All One In Him
ALL ONE IN HIM
ROMANS 10:12-15
The opportunity to call on the name of the Lord must be given to everyone.
Verses 12-13. Chapter 3 has already dealt with this truth. The world’s vast problems of race find solution here. And consider the tremendous adjustment which the Jew, in Christ, was called upon to make, and which Paul had made. He was not speaking mere theory, beyond the orbit of his personal experience.
Note the natural ease with which Christ is called by the title given to Jehovah (Acts 10:36; Philippians 2:10f.). For the imagery of wealth see Ephesians 3:8. It is a plain fact of common Christian experience that the gift of Christ is something for which many would pay anything: peace. The phrase “calls upon the name of the Lord” (see 1 Corinthians 1:2), is a borrowed phrase (Joel 2:32), but, by the fact of quoting such a text, it is implied that there is no distinction between Christ and God (Acts 9:14,21; 22:16; 2 Timothy 2:22).
10:14. ‘Everyone’ of 10:13 leads to this digression. “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved”—it therefore follows that the opportunity to call on the name must be put in reach of everyone.
10:15. Paul’s quotation from Isaiah 52:7, produced in his own paraphrase rather than literally, suggests that the closing chapters of the prophecy, which, in their historic context speak of deliverance from exile, were already finding a place in the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament as a prophecy of the liberating message of Christ. The interesting point for us is the rapidity with which the Old Testament was absorbed into the thinking of the church.
Meditation “No other name” (Acts 4:12).