Sermon Tone Analysis

Romans 10

Verses 30-31

How did Gentiles get saved?

By faith in Christ Jesus even though they weren’t previously trying to follow God by performing the works of the Old Covenant Law.

But remember that doing the works of the law never saved anybody.

Salvation has always been an issue of faith and not works.

Verse 32-33

Look here at how Paul sums all of this up.Salvation is not of works but by faith in Jesus Christ.So even if you have trouble understanding election or God’s choosing, you can still simply understand that at the end of the matter is still a person’s responsibility to come to God by faith in Jesus Christ and no other way.

Have you done that?

Verses 1-4

Paul has a deeper understanding about his fellow Jews than most of us.

Paul was once a man who had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge...

He was so zealous for God he persecuted the church to death.

listen as shares his testimony with the Jews in Jerusalem just after being arrested for stirring up the crowds… (no time to read this)

You see Paul knew what it meant to be zealous for God without knowing who God was and his heart is broken for those who are now what he once was.

There are many sincerely zealous people out in the world who do horrible things in the name of their god, who believe they are doing the right things that please their god, but the problem is they don’t actually know God because they don’t personally know Jesus Christ.

Many think they are doing God’s work, but they don’t realize the first step is knowing Jesus Christ…

The only way any person can truly know God is to come to Him through the blood of Jesus Christ shed on our behalf.

The Jews that Paul is referring to here are those who have not yet come to Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, an that is why he says they have a zeal for God but not according to knowledge.

What is the knowledge they lack?

- God’s righteousness imputed to us through our relationship with Christ Jesus.

These Jews thought they could earn their righteousness, but the first 8 chapters tells us over and over that nobody can work their way to God and earn their place in heaven.

This is why Paul says that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

You see when a person (Jew in this case) comes to Christ who perfectly fulfilled the law for us (Matthew 5:17) they now come to God in the name of Jesus and covered in His perfect righteousness and not in their best efforts to earn righteousness by their works.

What this does is make the basis for our relationship with God one of faith in Christ the perfect One and instead of the basis being our best efforts at keeping the law that we fail to keep perfectly on our own.

Verses 5-8

The person who does the commandments shall live by them

This is a quote from the law...

- If you want to adopt the works of the law as your way to salvation then understand that you have to live out the law in perfection...

However if you come by faith to God through Jesus Christ the perfect and holy One who has provided salvation to us by His perfect work of redemption then a simple saving faith is what is required.

Paul wrote about this at length regarding Abraham back in chapter 4.

There is no (work) chasing Jesus up to heaven or down to the abyss trying to get saved.

Just believing upon His work for us is necessary for salvation.

The word is near your you is also a quote from the Law, you see Paul is making a very clear case regarding the Jew that even in the Law salvation was an issue of faith and not works, in that a Jew had to believe what God said about right, wrong, life, death, salvation and jusgement...

Alford a Greek scholar said about this verse...

“Personifying the great Christian doctrine of free justification through faith, he (Paul) represents it as addressing every man who is anxious to obtain salvation, in the encouraging words of Moses: ‘Say not in thine heart, (it says to such an one) etc.’

In other words, ‘Let not the man who sighs for deliverance from his own sinfulness suppose that the accomplishment of some impossible task is required of him in order to enjoy the blessings of the gospel.

Let him not think that the personal presence of the Messiah is necessary to ensure his salvation.

Christ needs not to be brought down from heaven, or up from the abyss, to impart to him forgiveness and holiness.

No.

Our Christian message contains no impossibilities.

We do not mock the sinner by offering him happiness on conditions which we know that he is powerless to fulfill.

We tell him that Christ’s word is near to him: so near, that he may speak of it with his mouth, and meditate on it with his heart.…

Is there any thing above human power in such a confession, and in such a belief?

Surely not.

It is graciously adapted to the necessity of the very weakest and most sinful of God’s creatures.”

(Alford)

Now notices that all of this hinges not on the works that a person can do in regards to the law, but on the word of faith that we proclaim.

There are 2 primary words in the Greek we translate as “word” in English.

Logos - which essentially speaks of the totality of expression of an idea or person such as

The expression of Jesus Christ as the Word.

But here the Greek word rhema is used.

Rhema - to say or to speak - the message spoken - rhema describes the word spoken or the power of the word spoken to penetrate the heart.

In the context here it is that the word is in regards to faith, and that faith is in Christ, and because it is a word of faith and not a work of the law it is the means for salvation and peace with God.

The word “faith” describes the contents of Paul’s message.

It is a message of salvation in which faith is the appropriating method of obtaining salvation.

Verses 9-10

“because” is a continuation of thought and description of what Paul said in verse 8 regarding the word of faith being near you, in your mouth and in your heart.

The idea is that verses 9-10 build upon and elaborate by way of explaining what verse 8 means.

Confess homologeo- is an interesting word that is made up of 2 words in the Greek homos (same) and lego (to speak).

so confess means to speak the same thing or to agree with God regarding the way of salvation being in and through faith in Jesus Christ the Messiah.

Now just by way of reminder the context of chapters 9-11 is the Jew.

These are monuments and even scandalous thoughts for a Jew!

Now pause for a moment and think about this for a minute in your own life.

Do you confess and believe everything the Bible says about the Lord Jesus Christ?

Now again for a Jew especially to confess Jesus as Lord was a major step away from their previously held position and beliefs.

In Judaism to proclaim that Jesus or anyone else for that matter is Lord is to commit idolatry and is punishable by excommunication and even death.

But that again is because of their zeal for the law of God that is lacking in their knowledge of the God who gave the law and saves sinners.

Lord is the Greek word kurios - it was a title given to Caesar as an act of worship to him, but more importantly was the Greek word used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the OT for Jehovah.

So realize that for a Gentile to confess Jesus as Lord meant that they were at risk of punishment including death for calling someone other than Caesar Lord, and the Jew was likewise at risk of punishment including death for proclaiming Jesus as Lord.

The weightiness of confessing Jesus as Lord is diminished in our day and age here in the U.S. because of our freedoms which we enjoy as citizens and also because of the Christianization of the western world.

For instance in N.C.

where our older kids and grandkids live, almost everyone you meet would say they are a Christian.

It’s part of southern culture.

But in the days this was written it meant everything changed in a person’s life.

Verses 11-13

To really drive the point home to his fellow Jews, Paul quotes from Isaiah

Jesus Christ is the cornerstone rejected by men (Jews)

Peter said it like this...

Peter also quoted this in Acts 4 when he said...

Isn’t it interesting that if a person only read chapter 9 they might come to the conclusion that the Calvinist is right regarding salvation that it is all about God’s election alone, and yet if a person read through this section they might come to the conclusion that the Arminian is right regarding a persons responsibility to confess and believe in Jesus Christ for their salvation?

Verses 14-15

How then will they call - is in reference to the “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” from the previous verse.

Only the KJV and NJKV include the later phrase

Romans 10:15 (NKJV)

15 And how shall they preach unless they are sent?

As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, Who bring glad tidings of good things!”

Thats is simply because of the variants in original manuscripts and doesn’t change the meaning at all.

Now as to beautiful feet - The idea in using feet as the thing of beauty seems to be the haste that is made in running with the message of good news for the nations to hear and thus have something to believe.

Verses 16-17

Paul again quotes from Isaiah when he says who has believed what he has heard from us.

This quote is from Isaiah 53:1, and if you know the book of Isaiah you know that from the end of Isaiah 52 through all of 53 the context is about the coming Messiah, Jesus.

Hearing through the word (about) Christ

Verse 18

Here Paul quotes from Palm 19:4.

Psalm 19 is a psalm that shows how God has declared His truth throughout the whole world in the way that He created and ordered the world.

In the context Romans 10, Paul uses the quote to prove that the word of the gospel had been preached to the Jews by their prophets, by Jesus Christ Himself, by the Apostles, and through the lives being changed all around, and yet the Jews continued to reject it.

And they as we saw in the previous verses will be held accountable for their rejection.

Verse 19

Did Israel not understand?