The Righteousness You Can't Manufacture Text: Romans 10:1-4
Introduction: The Great Obstacle
The apostle Paul has just spent a chapter, a glorious and difficult chapter, defending the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. He has shown us that God is God, and that He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. But this doctrine, far from making Paul fatalistic or cold-hearted, drives him to a profound and passionate evangelistic desire. Here in chapter 10, he turns his attention back to his kinsmen according to the flesh, the Jews. And in doing so, he puts his finger on the central obstacle that keeps any man, Jew or Gentile, from salvation. It is not, fundamentally, a lack of religious fervor. It is not a lack of moral effort. The great obstacle is a rival righteousness.
We are in a world that is drowning in religion. Everyone has a zeal for something, a functional god they are trying to please, a standard they are trying to meet. Our secular age is just as religious as any other; it has simply swapped out the temple for the state, the priest for the therapist, and the sacrifice for the tax return. And at the heart of every false religion, including the religion of secular humanism, is the burning desire to establish one's own righteousness. It is the attempt to build a tower to Heaven with the bricks of our own good intentions and the mortar of our own sweat. It is the project of self-salvation.
Paul is going to show us that this project is not only doomed to fail, but it is a direct act of rebellion against the righteousness that God has provided. There are only two kinds of righteousness in the universe: the kind you try to manufacture yourself, and the kind you receive as a free gift. These two are mortal enemies. They cannot be reconciled or blended. You must choose one. And to choose the wrong one is to remain under the wrath of God, regardless of how sincere or zealous you are in your efforts.
This passage is a bucket of cold water on all sentimental notions of salvation. It teaches us that it is possible to be devoutly religious, intensely zealous for God, and yet be utterly lost. It is possible to dedicate your life to the pursuit of righteousness and yet be an enemy of the righteousness of God. This is a sobering and necessary word for us today, because the temptation to establish our own righteousness is the native tongue of the fallen human heart.
The Text
Brothers, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
(Romans 10:1-4 LSB)
Passionate Prayer for the Lost (v. 1)
Paul begins with a heartfelt declaration of his love and concern for his fellow Israelites.
"Brothers, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation." (Romans 10:1)
This is not the language of a detached, academic theologian. This is the cry of a pastor, a brother, an evangelist. Having just laid out the doctrine of election in Romans 9, Paul does not conclude that prayer is therefore pointless. Quite the opposite. Because he knows that salvation is entirely of God, he goes to God for it. This is the perfect marriage of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. God's sovereignty is the very thing that makes our prayers and evangelism worthwhile. If salvation depended on the sinner's free will, we would be wasting our breath. But because God is the one who saves, we can appeal to Him with confidence.
Paul’s desire is not for their political restoration, or their cultural preservation, but for their salvation. He understands that to be a physical descendant of Abraham is not enough. To be a member of the covenant community in an outward sense is not enough. You must be born again. You must be saved. He is not sentimental about their spiritual condition. He loves them too much for that. He sees them as they are, lost and in need of a savior, and so he prays.
This sets the tone for everything that follows. Paul is not engaging in a bitter polemic against his enemies. He is delivering a tragic diagnosis of the people he loves. He is about to tell them the hard truth, but he does so with tears in his eyes. This is the model for all faithful ministry. We must have a heart that breaks for the lost, and a spine of steel to tell them the truth that can save them.
Zeal Without a Compass (v. 2)
Next, Paul identifies the central characteristic of their spiritual error. It is not apathy, but misdirected energy.
"For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge." (Romans 10:2)
Paul gives them credit where it is due. They have a zeal for God. They are not lazy atheists or casual agnostics. They are passionate, dedicated, and serious about their religion. Paul himself had been a prime example of this before his conversion. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, blameless according to the righteousness which is in the law (Philippians 3:6). He was not lukewarm. He was boiling over with zeal.
But zeal is like fire. It is a powerful and wonderful servant, but a terrible master. If it is not contained and directed by the truth, it will burn down the whole house. Their zeal was "not according to knowledge." This is not a lack of factual information. The Jews had the Scriptures. They knew the commandments. The "knowledge" they lacked was a true, spiritual understanding of God's character and His plan of salvation. They knew the words on the page, but they did not know the God who wrote them.
This is a permanent danger for the church. It is possible to be orthodox in your creed, diligent in your attendance, and passionate in your service, and yet be running furiously in the wrong direction. Zeal is not a virtue in itself. Zeal for a lie is a damnable vice. The measure of true spirituality is not the heat of our emotions, but the truth of our doctrine. A man can be utterly sincere, and be sincerely wrong. And being sincerely wrong about the way of salvation is the most dangerous position a man can be in.
Two Rival Righteousnesses (v. 3)
In verse 3, Paul explains the specific content of their ignorance. It is an ignorance of God's righteousness, which leads them to a fatal project.
"For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (Romans 10:3)
Here is the heart of the matter. They were ignorant of "the righteousness of God." This righteousness has a twofold meaning. First, it is the righteousness that God's own character requires. It is His perfect, holy standard. Second, and more to the point here, it is the righteousness that God Himself provides for sinners as a gift through faith in Jesus Christ. It is an alien righteousness, a righteousness that comes from outside of us.
Because they were ignorant of this gift-righteousness, they set out on the impossible task of "seeking to establish their own." This is the religion of self-help, of moral achievement, of ladder-climbing. It is the attempt to make oneself acceptable to God through law-keeping, through ritual, through personal effort. It is the religion of the flesh. And notice the language. They are "seeking to establish" it. This is active, strenuous work. Self-righteousness is a full-time job.
The result of this project is rebellion. "They did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." The word for "subject" is a military term, hypotasso. It means to line up under authority. They refused to surrender. They would not lay down their arms. The righteousness of God, which is offered freely in the gospel, demands an unconditional surrender of all our claims to merit. It requires us to admit that we are bankrupt, that our own righteousness is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6), and that we must be saved entirely by the work of another. This is a profound humiliation to our pride. And the proud heart will not bow. It would rather go to Hell as the captain of its own soul than to Heaven as a beggar saved by grace.
Christ, the Goal of the Law (v. 4)
Finally, Paul provides the divine solution. He shows how God's plan all along was to provide the righteousness that the law demanded but could not produce.
"For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." (Romans 10:4)
This is one of the most crucial verses in the entire epistle. What does it mean that Christ is the "end of the law"? The word for "end" here is telos. It does not mean "termination" as in the end of the road. It means "goal," "purpose," "fulfillment," or "culmination." Christ is the target that the law was always aiming at. The entire Old Testament sacrificial system, the moral law, the civil code, all of it was a giant arrow pointing to Him.
The law has two primary functions. First, it is a mirror. It shows us our sin. It reveals God's perfect standard and demonstrates how far short we fall (Romans 3:20). It was given to shut every mouth and make the whole world accountable to God. The Jews, in their zeal, tried to use the law as a ladder to climb to God, when God intended it to be a mirror to show them they needed a savior.
Second, the law is a tutor, a guardian, to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). It was designed to hedge us in, to show us the futility of self-salvation, and to make us cry out for a deliverer. Christ is the fulfillment of the law because He perfectly obeyed its demands, and He paid its penalty for sin. He is the righteousness that the law required.
And this righteousness is available "to everyone who believes." Not to everyone who works, or tries hard, or is zealous. It is for the one who believes. Believing is the opposite of establishing your own righteousness. It is the abandonment of your own efforts and the reception of His. It is the open, empty hands of a beggar. This is the great scandal of the gospel. It is not a reward for the righteous, but a gift for the guilty. And it is offered to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, who will stop trying to save themselves and simply trust in Christ.
Conclusion: Surrendering Your Resume
The choice before every human soul is laid bare in these four verses. Will you stand before God on the basis of your own resume, your own zeal, your own religious performance? Or will you stand before Him clothed in the perfect righteousness of His Son?
The Jews Paul was praying for were trying to hand God a resume filled with their pedigree, their circumcision, their dietary laws, their Sabbath observance. Modern man tries to hand God a resume filled with his tolerance, his philanthropy, his environmental consciousness, his personal niceness. But it is all the same project. It is the attempt to establish our own righteousness.
The gospel comes to us and tells us to tear up that resume. It tells us that the only righteousness that will stand in the judgment is the righteousness of God, which is Jesus Christ Himself. To receive it, you must submit. You must surrender. You must stop fighting for your own honor and fall down in helpless reliance on His. You must confess that your virtues are just as tainted as your vices, and that your only hope is a righteousness that is entirely outside of you.
This is why Paul prayed with such passion. He knew that this submission was not something men could work up on their own. It is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. It is the gift of God. And so we must pray as Paul did, for our friends, our family, our nation. We must pray that God would grant them the knowledge that shatters their pride, that He would demolish their self-made towers of righteousness, and that He would cause them to joyfully subject themselves to the glorious, liberating, and perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ.