Sermon Tone Analysis

Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness (verse 3).

God did not accept the Israelites because they put their faith in their own law-keeping, and not in the Saviour.

But Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes (verse 4).

The law which itself reveals the pattern of good works should drive us to Christ.

Christ is the point of the law; Christ is the goal of the law; Christ is the meaning of the law.

So if you try to follow and obey the law, but avoid Christ, you have missed the whole point of the law.

Paul further elaborates in verses 5–7: Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law: “The man who does these things will live by them.”

But the righteousness that is by faith says: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’

” (that is, to bring Christ down), “or ‘Who will descend into the deep?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).

This is difficult to understand.

I am not sure exactly what Paul means here, but there was a tradition among the Pharisees that if any single Pharisee kept all the Jewish laws perfectly for one day, that man’s righteousness would be so pure that it would induce God to send the Messiah.

The idea was that if a person was good enough he could have the merit to climb right up to heaven and bring the Messiah down, or if the Messiah had gone into hell, he could bring him back up.

But who has that kind of righteousness, that kind of merit?

We can’t climb up into heaven and bring the Saviour down from heaven.

The whole point is that only God can send a Saviour from heaven, and only God can bring one back from the dead.

Only God can save you and that is where your faith must be.

6 But the righteousness which has its root in faith speaks thus: ‘Do not say in your heart, Who shall ascend into heaven?’

(that is, to bring Christ down).

‘Bringing Christ down from heaven’ means to precipitate the incarnation.

This has already taken place; the Messiah has appeared, and it is therefore impossible to hasten his coming (as some devout Jews thought to do) by perfect obedience to the law and penitence for its transgression.

The divine act of redemption (3:24) has already been performed, not as a reward for legal righteousness but as an act of sheer grace.

7 It is equally wrong to say, ‘Who shall descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).

Paul’s words here differ from all known forms of the text of Deut.

30:13 (RV: Who shall go over the sea for us?).

His freedom suggests that he is not using his quotation as a rigid proof of what he asserts, but as a rhetorical form.

The variation in the quotation was no doubt suggested by the interpretation of the previous clause.

The counterpart of bringing Christ down from heaven is not crossing the sea, but bringing Christ up from the underworld (the abode of the dead).

This also is sheer impossibility, since the resurrection has already happened and Christ has ascended into heaven.

This means that the eschatological conditions have been realized; the Age to Come has dawned; the Gospel has come into being through the manifestation of God’s righteousness (1:17; 3:21).

9 The word of faith is to this effect, namely, that if ‘with your mouth’ you confess Jesus as Lord, and if ‘with your heart’ you believe that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.

The formulation of this verse is due to Deut.

30:14 (in thy mouth and in thy heart).

No distinction is to be drawn between the confession and the faith; the confession is believed and the faith confessed.

The Old Testament passage also suggests (though it certainly did not create) the content of faith—Christ the heavenly Lord, Christ crucified and risen.

The word ‘confess’ (ὁμολογεῖν) has several meanings in New Testament Greek, as in modern English.

Here evidently it means to ‘declare’, ‘profess’, ‘avow’, ‘proclaim’.

For the double accusative (Jesus as Lord) compare John 9:22; for similar use of the verb see, for example, 1 John 4:2, 15; for the cognate noun, Heb.

3:1; 4:14; 10:23; 1 Tim.

6:12.

The verb suggests that Paul may be using a recognized formula, and this is confirmed by 1 Cor.

12:3.

The form of the sentence, ‘If thou shalt confess … and believe … thou shalt be saved’ suggests that the formula may be a baptismal confession.

The profession ‘Jesus is Lord’ is undoubtedly one of the oldest expressions of Christian belief.

It has been suggested that it arose in time of persecution as the Christian reply to the insistence of the state religion that ‘Caesar is Lord’,2 but this seems improbable.

(i) The Aramaic-speaking Church seems to have called Jesus Marana, our Lord (1 Cor.

16:22; Didache, x. 6; cf.

Rev. 22:20).

At first, during the life of Jesus, this may well have meant no more than ‘Teacher’; but as soon as Christians, after the resurrection, said, ‘Marana tha’ (Our Lord, come), begging their absent Mar to return from heaven, they were addressing not a Rabbi but a heavenly being.

(ii) In the non-Jewish world, the word ‘Christ’ (χριστός) was unintelligible, and speedily became (as it already is in the Pauline epistles) scarcely more than a proper name.

The notion of divine kingship (more or less bound up with Messiahship) was now expressed by Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles alike by the term Lord (κύριος).

(iii) Lord (κύριος) was the natural correlative term for men who knew themselves to be slaves (δοῦλοι); compare 1:1 and the note.

Along with the first article, Jesus is Lord, goes the second, God raised him from the dead.

This provides a very important qualification, or corrective.

In the Hellenistic world it was very easy for the figure of Jesus, as the divine Lord and Saviour, to become assimilated to the ‘gods many and lords many’ (1 Cor.

8:5 f.—Paul associates Christ with even as he distinguishes him from these lords) which peopled that world; he might well seem no more than another ‘divine man’, the centre of yet another oriental-Hellenistic cult.

By insisting upon this second clause, Paul does two things.

(i) He emphasizes again the true Christian subordinationism (see pp. 21 f.).

Christ is not an independent demigod, but one who was what he was only in virtue of his ordination by and unbroken union with the Father.

His ministry, and his death, had their effect only through the seal laid upon them when God raised him from the dead.

The Christian faith therefore is not one cult among many, nor is Christ one ‘lord’ among many; he is, and the Church accordingly rests upon, the one unique act and self-revelation of God.

(ii) At the same time, Paul reasserts the primitive Christian eschatology.

The significance of Jesus is that in him God began to put into effect the Age to Come.

Jesus is confessed and believed as one who stands both within and outside history; not primarily as a teacher (Paul shows no interest in him in this role) but as the source of supernatural life.

Hence he adds: You shall be saved.

For Paul’s conception of salvation see pp. 28 f., 100; as usual, the verb ‘to save’ is used in the future tense.

Paul means that believers, already justified, will be saved at the last day; though, of course, he does not deny that preliminary effects of salvation are already apparent through the work of the Holy Spirit.

10–11 The shape of v. 10, like that of v. 9, is determined by Deut.

30:14; the distinction between faith and its effect, and confession and its effect, is rhetorical only.

For faith works in the heart to produce righteousness, and confession in the mouth to produce salvation.

In this neat rhetorical summary of vv.

6–9, Paul uses some of his key-terms (faith, righteousness, salvation), and works back to the theme, central to his argument in this chapter, that righteousness is by faith only, so that the Jews who sought it by means of the law were doomed to failure and rejection.

This is supported by another quotation: For Scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame’.

The passage is taken from Isa. 28:16, already used at 9:33; here Paul has slightly modified it (by adding πᾶς—‘all’—in Greek) so as to make it more universal in scope.

He does this perhaps under the influence of the words he is about to quote in v. 13, but also because his argument requires it.

In the back of his mind, the dominant question is still, Why have the Jews been rejected?

And a major part of the answer to this question is (see ch. 11), In order that the Gospel may be preached to all, Gentiles as well as Jews.

Paul proceeds to emphasize this.