a joint venture; but from the moment we take our first breath of regenerated spiritual life, it  becomes a joint effort.” the work of one Person is what salvation is about. The joint venture is what sanctification is about. Ch.6 ends and we continue into Ch.7 describing what this “sanctification road” looks like to walk down. We were on the sin road that leads to death, but now we are on the grace road that leads to eternal life.
• Chapter 8 is describing the assurance we have as Christians in salvation. Deus pro nobis – God for us. It is a reminder of God’s sovereignty over our salvation, and God’s infinite wisdom, in the creation, fall, redemption plan he has for not just us, but the whole world. Ultimately, God, not us, foreknows, predestines, calls, justifies and glorifies. There are many verses (Romans 2:4, John 3:16, etc) that point to God’s patience with everyone, His love for everyone, that none should perish (2 Peter 3:9), so I believe there is some free will in there somewhere, perhaps an ability to answer the call, or not. But, even if we answer the call, it is God who initiated. Even if we are crying out for God, “feeling our way to Him” like Acts 17:27 says, we are only doing this because He has already called. We are MORE THAN CONQUERORS, not on our own of course, but “through Him who loved us” from before time began. 
• Chapter 9 continues on the point of election, which, if you think about it, Paul has been discussing since Romans 1:1 when he said he was “set apart”. Paul continues to hammer the point that it is God’s free will, not ours, that matters most. It’s good to keep in mind the complexity of God, as he is not just electing, but he is doing a bunch of things simultaneously and eternally. He is electing, foreknowing, predestining, calling, justifying, glorifying, answering prayer, “giving them over to a debased mind” (Romans 1:28-32) while also being kind as a means to lead people to repentance (Romans 2:4), showing mercy to some and hardening others (9:18). It’s like God is working on an eternal and therefore infinite scale, but also an instantaneous and therefore infinitesimal scale. Pastor John Macarthur, who went home to Jesus recently, described this as a parallelism, God’s sovereign election running alongside the “whoever believes in Him will have eternal life” of John 3:16. It is Euler’s “every instant,” of God initiating, so the saved are always indebted to Him. And it’s also Paul’s “unceasing anguish” for the lost in 9:2, something we should ask God to give us, too. And something that clearly shows that God predestines us to a team, His team, and we are working with Him to save sinners. He’s just team captain and MVP. He gets all the glory!
  • Also remember that Paul references almost 50 OT verses in Chapter 9 alone. He is retelling Israel’s story in many places to serve as a reminder of God’s sovereign will over nations, but also individuals like Pharoah, Moses, Jacob and Esau, etc. Some want to say election is only about nations, or only individuals, but this is another both/and. 

Intro

• Key words: This passage, like the previous v. 5-15, is built around questions (who(4), did(3), ask(3)), personal references(I(7, 5 refer to God), he(2), they(2)), and responses centered on obedience (not(6), have(6), heard/hearing(4), says(3)). The end of the passage transitions to what God has done and will do. 
• In v. 5-15, we continued the discussion of righteousness from Christ alone. No self-righteous works are involved in our salvation. We discussed the very deep, relational connection God has with his people, with using imperfect humans to get the gospel message out. It would be so easy for God to bypass people, which includes preachers, authors of the different bible translations, etc., and speak directly from the heavens to us, but He chose to use people and to complement their feet, haha. 
• Verse 16
  • We are switching from “beautiful feet” spreading the gospel through preaching to the reality that not all obey it. Paul began Romans by proclaiming he is not ashamed of the gospel, and that it is the power of God to salvation (Romans 1:15-16). Sproul also points out that Paul describes preaching in a humble way, describing in 1 Cor 1:21 that God uses the “foolishness of preaching” as His method to save the world. This is actually really incredible, that God, in all His power, chose to use imperfect humans as his major method to share the gospel.
  • There is something deeply relational in this(I keep saying that). God didn’t just skip over humans, He actively uses them to accomplish his purposes of election. 
  • It might be good to stop for a minute and think about this election thing some more.
    • Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Meaning, men take chances, but God is actively involved in the outcome. We can see liberty, freedom to take a chance, not knowing the outcome, but God orchestrates the outcome. This verse, and the next, are describing some of what predestination means.
    • Proverbs 16:9, “The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Again, free will of man in planning, God orchestrating the outcome, connected to man, deeply related and not just sitting off spectating. Active, not passive. Which is also how we should interact relationally with friends and family and future kids and grandkids.
    • 2 Peter 1:3-11, if we are called and elected, our response should pattern this. Truly saved have some form of diligence to confirm their calling and election, trusting He has “called us to his own glory and excellence.” 
    • 1 John 4:19, why do we love God? Because God first loved us.
    • Matthew 22:14, many are called, few are chosen.
    • John 6:35-38, all that the Father gives me will come to me, whoever comes to me will never be cast out.
    • Think about these, and the following verses as we read how God dealt with Israel. Was he actively involved and choosing, or passive and far off?
  • Sproul: Paul is saying in Verse 16 that preaching the word is a necessary condition for faith, but it is not a sufficient condition. In other words, you can’t have faith without preaching, but you can also have unbelief with it. But why is that? Why is there always some unbelief? Is that coming from God’s sovereign election or man’s free will?
  • Verse 16 ends with a quote from Isaiah 53:1. Isaiah knew not everyone would believe, and that the gospel needed repeated proclamation. Maybe you have heard “preach the gospel to yourself daily,” and I think that is true! We need to hear that over and over. But how did Isaiah know Jesus would bear the sin of “many”, not “all?” Election, that’s why, God initiating, humans responding.  God deeply connecting and actively involved in the lives of human preachers of the gospel to send out the good news. Using us in spite of our failures, not because of our perfection.
  • But why is there a connection between preaching the gospel and belief? Why does it seem like a historical ebb and flow, with better preaching of the Word bringing about more Christians and a broader influence on culture, while less preaching brings more unbelief, why does it seem to ebb and flow like that? If election was purely robotic and deterministic, it seems like the number of new believers would be a fixed annual percentage. But it’s not like that. Yet, we just read a bunch of verses, including in Romans, that we are elected, adopted, chosen, etc. Why then, is election in any way related to people preaching?  I think there is some mystery to election – okay, A LOT of mystery, haha – , and we need to be okay with that. And simply obey, serve Christ and preach the Word like he asked. Deeply trusting His sovereign plan involves using believers in the election process.
  • We don’t know with certainty who is chosen, but we do know we are supposed to share the gospel. And, on top of all this, there is a spiritual battle. Satan and demons are real, and we need to put on the Eph. 6 full armor of God and wage spiritual warfare daily. God has not called us into a passive and peaceful life! What does Jesus say? In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, He has overcome it (John 16:33). So, if He is in us, we’re good! It is a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be beautiful feet, to be a doulos of Christ and to have a personal and intimate  and hierarchical relationship with the Creator of the Universe.
• Verses 17-19, describe how faith comes through hearing, further emphasizing the need for people to preach the gospel. This is coupled with the fact that not all who hear it, believe it.
  • Verse 17, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ(some translations say by the word of God). So, faith comes through hearing, but hearing what? The Gospel. In other words, faith comes through the gospel. Of course Paul is not saying deaf people can’t be saved. In context with the rest of the chapter, Paul is saying that faith comes through the gospel message, and God uses people to share the gospel.
    • Another way to look at this is a syllogism. Euler’s Letters to a German Princess lists many types of syllogisms. Imagine three nested circles. Circle A inside of B, inside of C. Stay with me here! If we have that order of nested circles, then we can say “Every A is B: But Every B is C: Therefore some C is A.”
    • Connect this syllogism to these verses. If faith then hearing: If hearing then the gospel: If faith then the gospel. A is saving faith, B is hearing, C is the Word. So, the Word ( C) goes out, people hear it (B), some of those people are saved (A). Paul is saying you can’t go directly from A to C, and that this word will fall on deaf ears and minds and hard hearts, which are other circles we could draw inside of B and C. 
  • Paul is focusing on Jewish people here, connecting this all the way back to Deuteronomy 32:21.
    • The “jealousy” Paul refers to in verse 19 is brought about by God’s sovereign decree. God says to the Jews that He will make you jealous. This theme of a jealous Israel will continue into Romans 11.
      • Imagine being Jewish at this time in history. Being a Jew, who like Paul was back when he was Saul, had a “zeal, but not according to knowledge”(10:2). I watched a sermon by Brett Meador of Athey Creek Church, and while preaching through Romans, he would put up on the screen all 600+ Jewish laws that they prided themselves in trying to keep. Some Jews would memorize ALL these laws! Imagine these Jews, upon knowing that NONE OF THAT MATTERED, that Christ fulfilled the law, was the “end of the law”(10:4), and all you had to do now was repent and believe, and that’s it! All that self-righteous striving – which they should have already known was not the point, faith was the point – was meaningless. No wonder they were jealous, watching the Gentiles, basically to them a bunch of disorganized underdogs, come out of nowhere to claim victory in Christ alone!
      • We really need to see this as such a great honor, such an incredible privilege, to preach the good news of the gospel. It is so simple, so much freedom in knowing there is NOTHING we can do. No Mormon temple ritual, no new age crystal in the right place in our room, no meditative contemplations and other works that book authors say you have to add to the gospel. Going back to what Sproul said: “Our rebirth, our regeneration, was the work of one Person, God. It was not a joint venture.” The fact that we can repent and believe is not us, it’s because of the Holy Spirit already at work in us. That is our response to what Christ has already done in us.
        • Pray for today’s Jewish people, that they would see the futility in their strivings to keep the law, and that the jealousy they harbor in their hearts is because God is putting that situation in them to bring them to repentance.
  • Paul in verse 18 also references Psalm 19:4, and how this “word of faith”(10:8) had gone outside the borders of Israel to the Gentile community (the ends of the world), which connects back to how righteousness is based on faith, not works.
  • Keeping things in context, Sproul connects back to verse 13 here and considers the “everyone” described there. In Calvinism, there are 5 points, called TULIP, and the L stands for limited atonement, that Jesus doesn’t save everybody. It seems like Paul is making a universal offer here, with “everyone”. But it’s everyone who calls on Jesus. So, we might say, at the very least, atonement is limited to believers. And who are the believers? The elect. Think about the election verses we read earlier. Sproul writes: “The Son knew that there would be a people saved as a result of His sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit knew all those to whom He would apply that work of the son for salvation.”
    • Atonement is limited to believers. That is what the Bible teaches. We don’t need to say we are “of Calvin” to believe this, we just have to read the Bible. Look at the list of election verses we read earlier. Look at what Paul is saying right here in these verses, that they heard but did not obey. If “everyone” meant every single person, then John 3:16 would say “For God so loved the world, that He sent His son to save everyone.” No, the “everyone” and “whoever” is not just random, it is always connected to believers, and the believers are the elect. 
    • This is not “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” as you might hear in some churches. No, salvation is for everyone “who believes.” 
    • “God loves everyone” in a Matthew 5:45 sense, that the same sun rises and the same rain falls on the righteous and wicked. But even there, note how Jesus breaks people into two groups, basically the elect and non-elect. Sproul calls God’s universal love “His love of beneficence,” and the love He gives the redeemed is “His love of complacency.” Common grace=beneficence, while God’s complacent love is His delight and pleasure in the redeemed. So this is not “complacency” as we might think of it today, like lazy and indifferent. God’s complacent love is expressing his delight and pleasure in His son. Think of what God said when Jesus was baptized(Matthew 3:17), he said He was pleased in Jesus. And not just pleased, but “well pleased.” In believers, God sees Jesus. Christ’s righteousness covers our sin so God does not see us, but sees his Son. And therefore has this complacent love for us. Not because of what we did, but what Christ did for us, and we don’t face His wrath. This is incredible grace!
    • The conclusion here is that we should get the gospel out to everyone, knowing the benefits are offered only to believers. Some will respond, others will never respond, and a third group will respond later. This is also the pattern we see in the Bible, in Acts and elsewhere.
• Verse 20
  • Found by those who did not seek Me. Think about Paul himself, on the road to Damascus, he wasn’t seeking Jesus, he was too busy overseeing the murder of His believers. Think about 1 John 4:19, FIRST God loved us. We respond in faith because He has already done a work in us.
  • Remember Romans 3:10-11? None righteous, no one seeks after Him. Paul is restating what he has already said 7 chapters ago. In fact, 3:10-11 are also an OT reference, Psalm 53:1-3. Paul is not saying something new here, he is describing the human condition. I don’t think we can ever completely understand the human condition, but we can see it MUCH MORE clearly as Christians. Makes sense that we would, with the Creator of the universe in us now! And because Christians can see more clearly, we need to realize the honor and privilege and responsibility that we have. 
  • Sproul also mentions how verse 20 greatly contradicts “seeker friendly” churches. Not that we shouldn’t have programs and things, but “biblical preaching is the only thing a church actually needs.”
    • In other words, if all a church did on Sunday was read from the Bible and discuss it then that is all we need.
    • Paul was in a really bad prison – put there for preaching the Word – when he wrote his last letter to Timothy. And what did he tell Timothy in 2 Tim 4:1-2? Preach the Word! He told Timothy to preach the Word, while in prison for preaching the Word. Amazing. Oh, and be ready to preach the Word in and out of season, so always in other words.
• Verse 21
  • As we move into Chapter 11, it is good to review the special place Israel has had in history. Paul said in Romans 1:16 that the gospel was for “the Jew first.” Jesus was a Jew. So was Paul. And while describing that outward signs like circumcision (or baptism) don’t save, Paul reminds that the chief advantage, the number one thing the Jews had over other nations, was they had the Scripture. They had been entrusted with “the oracles of God.” And just because some were unfaithful, just because many were often a disobedient and contrary people, that doesn’t nullify Scripture. It actually reminds us that Truth is from God, not men. Remember Romans 3:4? “Let God be true though every one were a liar.”
  • Sproul concludes Chapter 10 by reminding there is a divine agreement within the Godhead, the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit. What do they agree on? The Word. 
  • Sproul writes: “Many want to be led by the Spirit without the Word.” This is still very true, and will always be very true. There’s this part of our sin nature that wants anything but God. One trend I have heard is SBNR, spiritual but not religious. But, whose spirit? There are lots of self-help books out there about spirituality, one being Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer. While it has some good stuff, one goal is to introduce readers to “spiritual formation,” using a mix of “ancient practices” connected to buddhism and mysticism, and the Bible. But this is just typical human sin nature in my opinion, us humans always seeking for Jesus + other stuff=salvation
  • But it is never really about “my” spiritual formation anyways, right? Christianity is about the Holy Spirit in us now, about sanctification. What did Romans 6 teach? As Christians we are slaves to righteousness. And what is righteousness? It is Christ. We are slaves to Christ, slaves to the Father, slaves to the Holy Spirit in us. Sanctification is about focusing less and less on “our” spiritual formation, and more and more on following Christ. The end is not salvation, as Comer teaches. The beginning is. We are born again, redeemed, elected, called. Just because we don’t know with 100% certainty we are saved, doesn’t mean God doesn’t know either. He does know, that is what all the election stuff in the Bible is about. It makes no sense for Jesus to say “you must be born again” in John 3 or for Paul to talk about walking in “newness of life” in 6:4 if salvation is the end goal instead of the starting point. No, salvation in Christ starts it, and sanctification is the road we walk to glory.
  • Possibly one way false teachings like this “salvation at the end” happen is because our sin nature constantly wants to flip John 3:30 into “I must increase, He must decrease.” It’s the same story since the Garden, since before sin had even cursed us. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be like Christ. Disobedience is the problem. Reject the false idea that “me and my brain and the brains of other deep-thinking scholars must increase.” That, “surely, God is not ‘that’ sovereign. Surely His grace is not ‘that’ sufficient (Isaiah 43:2, 2 Cor 12:9). Surely Jesus meant there is a set of rules we must follow in order to be saved, which is what He meant by ‘the way.’ Surely Paul is completely wrong about salvation by faith, not works. And if I can show that, then surely Paul is also wrong about the mean stuff about gay people in Romans 1 and 2, etc., etc.”
    • Sadly, MLK Jr, as well as other progressive and so-called Christians, denied the resurrection, which totally contradicts Romans 6:9, “Christ, being raised from the dead”, and many other verses. If MLK Jr and others could be deceived into rejecting a clear biblical teaching, then I can see how Comer et al could say “the way Jesus was referring to was to follow these rules I am going to show you in my book in order to get to salvation. You can’t be saved unless you buy my book and follow the steps it has.” Yikes!
  • Sproul writes: “Many want to be led by the Spirit without the Word, but they cannot distinguish between the leading of God and indigestion, because they have nothing concrete against which to check their inclinations and hunches.”
    • Remember Romans 10:17, faith comes through the Word. 
    • Sproul asks: “Does the Spirit of God take this Word and bother you with it?”  Yes? No? If no, then you definitely need to spend more time in the Word. Where is the power of God? Romans 1:16, Paul says the power of God is in the gospel, in the Word. The power, Sproul writes, “is not in our programs, buildings, or parking lots. It is in the Word.”
      • And, not that programs and buildings etc. don’t matter, preaching the Word is what matters MOST.
• Up next, Romans 11:1-10