The Example Of Israel
THE EXAMPLE OF ISRAEL
ROMANS 2:22-26
Do our lives really show our faith?
Among the greater characters of Israel there was always a realization that the honor of their God was in their hands. Note the significant phrase in the story of Abraham and Lot (Genesis 13:7-9)—“the Canaanites and the Perizzites lived in the land.” It was this which made strife in the camp of Abraham serious. Observe, too, Ezra’s remark (Ezra 8:22). He had boasted of his God.
And now Paul in 2:24 quotes the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) rendering of Isaiah 52:5. In the prophetic passage it is the degradation and misery of Israel which forms the basis for the Gentiles’ scorn. What sort of God, they said, so abandons his people? This is more than once the theme of Old Testament prayer.
Paul gives the words another twist. Like people, like God. If Jews have a reputation for vice, then the Gentiles’ response will inevitably be that their God is contemptible. There was some reason in the assumption. People become like the object of their worship, and if people create an object of worship out of their own mind, that deity inevitably reflects its origin, and courts rejection. Paul is writing, no doubt, with some knowledge of Roman Jewry.
This was stern language. Of what use the Law if the Law was flouted by its advocates? Nor is this irrelevant to those set free from the Law in Christ. Christ is dishonored if those who do not acknowledge him walk more righteously than those who do. As John wrote many years later: “The one who professes to abide in him should walk as he walked” (1 John 2:6). There is a debt of love, a binding obligation, and doctrine is tested by its fruit. So we prove the validity of religious experience. Unless that experience involves a reorientation of the will, a setting of the affections in the direction of the moral excellence revealed perfectly in the person of Jesus Christ, it is no true experience of God, but stirring of the emotions that is sham, self-exalting and futile.