Jew And Gentile

Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Ten
A COMMON BASIS FOR JEW AND GENTILE

Scripture Reading: verses 11-15

FOR THE SCRIPTURE SAITH, WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH ON HIM SHALL NOT BE ASHAMED. FOR THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE JEW AND THE GREEK: FOR THE SAME LORD OVER ALL IS RICH UNTO ALL THAT CALL UPON HIM. FOR WHOSOEVER SHALL CALL UPON THE NAME OF THE LORD SHALL BE SAVED. HOW THEN SHALL THEY CALL ON HIM IN WHOM THEY HAVE NOT BELIEVED? AND HOW SHALL THEY BELIEVE IN HIM OF WHOM THEY HAVE NOT HEARD? AND HOW SHALL THEY HEAR WITHOUT A PREACHER? AND HOW SHALL THEY PREACH, EXCEPT THEY BE SENT? AS IT IS WRITTEN, HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THE FEET OF THEM THAT PREACH THE GOSPEL OF PEACE, AND BRING GLAD TIDINGS OF GOOD THINGS!

Paul is indicating the only possible way whereby his fleshy kinsmen, the Jews, could find salvation. At the outset of the chapter he breaths a prayer to his God for their salvation. Then he goes on to declare that the way of salvation cannot be attained through righteousness of the law, because the works of the law justify a man only as long as he continues to do everything written in the law. Both na-tionally and individually, the Jews, as well as the Gentiles, have been found disobedient. Therefore, justification along that line is no longer available to them. But Paul indicates a new righteousness in and through the Lord Jesus Christ, the One who died, bearing the penalty of sin, and who is risen, mighty to save. However, this new righteousness is conditional, because it is on the principle of faith.

The great question regarding whether we have this righteousness or not depends entirely on whether or not we have accepted it by true faith. The way of salvation is available in Christ Himself:

If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in thine heart that God has raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

When asked on the day of Pentecost, “What must we do?” Peter said: “Repent and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

This is a salvation conditioned on accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and risen Savior – not of works. And verse 11 brings forward the promise, “Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.”

Perhaps this touches a point of delicacy with some. Perhaps more would come out boldly and confess the Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, long before they do, except for the fear that they might somehow fail in their testimony and be ashamed. As one Christian said:

For a long time I avoided taking the definite step of accepting Christ and His public confession, because I felt I could not live up to it, and a sensitive spirit indicated I would be thoroughly ashamed if I failed after making the confession.

However, the premise of this supposition is that the continuance of salvation depends on our natural ability to be sterling and true. The human heart is incorrigible; meaning it will always fail. The fact is, after conversion, because of failure we are often ashamed of ourselves. We are never ashamed of the Lord and, after every failure, without excusing the failure for a moment, we rally again to the Lord’s blood-stained banner because everything depends on Him who died and is risen again. “Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.”¹ In spite of everything, the Lord will uphold us and even if we occasionally meander into paths of disobedience, He will allow us to learn therein the bitterness of the fruits of self-will, and once again bring us back to enjoy the sunshine of His love and favor, if, that is, our heart is contrite for God loves a contrite heart.

The poet put it this way:

Yet, Lord, alas! what weakness
Within myself I find,
No infant?s changing pleasure
Is like my wandering mind.
And yet Thy love?s unchanging,
And doth recall my heart
To joy in all its brightness,
The peace its beams impart.
Still sweet ?tis to discover,
If clouds have dimmed my sight,
When passed, Eternal Lover,
Towards me, as e?er, Thou?rt bright.
0 keep my soul, then, Jesus,
Abiding still with Thee,
And if I wander, teach me
Soon back to Thee to flee.
That all Thy gracious favor
May to my soul be known;
And, versed in this Thy goodness,
My hopes Thyself shall crown.
(J.N. Darby)

We may often be ashamed of ourselves, but have no need to be ashamed of the Name of the One who died to save us, whose endless unsearchable love never changes. So, in this twelfth verse of Romans 10, Paul indicates “there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him, For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”² Here is the reason why the true believer need never be ashamed. Why? Because his Lord is so infinitely rich, he can recommend Him to anyone. How wonderful that this same Lord over all is available to everyone, whether Jew or Gentile.

Therefore, we may proclaim the riches of God’s unbounded goodness. Just what does it mean? It means this: our name has been dragged in the mire of shame and sin: we are transgressors and sinners. In this universal courtroom, the mention of our name in relation to our trial brands us forever as criminals; ungodly, rebellious, hopelessly lost. Therefore, if we are going to find salvation, we must call on another Name, and that Name must be the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the One who took our place on Calvary,

He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

His Name is the risen glorified Christ, the Lord of all, able to save to the uttermost all who come to God through Him. To call on His Name means to abandon our own efforts, to declare in God’s presence our unworthyness because of the pollution of sin, and that for pardon and refuge we flee to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Footnotes:
¹ This verse is the occasion for the “faith only” advocates to repeat the doctrine they have imported into the book of Romans. For example, H.C.G. Moule (The Epistle to the Romans, p. 273) said: “There, in the summary and close of the passage, nothing but faith is mentioned. It is as if he would correct even the slightest disquieting surmise that our repose upon the Lord is to be secured by something other than Himself, through some means more complex than taking him at his word. The ‘confession with the mouth’ is not a different something added to faith; it is its issue, its manifestation.” But, of course, “confession with the mouth” is something different from faith and is extravagantly more than enough to prevent its being dismissed, as Moule dismissed it, as a “disquieting surmise.” Disquieting surmise indeed. If faith and confession are the same thing, why (?) is it written that “Even of the rulers many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: for they loved the glory that is of men more than the glory that is of God” (John 12:42,43). Thus, when faith and confession are viewed as two distinct preconditions of salvation, there is no surmise at all; there is no guesswork or speculation. Paul viewed them as distinct conditions and here mentioned them separately, even putting confession first, which he would not have done if it had been merely something that went along with faith, and making exactly the same statement concerning one that he made of the other. Paul’s naming but one of the preconditions of salvation in Romans 10:11 is not a denial of the others, but is a synecdoche, a figure of speech in which one of a group of related things is intended to stand for all of them, as, for example, when one speaks of an automobile as a motor. Paul’s naming faith in this verse does not exclude repentance, confession and baptism any more than it excludes the blood of Christ, the latter also not being mentioned in this place. There are not merely a few, but a hundred instances in the New Testament where this use of the science of language is employed; and there is not any excuse for overlooking it by intelligent people. The apostle Peter wrote that “baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21 KJV); does that exclude faith, repentance and confession? Luke wrote, “To the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18); does that exclude faith, confession and baptism? Repeated mention in this commentary has been made of faith, repentance, confession and baptism as the divinely imposed preconditions of justification; and in this verse faith is an abbreviated reference to all of them, a form of synecdoche often found in the Bible. It was by the device of ignoring the synecdoche that Satan himself assailed the Lord Jesus Christ in the temptation, in which Satan presented a verse of Scripture which if taken alone, as Satan tried to induce, would have made it all right for Christ to jump off the temple; but the Lord foiled the tempter by saying, “It is also written, etc.” (Matt. 4:7). They who dare to take this verse as an exclusion of other God-commanded actions leading “unto” salvation would be well advised to consider what is “also written.” Thus, verse 11 is Paul’s way of saying that a Christian (a believing, penitent, confessed, baptized member of the body of Christ) shall not be put to shame. The mention of shame indicates that Paul was still thinking of the confession mentioned a moment before, and of what Jesus said of the confession, thus: “For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38).
² Here is another synecdoche. Can it be believed that calling upon the Lord without faith, repentance, confession and baptism would avail anything? Oh, but one says this implies faith. Of course it does, and all of the other things required in becoming a Christian are also implied. But error dies hard; and the allegation immediately appears that none but believers can call upon the Lord. This is also true along with the fact that repentance, confession and baptism are all necessary to any effective calling upon the Lord. That is why Ananias said to Paul himself: “Arise and be baptized and wash away thy sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). But the argument here is that it takes more than calling on the name of the Lord to be saved, if such calling on His name is understood otherwise than inclusive of the preconditions of salvation we have been discussing. The proof is as follows: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matt. 7:21-23). “Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46) In these blessed words of the Master lies the compulsion to receive Paul’s words in Romans 10:13 an another synecdoche. “No distinction” ... these were the words that antagonized Israel, whose people had been so long accustomed to a distinction in their own favor as the chosen race of God. Paul had already made it clear that the favored position of Israel had perished in their rejection of Christ; and here he made it plain that Jews, as individuals, were by no means excluded from the new institution but were acceptable in it upon the same terms that applied to all others. The thrust of “Whosoever shall call, etc.” is that “You Jews also may become Christians and receive God’s blessing.” “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” ... is a quotation from Joel 2:32 and formed the topic of Peter’s opening sermon of the Gospel age on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:21). The thesis maintained here, that calling upon the name of the Lord has reference to obeying the Gospel (in its four primary steps), is remarkably supported by the apostle Peter’s interpretation of what his sermon topic really meant. When the people cried out, “What shall we do?” (the obvious meaning of their question being “How shall we call upon the name of the Lord and be saved?”), Peter commanded them to “repent and be baptized, etc.” (Acts 2:21,37, 38). Paul’s prior mention, only a moment earlier (Rom. 10:9-10) of such a thing as the confession with its known relation to baptism and primary obedience, also indicates that the quotation from Joel is a synecdoche for all the things required of converts. And why not? Peter’s interpretation of Joel’s quotation was perhaps the most universally known and the most frequently repeated sermon of the entire New Testament age. John Locke (Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, p. 348) took the same position: “Whosoever hath with care looked into St. Paul’s writings must own him to be a close reasoner, that argues to the point; and therefore, if, in the preceding three verses, he requires an open profession of the gospel, I cannot but think that ‘all that call upon him’ (Rom. 10:12), signifies all that are open professed Christians; and, if this be the meaning of calling upon him (Rom. 10:12), it is plain it must be the meaning of ‘calling upon his name’ (Rom. 10:13); a phrase not very remote from ‘naming his name’ (2 Tim. 2:19), which is used by Paul for ‘professing Christianity.’” Further, this interpretation cannot be overthrown by an appeal to the context in Joel. We have already observed that Paul’s meaning was not restricted to the context of Old Testament passages which he quoted. Paul’s own understanding of calling on the Lord’s Name would inevitably have been associated with the words of Ananias quoted above (Acts 22:16) which associated them with his own baptism.