Sunday, April 21, 2013

Everyone Who Calls (part 3 of 4)


In that day (the time of Jesus and Paul), these marks of the covenant people would be generally referred to as the “works of the law.”  Their purpose was to mark them off from the Gentile nations that stood against Israel, and therefore, according to the way of thinking maintained by the larger part of the people of Israel, did not deserve their God’s blessings.  Paul insists that with this way of thinking, Israel did was not submitting to the Creator God’s plan of covenant faithfulness, which was that all peoples would be blessed through His chosen people, beginning with Abraham, with whom the covenant had originally been struck. 

Rounding out this line of thinking, Paul then writes, “For Christ is the end of the law, with the result that there is righteousness for everyone who believes” (10:4).  What the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ would accomplish would be the tearing down of those boundaries of the “works of the law” (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath-keeping).  Having torn those things down, He would set up in their place, a new standard for entering in to the blessings of the Creator God’s covenant faithfulness.  That way of entering into the covenant, and so being able to share the blessings (as outlined by Israel’s self-defining narrative), would be that of believing upon Jesus as Lord.    

As one reads through this letter to the Romans, it must be continually borne in mind that Paul is writing to a mixed group of both Jews and Gentiles.  There would have been a faction of the Jews, as is to be found repeatedly throughout the New Testament, that did not want to see the Gentiles come under the blessings of their God’s covenant.  There would have been a faction that would have insisted that Gentiles, in order to truly be a part of the Creator God’s covenant people, would need to undergo circumcision, and along with that, would need to diligently keep to the prevailing dietary restrictions and Sabbath laws. 

In addition to those factions of Jews (who could certainly be counted as committed Jesus-believers), there would have been Gentiles (also Jesus-believers) that held to the thought that the covenant blessings had passed completely from the Jews to the Gentiles, as they could point to Israel’s nearly wholesale rejection of Jesus as Messiah as evidence in favor of such a verdict.  One could presume that these various factions could have eyed each other suspiciously, seeking to draw boundaries where none should rightfully be allowed to exist, and Paul can be seen dealing with these things throughout this letter.

Thus, Paul’s talk of “righteousness for everyone who believes” (right standing in the covenant and access to the covenant faithfulness of the Creator God) also serves to address any Jewish provincialism, along with Gentile high-mindedness, as Paul makes it a point to inform them that all can be saved.  The implication that all can be saved would also seem to imply that all need to be saved, which further implies that all, Jew and Gentile, are in the midst of cursing and exile and in need of salvation from such.  For the Jew, the curse and exile was associated with their violations of the law delivered to them through Moses.  For the Gentile, if one considers the whole of the Scriptural narrative, the cursing and exile would go all the way back to Adam, and his purported actions that resulted in the bringing of the curse of death and exile from God’s presence into the creation (which would naturally apply to the Jew as well). 

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