I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE, on August 16, 2026. The preachers from the previous two weeks had not covered Romans 9 & 10 from the lectionary, so I did a brief overview of those two chapters before tackling chapter 11. Message was captured in audio (here) and video (Rumble) formats.I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE, on August 16, 2026. The preachers from the previous two weeks had not covered Romans 9 & 10 from the lectionary, so I did a brief overview of those two chapters before tackling chapter 11. Message was captured in audio (here) and video (Rumble) formats.
Good morning! The Lord be with you!
I’m continuing on through Romans today. While the first eight chapters were pretty heavy on doctrine, the nature and role of faith and faithfulness, and the “how” of life—both here and beyond—in the Spirit, Paul hasn’t really dealt with the social and cultural dynamics of the mix of Gentiles and Jews in the Roman churches. That’s where chapters 9 through 11 fit in.
Remember that the Roman church was a healthy mix of Jews and Gentiles, with Gentiles in the majority, especially after the banishment of Jews from Rome ended and the Jews had begun to return. There are hints later in Romans of some of the tensions that may have arisen when the Jews returned, most notably involving the diet restrictions that Jews followed but Gentiles did not. That would have caused no small kerfuffle at their fellowship meals, to be sure.
It would seem from Paul’s comments in chapters 9–10 especially that each group felt they had one-up on the other. The Gentiles, after all, had kept the churches alive and growing in the absence of the Jews, while the Jews had the rightful claim of being the religious and ethnic “home,” if you will, of the Messiah. Paul attempts to balance that tension by using the metaphor of the olive tree.
Sure, the Jews represent the original olive tree, the foundation from which Christianity arose through the Messiah. But Gentiles had some bragging rights as well, having been welcomed, or in Paul’s terms, “grafted,” into the new Christian “sect” of Judaism where they had previously been deemed as second-class humans, or worse, as dogs, by traditional Judaism. I’m sure it must have been difficult for life-long Jews who had converted to Christianity to get over some of these biases about Gentiles.
What Paul is doing in chapters 9–11 is trying to convince the Jews that their standing, as well as the Gentiles’ standing, with God isn’t based on their ethnicity alone. It is based on what they believe about God, their faithfulness to his commands, and the state of their hearts. The Jewish Christians aren’t more saved or more blessed than the Gentile Christians simply because of their ethnicity. By the same token, the Gentiles aren’t more saved because they are inherently free of the constraints of the law that was deeply etched in the Jewish mindset. That doesn’t mean the Gentiles aren’t responsible for the moral behaviors reflected in the law; they just don’t have the kind of bias against a Jew that a traditional Jew might have against Gentiles.
We see this in Chapter 9 with a couple notable passages. Verse 14–16 state:
14 What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” r
16 It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.[1]
In other words, God will bring about salvation for Jews and Gentiles in his own way.
Then in verses 27–28, Paul quotes Isaiah’s warning from chapter 10 of his prophecy:
27 Isaiah cries out concerning Israel:
“Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea,
only the remnant will be saved.
28 For the Lord will carry out
his sentence on earth with speed and finality.”[2]
God’s “sentence on earth” is like a reference to the warnings in the Torah about disobedience, especially Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. These warnings speak directly to why some of the Israelites were considered the branches cut out of the olive tree. What’s interesting about these warnings about disobedience are much longer than the promises for obedience that precede them in each of these chapters.
Here’s a sampling of Leviticus 28:14, 16–17.
14 “ ‘But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands… 16 then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.[3]
Leviticus goes on with a series of paragraphs that take us down the infamous slippery slope by introducing subsequent sections with the sentiment: “If you don’t listen to me and turn back after all this, here’s what else is coming” with list of even more painful and in some cases gruesome consequences.
Deuteronomy isn’t any more pleasant (28:15–19):
15 However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.[4]
They can’t run and they can’t hide from the consequences. But it is because of God’s mercy that he didn’t wipe them out completely.
Chapter 10 (verses 8–10) makes it clear what our next step should be to escape this. I’m sure many of you have heard this before as part of the Romans Road:
8 But what does it say? “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” [Deuteronomy 30:14] that is, the message concerning faith that we proclaim: 9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.[5]
This brings us then to our passage this morning from Romans 11. We’ve only read the first and last part of the chapter, but they are the opening and closing summaries of the heart of the passage. Paul is proud of his Jewish heritage, just as he enumerated the blessings the Jews have from their history at the beginning of chapter 9. He speaks of “the remnant [of Israel] chosen by grace,” that is, those who reaped the rewards of obedience from the first verses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Their salvation is a completely free gift of God. There’s no application to fill out, no extensive background check, no references to check, because God already knows that. All he needs to see is that circumcised heart, represented by your confession that Jesus is Lord.
In 11:28, Paul calls the disobedient Jews “enemies” to the Gentiles when it comes to the gospel, but because the Jews are God’s chosen people, they are still considered “elect” and God’s love never fails for them. The promise of vs. 29, that “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable”[6] is as applicable to Israel as it is for the Gentiles. That promise to include the Gentiles goes all the way back to Isaiah, at least. Verse 32 about Jews and Gentiles being bound for disobedience comes across as a sticky wicket of sorts, until you realize Paul is just restating what he said way back in Romans 3:10–11: “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.”[7] We can never be saved by the works of the law; we can never be declared righteous by following any law. That only comes from the mercy and the declaration of God because of what Christ has done for us.
Paul realizes he’s laid on the theology and doctrine rather heavily in these first 11 chapters. But he ties it up in a neat little bundle here, at least by implication, by returning to his opening concept from chapter 1 of the “obedience of faithfulness” in contrast with all of us being bound over to disobedience. Romans 1–11 give us great promises of salvation: resurrection, new and eternal life, life in the Spirit, and even a corporate fellowship among those who used to be enemies. It is a beautiful picture of salvation based solely on grace and not on any ethnic connection. I’m looking forward to next week when I tackle Romans 12 and get into some of the real-life issues we face as believers, especially around the call to love our neighbors. The principles of the first 11 chapters show up often in the last 5 chapters of Romans, so we’ll see how all Paul’s theology and doctrine play out in real life.
The benediction at the end of 11 is as profound as it is encouraging, and I close with that:
33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?” b
35 “Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay them?” c
36 For from him and through him and for him are all things.
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Part 1 of the Romans podcast series may be found here.
Pip: Welcome to Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the coffee is hot and the participles are passive — and sometimes that’s the whole point.
Mara: Scott Stocking is our guide this episode, working through Romans with a close eye on the Greek text — what words like pistis and dikaiosyne actually mean, and why the translation choices matter for how we understand salvation.
Pip: Let’s start with the Romans Road and what happens when you read it in the original language.
Pip: The post on Romans 3:23–24 opens a question most readers skip right past: when Paul says we are justified by faith, whose faith is he actually talking about — ours, or Christ’s?
Mara: The post frames it this way: “For all who are being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Messiah Jesus sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” That rearrangement of word order is deliberate — the participle dikaioumenoi, meaning “who are being justified,” attaches directly to “all,” making justification an ongoing process, not a completed event.
Pip: So the grammar itself is doing theological work. Being justified is present tense, active right now, not a box you checked at conversion.
Mara: Exactly. And that present-tense framing connects to a comparison with Ephesians 2:8, where the parallel construction swaps “through the redemption in Christ Jesus” for “through faithfulness, and this not from yourselves.” The argument is that the faithfulness in view is Christ’s — his obedience to the cross — not a quantity of belief we have to produce on our own.
Pip: Which dissolves a question that has quietly tormented a lot of Christians: do I have enough faith to be saved? If the faithfulness is Christ’s, the answer is structurally irrelevant to us.
Mara: The post makes that point directly. If salvation rests on our faith, it becomes relative — how much is enough? But if it rests on Christ’s faithfulness, the statement becomes absolute. Our own trust in Jesus is, as the post puts it, “not so much for the purpose of being saved but the result of being saved.”
Pip: That’s a quiet but significant inversion of how the passage usually gets preached.
Mara:The companion piece on pistis across Romans 1–5 develops this at length. It argues that the phrase pisteos Iesou Christou — “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” — in Romans 3:22 is a subjective genitive: Christ is the one being faithful, not merely the object of our faith. The post traces that reading through the whole arc of Romans 1–5, from God’s wrath under the Law in chapters 1 through 3, to Abraham’s faithfulness in chapter 4, to the application in chapter 5.
Mara: The inclusio that brackets the entire letter is telling: the phrase eis hypakoēn pisteōs — “into obedience of faithfulness” — appears in both 1:5 and 16:26, the first and last occurrences of pistis in Romans. That structural frame suggests Paul’s whole argument is about faithful obedience, not faith as a discrete interior event.
Pip: So Romans is less a manual for how to believe and more a demonstration that Christ already did the believing on our behalf — and we walk in the wake of that.
Mara: With the caveat that our own faithfulness still matters — the post is careful to say this doesn’t imply universalism or unconditional security, but rather a call to trust more deeply because God has already demonstrated his reliability. Works, confession, and obedience all follow from that trust.
Pip: From the mechanics of justification to the question of who the righteous one actually is — that thread runs all the way back to Romans 1:17, which is where the deeper argument begins.
Mara: The thread connecting both posts is really one question: what kind of faithfulness is Romans built on, and does the Greek text change the answer?
Pip: Turns out the grammar has opinions. Next time, we’ll see where else those opinions show up.
Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog is back, and if you thought Paul’s letter to the Romans was just a greatest-hits playlist of salvation verses, Scott Stocking is here to walk you through the whole road — construction specs included.
Mara: Scott Stocking covers two connected territories this episode: what righteousness actually means in Romans, and how the phrase “obedience of faithfulness” functions as the letter’s spine from opening greeting to closing benediction.
Pip: Let’s start with righteousness — and what it costs to define it carefully.
Mara: The central question in this segment is what Paul means by “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 — and whether it’s something God hands over to believers, or something embodied in a person.
Pip: The answer lands hard. The post sets up Romans 1:17 carefully, then offers this reading: “The righteousness of God then isn’t an object to be given. It is embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the righteousness of God.”
Mara: The upshot is that righteousness isn’t a transaction — it’s a participation. Because Jesus fulfilled every requirement of the law, he alone is called righteous, and believers share in that only by being “in Christ.”
Pip: Which reframes the familiar Romans Road considerably. The post uses a road-construction metaphor that actually earns its keep: righteousness is the substructure — the rebar, the compacted earth, the dowel bars — and Jesus’s faithfulness is the surface we walk on.
Mara: Romans 1:17 gets parsed as “from faithfulness into faithfulness” — Jesus’s perfect obedience to the law moving into his faithfulness unto death on the cross. The post ties that directly to Philippians 2:8: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross.”
Pip: So “obedience of faithfulness” in Romans 1:5 isn’t just a theological motto. It points, specifically, to the crucifixion.
Mara: Romans 2 extends this. Paul warns both Jews and Gentiles against hypocrisy — knowing the law isn’t the same as following it. The post notes that circumcision and baptism function as parallel initiation rites in Paul’s argument, and reads Romans 2:25–29 as groundwork for the baptism discussion coming in chapter 6.
Pip: The small-group kickoff context matters here — this is a congregation being asked to read Romans one chapter at a time, and the post is honest that chapters 1 and 2 alone carry enough freight to slow anyone down.
Mara: That honesty is part of the argument. The post closes the Romans 1 and 2 discussion with a summary worth quoting directly: if we remain faithful to living in the righteousness of Christ, then as Romans 2:13 says, “we’ll be declared righteous when we stand before our maker.”
Pip: Which brings us to the phrase that holds all of this together — and how it functions across the whole letter.
Mara: The question the second post takes up is whether “obedience of faithfulness” is a throwaway greeting formula or the actual organizing theme of Romans — and the answer is the latter.
Pip: The post on “Obedience of Faithfulness: A Walk On the Romans Road” opens with personal testimony but arrives at a precise textual claim. Paul, it argues, “told us what he was going to say, he said it, and he told us he said it” — the phrase appears in Romans 1:5 and again, word for word, in the closing benediction of Romans 16.
Mara: That’s not a coincidence. The Greek is only two words, and the post explains that the structure implies the terms define each other: “obedience is faithfulness, and faithfulness is obedience.” Faith, in this reading, is never purely intellectual — it always carries action with it.
Pip: The post traces this through baptism in Romans 6, reading immersion as the believer’s own enactment of the pattern — buried with Christ, raised to new life. That’s the “obedience of faithfulness” made physical.
Mara: And Romans 12:1–2 closes the arc: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The post is careful to note these are promises for life now, not only for life after death.
Pip: Two posts, one through-line — the road Paul built was always meant to be walked.
Mara: Righteousness as foundation, faithfulness as the road you actually travel — that’s the frame Romans keeps returning to.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see where else on the blog that road leads.
Welcome to Lectionary Help for the first Sunday of Lent, February 22, 2026, the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. The celebration of Easter/Resurrection of the Lord is on April 5 this year.
I’ll just pull a relevant quote from the sermon linked above, as I think it’s succinct enough to give you the sense of the words used for “temptation” and “testing.”
Word Study (from the sermon linked above)
Tempt, test (πειράζω peirazō)
Temptation, testing (πειρασμός peirasmos)
So why do three of the versions I mentioned use “test” instead of “temptation” for the same Greek or Hebrew word? Well, as I tell my students when they ask me questions like that, the answer is “context, context, context.” If you follow the use of the words in their respective story settings, you find that “testing” has to do with the relationship between God and humans. The general thrust of the verses in question goes one of three ways: either God is testing his people to see how they respond, or the people are testing God by NOT doing what he’s commanded them to do, or one person is testing another’s character. And consistent with the concept of testing, sometimes there’s a judgment or “grade” on how we responded to the test.
“Temptation” is a subset of testing. That is, all temptations are tests, but not all tests are temptations. The word “temptation” is used by these English translation committees to indicate a situation in which some personified evil power or influence is at work.
Application
In the message above, I offer three ways after the example of Jesus to fight against temptation and weaken their influence in your life:
Pray! (Hebrews 4:15–16)
Live in the will of God; Live “in Christ” (1 John 2:15–17)
Memorize and proclaim God’s word (Psalm 119:11)
Epistles passage (Romans 5:12–19)
If you’re looking for a different angle to approach the theme, consider using Romans 5:12–19 as your starting point. I’ve had Romans on the brain for the past couple months because I gave the kickoff message to our 2026 first semester church-wide small group study in Romans (Romans 1 & 2: Jesus Our Righteous and Faithful Savior (StoneBridge small group kickoff) | Sunday Morning Greek Blog). I side with the subjective genitive approach to Romans when it comes to talking about both righteousness and faithfulness, so Jesus is “the righteous one who lives by [his] faithfulness” and we’re saved through the faithfulness of Jesus, the Righteous One.
Having established my foundation for my understanding of Romans, I’ll give some quick hits here.
The “sin entered the world through one man” concept is countered by Jesus, the Righteousness of God, the “one man” through whom all are made righteous by being “in Christ.” Jesus’s faithfulness secures that for us.
Verse 19 makes the connection to the stated theme of Romans (leading the Gentiles to the “obedience of faithfulness”; 1:5 & 16:26): “Through the obedience [of faithfulness] of the one man the many will be made righteous.” This is the set-up for Paul’s discussion of baptism in chapter 6: If we’re baptized into Christ, we’re baptized into his death. That “death” is how we’re freed from the law (Romans 7), and our subsequent emersion (coming out of the baptismal waters) results in life “in Christ.” Our righteousness is not something separate imparted to us; it’s something we walk in when we walk “in Christ.”
Blessings this week as you enter into the Lenten season. If you’re in a tradition that gives up something for Lent, try giving up those things that keep you from drawing closer to your Savior. I’ve preached the above sermon twice in the last four years, so time for me write something afresh.
NOTE: Video link will be added when it is available.
I presented this message at StoneBridge Christian Church in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 2026, to kick off the church-wide small group study on Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the first part of the message, I address the connection between faithfulness and righteousness in 1:5 and 1:17. In the last half of the message, I cover the high points of the other sections of the two chapters. There is a 7-second lacuna at about 9:18 where I had to cut out the audio from a Bible Project video on Romans that we showed during the service due to copyright laws. The bold text in the message represents the supporting slides on the screens.
Good evening, Church! The Lord be with you!
I trust you all have been enjoying Mark’s and Josh’s messages to this point. It is a huge undertaking in this day and age to take one chapter at a time through a book like Romans, but then that’s the answer to the age-old question, right? How do you eat the elephant in the room? One bite at a time.
If you’ve been in one of our First Step classes, or, if you’ve been here as long as I have, a 101 class, you know that StoneBridge is affiliated with a brotherhood called The Restoration Movement or Stone-Campbell Movement. You were probably also told that we have our “catchphrases” like “No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible” or “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, there is freedom.”
It’s important and beneficial, then, to do something like this every so often to make sure we’re aligned as a congregation on both how we understand our relationship with God and what we expect from the church and each other in the congregation and especially in our small groups.
Paul’s epistles in the New Testament historically were arranged from longest to shortest, which is why Romans stands at the head of the Pauline epistles. But Romans is also the most complete “systematic” theology we have in the New Testament, covering all the key concepts of salvation and walking faithfully with Jesus, our Righteousness. The contextual clues in Romans 15:23–32 place the time of writing somewhere around AD 56 or 57, which coincides with the historical record in the first few verses of Acts 20. Paul was in or near Corinth at the time waiting to return to Jerusalem.
The situation in Rome at that time is probably pretty fluid. The Jews had been kicked out of Rome twice in the 40 years prior to Paul’s writing the letter: By Tiberius in AD 19 and by Claudius in AD 49. Under Claudius, then, the church in Rome was primarily Gentile. But some speculate after Claudius’s death in AD 54, the Jewish Christians may have started to return to Rome, only to find the church somewhat different than when they had left.
Paul’s letter may serve a couple purposes, then. The first, as evident in 1:5, is to affirm that his mission is to call the Gentiles into what he calls “The Obedience of Faithfulness.” But it seems also that he needs to remind the Jewish Christians who have returned to Rome what is their own relationship with their law in Christ and what responsibilities they have as God’s original “chosen people.” The Gentile Christians wouldn’t have been ignorant about the Jewish background of Christianity, but they may have forgotten some important details in their absence.
Paul talks about the law quite a bit in Romans, but he does so in a way that engages both Jews and Gentiles. While the law is important and reverenced by the Jews, Paul argues that it cannot ultimately be the thing that saves them. He points out that sometimes the Gentiles get it right even though they don’t have that connection to the law the Jews do. What matters is what is in their hearts, and that’s how he grabs the attention of both groups.
Paul also realizes the importance of evangelizing the largest city in the Roman Empire as well. Population estimates vary, but it was likely somewhere around 500,000 people, give or take a 100,000 or so. The only time Paul uses the word “church” (ἐκκλησία ekklēsia; perhaps a better translation would be “congregation”) in Romans is in chapter 16, where greets those who seem to be leaders in house churches in Rome. They certainly didn’t have any church buildings yet, although some Jewish Christians may have still been able to meet in synagogues. In a city that size, it may not have been feasible to try and gather all the Christ-followers in one place, either, even if only a couple times a year.
In keeping with the theme of “Pave the Way,” I want us to look at the “Romans Road” from two perspectives so we can get a fuller idea of the two main themes in Romans: the first is Righteousness and the second is the thematic statement at the beginning and end of Romans, Obedience of Faithfulness.
Now even though we have two perspectives of the Romans Road here, we’re not going to be looking at two separate roads. We’ll be looking at two parts of the same road. You can’t have one without the other. “Righteousness,” as I’m going to describe it here, is the foundation or substructure of the road. It’s the rebar, the expansion joints, the paved-smooth layer of compacted earth that ensures there will be no surprises or sinkholes after the road is complete. The foundation for any road, just like the foundation for any building, must be perfectly aligned and perfectly measured.
If you’ve ever seen the never-ending construction on I-80 across Nebraska, you’ve probably seen the perfectly placed dowel bars and tie bars they lay down before they start pouring the concrete. Those ensure that the road structure holds together under all the stresses placed on it. That is what righteousness is times infinity. Righteousness isn’t just about being “right with God”; it is absolute, uncorrupted perfection in the eyes of God. That is the foundation we need as Christ followers to have the assurance that we’re walking on the right road with all the support we need from our Father in heaven and to support our fellowship with one another here on earth.
The main part of the road, the part we see and walk on, is paved on this foundation of righteousness by Jesus’s faithfulness. Just like there’s more to righteousness than being right with God, there is more to faithfulness than just saying you believe in Jesus. I’ll break that out here shortly.
Now here’s the beauty of the foundation aspect of righteousness. That foundation has already been lain and the road has been paved and maintained in perfect condition for 2,000 years now. It is a straight and narrow path that goes straight from where each of us is now to the main entrance of the heavenly city. All we have to do is walk on it, in Jesus. People like Mark and Josh and your campus pastors are all primarily concerned with the part of that road that goes straight to heaven’s gate. But the reality is, when you’re “in Christ,” you have that foundation of righteousness wherever you find yourself—at work, on vacation, in your home, etc.
That is the important background information you need to know about Romans and some of the key words in this epistle. We’ve got a short Bible Project video here we want to play for you before we focus on chapters 1 and 2.
In Romans 1:5, Paul makes an interesting statement about the “obedience of faithfulness” in his greeting. I want us to read my translation of the first five verses of Romans 1 together here, because Paul has a lot of “supporting facts” that will come up as we discuss both righteousness and the obedience of faithfulness.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who was a descendant of David according to his human ancestry, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord 5 through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience of faithfulness for his name’s sake.[1]
Paul will close his letter to the Romans with that very same phrase. Again, let’s read the final verses of Romans together in context so we can hear it for ourselves.
25 Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, 26 but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience of faithfulness—27 to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.[2]
Now many translations have tried to get creative with this phrase “obedience of faithfulness,” but the truth is it’s only two words in the original Greek. The New Living Translation, which Mark typically uses in his sermons, has “believe and obey.” While that captures the meanings of the two words, it doesn’t capture the unity of the phrase in the original language. The way it’s written in the Greek text implies the two words refer to the same thing. When Paul says, “obedience of faithfulness,” he is really saying that “obedience” is “faithfulness,” and “faithfulness” is “obedience” (e.g., see McKnight p. 32). The other implication of this is that “faith” is not just an intellectual assent to a fact. “Faith” always implies that some action is involved, as we’ll see.
Before we commence on this journey, I do need to make you aware of a couple of synonyms for these terms. Depending on the version of the Bible you read, and sometimes even within the same version, you may see the adjective “righteous” translated as “justified” and the verb “make righteous” as “justify.” Those words all come from the same root word. The Greek word for the noun “faith” also means “faithfulness” or “belief.” The verb “have faith in” may be translated as “believe” or “trust.” My goal is to be consistent with how I speak about these terms when they occur.
Let’s start with the theme verse in Romans 1:5. The concept of “the Obedience of Faithfulness” permeates Paul’s letter to the Romans, so it’s crucial to understand what it refers to. It’s also strongly bound to the concept of righteousness. We see that at the end of the first section in Romans 1, Romans 1:17. In the NIV, it reads like this:
17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”[3]
In the New Living Translation, we regularly use in Sunday service, it sounds a bit different:
17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.”[4]
This is a rather difficult verse to translate because of some technical grammatical issues that scholars debate. It’s also tricky because so much meaning is packed into the phrase “the righteousness of God,” it’s hard to capture the nuances of that in a straightforward translation. I won’t go into the grammatical issue here tonight, but I do want to deal with the part of the verse that is translated “from first to last” or “from start to finish” and establish the meaning of “righteous/righteousness” here. This is important to spend a few minutes on, because once you understand what’s going on, a lot of other things fall into place and make sense in Romans.
First, I want to talk about what “righteousness” means here, especially “the righteousness of God.” For years, many assumed that this phrase refers to the righteousness that God imparts to us when we believe. But about 35 years ago, several scholars argued for a different understanding of that concept, and I’ve been following, studying, and writing about that concept for almost that whole time. The concept they argued for, and that has taken hold in many circles, was that “the righteousness of God” was an inherent character quality of God that is unique to him, a quality that is active, that “is being revealed” in the gospel.
Who or what is the gospel that’s being revealed about, then? It’s about Jesus, of course. The “righteousness of God” then isn’t an object to be given. It is embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is “the righteousness of God.”Jesus Christ is “The righteous one [who] will live by faithfulness.” That last bit is a quote from Habakkuk 2:4, where the Hebrew adds a pronoun: “The righteous one will live by his faithfulness.”
Let that sink in for a minute. Look back at vs. 16: the gospel is “the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who has faith.” Again, isn’t the “good news” of the Gospel that Jesus’s death on the cross and shed blood is what makes our salvation possible? This also helps flesh out the “first to last”/“start to finish” translation. A word-for-word rendering of verse 17 is “the righteousness of God in the gospel is being revealed from faithfulness into faithfulness.” How does that apply to Jesus?
Remember what I said a couple paragraphs back: God’s righteousness, like God’s word, is living and active. When it says “from faithfulness,” this refers to Jesus living out the righteousness of God by perfectly obeying the law of God while he’s living on earth. He’s the only one who can do that. Romans 10:4 says: “Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who has faith.” That means Christ fulfilled every requirement of the law, something no one to that time had ever done. Because Jesus fulfilled every requirement of the law, he is the only one who can be called “righteous.” And because Jesus is the righteous one, if we are “in Christ,” we share in that righteousness as well.
Because the phrase is “from faithfulness into faithfulness,” we must find out what is the “into” part. Well, Josh Dotzler said that when he preached on Romans 2: Jesus Christ lived a perfect life, and his reward was death on the cross. Christ’s faithfulness to the law resulted in his being faithful to death on the cross. Sound familiar? That’s because Paul makes that same statement in Philippians 2:8: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross.” There’s that word “obedient” from Romans 1:5. “Obedience of faithfulness” refers to the crucifixion of Jesus! So it makes sense that Paul would want to lead the Gentiles into an understanding of the significance of Christ’s death on the cross and his resulting resurrection from the dead.
Okay, everybody take a deep breath for a moment. Breathe in. Breathe out. That was kind of intense, so let me bring it down a notch. I want to come back to our current them of “Pave the Way” for Mark’s sermon series. I went through all that because it’s important to understand this: “Righteousness” is the foundation for the road we walk on. What I just said about Jesus being the righteous one doesn’t take away from the fact that because we are in Christ, we “have faith” or “act faithfully” as well. We’ll get to that in chapters 4 through 8, and especially in 8 when Paul talks about the role of the Holy Spirit in our walk of faithfulness. I would encourage you to read the section on “Honor” on pp. 40–42 in Scot McKnight’s Romans book that you should have received, because he unpacks so much more meaning and application from Romans 1:16–17, more than I can get into here tonight.
Here’s a quick summary then, and we’ll move on to other topics in chapters 1 & 2. Righteousness is something that only Jesus possesses because of his faithfulness to the law of God, but we still share in that because we’re “in Christ” and we have the Holy Spirit as our internal guide. It is typically more accurate to speak of “faithfulness” than just “faith” when we encounter that concept, especially in chapters 1–4. We need to use some discernment, however, to determine if the word is referring to the faithfulness or work of Jesus Christ or to our own faithful walk in Christ. This will influence how you understand these concepts throughout the rest of the epistle. God knows we will mess up from time to time. If we’re in Christ, though, his righteousness covers us. So don’t mistake what I’m saying here that we must be perfect 100% of the time or we’ll lose that standing. That doesn’t happen when we strive for faithfulness.
Now, some notes on what we skipped over to talk about the theme of 1:5 and its relationship to 1:17. In 1:2–4, we see that Paul, right off the bat, emphasizes both the humanity of Jesus and his divine nature. We often forget about the human side of Jesus. He never sinned, of course, but he did experience the full range of human emotions. But why did Jesus have to come in the flesh? Why couldn’t God have just made an updated list of the Ten Commandments and sent it through another prophet? Well the answer is quite simple, and it’s not some fancy theological mumbo jumbo.
By sending his son, who had all the fulness of the deity dwelling in him according to Colossians, God got a first-hand report of just what the human condition was like. God did know in a certain sense, but because God is spirit and we’re not, he couldn’t really express his love to us. That’s what Jesus did, both in his life and in his death: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son….” And why did Jesus have to die on the cross for our sins? The blood of bulls and goats in the sacrificial system could never really deal with sin. Those sacrifices were only an appeasement to God. They couldn’t make us righteous. They never came back to life. And those animals didn’t, and couldn’t, love us like Jesus could. Only the sacrifice of one in human flesh who had attained the fullness of God’s righteousness could love us enough to be both a sacrifice AND our source of hope (and righteousness) in his resurrection. That’s the importance of Jesus’s humanity.
A quick note on verse 6: I think Paul must be speaking to the Jews who have returned to Rome after getting kicked out when he says “you also are among those Gentiles.” The reason I think this is because he addresses the Jews and their relationship with the law in chapter 2.
After the greeting, in verse 8, we see Paul’s praise for the Romans that their faithfulness, that is, the way in which they are living out their faith in Christ, is being reported all over the world. That’s a common sentiment in many of his letters. He probably didn’t know too many Roman Christians personally. We know from Acts 18 that Paul had met Priscilla and Aquila (the first two mentioned in Romans 16) in Corinth and had probably learned much about the Roman church from them since they had just been expelled from Rome. I think it’s a safe guess to say that the list of house churches in Romans 16 probably came from Priscilla and Aquila. “Be sure you mention these folks when you write to the house churches there, Paul. Wouldn’t want to leave anybody out!” He learned enough to know he wanted, no, needed to go to Rome and encourage them all.
We can look at verses 8–13 here as a sort of model for what our small groups should look like. Praying for one another; sharing the gospel with one another; and encouraging one another to faithfulness. Small groups aren’t just a good idea; they’re a biblical concept that makes the experience of “church” more personal.
Jumping over to verses 18ff, we have a parallel statement on a different aspect of God’s being and activity in the world. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”[5] God’s wrath, unlike God’s righteousness, is not bound up in one individual, though. God’s wrath is being revealed in real time. The verb form there implies the action is continuous and has not ceased.
The descriptions of unfaithfulness, idolatry, and contempt for the created order are pretty grim, perhaps even bordering on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (see Romans 2:24), the “unforgiveable sin” in the gospels. This “wrath” likely encompasses both the physical and spiritual damage to an individual who’s progressed to that point. The physical damage in some cases may be beyond repair, (at least by human hands), but I think Romans 2 indicates there may be a possibility of spiritual redemption even for those whom God has already given over to separation from himself. Let’s turn there next and land this plane for the evening.
In Romans 2, we have two things going on. From a high level, Paul begins a series of “arguments” or persuasive speeches demonstrating how God is righteous in his judgments and that walking faithfully in Jesus is the only way to new life, but also warns of hypocrisy for those who think they have no reason to be rebuked. Then he starts to address the Jews, formally and cordially.
Paul emphasizes in the first part of chapter 2, as he’s continuing on from where he started in Romans 1:18, that you don’t need the law to know if you’re doing something bad. If you don’t live under the law and do something bad, you’ll still experience judgment. If you live under the law and you’re a Jew at least or a Jew who’s converted to Christianity, you understand what the law is and how it can be applied to you, if you’re not in Christ. But fortunately for those who are in Christ, they’ve already had the assurance we saw in Chapter 1: Christ became the righteousness of God so we wouldn’t have to experience the judgment and wrath of God.
But he also emphasizes that since we (Jews and Gentiles) have broken the law in some way, we must be careful of the judgments we make of others who are enslaved to sin. He reminds his readers in 2:4 that some of them have already received God’s kindness that led them to repentance, and they should be paying that forward to those who still need to hear the message of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus. Instead, they’re “storing up wrath” for themselves in the final judgment by showing contempt for God’s kindness because they (Jews and Gentiles both) are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. What is the ultimate source of stubbornness? Persistent selfishness.
To counter this persistent selfishness, Paul exhorts his readers to persistent faithfulness in verses 7–10. In other words, instead of focusing on how bad others are, they need to focus on the good things that lead to eternal life, glory, honor, and peace. Let God take care of the judgment.
In verses 12–16, Paul shifts to talking about that final day of judgment. Just because the Jews are God’s chosen people and have “heard” the law all their lives doesn’t mean they are automatically declared righteous in the end. It’s not a matter of hearing only; it’s a matter of following through on what you’ve heard. The OT background here is Deuteronomy. Over and over again in Deuteronomy Moses exhorts the Israelites to “Be careful to heed the word of the Lord.” That “carefulness,” or to use a modern buzz word, “mindfulness,” carries over into the NT. We shouldn’t be sloppy about our faith. Think before you act or post (I’m speaking to myself when I say that!). What matters is that what you hear about the law or the gospel in your ears and process through your brain makes it to your heart and to your hands and feet. Then you will have assurance in the day of judgment.
Paul addresses the Jews specifically in the last half of chapter 2. He essentially repeats the warnings of the first part of chapter two, but for good measure and to tweak their consciences a bit, he throws in some conspicuous references to the Ten Commandments and how they might not be following them. The good that’s required by the law doesn’t go away because we’re in Christ. One way to look at the “thou shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments is to flip them into positive actions. “Don’t commit adultery” becomes “set boundaries for your marriage,” “love your wife as Christ loved the church,” “pay attention to when she does something different with her hair,” etc.
Paul ends chapter two with a discussion of circumcision. This was an initiation rite into the Jewish community from birth. Although many non-Jews practice circumcision today, it’s not much of a religious rite; it’s ostensibly done for health reasons. But as followers of Christ, we do have our own initiation rite: immersion, commonly known as baptism. I believe that Paul is setting up his readers for his discussion of baptism in chapter 6 here. We can’t rely on our baptism to get us into heaven if we’re not going to live like we’ve undergone that transformative event! What Paul says about circumcision in vv. 25–29 can be applied to baptism. If we’re only baptized outwardly but our hearts and our minds haven’t been “baptized,” then it’s of no value.
I’m going to tease chapter 6 here: As I’ve studied the book of Romans over the past 30 years, my understanding of the argument Paul is making in chapters 2–11 had broadened immensely. I have come to see that the first five chapters of Romans are building up to what is our “obedience of faithfulness”: our baptism. When we are baptized into Christ, Paul says, we are baptized into his death. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, so too does our coming out of the water affirm that we have newness of life. Think about the implication there. If Christ is “The Righteous One [who] lives by faithfulness,” then being in Christ means we share in that righteousness. That’s why righteousness is much more than being “right with God.” It’s about a whole new way of living life. If we remain faithful to living in the righteousness of Christ, then as Romans 2:13 says, we’ll be declared righteous when we stand before our maker. That is our prayer for all of you.
Let’s pray,
Thank you for allowing me to share with you. Go forth in the peace and strength of God.
I can think of a number of reasons Paul’s letter to the Romans wound up at the head of Paul’s writings in the New Testament. His discussion of justification by faith is classic, strengthened by his further treatment of the subject in Galatians. The statement from 1:16 has long been hailed from pulpits to encourage the body of Christ to boldly serve, speak, and act for the cause of the Gospel. I especially like Paul’s treatment of immersion in chapter 6, where he rescues the subject from those who downplay it as a “work of the flesh” by empowering it with the blood of Christ and his resurrection to make it an important and necessary part of our salvation journey. And of course, the Romans Road has long been an effective evangelistic tool for many, although I was never sure why that always took a detour around the heart of chapter 6. But there’s a bigger picture in Romans that often gets overlooked when we focus on verses and individual sections.
An Overlooked Inclusio
In a previous post, I mentioned that Romans 1:5 and its parallel in 16:26 form an inclusio for the entire book of Romans. However, in that post, I focused on the term πιστίς (“faith”/”faithfulness”), especially as Paul builds his initial argument in the first five chapters of Romans. In some contexts (e.g., Romans 1:17), that term refers to the faithfulness of Christ But what I noticed this time through Romans is that seven of the ten occurrences of the words for “obey” (ὑπακούω) and “obedience” (ὑπακοή) in Romans are found in chapters 6 (four times) and 15–16 (three times). The four occurrences of the words in chapter 6 come in the midst of his discussion about the significance of immersion and our being released from the slavery of sin. In fact, the words are tied to the metaphor of slavery in all occurrences there.
Because πιστίς refers to Christ in several key passages, I asked myself if “obedience” might have some Christological implications as well. One of the first passages that comes to mind is Philippians 2:8: “And being found in appearance of a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross.” A few verses later (v. 12), Paul commends the Philippians for their obedience and encourages them to “work out [κατεργάζομαι] their salvation with fear and trembling.” That word for “work out” figures very prominently in Romans 7, where Paul speaks of “doing” what he does not want to “do.” What does this mean?
Breaking it Down
First, the discussion of obedience comes between the discussion of the significance of immersion and the popular conclusion to chapter 6 (cited in the Romans Road without the rest of the context of chapter 6): “The compensation for sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Here is the irony: obedience or slavery to sin and obedience or slavery to Christ both lead to death. For those who are slaves to sin, they only have eternal death to look forward to, assuming they are looking forward to anything eternally. Obedience to Christ does lead to death, death to self, but there is on the other side the gift of eternal life. What is this obedience? One only need to look back to the first part of chapter 6: obedience to immersion. Just as Christ was obedient to death on a cross, we who believe are called to be obedient to death by immersion. Immersion is our Calvary. Immersion is also our Resurrection. Paul’s conclusion in 6:23 must be viewed in the context of 6:1–10.
Second, this gives new light to the phrase “obedience of faithfulness” found in Romans 1:5 and 16:26. The whole phrase is a euphemism of sorts for the crucifixion of Christ. It’s not just about legalistic obedience or stilted faithfulness. It’s about living this life sacrificially, knowing that we have eternal life as our ultimate reward on the other side of death. Ideally, obedience to immersion is a one-time event for the Christ-follower. But obedience in general is a lifelong commitment. Salvation is not a one-time event: it is a lifelong process we “work out… with fear and trembling.” Don’t get me wrong: we become a part of the kingdom the moment we put our trust in Christ, and we can be sure of the promise of eternal life from that moment on. But we cannot sit back and expect God to do everything for us. Repentance, discipline, study, meditation on God’s Word, and faithful obedience are all part of the “working out” process. We can never become perfect in this life, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try (Matthew 5:48, 19:21).
Conclusion
Those of you who are fond of the Romans Road, don’t take a detour around the discussion of immersion in the first part of chapter 6. It is part of the obedience that informs the rest of the discussion in Romans. To add a little more context to Romans 6:23, you might read it this way: “The compensation for slavery to sin is death, but the gift of God for those who are obedient to righteousness is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Immersion is our physical experience and signification of the death and resurrection of Christ. It’s not just a “work” that you can do whenever you think you’re ready. It’s an important component of working out your salvation as you grow in your faith in and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Sunday Morning Greek Blog 