The hard-heartedness of the Jews and how entrenched their elitism was, even in the days of Jonah, into the days of Paul, and even to this day with many of them. God is not going to stop reaching Gentiles because someone doesn't like it.
And he won't stop trying to reach anybody else because someone likes it. The whole, again, the whole of Romans 9 through 11 is a study in the causes and the consequences of rejecting this Jewish Messiah. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Romans.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the Book of Romans 9 with today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. Well, we are in Romans 9, and if you have your Bibles, please turn to Romans 9. We will take the first five verses in reading and exposition. I tell the truth in Christ.
I am not lying. My conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were a curse from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen, according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises of whom are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all eternally blessed God.
Amen. You know, it made no sense to Jesus that the Jews would treat him the way they did. He said, Many good works I have shown you from my Father, for which of those works do you stone me? Of course, he understood the depth of it all, but it didn't make sense. That's how I'm using his not making sense of their behavior. In spite of all the information that God poured into the Jewish people, the prophecies, the miracles, the preaching, the protection, the preservation, the selection, the care, all that attention, you would think that they would have done more with it than what we have.
Well, you can say that about church, too. Paul also couldn't make no sense of it either. That's what he's writing about. These three chapters, Romans 9 through 11, he's dealing with Israel, her past, her present, and her future. These are the ones that got their own Messiah crucified and then persecuted his disciples, hating Christianity.
A new word I'd like to give you, you've probably not heard this word before because I've made it up. It's an alternate word for Christianity, but I think it gets to the point in the context of the facts that we have before us, and that is Messiah-anity. Christianity goes further than that, but to the Jew, this is what they're missing out on.
This is their Christianity, too, if they come get it. A single word that preserves the origins of our word, Christianity. Messiah-anity. It sums up for all Jewish people what Christianity is.
We're worshipping the one they should be worshipping, too. Side by side, the one who brought us the new covenant as promised sounds goofy, but it is spot on. It is a word that expands on Messiah because Messiah, that word is really limited to the Jewish people. Christianity takes that Jewish Messiah and goes beyond the Jewish people, brings everybody in who would come.
Christ is a non-Jewish word for the Hebrew word Messiah, as you should know, but they will get it. They will figure this out at the climax of the great tribulation period. It's crazy. This kind of stuff was breaking Paul's heart. This is what he's talking about.
That's why I'm talking about it. He anticipated the objections after he would distribute this letter and they would read the first eight chapters. He, Paul, anticipated objections such as, well, what about the Jewish people and all of our rituals and our glorious temple and our heritage? What about that? What are you Christians saying about that? We're saying this. We did not adopt God. God adopted us just like he did you through Abraham. In that sense, we share this invitation of God to be his people in spite of the curse that is upon us, that has been upon us since the Garden of Eden.
That is what we're saying. God takes the outsider in if the outsider will come according to his invitation. So the punchline of Romans 9 through 11 is that God saves whoever he desires, and those whom he desires are those who respond to his invitation.
It's a very simple formula. It is a glorious formula, Jew or non-Jew. This is very relevant to our lives, to every age of Christianity. God moved beyond the Jews but not without them, and we should soak in as much detail from everything in Scripture as we can to give God, to give the Holy Spirit something to use, or else we just stay stunted, just enjoying our salvation and the basic things of our faith, and we never move on to the deeper things where the action is.
You used to write on the old maps, beyond this may be dragons, but for us, beyond the basics of Christ, are not dragons but opportunities to take out dragons, to win souls. Paul was facing in his day this resistance from the people who had the Scripture. Jonah's first response parallels the hard-heartedness of the Jewish people that was there for centuries towards the Gentiles.
It's still there. Jonah's second response underscores how entrenched the Hebrew people are against the Gentiles. His first response, Jonah, go to Nineveh, there are Gentiles there, I want them to be with me. And Jonah ran away from that, wanted no part of Gentiles being saved. Then after he preached the shortest sermon, one of the most prolific sermons ever, he waits outside the city to see if they can still be doomed as Gentiles. And so there you have the first and second responses, the hard-heartedness of the Jews, and how entrenched their elitism was, even in the days of Jonah, into the days of Paul, and even to this day with many of them. God is not going to stop reaching Gentiles because someone doesn't like it.
And he won't stop trying to reach anybody else because someone likes it. The whole, again, the whole of Romans 9 through 11 is a study in the causes and the consequences of rejecting this Jewish Messiah. You younger Christians, I hope you're getting this. I hope you're not one that sits under the Word of God, gets good Bible exposition, and grows up to forget it all and be able to say, well, I grew up in the church and understand nothing about God.
Don't let that be you because that's what Satan is trying to do to you. First, the Jews, in their homeland, bullied Pilate into condemning Jesus of Nazareth. God's love then gave them a second chance.
I don't know if we lose sight of that. We see the Jews in the homeland condemn Christ to the cross. Are we mindful that he gives the people a second chance? The Jews of the diaspora, the Jews that were spread out throughout the Roman Empire, God reached out to them, too, through the preaching of the apostles. But the majority of them rejected that preaching of this Jesus as Messiah, this messianic faith that belongs to us, too. God's sovereign right to reach the Gentiles without making them Jews very much disturbed them. And we, as we learn the Scripture, should know how to deal with these things. It created a firestorm in that ancient world amongst the Jews and in the churches. What firestorms are we creating as Christians? I don't mean as patriots, as rational people. As Christians, are there any firestorms around us over the truth, over the person of Jesus Christ?
And if not, why not? I think every Christian should maybe start their week out with, Lord, help me to bring an unbeliever to church on Sunday. I think that would be a good prayer. Well, now we come to the first verse, and we're looking for this passion that is in this man, the saturation of this passion in his words. He starts out, I tell the truth in Christ. I am not lying, my conscience also bearing witness in the Holy Spirit. Well, he had been a victim of so much Jewish animosity and violence.
He was very conscious of how the slanderers would pounce upon his integrity. So he says, I'm not lying to you. I have heart for the Jewish people. Just because I'm telling you the rituals and the temple and all those things have been fulfilled in Christ and are now obsolete does not mean I have no passion for your souls, that I do not love you and respect the prophets, our forefathers, and the righteous of the Old Testament. And so he starts out this section now, having dealt with the glories of our salvation, he's now saying, here's what about the Jews? He's anti-Semitic. He's Jewish himself. They despise his showing from their scripture that God planned to phase out Judaism.
They despise it so much that they killed Stephen over it. He was there for that. He sided with them, and now he's on the other side, the one crucified. Christ said this about the phasing out of the law. He said, the law and the prophets were until John, that's the baptizer. Since that time, the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it. You see Christ teaching. You see the multitudes constantly pushing on him, shoving, trying to get closer to him. He said, they're pressing into the kingdom. There'd be a lot of twists and turns before they got there, but it was happening. And he was saying, the old system is phasing out into the new covenant, the new system that is coming, but he couldn't say it that way.
Too complex. But it's there. There's no missing it once you begin to see, look at the scriptures for what they say and not what religion says.
You have a lot more strength, clarity. The gospel to the Jew and Gentile was that Messiah had come. And that, all over the world, Jews and Gentiles are pressing into this kingdom. Well, of course, Paul and Peter and Jude and others like them, they were pressing into the kingdom. And then there were the Gentiles like Luke, for example, and Timothy and Titus, they were pressing into the kingdom. And then there were us. We're pressing into the kingdom. And that's what it's going to take.
It's straight and it's narrow and you've got to press in. Hardship belongs to Christianity. It belongs to life. But Christianity makes it count, makes your struggles count.
Maybe you've got legal issues, maybe you've got medical issues, maybe you've got some other kind of issue. Somebody's watching how you, as a professed Christian, are going to handle that, knowing that one of these days is going to be their turn to deal with something. You look at those older Christians, which I'm not one, and you see them age and you're watching. How are they going to deal with this? Are they going to finish the race in a glorious way?
Or are they going to back away from it? In my experience, in most cases, they gain steam. They gain momentum as they age, have to deal with the processes of aging. The point, I'm not talking about aging, I'm talking about being a witness. People are watching you.
Not on purpose, sometimes they are, but we pay attention to one another. That's what comes out of fellowshipping. Things resonate, they stick with us. You meet somebody 20 years from now and they say to you, I remember you said this, and hopefully it's going to be good.
And it is nice when it is good and you don't even remember it because the left hand is not telling the right hand what it's doing. It's busy trying to serve the Lord, not itself. The Gospel did not undermine the Jewish faith, it enhanced the Jewish faith. It glorified it, it fulfilled it, it expanded it, and they were resisting it every step of the way. Of course, Paul was one.
And for this, they accused Paul, now that he has embraced Christianity, of hating his heritage. But they weren't investigating the facts. You come across people, you tell them about Christ, they're not going to investigate the facts because they don't want it to be true. They think that the only life they have is in the pleasures they are enjoying or indulging in. But there's more to life than that, and there's an indulgent in the faith. We call it being filled with the Spirit. It is not random, this Christianity. It is not man-made.
It is right on schedule. Jesus of Nazareth is not the false Messiah, but the only Messiah. There is no other. And it's too late. All the prophecies have closed it up.
He's either come or he's not coming. And they don't want to look at it that way. It is not a new religion. This new track of experience that God has opened to believers. It is just as God printed in his Word. Now remember, and this is important, at the time Paul's writing this letter, it's all the Old Testament scripture for the Christians. The letters of the apostles were really not yet embraced as scripture. They were on their way to being embraced, even in the lifetime of Paul, but not just yet. They were not against the Old Testament, and neither are we. Judaism and the Old Testament are not the same thing.
And if you don't see that, you're going to get tripped up a little bit. No Jew or Gentile can stop God from doing what he is doing in his truth and his care for people. Can you see how vital to understanding as much of your Bible as you can is? Can you see the value of not just understanding God's plan for salvation, but there's so much more for our life, the hardships that we face in life? You know, some people come to church, they only want the pastor to talk about their hardship. Tell them it's going to be all right.
Tell them how much God loves them. Any lesson you get from the scripture is God telling you. He is sovereign, so it will be all right.
He is a God of love, so it will be all right. And the hits that you take, take them. That's called endurance. Again, I always say it because I always mean it. I don't like it any more than you. When I'm in pain, I want to be out of pain, but not to the point where I'm going to turn on my Lord.
May that never happen. So he affirms his passionate love for his own people. Those who chased him, those who beat him, those who went behind him to undo his work and plotted his death, he still loves them. Sometimes you'll meet a Christian, they're bitter. Somebody's done them wrong. Maybe 30, 40 years later, they're bitter. They are not looking to forgive.
That is not who we are supposed to be. You can hurt, you can feel it, but you can also say, you can also say, I have a bitterness that I hate and I'm going to fight it to my death. I will not give in to it. You could do that much. You have a stomach for that.
You have what it takes to do that. It will get worse for Paul once this Roman letter is circulated in that ancient world. That's when we come to the book of Acts, when they come at him at the temple and he is arrested by the Roman soldiers. And then they plot, they take a vow to kill him.
That's not happened chronologically yet, but it's coming. He's kind of, I don't care, I'm sharing the truth. The future's going to do what the future's going to do. The Spirit of God in me is going to do what he's going to do. This is what this man was committed to. And his words are saturated with a genuine passion for lost souls, not only the Jews, but the Gentiles also. Even some of the Christian Jewish people worked to undermine his teachings.
He still loved them. In his day, he was hounded by bloodthirsty zealots who declared him an apostate for simply saying, hey, look, this part of the scripture's fulfilled right in front of our eyes in our lifetime. It's like you saying, hey, I've got one of these too. The Bible says there's going to be a cashless society. I mean, isn't it getting harder and harder to find cash, to use cash in some places? We're moving in that direction. You can look the other way, bury your head in the sand, pretend it isn't so, or you can line up with the things that God has published in scripture. But they muted the prophecies. They did not want them to fit Jesus because he would not conform. Our hearts ache over how close they were to the truth. And it ached for Jesus, and it ached for Paul, looking back at Romans chapter 3, verse 2, chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God. They had the scripture. How could they miss it? He's going to say this again when we get next session to chapter 6.
I'll read it now. But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect, for they are not all Israel who are of Israel. Well, how do you determine who is governed by God and who is not? Faith. Belief in what the scripture says. An earnest approach to scripture, without which, how could we ever confess our own sins? If we were dishonest when we looked at scripture, we'd hide them.
We'd do like Adam and Eve, try to hide from God. What kind of damage theology is that? He's not sovereign to you if you think you can get away with something. The truth should have been easily recognized by them and received by them, and it was not.
I don't know that any of them easily received it, even as Christ was doing miracles. He says, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit. This is now integrity. Integrity should mean something. What's the opposite of integrity?
Answer, fill in that blank. Next time you drive over a bridge, ask yourself, what if the integrity of this structure weren't there? Integrity should be in many places of our lives that we can get it. Earlier he had written to the Corinthians, he says, we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God, which is the Old Testament as he meant it, deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. Conscience is awareness. It's a deep awareness. And Paul was saying to those Corinthians, my integrity in ministry is intact, and we hopefully can say the same thing, because what is the antithesis?
What happens to you without integrity? Well, one of the first signs that you're becoming an apostate is you stop using your turn signal. I mean, I don't know if it's in the Bible, but it should be.
And we have the fluid in the chapel store, if you're low on turn signal fluid, just sign up for it. Anyway, verse 2, I'll have more traffic suggestions, things that irritate me on the road for you, because I know you're guilty of it, I can look at you and tell. All right, back to the serious things. Verse 2, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. Here's the words, here are the words saturated with passion. There's not a little bit of passion.
It's not like, you know, I have a burden for the Jews. This was intense, going by his words. We've already discussed his integrity. We have no reason to doubt his words, especially when we know the man's background. He bears on his body the marks of Christ.
There are many times he could have escaped those beatings and those whippings and all the other stuff, but he did not. To miss this is to miss out on frontline ministry. To miss the passion that belongs to our faith when it comes to saving souls is to miss out, is to forfeit. Sometimes you can listen to someone preaching and you just don't like them.
That's never happened to me, but I hear it's happened to others. You just don't like them and you dislike them more because they're making points that are spot on. You've got to grow out of that kind of stuff. You have to see beyond the speaker, see to the anointer of the speaker.
You have to see the Lord. There are people that didn't care for how Paul talked. His speech, he talks about that. They said he's slow of speech. He doesn't really have that Gresham language like us.
But the man was a firestorm and they were not. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.
We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again or want to listen to others like it, head over to CrossReferenceRadio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website, you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross Reference Radio, so make a note of it, CrossReferenceRadio.com. That's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans here on Cross Reference Radio. .
