Chasing Faith by Works

(Isaiah 8:13-15, Isaiah 28:14-18; Romans 9:30-10:13)

As we’ve seen the last two weeks, Paul in Romans 9 strongly insists on the sovereignty of God in salvation—God chooses his people, he chooses whom he wants to choose, and our salvation is his work from first to last; it’s only by his power that we can even desire to be saved, much less turn to him in faith. I noted last week that laying it out as baldly as he does is distressing to us, and I got some of that distress reflected back at me after the service. Does this mean that God could look at someone who wanted to know him and worship him and reject that person, send them to Hell? Does it mean that no matter what you do, you might find yourself chosen for damnation anyway?

No, it doesn’t, for a few reasons I’ve already mentioned, which lead us into our consideration of this morning’s passage from Romans. First, that fear rests on the assumption that God’s choice of his people is irrational, based merely on his whim; it views God as capricious, unreasonable, unfair, and untrustworthy. This isn’t true. Again, just because we can’t know the reasons why God chooses to save this person and not that one, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have reasons; and the Bible is very clear on this point: “No one who believes on him will be put to shame.”

Second, Paul’s point is not, absolutely not, that God chooses people with no regard to whether they want to be his people; the point, rather, is that no one is able truly to choose God unles God has already chosen them first. It isn’t, “Oh, I go seeking God, and then I hope he lets me find him”; no, it’s, “I sought the Lord, and then I realized that the only reason I went seeking him is because he moved me to do so.” His work is always first. The sincere desire for God is always the work of his Holy Spirit in our hearts, and he will never reject his Spirit whom he has placed in us. Anyone who truly desires the salvation of Christ need have no fear, for that desire is itself evidence of his saving work.

And third—though this is deep water, I know—to insist that God saves us entirely by his own choice and his own will is not to say that our own choices are not real, or not important. I wound up going into this a fair bit in each of the last two weeks, so I’m not going to do that again; the key point is that Paul insists on both the absolute nature and importance of God’s choice and on the importance of our own choices and actions. It isn’t obvious how both those things are true together, but it’s clear to Paul that they are, and must be. Lose the first, and the door is wide open to spiritual pride and judgmentalism, as our salvation becomes the product of our own work and thus reason for boasting; lose the second, and our lives become inconsequential, leaving us to drift into despair or dissipation; and lose either of them, and our view of God is diminished.

Thus in this passage, having passionately declared that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and will harden whom he will harden, Paul now turns to show that God’s rejection of Israel—not all Israelites, to be sure, but national Israel in general—is the result of their own rejection of him. He doesn’t try to say that one is the cause of the other, he just sets them together and holds them in tension: both are true, and we cannot diminish either one, or explain either one away.

His basic critique of Israel in these verses is that they got righteousness wrong, and then refused to let God put them right; he lays this out in one contrast which he repeats three times. On one hand, there is “a righteousness that is by faith” which is “the righteousness of God,” which he then describes again as “the righteousness that is by faith.” On the other, he says that Israel “pursued a law of righteousness,” seeking to “establish their own righteousness,” and thus to achieve “righteousness based on the law.” They understood that God was righteous—not at every point in their history, to be sure, but they eventually learned—and they wanted to be righteous, but they wanted to be righteous their own way, by their own efforts. When Jesus tried to tell them, and his disciples tried to tell them, that their way wouldn’t work, and that God had ordained a different way for them to be made righteous, they refused to listen.

That phrase “law of righteousness” is particularly telling. Grammatically, it’s more than a little out of whack—it doesn’t make obvious sense—because it’s describing an attitude that’s out of whack; the Jewish understanding of both righteousness and the law had become seriously skewed. To pursue a law of righteousness is to think that one can earn righteousness or make oneself righteous through effort in doing the law. The Old Testament law did indeed promise righteousness, but it didn’t actually guarantee that that promise could be reached purely through our own work; it was always predicated on faith in God. To believe that we can make ourselves righteous by our own work in keeping the law is to substitute faith in God with a different faith: faith in ourselves.

That may sound like a strange thing to say, but think about it. To commit ourselves to become righteous in God’s eyes by keeping the law is to put our faith in our own wits—that we can be smart enough to understand it well enough to do it right—and in our own commitment and endurance—that we can keep doing it right all the time, without ever giving up, backing down, breaking down, or wearing out—and in our own strength—that we can overcome all of our weaknesses and bad habits and temptations by sheer force of effort and will. It’s the faith that we are good enough, smart enough, strong enough, and committed enough to compel God to bless us and save us. That is the pursuit of salvation by a law of righteousness: we keep the law, and by our own efforts we keep it so well that God rewards us with salvation.

And you know, that’s religion; but that’s not God, and that’s not his way. Instead, he calls us to a righteousness that is by faith. He freely makes us right with him by his grace, through the sacrifice of Christ who took all our sin and all our guilt on himself, and paid the penalty for all of it. He gives us faith to receive his gift of salvation, to trust that he truly means it and he has really done it all, and that we truly don’t need to do anything at all to earn it—and indeed, never could. And then, yes, he calls us to live lives that reflect and illustrate his righteousness, not in order to earn anything from him or to make him do anything, but simply out of love for him and gratitude for all he has done for us. The outward behavior may look much the same; but the heart is completely different.

The thing is, this was really nothing new. One of the things Paul keeps pointing out to his opponents is that obedience to the law was never the basis for God’s choice of Israel. God’s choice of his people began with Abraham, and what does the Bible say about Abraham? Paul quoted it back in chapter 4: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Even from the beginning, what mattered was God’s choice; even from the beginning, the righteousness of God came not by law but by faith. The law came not so that Israel could earn their salvation, but so that they could respond in gratitude to the salvation they had been given by living in a way that pleased God.

The idea of earning salvation by outward obedience to the law was a misuse of the law from the very beginning; but because they’d gotten fixed on that idea, they failed to see that Christ was the end and purpose of the law. Jesus is the cornerstone of God’s work, the foundation of the people God has been building for himself all along; but because they refused to see, because they focused solely on the law, Christ became a stone over which they stumbled, on which they were broken.

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