Sermon Tone Analysis

Opening Remarks

Good morning!

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who showed up for our first community garden meeting; everything went really well.

I am really excited to see how God is going to use this to display the love of Christ

I emailed out the notes and video of this meeting for those who want to review it

And I want to remind everyone that this Friday @ 1:30 is the meeting to plan for repainting the halls

Your reading assignments for next week: Romans 3:1-8

Alright, we have so much to get to today, so let’s jump right in!

Introduction

Now that Paul has critiqued the Gentile conception of righteousness, his next task is to refute the Jewish conception of righteousness through the law outside of Christ.

And what is quite striking about this argument is that a full 1/3rd of Paul’s argument is composed of quotations from the Old Testament, which both suggests that there were Jewish Christians in Paul’s audience, and that Paul believes his view of righteousness through Christ is explicitly Biblical!

Before we get into our exegesis, I want to ask for your patience as I take a moment to explain why I preach the way I do.

I believe this is worth our time because Biblical preaching is being dismissed in our age.

A lot of preachers have gotten into the habit of preaching surface-level sermons.

They take a snippet of the text and then spend their time thinking up clever stories and anecdotes to catch your attention and make you come away feeling good and happy.

I’ve been told by others to dumb my sermons; explaining the structure of the text, how arguments progress, and the context of the text is too boring.

“Regular people”, they say, “don’t care about all that.”

But I believe that kind of preaching is misguided, and is the recipe for cultivating “itching ears”.

So why do I preach this way?

Why explain the grammar, structure, and things like this?

I do this because I want you to be able to test my teaching.

To be convinced that what I am preaching is true.

And if true, to be confident enough in God’s word that you will change your beliefs and your life if necessary to live by faith in the things that you hear!

And I know this is a very tall order.

So I preach this way to accurately explain the meaning of God’s word to you in order to “bring about the obedience of faith”!

So I thank you for bearing with my little detour here.

But sometimes I really do think it is necessary to defend the need for Biblical preaching in our age.

Now let’s get into our lesson.

Exegesis

Today’s lesson brings us to Paul’s second argument, which progresses in one movement from 2:17-3:20.

He advances his point that “the gospel reveals the righteousness of God” by arguing that legal-righteousness is insufficient to establish our righteousness before God; we need something more!

To make this argument, Paul uses diatribal rhetoric.

You may remember this refers to dialogue with theoretical interlocutors (or opponents).

The purpose of this kind of rhetorical argument is to show the weakness of the opposition’s view in contrast to your own.

Paul wants to demonstrate the superiority of the righteousness that comes by faith.

For this reason, Paul has carefully chosen specific texts from the Old Testament to engage his Jewish interlocutors: Romans 2:24; 3:4, 10-18.

We see the inferiority of legal-righteousness: human hypocrisy maligns the good we profess by the evil we practice.

We see that God is justified in judging human sin:

One of Paul’s chief points throughout Romans is to defend the righteousness of God

So God is justified in condemning the Jews because they practiced the sins they denounced

And so Paul establishes our universal corruption:

All humanity has together become corrupt

We all practice the evils we denounce

Therefore, God is righteous in his judgment of the human race.

All of these texts are carefully designed to advance Paul’s argument that the righteousness of faith is superior to legal righteousness.

And this point is vital to understanding the theological climax of Romans in chapters 9-11, which answers an implied question: What makes us God’s children?

“By The Spirit Not The Letter”

The importance of “righteousness” to the Christian faith cannot be overstated.

Failing to understand the basis of Christian righteousness has disastrous consequences, for “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14)!

And we’ve seen the fruit of this failure in modern Christianity, as those who would abuse “grace” as their license to sin have caused the name of Jesus to be blasphemed among unbelievers.

“Personal righteousness” is essential to the Christian faith.

And so I've felt a weighty burden for my preaching to carry this message.

A burden to challenge the belief that “self-mastery” or “rule keeping” is sufficient.

Such righteousness is wholly insufficient to bring us before God and will robe us of our peace, our joy, and even our perseverance!

We need to hear the words of the apostle Paul:

Both “self-mastery” and "legal-righteousness” share the same flaw in that we are not the true masters of our own “self”, and we still do the very things we know are wrong.

These constructs of righteousness are flawed simply because of our unrighteousness!

The superiority of the righteousness that comes by faith is what Paul is explaining:

Paul undertakes to explain one of the central truths of the gospel, which offers a superior conception of righteousness based on faith.

And this will be the sum of his theological arguments in Romans as expressed in Romans 11:26-27:

We see the argument for “the righteousness of God that comes by faith” in 1:17 being taken up and carried all the way through to this end.

In this way, Paul tells us that the heart of the gospel is God taking it upon himself to turn godlessness away from his people!

So now we should ask an important preliminary question: “where did Paul get the idea that the gospel calls for a superior form of righteousness?”

I want you to think about that question.

Does the good news of Jesus ever call for a superior form of righteousness to that of the law?

Yes, in fact, Jesus based all his teachings for Christian living on this point:

So I am proposing that Paul is making this argument here, and using it to answer the prior implied question, “what makes us children of God?” We can not ascend to God’s throne through self-mastery, nor can we earn our way into his presence through the law.

And to this last point, as a Pharisee of Pharisees, and a Jew born under the law, Paul was uniquely suited to speak.

Now let’s jump into our text:

“Now” (v.

17): Whereas many Bibles will translate this word “but”, the CSB consistently prefers “now” wherever “δὲ”, which is a logical conjunction, functions to extend and continue a previous thought.

I want to stress the continuity of Romans.

You can’t study any part of Romans in isolation from the rest of the letter because the whole letter unpacks and develops one central message.

And this is consistently reflected in the grammar Paul uses in Romans.

“If you call yourself a Jew, and rely on the law, and boast in God” (v.

17): Paul identifies three pillars in the Jewish construct of righteousness: first, their heritage as God’s people; second, their reliance upon the law; and third, their confidence in God.

The Jews believed that they were called to be the light of the world.

We see this theme in Isaiah:

Jews celebrated that God chose Israel and gave them his law in order to make them a beacon of virtue to the rest of the world.

Before his conversion, Paul himself would have seen this calling of Israel as the rock on which he could stand.

He was a Jew and God had called Israel to this position, therefore he was secure.

“and know his will” (v.

18): Then Paul draws three conclusions from these pillars of Jewish righteousness: first, the Jews are enlightened.

There is a kind of confidence and peace that comes from knowing.

Have you ever experienced sudden and unexplained health-complications?

You go in for testing and wait to learn what is wrong with you.

You look online and discover that it could be anything from mild gas to rare flesh-eating bacteria.

You suffer in the darkness of the unknown.

Not so with the Jews!

They know the will of God!

They have the answers.

“and approve the things that are superior” (v.

18): Second, the Jews not only know the will of God, but they, unlike the Gentiles, wholeheartedly agree with God’s law and approve his superior truths.

Whereas the Gentiles philosophize about the virtues of their vices, the Jews see these things for what they are and condemn them, approving instead of the superior virtues illuminated by God’s law.

“being instructed from the law” (v.

18): Third, the Jews were not tossed about by the unstable speculations of human philosophy, which today blows one way, and tomorrow blows the other.

They have been taught by God.

These things are the dangerous pillars of religious hypocrisy.

Romans 2:19–20 (CSB)

19 and if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light to those in darkness, 20 an instructor of the ignorant, a teacher of the immature, having the embodiment of knowledge and truth in the law—