Paul’S Love For Israel
PAUL’S LOVE FOR ISRAEL
ROMANS 10:1-4
Paul very much wants the Jews to be saved.
This is the beginning of the second section of Paul’s “Synagogue Sermon.” He has demonstrated that Israel has no claim, and right, to special treatment. Their whole history, rightly conceived, showed God acting towards humanity on principles quite foreign to those to which they clung with such fervor. He is now about to show that this grave and fundamental error was made in self-will, but before launching on this indictment he feels compelled, in anguish of heart, to cry aloud his concern and love for his people. (Look back to again 9:30-33, which might logically have been included in this chapter.)
Notice that he speaks of the Jews in the third person, an indication that he regards the Roman Christian community (“brothers”) as a people apart, and not entirely Jewish in their ethnic content. The nature of his argument, so preoccupied with the imagined righteousness of the Law, and the assumption of a full and detailed knowledge of the covenants, is surely proof that the church in Rome was not, as some contend, on the strength of this third person pronoun, completely Gentile.
But the deepest interest of these verses is their biographical content. They reveal the Christlikeness of Paul. Like Jesus, he “weeps over Jerusalem.” He has said stern things about the Jews. He is about to say more, and to press home with insistence the charge of willful rebellion. But he does it with yearning, not anger. He pleads; he does not denounce. Read Ezekiel 3:14-21. Commissioned to speak grim words to the exiles of Israel, the prophet went “in bitterness in the heat of his spirit” to the labor camp on the great Kebar irrigation canal. And “the hand of the Lord” fell upon him, and he “sat where they sat” (KJV) for seven days. Having shared the misery of those to whom he was to minister, he was finally allowed to speak, and did so, with no less regard for truth, but deeper understanding. Paul had already “sat where they sat” (Philippians 3:4-6), and it is out of that fellowship of blindness, in the sharp memory of his Pharisaic sin, that he speaks the words of this letter. It is a model for preachers. Let there be none of the hard denunciation of sinners which speaks of self-righteousness, but rather the indictment of sin, in all and through all, the compelling love of Christ.