Judaism has not worked in Israel.
Why would they expect it to work throughout the world? But they were too blind to this. They just could not remain acceptable to God and admit it. They could not admit that on the basis of their own law they were not acceptable to God because they could not keep it. Those who do, as he says here, the man who does those things shall live by them.
But they failed. They too needed the 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 chapter 10 as he begins his message, He Was Seen. Romans chapter 10 is where we are, and we'll get verses 5-13. When you have a chance, well in a moment, we'll stand for the reading of verses 9-11. Stand please for the reading of God's Word, Romans chapter 10 verses 9-11. That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture says, whoever believes on him will not be put to shame.
Please be seated. He Was Seen, that's the title for this message, and I hope to bring the importance of that out and its relationship to what Paul is writing to the Christians in Rome at this point. I want to start with a couple of verses from the book of Acts, the Acts of the Holy Spirit, which led to the actions of the apostles. In the fourth chapter, the apostles responded to calls for them to be silent and not preach Christ as Messiah and risen, and he said, or they said, we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.
He's speaking as a witness for Jesus Christ, not a lawyer, but a witness. In the 33rd verse of that same fourth chapter in Acts, we have this comment by Luke, the one who put the book of Acts together. And with great power, the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. I think about the resurrection.
I ask myself, when I share the gospel, do I keep that up front as much as it should be? It's a good reminder to us that the first Christians, it was all about the resurrection. Sadly, at this time, most of the Jews were not allowing Jesus to be the Lord, the Messiah that he was. At this time, many of them were disallowing the astounding evidences that surrounded the life of Christ.
Of course, the resurrection being the capstone to it all. And so with zeal, they personified ignorance as a people concerning the Messiah, which unfortunately many are doing today, not only amongst the Jews, but amongst the Gentiles. Barages of scripture and reason bounced off of them, as it does sometimes when we give people scripture and reason that they cannot refute. Still, many are determined to not submit to Christ. Just as the life of Christ, his teachings, again the countless miracles, and they were countless, just as he had ministered amongst them in those days, everybody knew it.
It was not something you could keep quiet. So the apostles continued the work. Paul, one of the apostles now, once believed any Jew claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah was to be arrested. He persecuted the Christians, having the audacity to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. So on the road to Damascus, he went searching for them, which would be us, establishing his own righteousness. That's critical to this letter to the church in Rome, because Paul is dealing with this mindset in those Jews who reject Messiah. They wanted their own righteousness and were not listening to the righteousness of God through this Messiah. Well, Paul, he thought he was making himself important to God, as the rest of his type did at the same time. They felt that abiding by the ceremonies, the Sabbaths, and all the other things that surrounded the Mosaic law made them important to God.
Well, for sure, if they violated those things, they would bring the wrath of God, which their history is loaded with. But when Paul was converted, he learned to never let anyone think that they were good enough to be saved from hell. He made that very clear in his writings, and he's doing it now. When he wrote to the Ephesian church, he said, God, in chapter 2, Ephesians 2, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved.
There's nothing in any human being that can take away their sin, that can give them access to heaven. It is Jesus Christ, and that comes when Christ comes into the life the Holy Spirit comes along to and resides in us. And these are the things that make up the Christian. And so this is what's surrounding the words that we're going to consider in these verses, 5 through 13, and what we've been talking about in the earlier parts of this 10th chapter. Hopefully, by the Holy Spirit, we will grab from these lessons and scriptures, things that are useful to us, and not say, well, that was a good Bible study, or I went to church today.
That should never be the story. We come to church not only because we're commanded to assemble, but because we want to hear from God, and this is how he speaks. Even there are times the pastor says things, and it's not directly what he says, but it's what has ignited, and the Holy Spirit takes it from there. In the fifth verse now, Romans 10, verse 5, Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law. The man who does those things shall live by them. Well, we need to talk about this Moses more. God used Moses to deliver Israel from the Egyptian slavery and to deliver them to the law of God.
Among men, he is known as Israel's law giver and deliverer, among men. He says here, in verse 5, the man who does those things shall live by them. Well, that's the law that Moses delivered to them, the Mosaic law.
Everything after Moses is built in the Old Testament scriptures, is built on what God did through Moses. And the verse that Paul is quoting, and he is quoting the Old Testament here, the man who does those things shall live by them, he's quoting Leviticus 18. He's talking about obedience.
He's essentially saying, and the apostles didn't miss this, if you want to be under the law, you better not mess any of it up, because if you make one wrong step, you've ruined it all. And the apostles understood this, but their audiences many times did not. So he applies this Levitical verse that at the time that he quoted it, the verse was 1,600 years old. Now it's over 2,500 years old to us.
It's been around a long time. And he is applying the doctrine of the Jews to point out that none were righteous enough. You've got this Mosaic law and you can't even do it. But Christ knew this was coming.
That's where he's going with the whole thing. You have to take the whole letter and all his other teachings, and not only Paul, the New Testament church, the Messiah. Paul heard them say, yes, the Old Testament speaks about the Gentiles coming into Judaism to be saved.
No, it does not say that. It said the Jews would be a light to the Gentiles. The Gentiles would find favor with God. But the Jewish position was, yes, only if they convert to Judaism.
Follow the diets, follow the days, follow the law of Moses. Paul says that this is not good enough because you cannot keep your own law and your history shouts that out to your face out loud. If Judaism worked we would not have needed the prophecies from Isaiah all the way through Malachi, which is dealing with the Jews breaking their laws with their disobedience.
If Judaism has not worked in Israel, why would they expect it to work throughout the world? But they were too blind to this. They just could not remain acceptable to God and admit it. They could not admit that on the basis of their own law they were not acceptable to God because they could not keep it. Those who do, as he says here, the man who does those things shall live by them, but they failed. They too needed the Messiah. The great lawgiver Moses broke the law when the ink was still fresh on the stones.
Of course it was not ink, but you get the point. It was as soon as the law was given it was broken by the great lawgiver Deliverer himself. That is illustrated for us and that becomes a fact. Under enough pressure man cannot hold on to God's law. He'll throw it down. He'll break it, the handwritten word of God. And again when Moses came down the mountain and he saw the people dancing in idolatry, romping off to sin, what did he do? The great lawgiver threw the word of the word to the ground and broke it. Well Christ never broke the law, never downsized its standards. He upheld it, but he did not only uphold it, he expanded it, which is what they were rejecting, which is what this is all about, which is what Paul's last statement in chapter 4, for Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to everyone who believes is the end of the old covenant. But he's of course the author and finisher of the new covenant that was already in their scriptures to come. So it was not this new idea, it was a new covenant because the old one they couldn't keep anyway. And so they needed a covenant with God that would protect them from themselves. Because all the Mosaic law did was expose them to their inability to keep God's law. Matthew 5 tells us about Christ upholding the law and expanding it.
For surely I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle will by no means pass away from the law till all is fulfilled. Well he fulfilled. He is the fulfillment, all the types and the teachings of the Old Testament. Even before Moses. He fulfilled what was said to Eve, that through her seed.
You say, well the woman doesn't have seed. No, but the virgin does. Ephesians 2.15. And if you understand the virgin birth and that teaching, I don't have to build on that, we'll let it stand right there. Paul again to the Ephesians, he writes, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in himself one new man from the two, thus making peace. What is this making peace with God and having one man made out of two? Well the two men referenced there are Jew and Gentile and God has dismissed that distinction amongst his people. There is no longer Jew nor Gentile, there's Christian as far as having a right relationship with God.
There is still ethnic Israel and ethnic Israel will remain till Christ returns and finishes up business there. But as far as the righteous now, there are no distinctions. We're just believers. Christians are not viewed. Look at verse 12 of Romans 10, if you still have your Bibles open, for there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is over all and is rich to all who call on him.
Well we believe that, it's very liberating. But even in Christian circles you're going to find resistance to this too. Mankind has always needed an ultimate savior. There have been deliverers, there have been those the judges were deliverers, they saved the people from circumstances of their time, but they could not deliver them from the plague on humanity of sin. Everything in their religion pointed to the coming of this ultimate savior, this anointed one, the Messiah. And when he arrived, they rejected him. His way of coming to God did not fit their preconceived reality. Going back to yeah, we want God to do it this way, to keep us Jewish, to keep the diet, to keep the feast, and to keep the Gentiles either proselytized into Judaism or damned to hell. And they would accept no alternative. New Covenant did not mean New Covenant in the end to those who rejected the Christ that we love. He did not applaud their self-importance. That was a big strike.
Do that today. We're living in a time where they want you to celebrate debauchery, they want you to celebrate perversity, not enough to acknowledge them, you have to celebrate it with them. That's what hell does.
And that's what they were trying to do. The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious elite, you had to applaud their self-righteousness. They wouldn't call it self-righteousness, but that's what it was. And so those hostile Jews, because again, it's not about Jew or Gentile, it's about who rejected the Christ and who should have known better. And the Jews were first in line, the Jewish people. Many of them were believers, but overall not. And so those hostile amongst them did not care for a messiah who dined with tax collectors, allowed harlots to weep over him, preached in Samaria, healed on the Sabbath day, outperformed their rabbis, held them accountable to scripture, mocked their sacred cows. You're not allowed to do that.
You're not allowed to do that today in every circle that you find yourself in. So they invalidated his miracles, his fulfillment of scripture. They invalidated his claim to be the Messiah. Never mind, he was from the line of David and all the other things were in place.
He's not applauding us. One time in John chapter 9, and there are many times, they said, we know that God spoke to Moses. As for this fellow, we do not know where he is from. Well, they could find out, a short walk to the temple. Temple records were available. They knew where he was from. They knew he was the son of David. Even lepers were crying out. The blind were crying out, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. They knew. They just rejected. This makes good ammunition for preaching the gospel to the lost and saying, they knew they opted for hell. What are you going to do because now you know.
Are you going to do the same thing? You don't have to be Jewish to reject the Messiah that came from the Jews. Anybody can reject him and anybody can receive him. In verse 6, Paul writes, but the righteousness of faith speaks in this way. Now he's quoting Deuteronomy.
Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven, that is to bring Christ down from above, verse 7, or who will descend into the abyss, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. So verses 6 and 7 is Paul pointing back to that choose life passage in Deuteronomy 12. He's pointing back to their scripture. He pictures for those with the Bible that they have no excuse to be zealously ignorant. They have the scriptures. And we say the same thing to peoples like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons who bypass the scriptures. Or to some of those, the prosperity teachers who add to the scriptures the things that they are teaching that actually take away from the scripture. Telling people it's alright to sin, you can sin all you want, just don't forget to repent. Righteousness of faith is near every man.
That's what Paul is talking about. None are any longer required to bring the blood of goats or to bathe in the filthy waters of some river in the world for salvation. No one has to climb up steps in Fatima, Italy on their knees to demonstrate to God how sincere they are and therefore worthy they are of repentance. Faith, not effort, travel's not required. You don't have to climb up towards heaven or sink down towards hell to benefit from what Christ has done. You have to believe.
What is so tricky about that? What will the man or woman say before the throne of God when He says to them, all I did was ask you to believe? And you refused.
So then they will be refused. There is no need to leave earth for Christ. He has been given.
He is here. Otherwise, how would the fishermen of Galilee have been saved? They didn't go to heaven to get saved.
They didn't sink to the abyss. They were on the shores of Galilee. The women of ill repute, the lepers, the demon possessed, the beggars, the tax men, they could find Christ. The rich man Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, they could find Christ. Everything man needs from religion is right here on earth and it is available.
Especially as the internet just continues to sprawl throughout the planet. And so God says avail yourselves. He was saying it to Paul. It was right there in front of him. He said, you got the scriptures.
Avail yourselves of their meanings. Other Jews are able to do it. What is your excuse? Self-righteousness. Is my religion as a Christian built on self-righteousness? I think God owes me something other than judgment for breaking his law. Is God's anointed my savior? Savior from my failed self-righteousness.
Yes, that's what he is to me. He saves me from my failed ability to obey God completely. Where is he whom the prophets spoke? Well, that's why the prophets spoke so they could know and that's what he's telling them. He's right here according to the word. Man is to live by the word of God. It's right there on the dining table.
Avail yourselves of it. That's why we read this earlier in our study through Romans, John chapter 1. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law. And also the prophets wrote Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Oh, he knew where he was from.
But the ones I read, the Pharisees in chapter 9 from John that I read earlier, they said, we don't know where this guy is from. They knew. They lied. There's a difference between being ignorant and saying the wrong thing or being wrong about something versus lying.
A lie is an intentional attack on the truth. This is what is meant by the righteousness by faith that Paul is talking about. The Jews were expected that his audience, the church in Rome was not only Jews, they were Jew and Gentile, but he is dealing with the Judaic influence on Christianity and in the lives of those Jewish Christians who still had friends and family and co-workers who were Jewish and they were addicted to the law without the law giver, Messiah. And so he's teaching them, he's giving them ammunition and he's saying, this is what it means to have righteousness by faith and not righteousness because you think you did something. Righteousness by the law, righteousness by deed, by good works. God wants us to do good works.
He wants us to abide by the law. But he also knows that if we were to get to heaven on obedience, we wouldn't get there. And so he's put this together, this new covenant. And all you have to find him in Paul's day, you just go to the empty tomb near the city.
So Paul properly expands the Old Testament quotation into a larger meaning than what many times seems to have been the original intention of the prophet. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reverence 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.
