“The End of the Law”
TEXT: Romans 10:1-4 – Preaching: Pastor Stephen
Magee –
REVIEW
1. Israel According to the Flesh: Paul started the ninth chapter of this letter with a statement of heartfelt sacrificial love for his countrymen, the Israelites according to the flesh. “… I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren…”
2. The Elect of God: The Apostle knows well that not all descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are part of the elect children of God. He also has made His case that there are Gentiles that are now children of God. The only hope for anyone, whether Jew or Gentile, is the credited righteousness of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. How does God’s saving plan work?
TODAY’S
PASSAGE:
Romans
10:1-4 Brethren, my heart's
desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. 2 For I bear them witness that
they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For they being ignorant of God's
righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not
submitted to the righteousness of God. 4
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who
believes.
The Way of
Salvation
I want you to consider an
important distinction this morning concerning the way of salvation. I want to distinguish between the theological
way of salvation, and the practical way of salvation.
In the first nine chapters
of this important letter, Paul has been largely focusing on the theological
way of salvation. How is it that men
are saved? Ultimately this all begins
with the glory of God and His determination to display that glory through both
mercy and justice. Because it all begins
with God, and is entirely empowered by God, men are saved according to God’s
secret will of election. Because God
will not extend mercy without also fully satisfying His righteous demand for
justice, salvation comes through the work of Christ alone – his perfect life
and his death on the cross.
God has further determined
that the benefits of the life and death of Christ would be granted to us only
by faith, since there is no way that anyone could merit the grace of God. Otherwise grace would not be grace. All of this happens by the work of God the
Holy Spirit. The beginnings of faith are
a gift from Him, and any growth in faith comes from His secret operations. All of this is the theological way of
salvation, and all of it gives glory to God, and takes away from us any ground
of boasting.
In
a sense we have answered our question.
How is it that men are saved?
Answer: By the electing love of God the Father, by the atoning work of
God the Son, by the effectual calling of God the Holy Spirit. Yet there is another practical sense in which
our question has not yet been adequately answered.
This morning we begin
chapter ten. Here Paul opens up clearly
to us the way of salvation in practice.
What do we mean by this? Here is
the practical question before us: In the life of any family, how is it that a
household comes to be Christian? This is
a very important question. We are not
speaking now about the foundational truths of the faith – the largely invisible
work of God’s eternal decree, the unseen spiritual reality of what Christ was
accomplishing on the cross, and the secret effectual calling of souls by the
Holy Spirit. We are now interested in
what can actually be “seen.”
Author and Pastor Stephen
Smallman introduced me several years ago to something that he called the “birth
line.” It is very practical tool that he
uses in talking with people about whether or not they are Christians – one
simple horizontal line with a beginning point on the left and an arrow on the
right. In the middle of that line is an
“X” which is meant to indicate the decisive moment of becoming spiritually
alive. In John 3 Jesus talks about
spiritual life using the illustration of physical birth. Smallman uses the birth line to talk people about a second
(spiritual) birth. With physical birth,
the decisive moment comes when the baby is removed from the womb. The baby was certainly alive long before
that, yet the young one “goes public” when the child cries. In terms of spiritual birth, the decisive
moment comes when you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that
Jesus is your risen Lord. You were being
drawn to that decisive moment by the effectual calling that God was doing by
His Spirit prior to that point, but it is in truly believing and publicly
professing that an invisible election becomes a more revealed salvation.
How does that experience
happen? How are we to pursue it
ourselves? How do we help others to
experience it? These are the questions
that Romans 10 answers with great clarity.
Zeal is Not
Enough
One
of the most important lessons that we learn in these opening four verses is
that zeal is not enough. People do not
experience true salvation based on zeal alone.
If strongly held beliefs were all that God required, then God would not
have told us that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ His
Son (John 14:6). If sincerity was all
that was necessary, then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, would not have
informed us that only through the name of Jesus can men be saved (Acts 4:12).
Paul
writes here about his countrymen. He testifies
that they have a zeal for God, but that is apparently not enough. The key thing that they are missing is
knowledge. In some sense their zeal is
an ignorant zeal. Remember, when Paul
writes on this topic, a man named Saul of Tarsus is biblical exhibit number one
of the syndrome he calls zeal without knowledge. There is hope for such a man, but not unless
he repents. Saul did repent of his
attempts to establish his own righteousness before God. He was laid low and believed in Christ for
all the righteousness that he could ever need or ever attain, and so he became
a new man with a new name and calling, Paul an Apostle. Unless you also give up on spiritual zeal
without knowledge, you too can not be saved.
How
did the specifics of this ignorant zeal work among many of the Jews of Paul’s
day? Verse 3 tells us first that
many were ignorant of God’s righteousness. Many today incorrectly assume that the
Pharisees had too high a view of God’s Law.
That is not the case. The problem
with all legalists is that they have too low a view of God’s Law, and therefore
they believe that they have attained to the righteousness of God through their
own obedience. The legalist needs to add
knowledge to his zeal. He needs to learn
God’s Law again from the source, and grow in his understanding of the
incomparable righteousness of God.
The
second problem follows from the first.
The person who is ignorant of God’s righteousness imagines that he is
doing well if he can live up to community standards or his own expectations. He seeks to establish his own
righteousness, and expects that as long as he is sincere, surely God will
accept him. “After all,” he thinks, “if
I can’t be saved, who can be? Surely God
cannot reject a man who has made the kind of efforts that I have made.” But God will reject all that suggest that the
death and resurrection of His only-begotten Son is a sideshow. This is what the man does who makes his own
works the ground of his “rightness” with God, instead of the righteousness of
Jesus Christ and the blood of the Messiah who died for us.
Again
the third problem follows from the first two. Those who are ignorant of the righteousness
of God will try to establish their own righteousness. Of necessity, those who are trying to make it
on their own in the courtroom of God have not submitted to the righteousness
of God. When God says that the just
will live by faith, and we insist that there is some other way through our own
obedience, then we have not submitted to the righteousness of God. Our first work of obedience is to bow before
the cross of Christ. Our hero of
obedience must be the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the “end” of the law for
righteousness to everyone who believes.
This word “end” means that Christ is the perfect fulfillment of the
law. He is also the purpose of the Law,
which drives us to Christ who supplies all righteousness. The man who sees this will not reestablish a
covenant of works by which he might win the approval of God.
Beware of
Pharisees Using Emotional Manipulation
Zeal without knowledge is
dangerous not only to those who practice it.
It can be strangely persuasive to observers. Remember that the Pharisees were powerful
evangelists, even though the news that they brought was a system of salvation
that was not true, good, or beautiful.
It was Christ who said that they would travel land and sea to make a
convert, “and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as
yourselves” (Matthew 23:15).
Be wary of those who would
use emotional manipulation to get you to pursue some false plan of
righteousness. There is no substitute
for the righteousness of God in Christ, and there is no substitute for growth
in the true knowledge of the faith. Do
not underestimate the benefits of knowledge, both for your own soul, and for
those in your charge. You need to be
both prayerful and knowledgeable.
Knowledge and godliness make a great team. Put your mind in gear, and use it to identify
and reject false gospels.
Loving
Persuasion
While emotional manipulation
is a dangerous enemy, you must not dismiss every emotional appeal. Notice here that the Apostle Paul makes
something of an emotional appeal as he openly mentions his heartfelt desires
and prayers to God for the Jews. He lays
his heart out before his readers as a man who knows God’s love. May you hear that heart of love as God’s word
for you this morning. Commit to a
growing knowledge of the truth. Turn
away from false gospels and turn to the true Lover of your soul.
Geneva Bible Notes:
Rom 10:4 (1) For Christ is the (2) end of the law for righteousness to (3) every one that believeth.
(1) The proof: the law itself points to Christ, that those who believe in him should be saved. Therefore the calling to salvation by the works of the law, is vain and foolish: but Christ is offered for salvation to every believer.
(2) The end of the law is to justify those that keep the law: but seeing that we do not observe the law through the fault of our flesh, we do not attain this end: but Christ heals this disease, for he fulfils the law for us.
(3) Not only to the Jews, but also to the Gentiles.
Let me suggest three ways of rightly understanding this rich verse:
1) Christ is the fulfillment of all that the Law demands concerning righteousness,
2) Christ is the purpose of the Law for righteousness
a) that we might flee to Him because of our disobedience to God and our obvious need for a Redeemer, and
b) that we might attain acceptance with God through law-keeping by our Substitute
3) Christ is the completion of the Law as a Covenant of Works (except as a rule of life) for all that believe, in that
a) we no longer stand condemned by the Law, and
b) we no longer need to pursue the Law as a system of approaching God, for
c) the
period of salvation history known as the time of the Law is now over through
the cross of Christ.