3. The world-wide proclamation (10:14–21)
C. Human responsibility (9:30–10:21)
1. The stumbling-stone (9:30–33)
Having considered the problem from the standpoint of divine election, Paul now considers it from the standpoint of human responsibility. What, in fact, has happened? The gospel, with its proclamation of the ‘righteousness’ of God bestowed on believers, came to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile, but (on the whole) it was accepted by the Gentile first. The Gentiles responded gratefully to the message which assured them of their acceptance by God on the ground of faith, and it was ‘reckoned to them as righteousness’. The Jews (for the most part) continued to pursue the path of legal righteousness, seeking acceptance with God on the basis of their law-keeping, and yet never attained their goal. The reason was simple: they were following the wrong path. Acceptance by God was assured to faith and not to the works enjoined by the law. It was indeed a hard lesson for them to learn that, in spite of all the privileges which were theirs as Israelites, the divine gift of righteousness could be attained by them only in the same way as it was open to those utter outsiders of Gentiles who had been for ages past shut out from the knowledge of God and his ways. No wonder the gospel was a stumbling-block to them.
But the very fact of its being a stumbling-block had been foreseen. To establish this Paul quotes from Isaiah again, conflating two oracles which have the common theme of a ‘stone’ divinely laid in a time of disaster and judgment, which provides refuge for those who entrust themselves to it but proves the downfall of those who stumble against it.
31. Who pursued the righteousness which is based on law. Hoping to be justified in God’s sight by conformity to the law.
Did not succeed in fulfilling that law. The requirements of the law were not met by those who followed the way of legal righteousness, as they are met by those ‘who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ (8:4).
32. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone. In Isaiah 8:13–15 the prophet foretells how the Assyrian invasion will sweep over the land of Israel like the waters of a great flood. But there will be one place of refuge from the overwhelming water: God himself will prove a ‘sanctuary’ to all who put their trust in him, a rock on which they will stand secure. Those, however, who do not entrust themselves to him but put their confidence in other powers or resources will be swept by the flood against this rock and come to grief upon it; to them, far from being a place of refuge, it will prove a dangerous obstacle—‘a stone of offence and a rock of stumbling’. The passage is later quoted to the same effect in 1 Peter 2:8, where Christ is described as ‘ “A stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall”; for they stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do’ (destined, that is to say, by the word of God spoken through Isaiah).
33. ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall.’ In Isaiah 28:16, in the course of a warning about the impending deluge from Assyria which will sweep away the ‘refuge of lies’ in which king and people are putting their trust, the word of God comes to the prophet: ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone,4 of a sure foundation.’ This foundation stone appears to be the righteous remnant,5 the hope of the future, which is embodied personally in the promised Prince of the house of David.6 This oracle is here conflated with Isaiah 8:14 (referred to in the note on verse 32 above). The combination of the two passages as a prophecy of Christ became commonplace in early Christian apologetic. They are similarly combined in 1 Peter 2:6–8, where they are further linked with a third ‘stone’ testimonium—the rejected stone of Psalm 118:22. (In Luke 20:17–18 the rejected stone of the psalm and the stumbling-stone of Isaiah 8:14 are brought into association with yet another ‘stone’ testimonium—the stone ‘cut out by no human hand’ of Daniel 2:34–35, which smashed Nebuchadnezzar’s dream-image in pieces.)
‘He who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ In the Hebrew text of Isaiah 28:16 this may be the inscription on the stone. The words ‘in him’ (quoted here and in 10:11) are added in LXX, perhaps reflecting the Messianic interpretation. Those who trust in Christ as the Saviour whom God has provided need never fear that their trust will prove to be ill-founded. God vindicates his people’s faith, even when others say, ‘He committed his cause to the LORD; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him!’ (Ps. 22:8). The Hebrew text of Isaiah 28:16 reads ‘He who believes will not be in haste’; that is, one who stands on God’s foundation will ‘keep his head when all about him are losing theirs and blaming it on him’; he will not panic or fuss or rush around, but will trust in God, confident that his purpose will be accomplished in his own time. The LXX translators possibly read in the Hebrew text before them lo’ yēbōš (‘will not be ashamed’) instead of lo’ yaḥîš (‘will not haste’), but this is not a necessary supposition.
2. The two ways of righteousness (10:1–13)
For all that, Paul will not cease praying for Israel’s salvation. He understands their state of mind more than most: ‘an unenlightened zeal for God’ was exactly what he himself had before he met the risen Christ. Of that zeal of his he speaks elsewhere: his zeal for the ancestral traditions of his people impelled him to forge ahead of his contemporaries in his devotion to the study and practice of the Jewish religion, and supplied the motive power in his energetic harrying of the infant church (cf. Gal. 1:13–14; Phil. 3:6).
To him the stone laid in position by God had indeed been a ‘rock of stumbling’ until the scales fell from his eyes and his life was re-orientated; now his consuming ambition was to magnify Christ in his life and work and bring others to know him.
If this had happened to him, why could it not happen to his people? True, for the present they did not know God’s way of righteousness, but endeavoured to establish a righteousness of their own. Yet, as he himself had found in Christ ‘the end of the law’, so might his fellow-Jews when they too came to follow the way of faith.
The two ways—the way of law and the way of faith—are illustrated by quotations from the Pentateuch. The conclusion at which he arrives is that God has brought his salvation near to us, in Christ. We do not have to ‘climb the heavenly steeps’ to procure it; we have no need to ‘plumb the lowest deeps’ for it, for Christ has risen from the dead to make it secure to us. It is here, present and available; what men and women are called on to do is to accept it by inward faith and to confess Christ publicly as Lord. ‘Jesus is Lord’ is the earliest, as it remains the sufficient, Christian creed.
2. I bear them witness. ‘I testify on their behalf.’ For another instance of this testimony cf. Acts 22:3, ‘being zealous for God as you all are this day.’
3. Being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own. Paul makes the same contrast in Philippians 3:9 between ‘a righteousness of my own, based on law’ and ‘the righteousness from God that depends on faith’.7
4. Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified. The word ‘end’ (telos) has a double sense: it may mean ‘goal’ or ‘termination’. On the one hand, Christ is the goal at which the law aimed, in that he embodies the perfect righteousness which it prescribes. This is implied in Matthew 5:17, ‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them.’ And the law’s requirements are fulfilled in the lives of those who are ‘in Christ Jesus’ (8:3–4; cf. 3:31). On the other hand, since Christ is the goal of the law, since in him the law has found its perfect fulfilment, a righteous status before God is available to everyone who believes in him, and that implies the termination of the law’s function (real or imagined) as a means of acquiring such a righteous status. In him the old order, to which the law belonged, has been done away, to be replaced by the new order of the Spirit. Cf. 2 Corinthians 3:6–18.
The case for understanding telos as ‘termination’ is presented by Käsemann, ad loc.; the case for ‘goal’ by Cranfield, ad loc. The two senses are combined by Barrett, ad loc.: Christ ‘puts an end to the law, not by destroying all that the law stood for but by realizing it’.
5. The man who practises the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. Quoted from Leviticus 18:5 (cf. Luke 10:28, ‘do this, and you will live’), adduced by Paul in Galatians 3:12 to show that ‘the law does not rest on faith’; there he contrasts it with Habakkuk 2:4b (cf. Rom. 1:17). According to Leviticus 18:5, life—which, for Paul, is interchangeable with justification (cf. 5:18, 21; Gal. 3:21)—is assured to one who keeps the divine statutes and ordinances. ‘What is wrong with that?’ it might be asked. Just this, Paul would reply, that no-one has succeeded in keeping them perfectly, and therefore no-one has succeeded in gaining life this way. (There is one exception, according to Karl Barth: ‘the man’ who has perfectly kept the law of God is Christ.8) Even if Paul’s own earlier career was ‘as to righteousness under the law blameless’ (Phil. 3:6), he now knew that it was blameless only in the sight of men, but not before God.
6–8. To illustrate the righteousness based on faith, Paul goes to another place in the Pentateuch—Deuteronomy 30:11–14, part of Moses’ farewell exhortation to Israel. But in its primary setting the sense of Deuteronomy 30:11–14 is almost precisely that of Leviticus 18:5. There the statutes and ordinances of God were enjoined on the people so that they might do them and live. Here God says that his commandment ‘is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.’ (Paul significantly omits the italicized words.) That the doing of the commandment was the way to life in the Deuteronomy context is evident from the words of Moses which follow immediately: ‘See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live …’ (Deut. 30:15–16).
Granted that Deuteronomy is suffused with a prophetic, and at times almost evangelical, fervour which is not prominent in Leviticus—granted, too, that there is an inwardness in the language of Deuteronomy 30:11–14 (‘in your mouth and in your heart’) which anticipates the ‘new covenant’ oracle of Jeremiah 31:31–34—yet it is not so easy for us as it was for Paul to draw a distinction between the meaning of Leviticus 18:5 and that of Deuteronomy 30:11–14. It may be that Paul was familiar with an interpretation of the Deuteronomy passage which facilitated his application of it to the gospel. If, for example, he had been accustomed to see in the passage a reference to wisdom (it is quoted with reference to wisdom in Baruch 3:29–30), then his identification of Christ with the wisdom of God could have led him to his Christian interpretation of Deuteronomy 30:11–14.
Here, then, is his exposition of the language appropriate to ‘the righteousness based on faith’ (more or less in the pesher style now familiar to us from the Qumran biblical commentaries):
Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’—that is, to bring Christ down (as though he had never become incarnate and lived on earth).
or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’—that is, to bring him back from the realms of the dead, the nethermost deep (as though he had not already been raised up to newness of life).
No; this is what the good news of justification says:
The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart—that is, the message of faith which we proclaim. It is with the lips and in the heart that the saving response to this message is made.
9. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord. It would be better to express the confession in direct speech: ‘if on your lips is the confession “Jesus is Lord” ’(NEB). (Cf. 1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:11.) Some commentators have thought particularly of the confession of his name before magistrates (cf. Luke 21:12–15; 1 Pet. 3:13–16); but if we are to think of one outstanding occasion for such a confession to be made, we should more probably think of the initial confession made in Christian baptism—‘the pledge of a good conscience towards God’ (1 Pet. 3:21, NIV).
And believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. Saving faith is resurrection faith (cf. 1 Cor. 15:17, ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’).
10. Man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. The order believing-confessing is the order of both logic and experience. The two clauses say essentially the same thing: believing and confession are inseparable, and justification and salvation—here with an eschatological reference (‘unto righteousness … unto salvation’)—cannot be distinguished.
11. ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ Quoted from Isaiah 28:16 (quoted already in 9:33): those who commit themselves to Christ will never be let down.
12. There is no distinction. The righteousness which God imparts is open without distinction to all men and women of faith, whether they are Jews or Gentiles. His saving mercy is lavished with ‘undistinguishing regard’: all who call on him will receive it. At an earlier stage in the argument of Romans (3:22) the words ‘there is no distinction’ had a grim sound, because they convicted Jews and Gentiles together of sin against God and incapacity to win his acceptance by personal effort or desert; now the same words have a joyful sound, because they proclaim to Jews and Gentiles together that the gates of God’s mercy stand wide open for their entrance, that his free pardon is assured in Christ to all who claim it by faith.
13. ‘Every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.’ Quoted from Joel 2:32, where it relates to the eve of ‘the great and terrible day of the LORD’ when God’s Spirit is to be poured out on ‘all flesh’; compare Peter’s use of the same scripture (in its context) to explain the events that marked the first Christian Pentecost: ‘this is what was spoken by the prophet …’ (Acts 2:16–21).
3. The world-wide proclamation (10:14–21)
Hence arises the necessity of proclaiming the gospel world-wide. Men and women are urged to call on the name of the Lord and be saved; but they will not call on his name unless they have been moved to believe in him, they cannot believe in him unless they hear about him, they cannot hear about him unless someone brings them the news, and no-one can bring them the news unless he is commissioned to do so. The preacher is an ‘apostle’ in the primary sense of the word: he is a herald or ambassador conveying a message from someone who has commissioned him to deliver it. Here Paul magnifies the office of the gospel preachers; it is God’s good pleasure by their proclamation of his amnesty to bring his mercy home to those who believe the message. Of one who brings such joyful news the prophet spoke centuries before: ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation’ (Isa. 52:7). If, in the first instance, the prophet’s words referred to the messenger who announced to the desolate city of Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’ they are now applied, as regularly in the New Testament, to the world-wide preaching of the gospel (see comment on 1:1, p. 78).
But how does this apply to the problem of Jewish unbelief? The message came to the Jews as well as to the Gentiles; indeed, it came to the Jews first. But the Jews (for the most part) did not pay heed to it. Even this, however, was foreseen, as may be gathered from the question of Isaiah 53:1, ‘who has believed our message?’ The relevance of these words to the gospel arises not only from the general context of Isaiah 40–66, but even more so from the particular context of the fourth Servant Song (Isa. 52:13–53:12), which has made such a notable contribution to the New Testament presentation of the passion and triumph of Jesus. This verse, moreover, is quoted elsewhere in the New Testament as one of a number of Isaianic texts used to account for Israel’s unbelief.
But if the disappointed messenger asks, ‘Who has believed our message?’ it is evident that the message was designed to produce faith. And the message itself rests for its authority on the direct command and commission of Christ.
Perhaps, however (an interested inquirer suggests), the people of Israel did not all hear the message? Indeed they did, Paul replies: the message has been published far and wide; it has been preached in every place where there is a Jewish community.
Well, says our inquirer again, they have heard, it appears, but perhaps they did not understand? No, says Paul, it was not that. They understood well enough, but they refused to obey. They have shown their envy and obstructiveness when Gentiles accepted the message, but they would not believe it themselves. But this too has fulfilled the word of prophecy. The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 contains a sustained indictment of Israel’s ingratitude and disobedience throughout her history. Later Christian writers of anti-Judaic apologies, instead of considering whether the same indictment might not have a message for their own community, used it as an arsenal of ammunition against the Jews, regarding it as a strong point in their argument that in this Song Moses himself testifies against them.9 The Qumran sectarians similarly used the Song in their protest against what they saw as the apostasy of the Jewish nation as a whole.10 In the Song (Deut. 32:21) God charges his people with idolatry—
They have stirred me to jealousy with what is no god; they have provoked me with their idols—
and pronounces sentence upon them:
I will stir them to jealousy with those who are no people;
I will provoke them with a foolish nation.
To Paul, ‘those who are no people’ would readily be interpreted of the Gentiles, to whom he has already applied the phrase ‘not my people’ in Hosea 1:10. How then does God stir Israel to jealousy by means of the Gentiles? By letting Israel see the blessings which are showered on the Gentiles when they embrace Christ by faith: God no longer speaks of them as ‘not my people’ but calls them his people. Israel, stirred to jealousy by the sight, asks why these same blessings should not be even more rightfully hers, and is assured that they will indeed be hers on the same basis—faith in Christ. This hope is elaborated by Paul in the next stage of his present argument, but this stage of the argument is summed up in two contrasted texts at the beginning of Isaiah 65 which are applied respectively to responsive Gentiles and to rebellious Israel.
15. ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!’ Paul here seems to give his own Greek rendering of the gist of the Hebrew of Isaiah 52:7 instead of reproducing the LXX, which obscures the sense of this verse.
In the New Testament this whole section of the book of Isaiah, from chapter 40 on, is applied to the gospel age. The deliverance from Babylonian exile under Cyrus, like the deliverance from Egyptian servitude in the days of Moses, is treated as the foreshadowing of the greater and perfect deliverance accomplished by Christ. The ‘voice’ of Isaiah 40:3, which calls for the levelling of a way through the desert by which God may lead his liberated people home to Zion, becomes the voice of John the Baptist, calling together in the wilderness of Judea a people prepared for the Lord (Mark 1:3; Luke 1:17; John 1:23); the ‘year of the LORD’s favour’ (Isa. 61:2) is announced by Jesus at the outset of his Galilaean ministry (Luke 4:18–21); and further examples of the gospel fulfilment of these chapters appear as Paul’s argument proceeds.
16. ‘Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?’ The vocative ‘Lord’ is an addition of the LXX. In Isaiah 53:1 the question is asked by those who hear the announcement of the Suffering Servant’s exaltation (cf. 15:21, below, for the quotation of Isaiah 52:15, the words immediately preceding those quoted here). ‘Who would have believed the announcement we have heard?’ they ask in amazement, as they recall the Servant’s humiliation. The announcement, now embodied in the gospel message, is still received with incredulity, says Paul—not now by the kings and nations of Isaiah 52:15 so much as by the bulk of the Jewish people. Isaiah 53:1 is quoted in John 12:38 to account for the people’s failure to believe in Jesus during his ministry in Jerusalem; it is coupled there with the quotation of Isaiah 6:9–10, also widely current in early Christian times as a testimonium predicting Jewish unbelief (cf. Rom. 11:8, with note).
17. Faith comes from what is heard. ‘What is heard’ renders the same Greek noun (akoē) as ‘what he has heard’ in verse 16; cf. verse 14, ‘how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?’
What is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. The ‘preaching’ (rhēma, ‘utterance’, as in verse 8, quoting Deut. 30:14) is the ‘word’ about Christ, the ‘word of faith’, so called because it awakens faith in its hearers.
18. ‘Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.’ Quoted from Psalm 19:4 (where LXX phthongos, ‘voice’, presupposed Heb. qōlām instead of MT qawwām, ‘their line’). These words, in their original context, refer to the universal witness of the heavenly bodies. It is unnecessary to suppose that Paul regarded Psalm 19:4 as a regular prediction of the world-wide dissemination of the gospel; the dissemination of the gospel, it is implied, is becoming as world-wide as the light of the heavenly bodies. This might seem to be an exaggeration: the gospel had not been carried throughout all the earth, not even to all the lands that were then known to inhabitants of the Graeco-Roman world. Paul was well aware of that; at this very time he was planning the evangelization of Spain, a province where the name of Christ was not yet known (cf. 15:18–24). But by now the gospel had been carried to most parts of the Mediterranean area where Jews were to be found; and that is all that the argument requires. For the ‘representative universalism’ (see p. 219, n. 21) implied in the quotation of Psalm 19:4, cf. Colossians 1:5–6 (‘the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole word it is bearing fruit and growing’) and 23 (‘the gospel … which has been preached to every creature under heaven’).
19. Moses says. The quotation from Deuteronomy 32:21 (in the Song of Moses), where Moses represents God as speaking. The Song of Moses furnished early Christians with a remarkable number of testimonia, and not exclusively on the subject of Jewish unbelief (cf. 1 Cor. 10:20, 22, echoing Deut. 32:16–17; Phil. 2:15, echoing Deut. 32:5; Heb. 1:6, quoting Deut. 32:43, LXX).
‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation.’ Because they had provoked God to jealousy by their worship of a ‘no-god’ (Heb. lo’-’el), he would provoke them to jealousy by means of a ‘no-people’ (Heb. lo’-‘am). That is to say, in the course of history God used as the instruments of his judgment on Israel this or that Gentile nation—those whom Israel regarded as being a ‘no-people’ in the sense that they did not enter nationally into God’s electing purpose in the way that Israel did. But in the light of the passages he has already quoted from Hosea (cf. 9:25–26) Paul reinterprets these words with reference to the new gospel situation. To one acquainted with the Hebrew Bible, as Paul was, the comparison between Moses’ ‘no-people’ (lo’-‘am) and Hosea’s ‘not my people’ (lo’-‘ammî) suggested itself readily (more so than to one who depended exclusively on the LXX). Just how Paul understood the Gentiles’ provocation of the Jews to the jealousy is shown below in 11:11.
‘With a foolish nation I will make you angry.’ The Gentiles were ‘foolish’ from the Jewish viewpoint in that they had not received the knowledge of God (cf. 2:20, where the Jew regards himself as ‘a corrector of the foolish’—the adjective aphrōn there being synonymous with asynetos here).
20. Then Isaiah is so bold as to say. That is, he goes to the limit of daring, even beyond the point reached by Moses, in his affirmation of the paradox of God’s bestowing his covenant mercies on those who were not his people, and had no claim on these mercies.
‘I have been found by those who did not seek me …’ In their original context these words from Isaiah 65:1 (‘I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me …’) seem to refer to rebellious Israel; but, as in his application of the Hosea prophecy, Paul recognizes here a principle which in the situation of his day is applicable to Gentiles, and the LXX wording (here quoted) lent support to this application. After long centuries of living without the knowledge of the true God, the Gentiles were now turning to seek him.
21. ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’ These words, quoted from Isaiah 65:2, refer to Israel both in their original context and in Paul’s application of them. He finds them as eloquent of the Jews’ general refusal of the gospel as he finds Isaiah 65:1 eloquent of the Gentiles’ eager acceptance of it.