Everyone Who Calls (part 1)

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. – Romans 10:13  (NET)

A great hope for the believer.  A great comfort to those that previously stood outside of covenant with the Creator God.  It is certainly an oft-quoted statement, but regularly and almost exclusively set forth with a complete lack of context.  Regularly, and certainly without any type of malicious intent (one would hope), this verse is lifted from its setting here in the tenth chapter of Romans and made to serve duty as part of a statement regarding nothing more than a personal salvation, with the concept therein expressed presented as something of a free-floating aphorism. 

It is a duty for which the statement is ill-equipped, especially when one is made to consider that the personal salvation with which it is always associated is a salvation of the soul, so as to enable a believer to “go to heaven” when he or she passes from this life.  Unfortunately, such a presentation and way of viewing the saving that is associated with calling on the name of the Lord, falls well short of the message of the Gospel (Jesus is Lord).  So while these words do represent a great hope, putting them in their proper context serves to make the hope even greater, as it demonstrates the covenant faithfulness of the Creator God.

Throughout chapters nine and ten of Romans, the Apostle Paul spills a fair amount of ink in writing about his national brethren, the Jews.  This ongoing dissertation concerning the Jews provides the context for verse thirteen of chapter ten, as well as what comes before and after.  After outlining Israel’s rejection of the Gospel message (Jesus is the crucified and resurrected Messiah of Israel and Lord of all creation) in the ninth chapter, Paul begins the tenth chapter (though, of course, Paul had no conception of chapter and verse in the composition of his letters to believers) by writing, “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God on behalf of my fellow Israelites is for their salvation” (10:1).  It was well understood that, until the messiah came---until the covenant God of Israel personally acted within history to deliver His people from oppression and exile---that Israel was still under their God’s curse, while continuing to live and labor and experience the exile that began with the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B.C. 

The coming of messiah, their acknowledgment of their God’s faithful fulfillment of His promise in the sending of that messiah (or perhaps coming to His people and returning to His Temple in the person of the messiah), along and their submission to the claims of that messiah and his lordship, would signal Israel’s salvation.  This did not mean that members of the nation of Israel could now go to heaven when they died, and this way of thinking would be quite foreign to a member of the covenant people.   What Israel’s salvation signaled was that Israel would be delivered from the curse of separation from their God, with their long exile from fellowship with Him brought to an end, and their subjection to foreign powers discontinued.  That is an extraordinarily large part of what it would mean for Israel to be saved. 

To the words of the first verse, Paul adds, “For I can testify that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not in line with the truth” (10:2).  What was the truth?  In Paul’s estimation, the truth was that the Creator God had sent His Messiah, that being Jesus, to His people, but that He had been rejected.  By rejecting Jesus, it was surmised that they also rejected the model for the inauguration of the kingdom of God that Jesus had presented to them, and which was now being espoused by those that continued to look to Him as Messiah, who believed Him to be and now worshiped Him as the incarnation of the Creator God, and who were convinced that the long-awaited kingdom of God had been inaugurated and brought to bear on earth via His death and Resurrection.  Contrary to this, many in Israel believed that the kingdom of God---the kingdom of heaven---would have to be ushered in through the overthrow of those who oppressed them, that being the Romans.  They were zealous for this.  As Paul insists, this zeal was not in line with the truth.