Resurrection
and the Gospel. Rom 10:9-10
With regard to the gospel
what we are to communicate and what we are to believe are really two different
questions. It is important to raise this issue an to analyze
it in terms of those two different questions because of things that have been
raised. Just what is the essence of the gospel? Today the battle among
evangelicals is a battle really between those who are called “lordship
salvation” and those who are identified as “free grace” or “unmerited favor.” Those
who emphasize the fact that works are not included in the gospel or in
salvation, either at the front end by saying that you must believe in Jesus and
do something else such as believe and obey certain principles in Scripture (a
front door approach to the gospel), or the problem in lordship salvation which
adds something suddenly through the back door. The basic contention is that if
you have the faith that justifies then that kind of faith will necessarily produce
certain kinds of works. Those works then validate the fact and give assurance
that you are indeed saved. So there are those who hold that position and we
will identify it as perseverance salvation, the idea that you can identify your
own salvation by the works that are there and if you don’t have certain works
then maybe you should question whether or not you are saved. There are those
also who come along and ask, what is the gospel itself, if we boil everything
down to just a core proposition, is there just one simple body of content that
you much communicate and must believe, and anything other than that then you
really didn’t believe the gospel?
That has come up in the
structures of what has been known as the free grace movement, and there have
been those in recent years who have come along and have asked a question: What
is the minimal gospel? What is the core of the gospel? And they have identified
it as just simply believing a promise that Jesus can give you eternal life. The
problem with the way this has been structured is to come out and say well they
don’t know who Jesus is, there is no mention of the cross, and the concern is
that this comes from John chapter five which is before the cross. So we don’t
have Jesus making clear statements about His work on the cross prior to the
cross. But we do after the cross. So can we go to a statement that was made
before Christ died for our sins and say that sums up the gospel, you don’t even
have to know Jesus died on the cross? And there are those in this camp who have
said that there will be many people in heaven who will be surprised when they
get there to discover the fact that Jesus actually died on the cross for their
sins—church age believers, not Old Testament. This position has been called the
crossless gospel, and that is the debate that has been
going on in the free grace camp. We need to be aware of the nuances and trends
that are going on around us.
In response to that there
are those within the free grace movement who also try to define the gospel that
the cross needs to be the center of the gospel. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:2 NASB
“For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” They say that that is the heart of the
gospel. They are not trying to answer the question as to what is the minimal
amount of information somebody needs to know to be saved. That is a wrong
question. When people start asking questions sometimes they ask wrong questions
and they end up getting distracted into things that are not really relevant. In
this there are those who have come along and said that the content of the
gospel is that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and that He was buried,
that He rose again, and that as part of what you must believe as opposed to part
of what you must communicate when you witness, what you must believe is that
Jesus died and rose again. And that if you believe that He died on the cross
for your sins but you didn’t believe that He rose from the dead then you are
not saved.
But wait, that presents a
problem. What is meant if we assert that if somebody doesn’t believe in the
resurrection they are not saved? Romans 10:9, 10 NASB “that if you
confess with your mouth Jesus {as} Lord, and believe in your heart that God
raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;
Verse 9 is a key verse for
the lordship salvation crowd. They come to this verse and say you have to admit
that Jesus is Lord to be saved. These verses have a lengthy history of misuse
and abuse in witnessing. An example of misuse is Romans 6:23 NASB “For
the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.” This isn’t talking about salvation. Paul quit talking about
justification at the end of chapter five, and he starts talking about the spiritual
life in chapter six. Romans 6-8 is walking in newness of life (Romans 6:3), so
in context “the wages of sin is death” is not talking about eternal
condemnation, spiritual death, it is talking about carnal death—the wages of
sin in the context of the believer who should be walking in newness of life but
if not then the problem is he is in temporal/carnal death, i.e. out of
fellowship. The “free gift of God is eternal life”—the life that he is talking
about is the newness of life that comes as a result of being baptized into
Christ’s death, Romans 6:2. It is important to understand these things because
in common evangelical jargon we use words like “saved” and “righteousness” as
if they always mean the same thing, and that is in terms of phase one
justification.
The questions we attempt
to answer are two. What should we communicate to those to whom we witness? When
we are talking to somebody who has no idea of who Jesus is,
what Jesus did for them, have no idea of heaven or anything else, what do we
need to communicate to them? People we are talking to bring a certain amount of
baggage, so that when we are talking to them we need to make sure that they
understand certain terms. When we look at the examples of Peter, John, Stephen
and Paul explaining the gospel there are two parts: the “who” Jesus is, and
what He did. Peter says, “It is this Jesus whom you crucified that God raised
from the dead” that you need to believe in. If you believe in the wrong Jesus
you are not saved.
We have seen that the term
“gospel” has a broad sense and a narrow sense. The broad use is the view that
presents all the good news of not only our justification but also the spiritual
life—how to have eternal life and then once we have it how to live the new life
that God gives us. The narrow use is just simply that narrow section: what do
we do to be justified in order to go to heaven, and what exactly is the content
there?
Questions:
1. How does Romans 10:9, 10 fit
in the context of Romans 9-11? Remember, a text without a context is a pretext.
We can also remember that when we take the text out of the context we are left
with a con job.
2. How do these verses fit within the context of Romans?
What is Paul saying in his letter to the Romans? Is he telling them in Romans
chapter 10 how to be justified, or is something else going on here?
3. We have to address the immediate context of Romans
10:9, 10, and by that is meant we have to look at what Paul is saying,
beginning in verse 5 where he says, NASB “For Moses writes…” and
going down through verse 13 (and a number of verses are in italics or upper
case, indicating that they are quotations from the Old Testament). What we note
from that is that there are several verses that lead into verse 9 that quote
Old Testament passages. Following v. 10 there are Old Testament quotes in verse
11 and 13. So we had better understand what those verses are saying in their
original context in Deuteronomy 30; Isaiah 51; Joel 2 or we may be making this
say something completely different.
4. What does Paul mean by “confess with your mouth”? Is
it public confession or can we say this is just an idiom for a mental
statement/confession? Does it have to be public?
5. What does he mean by saved and salvation? To understand
this we have to really get a grasp, a big picture, of Romans. We have to fit
this in that particular context.
6. What does Paul mean by righteousness? Is this justification
righteousness (imputed righteousness)? Or is this experiential righteousness?
Look at Romans 1:16, 17 NASB
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation
to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
Some things we need to
note here. First, the last phrase says that the righteous shall live by faith.
Is that justification or sanctification? It is talking about how you live after
you are justified. “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed
from faith to faith.” That first “faith”
is belief that justifies us and the second “faith” is a faith that is
characteristic of our post-salvation/justification spiritual growth. Having
understood in the immediate context that Paul has a broad nuance here, when we
go back to 1:16 where he says “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” it is clear
from the immediate context that by “gospel” he doesn’t mean the information we
need to know in order to be justified, he is using it to describe the totality
of Christian doctrine—what we need in order to understand how to have new life
in Christ but how to live on the basis of that new life in Christ. “… for it is the power of God for salvation…” So you say, there
it is right there; this is a salvation text! In evangelicalism we want to use
that word “salvation” only to refer to phase one,
justification, but that is not necessarily true. In Romans the word group
related to salvation—sozo [swzw], soteria [swthria]—are never used as a synonym for justification, not
one time. That is so important. If we don’t understand that we will
misinterpret many verses in Romans. Salvation in Romans is never a synonym for
justification.
If we think about the core
meaning of sozo [swzw] it means to deliver from something. If the context
is talking about deliverance from illness then we would translate it as
healing, and there are passages in the Bible where sozo is used for healing a physical disease. In other
passages it is more the idea of deliverance from some kind of a problem or
situation or circumstance. If we look at the context here Paul uses these two
words, “gospel” and “salvation,” together, but in the next verse,
Paul takes this whole idea
of righteousness, the righteousness of God, as the framework for this letter. He
is talking about the righteousness of God. How do we know that? He uses the
noun dikaiosune [dikaiosunh], the quality of being righteous, seventy-six times
in this epistle. That should tell us something? When we add the other forms,
such as dikaios [dikaioj] we are going to come close to two hundred uses of
these words. Romans is about the righteousness of God and man can have the
righteousness of God so that we can be declared just by God, and God can
maintain His integrity, His righteousness, in His dealings with man.
At the center of this
epistle Paul seems to digress from this theme, but actually he doesn’t. When we
come to Romans 9-11—and the verses we are looking at there are right in the
middle of chapter ten—he starts talking about Israel. He starts talking about
God’s righteousness in relation to the Jews and to
Context: In Romans
1:18-5:21 Paul relates
When Paul comes to the end
of chapter eight he will makes a statement: NASB “For I am convinced
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers,
When we look at Romans 9,
10, 11 we see that Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in His
rejection of national Israel—not individuals. Individuals are still saved/justified. In Romans 10 he demonstrates that the
rejection is based on
Romans 11:25 NASB “For
I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery [of a future
restoration of Israel]—so that you will not be wise in your own estimation—that
a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles
has come in;
What we must realize is
the importance of context. Saved in Romans 10:9, 10 doesn’t
mean justified, and righteousness there is not talking about imputation of
righteousness. That passage is surrounded by quotations both leading into it
and coming out of it. They come from Old Testament passages that without
exception talk about God’s promise to restore national