“Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Romans 10:1-4
This is one of my favorite verses in Scripture. I know, I know…that’s probably a little weird (plus, I have a lot of them) but hear me out.
First, it shows that Paul’s heart is wide open. It shows his great love for his people, the Jews, despite their intransigence and persecution of the church. Doesn’t that speak to your heart today? As you look around and see so much unbelief within the church and so much idolatry (as Christians ignorantly and with cowardice embrace a god-like state) doesn’t your heart break? So, we read this and understand. We understand that it’s biblical to have a broken heart in the midst of the inestimable joy of salvation.
Furthermore, we note that Paul doesn’t repay reviling for reviling. His own people had turned on him when he embraced Christ as Lord. The Romans one could expect, right? But his own Jews? Imagine his pain after the Damascus Road experience. Paul must have expected some leeway with them (his fellow countrymen) due to his rigorous devotion before conversion to the Way. But they turned on him and he must have felt the ghastly sting of betrayal. Many of us surely experience that today in different ways.
Instead of lashing out, though, he loved them and his whole heart desired that they might be saved. What a Christian witness for how we’re to navigate these treacherous times. Don’t forget that you’re not alone and not without support, Christian. The Bible is written for you – for your education and encouragement. Have you felt the sting of lockdowns, mandates, name-calling, social bullying, and demonization by those who served the little false lord of Dr. Fauci? Have you been maligned because you refused to consider the events of the day outside of Scripture? Have these days cut you? Has your heart bled as you’ve stood on the principles of the faith? Then know…you must know…that there’s a Day coming that He will personally wipe away every tear and heal every wound. As He showed Thomas the scars of His crucifixion for us, we should take our wounds (for Him) to Him and sweetly rejoice there at His feet.
The only way out of the labyrinth of bitterness and hatred is to bring our sorrows and hurts to Him. Lest we do that, this world’s bloody claws will pull off chunks of our hearts and tear them to shreds.
And this is how we find that blessed path to love our enemies…in light of the ultimate truth. Christians aren’t stoics, nor are they vacuous pacifists. We see the pain. We feel the pain. But we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God because His tomb is empty.
Second, Paul points out that they have a zeal for God – but not according to knowledge. This is an amazing line. Simply stunning. What does it mean? It means that sincerity is never, and can’t be, a test of truth. God is truth and the Bible is His word/law. Therefore, truth is God’s word, not our emotions. A zeal, a fervor, a passion, or anything else you’d like to call it, outside of the foundation truths of Scripture will lead us to ruin!
And the source of this ignorance is the folly that God’s righteousness isn’t, well, you know, quite so righteous. R.C. Sproul once said that God isn’t “love, love, love” or “mercy, mercy, mercy” but “holy, holy, holy.” The divine attribute of His holiness is essential to our life because unless we start getting our heads around it we’re acting/living “not according to knowledge”. Watch the math: since only He is utterly and comprehensively holy, and to be in His presence we must also be righteous, we can only obtain that righteousness through faith.
So, alas, the doctrine of salvation through faith alone, grounded and rooted in His incomprehensible perfection and power, is the key to understanding your life…and His love. To say that He’s the end of the law for righteousness is to say that He’s the purpose and goal of the moral law. This is the stumbling stone that Scripture speaks about with great urgency. The “lack of knowledge” is, in fact, the presumption that we’re capable, in the flesh, of reaching His standard. Nope. Can’t do it anymore than an ant can lift a house. Unless we come in faith, through the intellectual understanding of our spiritual inability to be righteous, we won’t have peace because sin causes trauma.
Next, and hird, we won’t have peace because this presumption of human innocence leads us to attempts to “establish our own righteousness.” Van Til called this “integration down into the void.” What he meant was that unhooked from the source of righteousness and truth, our attempts to reason, live, and love without Him will result in anguish, tyranny, aloneness, depression, and, ultimately, death. And yet we’ll keep trying to fix it, like a man going from alcohol to cocaine or like a woman returning to an abusive relationship. Sin batters us, demeans us, and steals our humanity and yet we won’t come to Christ who is the source of our humanness.
The attempt to be “okay” or “to find peace” by ourselves, on our own power, is what Paul’s saying is the problem. All of our personal, social, and political problems stem from this. Yes. Every. Single. One.
Today we face a problem of anthropology. This is to say, we don’t know what we are anymore. We’re so removed from questions of metaphysics (what’s ultimately real) and epistemology (how do we know anything) that we’ve completely lost any frame of reference for who and what we are? Follow the math: if there’s no God who created us and orders the universe, we’re all alone in a vast and dark sea of random facts. Someway, somehow, we have to make sense of all these things and figure out how to be happy. But if God didn’t create you, what exactly are you? What is man? That’s the crisis of anthropology. I mean, seriously, the questions of what you should do with your life and all that can only be answered by providing the context. Without God as creator, you have absolutely no context. You’re literally swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, spiritually speaking. It’s nighttime. There’s no land. There’s no boat or raft. It’s all up to you. You see, that terror that keeps bubbling up from the depths of your soul…that’s rational…and it’s what we try to suppress it because it’s honest.
Without God, you’re lost.
Child, come home. Child, stop kicking and paddling in that dark sea of sin and take His hand. No matter what skimpy vessel we might assemble of all the debris floating by, the end is tragic. We sink without Christ.
But the attempt to establish your own righteousness is psychological suicide. It leads to the terrors of spiritual masochism (personal severity through arbitrary self-discipline) and/or sadism (the act of imposing one’s arbitrary ethical will on others…usually through politics). All false religions/political movements are thus either sadistic or masochistic.
Plato was a pretty smart guy (despite what Vizzini said about him in The Princess Bride). Yet, despite his brilliance, he couldn’t understand what man was. Do you know what Plato called man? A featherless biped. Seriously.
Someone threw a plucked chicken over the walls of his Academy with a note. “Plato’s man.”
You see, without Christ and Scripture, even the greatest minds – like Plato – are foolish.
Did you know that Hitler gave Christmas gifts to his friends? He did. Do you know what book he gave everyone one year? “Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche. That’s the one where the great German philosopher announced the death of God. Yeah, that one. And, due to the death of God, incidentally, Nietzsche argued that there needed to rise from the ashes a new type of man. A super man (in German, an Ubermensch).
So, you see, the Holocaust wasn’t an accident. It was the result of Hitler’s, and Nietzsche’s, attempt to “establish their own righteousness.”
Or what about John Paul Sartre? One of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers was an ardent atheist. He wrote persuasively about why there was no God. Well, that’s all well and good except then – without God – you’ve got to define man, right? Sartre didn’t think men were featherless bipeds and, in the wake of World War 2 he avoided that nasty mess about Zarathustra. What did he say about mankind? In “Nausea” he said man is a “useless passion.”
So, yeah, we can try and ignore Him all we want but this is the sort of mess that results. And the mess is always tragic. Sometimes the tragedy is personal and invisible to society at large. Maybe it’s a hopeless soul weeping alone in a dark room, betrayed by the sin it embraced, and shattered by the lies of Jezebel. Maybe it’s a suicide or drug addiction. Maybe it’s the cold corpse of someone who overdosed – having yearned for escape from the inner hell of shame, having hoped to steal moments and be released from fear.
Or maybe it’s a Holocaust and visible to all. Maybe it’s the Gulags or Red Terror.
Sin will always trick us. It will take whatever power we have and turn it against ourselves if we’re powerless or others if we can. Sin, and the point of history as told by Revelation, leads us to the carrot dangled by Jezebel or the stick of the Beast. Jezebel is the temptations of the flesh – the greed and lusts of life; the Beast is the tyrannical state that crushes freedom in the name of man-made righteousness. The rejection of God sets off a cataclysmic journey of self-justification. This is why only a Christian person and Christian nation can have freedom. All other attempts are mere shades of self-destruction and slavery.
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