30 What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; 31 but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. 32 Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. 33 As it is written:
"See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall,
and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame." [m]
Romans 10
1 Brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. 2 For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. 3 Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. 4 Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.
Dig Deeper
My first year of teaching high school was also the very first year that the high school in which I taught opened up. The school and building were so new that the first year we were open they didn’t have time to put tile on the floor yet so the entire first school year was spent on plain concrete floors. Over the summer break between the first and second years, however, they were finally able to have the construction crew come in and put the tile down on the floors throughout our school. I couldn’t believe the difference that it made not only in esthetics but also in how everyone’s legs and backs felt at the end of each day. The tile certainly made getting around a more enjoyable process. But can you imagine if rather than putting the tile down properly, the construction crews had just dropped the tile down in six inch piles around the school. It would have been a nightmare not to mention just flat out annoying. The very thing that we expected would make life easier and allow us to walk around through the halls would have been causing us to trip all over the place.
This is something of what Paul is saying here concerning the Messiah. One of the primary themes of the book of Romans is covenant membership. Who are the people of God and how does one tell who is wearing the uniform of that covenant status? Paul would concede that the absolute zealous desire of the Jewish people was to be seen as the covenant people of God but something had gone wrong. Rather than submitting to the means and methods of God’s covenant faithfulness the Jews clung to the law which was never intended to mark out the covenant family. Now that God has sent his faithful servant through whom the covenant family would be embodied and defined, a problem had arisen for the Jews. The very thing that was intended to be God’s solution to allow them to walk into the age to come and truly be sons in God’s covenant family had been put in the middle of the floor, so to speak, and was causing them to trip.
There was, of course, a high sense of irony in what Paul has been saying about finding God to be faithful to his covenant promises and in Christians finding themselves to be declared as faithful members of God’s covenant. The Gentiles never pursued righteousness, the covenant faithfulness that the Jews sought after so vigorously, Because they were not seeking a covenant status with God they paid little, if any, concern to whether or not God was being faithful to his covenant promises. It’s funny how a watched pot never seems to boil and you can never seem to find what you’re looking for. Perhaps because when you are looking for something so intently you build up all sorts of expectations of where it will be found and what it will be like when you find it. In that vein, the Jews had pursed righteousness but had not attained it. The problem, of course, as Paul has already made clear was that the law was never designed to define the covenant membership or faithfulness of Israel. It had other purposes but Israel insisted on clinging to the law to demonstrate their righteousness. If you’re convinced that a bag of ice will warm you up, it doesn’t matter how tightly you cling to it, it will never accomplish what you wish it to. As Paul showed in 7:21-25, the more Israel pushed down the road of the law, the more it found evil lurking on the sides of the road entrapping them and making it impossible to find covenant family status down that road. Yet the more elusive it became, the more they became convinced that the law was the way and the further down the road they plowed. So, while the Jews could not find what they were looking for, the Gentiles, because they were not looking and had no expectations, found that the road to covenant membership is only reached through faith in the Messiah.
And that’s precisely the problem in all of this. Faith in the Messiah was the one thing that Paul’s countrymen would not consider. Paul borrows language from Isaiah 8:14 and 28:16 to make his point clear. God himself had laid a foundation stone in the Messiah. He was the stone that the rest of the Temple would be built on but something strange had happened for the Jews. It was as if the very stone that should be tucked neatly into the foundation, supporting the rest of the structure is lying right in the middle of the floor. Because of their preconceived notions and their unwillingness to let go of what defines covenant membership, they trip over the very stone that should be serving as the foundation. Rather than making them stand it was causing them to fall.
They pursued covenant status so adamantly they had a fundamental flaw in their thinking. It wasn’t following that law that would bring them covenant faithfulness in the family of God, it was fulfilling the law. But what they failed to see was the reality that one in Adam could never fulfill or attain to the law because of sin that is the curse of those in Adam. What God always desired was a people who would do his will through faith. Adam and Eve had failed to do God’s will and mankind has followed suit in exalting their own will over God’s ever since then. This is why when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them the importance of seeking and praying for God’s will (Matt. 6:9). The Jewish people thought that they could attain to the law by zealously following the works of the law, the things like food laws, land restrictions, and Sabbath regulations that defined them, so they thought, as God’s people. Paul will show clearly in the next section how one can attain to the law and find covenant membership but he anticipates in verse 32. Righteousness comes through faith in the Messiah.
Again, we should remind ourselves that in talking of righteousness, Paul is not laying out an argument between Jews who thought they could earn their status as God’s people by doing work and being morally upstanding versus a simple trust in Jesus which rejected such things. The problem with the Jews believing that the works of the law was the true sign of their righteousness, their covenant faithfulness, was that the law separated and created two groups of people. God’s promise was always that their would be one family, one people of God. So, the law could not be the end of the road, the thing to cling to but any Gentile Christians who felt, for whatever reason, that the Jews did not need to enter into Christ through faith or that God had given up on them would be bringing about the same two-family-rather-than-one problem. The irony, as we will see, was that God did want his people to fulfill the law but they could never fulfill God’s law through keeping to the law. Fulfilling the law could only come by having faith in the Messiah.
The thought of having two families was so unacceptable to Paul that he even stated in the beginning of chapter 9 that if he could be cut off from the Messiah so that his ethnic brothers could be brought into the one family then he would do so. Where his emotions showed their depth there, his true desire is expressed as chapter 10 opens. His heart’s true desire and prayer is that the Israelites be saved. They have great zeal for God’s covenant and always have but in their zeal which was not based on the knowledge of what God was actually doing, they have been put in the untenable situation of actually exalting their own will in God’s covenant purposes over God’s himself.
The Jews were so convinced that they knew God and knew what his covenant faithfulness was all about that they actually wound up creating their own version of what it meant to be faithful members of the covenant. They desired a way of doing God’s will and standing in the right in his covenant purposes that there would be no faithful remnant (as God had promised through Isaiah) and no bringing in of all nations into the covenant family (as God had promised Abraham). In clinging so zealously to the version of the covenant faithfulness that they had created, they were actually putting God in the position of being unfaithful to his promises if their concept of the covenant was kept. God had promised a family that would include a faithful remnant of Israel that lived by faith and that included all nations. God could either meet Israel’s expectations or be true to his word.
Now that God has revealed Christ as the culmination and fulfillment of the law it was a stumbling stone for the Jews because they simply would not submit to God’s righteousness. In other words, God had revealed that the way he would fulfill his end of the covenant promises would be through the Messiah so that everyone who believed in his life over their own and entered into the life of Christ through their resurrection faith in God could be found to be righteousness. Only in the Messiah could God’s will be done. Only in the Messiah could the law be attained to. Only in the Messiah could righteousness be found.
Devotional Thought
Do you ever find yourself in a similar position to what Paul describes of Israel here? Do you begin to get preconceived notions of how God should work in your life and then get angry or frustrated when he doesn’t work that way? Take a look and see if you’ve been doing that. If you have, isn’t it time to let God’s word determine how he will work?
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