Romans 10:12-13 “Who He Is”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹²For [there] is not a difference between Jew and Greek, for the same [is] Lord of all, being rich into all ones calling on Him, ¹³for if anyone calls on the name of [the] Lord, he will be saved.

I was thinking I’d study all the way to the end of the chapter before circling back and really thinking about what it says. However, before I move on, I want to park for a moment on these two verses. I believe there is a truth here that is actually enormously helpful. Paul, at this point, asserts that, as far as righteousness and salvation, there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles. That thought would have been a bombshell to most Jewish people, but then what proof would Paul offer to make such a statement? He says, “the same Lord is Lord of all…”

That is exactly the thought I want to ponder: “the same Lord is Lord of all…” Even for Jewish people, their “Great Shemah” is taken from Deut. 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the Lord is one…” In an ancient world of almost universal polytheism, it was a founding principle of Jewish life that there is only one God and He is the Lord.

One God.

Here is the point I want to make and then try to explain, Again, I believe it can be very helpful to us all. When the Jewish people looked out and despised us Gentiles, when they would be shocked by statements like, “there is no difference between Jew and Gentile,” what they failed to see was that it really doesn’t matter who we are. What matters is who God is. To you and me today, what’s important isn’t who we are. It’s who God is.

That is actually a new thought for me, and perhaps it is to you too, so I will try to explain, then hopefully show you that it is enormously helpful as you and I would seek to live our lives.

“The LORD our God is one Lord.” “The same Lord is Lord of all…” Who is God? He is the LORD. He is the Great I AM. The Jewish name for God was Yahveh, which we commonly express as Jehovah, but it is His name that means literally “I AM.” He is the infinite unchanging God who inhabits eternity, who is infinitely perfect in all His attributes. He lives entirely above time and space. In fact, He Himself created time and space for you and me to live in. For Him there is no time or space. He fills all of the universe with all of His being and is everywhere present in all His infinite perfection. He is changeless, because change requires the idea of time and would imply either improvement or decline, neither of which are even logically possible for the Great I AM.

He is God. He is who He is. He exists in the fulness of all His perfect Divine attributes, all of which inhere together in only more infinite perfection. That is part of what we mean when we call Him our Rock.

Enter us. God created Adam and Eve in perfection and placed them in His perfectly created world. They sinned and plunged the entire universe into the miseries of sin. They had been perfect. Suddenly they are fallen, condemned sinners. Note that God didn’t change. They did. But what happened? The unchanging God displayed to all Creation His attribute of grace. Before their fall, there was no need for grace as we know it. Yet there it was, intermingled with all His other perfect attributes, and suddenly there was a reason for Him to express it.

He came calling, “Adam, where are you?” and what did the sinners do? They ran and hid. He, of course, knew exactly where they were and called them out in their silly fig leaf outfits. He, in His perfect justice, clearly held them accountable for their sin, then, of His own free will, gave them the promise of the Messiah who would someday come and “crush the head of the serpent,” then “dressed them in animal skins.” This last act has throughout history been understood as an act of sacrifice – obviously the animals had to die and shed their blood to give up their skins. As it says in Heb. 9:22, “…for without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.”

Think about this: Before Adam and Eve sinned, they were perfect. After then sinned, they were miserable fallen sinners doomed to eternal death. After the Lord came to them in grace and gave them the promise of a Messiah, and which they obviously believed, they became saved sinners, restored to God’s favor, and bound for eternal life in heaven. Through all of that, what defined who they were? It was God Himself, yes? When they were created they were perfect, and why? Because their existence aligned perfectly with God’s design and will. They became sinners. And why? It was because of God’s perfect justice. They chose to rebel against His rule and therefore, became condemned sinners. Then suddenly, they became redeemed believers. And why? Because the Lord is a God of perfect grace.

All along the way, it is actually God who is defining who they are.  At every step, they are what they are precisely because of who God is. If God were not perfect in justice, maybe their sin could have been winked at. “Oh, well, after all, it really was only a little sin.” Right? However, that wasn’t possible – because of who God is. If God were not perfect in grace, He could have just been fed up with them, cooked them with a lightning bolt, and made Himself some “better” people. However, because He is a God of perfect grace, He Himself made a way for them to be restored, so suddenly they are redeemed believers – but they could only be so, because of who God is.

So now let’s talk about today. How many people down through the ages have thought, “I can never be forgiven. I’ve sinned too much. I’ve been too bad a person.” They were wrong, of course, but why? They are correct that they are a bad person, but what are they wrong about? God. Do you see how, in a sense, it isn’t important who they are. What matters is who God is. Because of who He is, they are free to accept His grace, and in fact, receive the very forgiveness of which they are despairing.

Then there is the person who says, “Not interested.” I once spoke to a man who was told he only had a short time to live. I asked if we could talk about His soul. He immediately responded, “Nope. Not interested. I’ve lived this way all my life and I don’t intend to change.” Obviously, if he kept that up to the end, he is today suffering his eternal destiny. He thought he was free to decide whatever he wanted and somehow, in his mind, it wouldn’t matter. He was correct that it was his choice. He was wrong in thinking it wouldn’t matter. In both cases, what made him right and wrong? Who God is.

Do you see, in both these cases, what was important in the end was not who we are, but who God is. It is God who defines who we are. In a sense, we don’t even know who we are until we first of all understand who God is and what that means for us. To misunderstand who God is guarantees we’ll utterly fail to understand who we are.

I suppose that is easy to see when it comes to people and their eternal salvation. Where you and I need to ponder this business, and where I believe we could receive great encouragement and help is to think about how it continues to apply to us, even as redeemed believers.

Although we are redeemed, yet we retain that awful sin nature until we die or Jesus comes. We have the Holy Spirit in us to help us, but, as Paul lamented back in Romans 7, we live in that tug-of-war between good and evil. So, although we are redeemed, as we look within ourselves, as we evaluate what we have and haven’t done, we will in fact find the full range of good and evil, of success and failure. There are many things that are true of us – both good and bad, – but once again, what is truly important? Who God is.

I myself have lamented many times about that video of failures that replays constantly in my brain. It feels as if my mind cannot be happy unless it’s constantly tormenting me with the memories of all the ways I’ve failed my whole life. I found not too long ago, quite by accident I think, that I could shut down that voice by simply replying, “To God be the glory.” What I meant was realizing that even though I may in fact have failed (miserably), yet God in His amazing sovereign greatness actually took those failures and in some way used them for good. Sometimes He was humbling me, sometimes He was teaching me, sometimes He was getting me somewhere He wanted me to go, and, although I almost hate to say this, I’m sure He was even using my failures in some way for others’ good. Turning Jospeh’s words around, “I meant it for evil, but God meant it for good!”

That actually did work really well for me to shut down the video. Bad memory? To God be the glory. Another bad memory? To God be the glory. Another bad memory? To God be the glory. I don’t think I could have verbalized it at the time, but what was I doing? Was I not saying, the important thing, even in my failures, was not who I was. What truly mattered in the end is who God is.

Another way of looking at it is the question then of who we are even in those failures. Like the man who despaired of forgiveness, we can conclude we are hopeless sinners. What does God call us in Christ? Redeemed. His children. His beloved children. Does that change because we fail? Obviously not. And why not? Because God hasn’t changed. In the end, what is important is not who we are, but who God is!

The same would be true even in what we consider to be our successes. If we think we “done good,” does that somehow “raise us up above the stars of heaven?” Of course not. Hopefully by this time we’ve learned that anything we ever do right, we did because God gave us the strength, the wisdom, even helped us make the good choices. So who really gets the glory? We can be free of our foolish arrogance and actually stay humble even in successes precisely because we remember what truly matters is who God is.

As I said earlier, this is all somewhat of a new thought for me. Back to our passage before us, Paul says, “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for the same Lord is Lord of all…” What is he saying? Is he not saying, in the end, it isn’t so important whether we’re found Jews or Gentiles. What matters is who God is. He’s the same, no matter who we are, what we’ve done, how we’ve succeeded or failed. Regardless of the facts of our lives, we will only find the truth of our identity when we look straight into the face of God.

No wonder Jesus said, “I am the truth.”  

No wonder Paul will conclude this whole section of Romans saying in 11:36, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen.”

Let us all say, “Amen,” but let us live that Amen as we would constantly remember, what’s important really isn’t who we are. It’s who He is!

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Romans 10:5-11 “Clarifying”

 Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁵For Moses is writing [regarding] the righteousness which [is] out of law, that the man doing these things will live in them, ⁶but the righteousness out of faith says thus, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will go up to heaven, that is to bring Christ down?’ ⁷or ‘Who will go down into the Abyss, that is, to bring Christ up out of dead ones?’” ⁸But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart,” which is the word of faith which we are preaching, ⁹that, if you confess with your mouth [the] Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead ones, you will be saved. ¹⁰for with the heart one believes into righteousness and one confesses into salvation, ¹¹for the Scripture says “Everyone believing upon Him will not be ashamed.”

Before I move on in this chapter, there is one thing I’d like to clarify. From the end of chapter 9 through then end of chapter 10, Paul is having to emphasize the error and failure of Israel’s legalism. Back in 9:30-32, he had said, “That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not obtained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works…”

Just like Paul, if we spend enough time condemning legalism, at some point it starts to sound like we’re against the whole idea of keeping the Law, of actually concerning ourselves with obeying God. In 3:31, he had to pause and ask, “Do we, then, nullify law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold law.”

All of that said, I think it’s worth pausing ourselves and clarifying what we’re saying. All the way back to Israel, they told Moses, “All that the Lord commands us, we will do” (Deut. 5:27). Read the Lord’s response then in v.29: “Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear Me and keep all My commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever.”

“Oh that they had such a heart in them!” He knew they didn’t. The problem was, they didn’t know they didn’t! Just like all of us in our natural fallen legalistic minds, they actually thought they could say to God, “Look here. Just give us the rules and we’ll keep them! Yes, sir, you picked the right people all right. Just stand back and watch what a great job we do of keeping the rules!” Of course, there’s one HUGE problem with all of that. We can’t. They couldn’t. No one can. We are born fallen sinners. The Lord gave them ten commandments which they should have immediately realized they couldn’t keep, but that wasn’t enough, so He went on to add some 618 more! “You want rules, I’ll give you rules.” When they realized they couldn’t keep those, rather than crying out for a Savior, what did they do? The Jewish people created thousands more.

However, is the problem the rules themselves? No! Back up in Deut. 5:29, the Lord wanted them to keep His laws “so that it might go well with them and their children forever.” The problem is not with God’s law. The problem is that the way to righteousness leads through the Cross. What did the Lord say? “Oh that they had such a heart in them!” The problem is we don’t. We do not have the heart to obey. We were born children of Adam with hearts God says are “desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). As Jesus told Nicodemus, “Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:3).

Before we talk about “the rules,” we need to be born again. We need to be born from above. When we go to the Cross and embrace our Jesus, the Lord Himself fixes our problem. Remember what He said? “Oh, that they had such a heart in them!” At the Cross, He does exactly that – He puts “such a heart” in us. He sends His blessed Holy Spirit to indwell us – to actually live inside us – so that it is true in every way, we do have such a heart in us. It’s His heart! As long as we live in these Adamic bodies, we’ll still have this awful sin nature that would drag us down into hell, but there is, at the same time, the very Third Person of the Trinity itself living inside us, making it possible for us to actually want to know God, to want to embrace Jesus as our Lord, to want to keep God’s commands.

The difference between faith and legalism is not a question of whether we want to do what’s right. It’s a question of how we get there. As Jesus said, “Without Me, you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5). Once again, the way to righteousness leads through the Cross – and that is true of salvation itself and it is still true as you and I seek to live our daily lives.

Just because we have truly been born again doesn’t mean we revert right back to the “All that the Lord commands us, we will do! Yes, sir, you picked the right ones here! Just watch what a bang-up job we do!!!” A thousand times, no! What our very salvation should have awakened us to is the enormity of our sin problem, and that realization should humble our proud hearts as long as we live in this fallen world. We need Jesus! As the old hymn said, “We need Thee every hour.” We need to “abide in the vine” (Jn. 15:5). Our very efforts to “keep the Law” or to obey God need to start with the heartfelt prayer, “Lord, help me!” “I can’t do this on my own.” He told us (if we’d listen), “From birth, even unto old, old age, I will carry you” (Isa. 46:4). We need to say, “Then, yes, please, Lord carry me!”

And here’s the thing. What did the Lord say back there in Deut. 5:29? The Lord wanted them to keep His laws “so that it might go well with them and their children forever.” “That it might go well with them.” Real born-again people realize the Lord’s way is the best way. We want to obey Him. Faith doesn’t make us forget right and wrong. Faith gives us the freedom to actually see the beauty of God’s way and makes us want to do right.

I know it’s true in my life and I hope it’s true in yours too, that the more I know the Lord, the more I want to just get lost in His goodness. I find myself in prayer telling Him, “I want You to confirm me in holiness. I want to be like the angels and not even want to sin!” I can honestly say to Jesus, “Adam’s image now efface; Stamp Thine image in its place!” I realize that cannot happen fully until I leave this world, but I am soooo thankful that He does help me day by day. I may obey Him very imperfectly, but He does help me, and to whatever extent I let Him, I find, in fact, His way is the way of life!

Faith isn’t opposed to God’s law. Instead it is the very path to it – it’s just that faith helps us see that path leads through the Cross. The fear of the Lord may have been the beginning of wisdom, but we find it isn’t the end. The end is “to love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself!”

Once in a while, we need to pause and clarify that!

Romans 10:5-11 “Very Simple!”

 Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁵For Moses is writing [regarding] the righteousness which [is] out of law, that the man doing these things will live in them, ⁶but the righteousness out of faith says thus, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will go up to heaven, that is to bring Christ down?’ ⁷or ‘Who will go down into the Abyss, that is, to bring Christ up out of dead ones?’” ⁸But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart,” which is the word of faith which we are preaching, ⁹that, if you confess with your mouth [the] Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead ones, you will be saved. ¹⁰for with the heart one believes into righteousness and one confesses into salvation, ¹¹for the Scripture says “Everyone believing upon Him will not be ashamed.”

This is another passage that could be written in gold letters. This is it. To understand and embrace these seven verses is the difference between life and death, between heaven and hell.

What do we find? In v.5, Paul is referring to Moses’ words in Lev. 18:5. “The man who does these things will live by them.” At first glance (and to an unregenerate mind), it might seem as if Moses is speaking like a legalist – “Do these things and live.” That understanding would be true except for one HUGE problem: We can’t. Anyone who took that meaning and tried to live it would (should) very quickly have realized something was seriously wrong, that no matter how hard they tried, they constantly failed. That, of course, should have pointed them to Christ – which was the whole point of the Mosaic Law to begin with.

Whether we’re talking about our eternal salvation or our daily lives, the Law’s model, “Do this and live,” doesn’t work. Every time we climb up one rung on that ladder, it would seem God moves up three. However, the whole Bible, the book of Romans, and the passage before us would tell us there’s a different way. As we read in 3:19, all legalism gets us is “…every mouth stopped and the whole world standing guilty before God.” Verse 21, however, says, “But now a righteousness from God apart law has been made known…” Rather than this “righteousness out of law,” there is a “Righteousness out of faith.”

Once again, to understand these things is the difference between life and death, between heaven and hell! I suppose, if a person actually could realize that their natural legalism won’t work, but that God has a different way, we would probably think it must be time to “roll up our sleeves” and embark on some new assignment that God is about to give us. We’d probably think, “This must be something really complex and difficult – but, no matter what, I must comply.” That is actually Paul’s point in alluding to Moses’ words from Deut. 30:11-14 – the “Who will ascend into heaven…who will descend into the Abyss…?” was just a Jewish way of expressing that something is impossible (cf. Ps. 139:7-10).

Instead of some new, difficult, complex, impossible assignment, what does our passage tell us? “The Word is near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart.” We already have the one thing we need! It’s been there all along. All our lives we’ve turned our backs to God and not our faces! I once spoke with a man who was dying of cancer. He started telling me that, as far as he could see, there were many possibilities of what happens to us after we die, and it just wasn’t clear what was true.

As we talked, he would say things like, “I just hope God lets me in.” In all his ramblings about “You just can’t know,” he kept making references to God and Jesus, to heaven and hell.” After a while, I pointed that out to him. I said, “It is true, a lot of people have a lot of different ideas, but it seems to me you really do believe in your heart there is a heaven and a hell, and that God and Jesus are very real.” I pointed out several things he had said, and suddenly I could see the wheels turning in his mind.

A short time later, he was a born-again man. He had realized exactly what Paul says in this passage, “The Word is near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart.” It wasn’t complex, it wasn’t difficult. In fact, he already “knew” it. He just needed to stop turning his back to God and start turning his face.

And what exactly is this “faith” that makes all the difference? These are the very words that turned on the lights in my own young heart: “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” I struggled for a long time to understand this faith thing. If you ask any Christian, “What must I do to be saved?” they will probably answer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.” Jesus Himself even said, “He who believes in me has everlasting life” (Jn. 6:47). My question was, “But what does it mean to believe?”

At that time, basically everyone in America went to church on Sunday and could talk about heaven and hell and about God and Jesus and the Bible. I could honestly say, “Everyone in America believes in Jesus.” My problem was, it was obvious to me they weren’t all saved. I wondered, “So what makes my ‘believing’ any better than theirs?” I said to myself, “It’s great if all that is required is this ‘believing,’ but what does that really mean?" It was obviously something different than what “everyone believed.”

Then one day I stumbled across this passage, Romans 10:9: “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” That’s it! Real saving faith is to tell God, “I accept that Jesus is Lord (the Boss), and I do believe in my heart that He died for me and rose again,” That’s it! It’s one thing to “believe” all that “stuff about Jesus.” It’s another thing to actually come to grips with the fact that He is LORD. Real believing always deals one way or another with this question of who’s going to be the boss in my life. And realizing that Jesus is the rightful Boss, I then have the problem that, up to today, I’ve been a cosmic rebel against Him. However, even as I embrace His rule over me, I also embrace the simple truth that He Himself took care of my sin problem. He died and rose again for me!

That’s what I mean about letters of gold. How could it be any simpler? And it isn’t difficult. It’s what I really already know in my heart. It’s been there all along. We’ve always known God was only a prayer away. We just wanted to go our own way, so we conveniently ignored Him.

People may get distracted by the idea of “confessing with your mouth” and “believing in your heart.” To me, the simple answer is that there is no such thing as a true believing that doesn’t change our lives. To truly believe that Jesus is Lord means I’m already changed. I want to live a new life. I want to be a different person.  The “believing” which goes on inside will change us on the outside. “Scholars” can argue all of that for pages and pages, but it isn’t that complicated. Real faith simply produces real Christians.

And what do we find? “Everyone believing on Him will not be ashamed.” Whether it’s a question of our eternal salvation or simply our daily lives, we can always rest assured that trusting God is the safest thing we can do. He will not disappoint us. In the short run, He may not give us what we think we want. In the short run, He may allow pain and trouble in our lives. However, faith will always, always, always be found to be its own reward. To trust God, to love Him, to turn our faces toward Him, is the smartest thing we can ever do!

It is really very simple!