Law Or Grace

Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Ten
LAW OR GRACE – WHICH?

Scripture Reading: verses 5-10

FOR MOSES DESCRIBETH THE RIGHTEOUSNESS WHICH IS OF THE LAW, THAT THE MAN WHICH DOETH THOSE THINGS SHALL LIVE BY THEM. BUT THE RIGHTEOUSNESS WHICH IS OF FAITH SPEAKETH ON THIS WISE, SAY NOT IN THINE HEART, WHO SHALL ASCEND INTO HEAVEN? (THAT IS, TO BRING CHRIST DOWN FROM ABOVE:) OR, WHO SHALL DESCEND INTO THE DEEP? (THAT IS, TO BRING UP CHRIST AGAIN FROM THE DEAD.) BUT WHAT SAITH IT? THE WORD IS NIGH THEE, EVEN IN THY MOUTH, AND IN THY HEART: THAT IS, THE WORD OF FAITH, WHICH WE PREACH; THAT IF THOU SHALT CONFESS WITH THY MOUTH THE LORD JESUS, AND SHALT BELIEVE IN THINE HEART THAT GOD HATH RAISED HIM FROM THE DEAD, THOU SHALT BE SAVED. FOR WITH THE HEART MAN BELIEVETH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS; AND WITH THE MOUTH CONFESSION IS MADE UNTO SALVATION.

In this legal document to the Romans, Paul is seeking to find a proper righteous basis whereon his fleshly kinsmen, the Jews, may stand in acceptability with their God. He is searching every avenue of approach to see wherein this may be found. Logically, he again goes back to Moses, the lawgiver, saying, “For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, That the man which doeth those things shall live by them.”¹ He is clearly stating that there is nothing faulty about the righteousness which is by the law, if a man can be found who can keep it. The wages of sin is death, and not until man is declared a sinner can the death sentence be pronounced on him. The law was set forth as a holy, just, and good means of regulation for the creature, and if one had been found who fulfilled the requirements of the law, then death would have had no claim on him. No son of Adam’s race was found adequate for this until we come to the Man Christ Jesus. He magnified the law. Not only did He maintain the austere rectitude of its moral obligations, but He went far beyond it in the magnificence of the grace of His own heart. The Lord Jesus then is the only One on whom death had no claim.

May we suggest to anyone who believes in keeping the Sabbath, that it is uniquely demonstrated in the New Testament that according to man’s concept the Lord Jesus broke the Sabbath. Again and again the religionists brought the charge against Him that He performed some of His miracles on the Sabbath day. Nevertheless, He upheld all the moral requirements of the law of Moses and He is called “this just Person,” even on the eve of His crucifixion. Paul’s contention however here is that anyone who keeps the law will live by the law. That is, the death sentence cannot be imposed upon him because he is not a transgressor. However, in verse 6, in contrast to all this the apostle says,

The righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (to bring up Christ again from the dead.)²

In other words, there is no triumph in law-keeping beyond the simple status of being an obedient servant here on the earth before the Almighty. No law keeper could ever get to heaven because the very keeping of the law would entitle him to live on the earth and would hold him here. No title to enter heaven is obtained by law keeping. Further, no title to triumph over the depths beneath, to be victorious over the power of death, is attained by keeping the law.

The status of a law keeper is simply to live by the law on the earth as a servant and no more. However, righteousness that is by faith is a new kind of righteousness, giving us rights in a realm above the sun, a realm of complete victory over the depths beneath, over the power of Satan, death, and hell. This is the triumph of the righteousness of God in Christ. It gives a title to glory that law-keeping could never do. Little wonder the apostle declared in this Epistle, and also in the Galatian Epistle that we are not under law but under grace. The keeping of the law maintains us in the status of a servant before Jehovah as long as we keep that law.

The Scripture says, “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.” So we do not come under the curse until we break one of the law’s requirements. Unfortunately we have all broken, not one, but many of them, and so we are under the curse, and the righteousness which is by the law is not available to us anymore. The grand truth is that the righteousness of God in Christ, appropriated by faith, is now available to all who truly believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and are born again. So the conclusion of all this matter is,

The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart, the word of faith which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.³ For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.⁴

The gates of heaven are now opened wide to the true believer on the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is no realm in the heights above, nor in the depths beneath, but faith in the living, resurrected Son of God carries us triumphant through and above. Here is the word Paul preached, “The confession of Jesus as Lord and the acceptation by faith that God raised Him from the dead.” We must each appropriate for himself that the Person called the Lord Jesus Christ is One who went into death, but, after He paid the penalty of our transgressions, God raised Him from the dead and now He is a living, triumphant Savior, able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him. It is in this way that with the heart man believeth unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.⁵

Salvation is more than the hope of getting to heaven in the distant future. In its New Testament meaning, salvation entails the emancipation of the soul from the power of Satan, from the fear of death, the transference out of darkness into light, the present victorious entrance of the soul into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love. This is salvation. It is not merely the hope of heaven by and by. It is present, victorious living. Let us never for a moment reduce it to the tawdry elements that are so often preached; that if we nod in assent to the terms of the simple Gospel then we can live as we please, go on in sin if need be, and be saved in the end. That is not the Gospel nor is it the truth. We must confess Jesus as Lord, the Sovereign of our lives, the Commander of our every activity and truly believe in the heart, not only in the head, that He was delivered for our offences and raised again for our justification. And as those did on the Day of Pentecost, when realizing they had crucified the Savior, we turn from sin and are baptized for remission of sins. That is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Footnotes:
¹ This quotation from Leviticus 18:5 is further indication that the “righteousness” in view here regards keeping God’s commandments. The person who kept that ancient law was indeed righteous, a fact which is modified by the truth that none save Jesus Christ ever kept it perfectly. Even the ascription of righteousness to Zacharias and Elizabeth, cited above, must be understood in a relative, not an absolute, sense. The mountain fact concerning Christ is that He indeed kept the law perfectly; His faith and obedience reaching a state of absolute perfection for every second of His total life on earth. That is what God requires to save any man. That is the righteousness which alone can save; and it is available to people “in Christ;” the great device of God’s redemption plan being not that of transferring righteousness into sinners, but that of transferring sinners into Christ, where the righteousness is.
² When Christ came, the Jews at first, impressed by His miracles, were inclined to receive Him; but they were repelled by the obscurity of His birth, the humility and meekness of Himself and His disciples, and the denunciation which He heaped upon them because of their sins. They had, of course, expected a mighty Prince, exalted in splendor, riding roughshod over all of His enemies and restoring the glory of their earthly kingdom. But when Jesus foretold the ruin of their sacred temple, the dispossession of their state, and the treading down of Jerusalem itself, their minds revolted from Him completely. Furthermore, at the Passover, the whole Jewish nation had seen Him shamefully crucified and buried. Therefore, the conclusion of all Israel (including the disciples themselves, at first) was negative regarding Christ. No dead man, they thought, could ever be the Messiah, or bring about the glorious deliverance which they expected. It was squarely against that prejudice that Paul directed these verses. John Locke’s (Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, p. 347) paraphrase catches the spirit of these words, thus: “Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? that is, to bring down the Messiah from thence, whom we expect personally here on earth to deliver us. Or, Who shall descend into the deep? i.e., to bring up Christ from the dead, to be our Saviour. You mistake the deliverance you expect from the Messiah; there needs not the fetching of him from the other world to be present with you. The deliverance by him is a deliverance from sin, that you may be made righteous by faith in him .... The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, or the doctrine of the Gospel which we preach.” “Who shall ascend ... who shall descend ...?” These questions are the taunts of unbelief. The Jews had said, “Let him now come down from the cross and we will believe him” (Matt. 27:42). The taunting question regarding His coming up from the grave grew out of the fact that, when Jesus rose from the dead, He did not appear to His enemies at all, but only to His disciples. The reference to bringing Christ down from heaven was an echo of the disbelief that refused to see in our Lord the miracle of the incarnation. Putting the cavil all together, we may understand the enemies as saying, “All right, if Jesus is the Messiah, bring him down from heaven, or up from the grave, and let him lead our nation in throwing off the yoke of Roman bondage.” The Jewish hierarchy seemed perpetually unaware that any such thing as an earthly kingdom was not in God’s plan. Even the kingdom they had once possessed was not of God’s will, but only of God’s permission; for, upon the occasion of their original request for a king, in order to be like the nations around them, the Lord had said to Samuel, “Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Sam. 8:7). Thus, the past glorious kingdom of Israel was not of God’s choice, but theirs; and their sin in seeking it was finally the sin that blinded their eyes to the true King when He came. It was that earthly kingdom that was the ceaseless undoing of Israel. Their evil kings led them repeatedly into rebellion against God; and the lives of many of their kings, as Solomon’s for example, were lives of shameless debauchery. The verses Paul quoted here are from Deuteronomy 30:11-14, reading thus: “For this is the commandment that I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it down to us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Paul’s use of this quotation has been the source of various opinions among scholars, because he uses the words out of context, borrowing, as it were, the expressions of Holy Scripture and providing them with a new and more exalted meaning. Strong agreement is felt here with the words of Richard A. Batey (The Letter of Paul to the Romans, p. 134), thus: “Paul quotes or paraphrases passages without regard to their original context or meaning whenever the words of that passage suit his purpose. It is as though the words of scripture convey a convincing power within themselves apart from their original context. The disregard of context is, in the eyes of contemporary exegetes, a glaring breach of the rules of acceptable interpretation. However, Paul’s dealing with the Old Testament should be evaluated first by the convincing quality which it had for its initial readers.” In this connection, it should be remembered that Paul was inspired, and therefore able to take liberties with the Word of God which are not allowed to the uninspired. The strong similarity in the two uses of these passages is evident. In both, the essential point is that no outlandish miracle, such as going to heaven and back, was needed in order for people to know God’s will. God had already given at Sinai the vital commandments for Israel; and, in Christ, the Gospel had already been provided for all people. Any thought that Christ should make a special appearance to unbelievers, either by rising from the dead or coming down from heaven in their sight, was preposterous and ridiculous. What could have been the point of such a thing? The Pharisees knew all about the resurrection, and they bribed the soldiers with gold to lie about it. Therefore, what depths of hypocrisy was in their taunt, “Bring him up from the dead.” Paul’s unconventional use of Scripture should be understood as additional inspired light upon what the words truly mean. As John Locke (op. cit., p. 348) observed: “It will be an ill rule for interpreting St. Paul, to tie up his use of any text he brings out of the Old Testament, to that which is taken to be the meaning of it there. We need go no farther for an example than the 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th verses of this chapter.
³ First, it should be noted that this verse contains ?doctrine of the gospel? as stated in the foregoing verse. Significantly, it is a pairing of CONFESSION and FAITH as coordinates among the conditions of salvation, that is primary salvation, or pardon from ?old sins? (2 Peter 1:9), such as takes place in conversion to Christ. If this passage stood alone in the New Testament, it might be fairly inferred that these are the two conditions of salvation; but it does not stand alone, for there are other similar pairings of the elementary conditions of primary salvation, as in the case of REPENTANCE and BAPTISM (Acts 2:38), and that of FAITH and BAPTISM (Mark 16:16). There are no legitimate grounds for thinking that any one of these pairings excludes the conditions mentioned in the others. Faith, repentance, confession, and baptism are all divinely imposed conditions of salvation, none of them outranking any of the others. Faith is omitted in one of the pairings and mentioned second in another. Repentance is mentioned in only one, confession in only one, and baptism in two; but all alike are commanded, all alike are necessary; and all alike are prerequisite to justification. “Confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord” ... is a reference to the confession of faith preceding one’s baptism into Christ, as in the case of the eunuch (Acts 8:37 margin). Some reject this understanding of this clause on the ground that a formal confession of faith is left out of all the precepts and examples concerning remission, and is to be found only in a reference in a letter to Christians as to what had been required. The ground of dissent from is found in the words “with thy mouth,” which certainly indicate a spoken confession. Moreover, Christ Himself, upon the occasion of a formal confession by Peter (Matt. 16:16-18), reciprocated with a formal confession of Peter, with His own precious promise almost certainly in view, wherein He had declared only a short while previously that “Everyone therefore who shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32). In addition to these considerations, which are weighty enough, there is the impressive witness of Acts 8:37 properly rejected from the text on sufficient critical grounds, but which, as a very ancient gloss, positively proves the custom of the early church in requiring a confession. However, despite this there can be no dissent from the above stated rejection as further expressed thus: It is necessary that at every step of the religious life, even after one has grown old in the service of the Lord, with the mouth confession must be made unto salvation, and with the heart he must believe unto righteousness. He must live and walk through faith unto the end. It is just as necessary that confession of Christ should be made at all times, or Christ will not own us.
⁴ Some of the modern translations have obscured and altered the meaning of God?s Word in this verse. Phillips translation has: ?For it is believing in the heart that makes a man righteous before God, and it is stating his belief by his own mouth that confirms his salvation.? This so-called translation changes the meaning of the Word of God by making a difference in the functions of faith and of confession, by ascribing to faith the function of making one righteous, and to confession the function of merely confirming what is already fact. Any student may observe that this kind of translation is not a translation at all, but is undeniably an unjustifiable substitution of human opinion for what is written in the Word of God. The preposition ?unto? (in the English Revised Version (1885) is here translated from a Greek word [eis], which means ?for? in the sense of ?in order to receive.? We know of no Greek scholar who would deny this. Attention is here called to two other New Testament passages where the same [eis] is involved: ?This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many UNTO remission of sins? (Matt. 26:28). ?Repent ye, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ UNTO the remission of your sins? (Acts 2:38). Putting the sense of these Scriptures in view together, we have this: blood of the covenant ? Christ's blood (remission of sins); repentance and baptism [@eis] (remission of sins); man believeth (righteousness); confession is made (salvation). Thus, in the New Testament, faith, repentance, confession and baptism are all categorically said to sustain exactly the same relationship to salvation, being ?unto? it, meaning that they are all, and all alike, divinely-imposed preconditions required of men, upon the fulfillment of which God gives them justification. This great truth should have been known even without what is said in Matthew 26:28; but the statement there, in which the blood of Christ is also said to be ?unto? the remission of sins, makes the understanding of this vital truth almost impossible, for the same word ([@eis] in the Greek) ?unto? relates the blood of Jesus Christ to remission of sins, in the sense of there being no remission of sins without it. This in no sense equates the blood of Christ with the primary steps of obedience leading to justification, because the blood of Christ is the causative and enabling factor making it possible for people to be saved, thus not resembling in any way the primary steps of obedience; but in one sense, the sense of being absolutely necessary and prior to man?s salvation, the first principles of the Gospel (faith, repentance, confession and baptism) are actually placed in the same time sequence leading to salvation as the blood of Christ, all of which, and each of which, are the sine qua non of salvation. The inexcusable rendition of Phillips, cited above, by its translating [@eis] with two utterly different meanings in the same sentence, indicates the lengths to which advocates of salvation by ?faith only? go in their efforts to represent God?s Word as teaching their theory. In the passages before us, faith, repentance, confession and baptism are clearly and emphatically presented as coordinates with identical functions ? facts which are made certain by the manner of these significant pairings in God?s Word. As to the identification of what that function is, which pertains to each of these, that also is unmistakably clear from Matthew 26:28. When the Scriptures state that Christ shed His blood ?unto? remission of sins, it would be impossible to construe that as meaning that he did so ?because man was already saved.? Identically with that, people believe, repent, confess and are baptized, not because they are already saved but ?in order to? be so. The significant ?pairings? of the preconditions of salvation, mentioned above, are entitled to a little further consideration. ?Repent ye, and believe in the gospel? (Mark 1:15). ?He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved? (Mark 16:16). ?Repent and be baptized for the remission of sins? (Acts 2:38). ?Confess with thy mouth ... believe in thy heart thou shalt be saved? (Rom. 10:10). ?Repent ye and turn again that your sins may be blotted out? (Acts 3:91; ?turn again? is here synonymous with ?be baptized?). It is the grossest error to view any of these pairings of the conditions on which God promises salvation to people as excluding any of the conditions omitted from any one of the pairs. All of the conditions mentioned in these pairs collectively are absolute requirements laid down in the Word of God as being necessary in order to receive salvation. They are coordinates in every sense of the word. One passage in Hebrews mentions no less than three of these, all except confession, naming them as coordinates and designating them as the foundation doctrine of Christianity (Heb. 6:1, 2). In teaching that these are preconditions to be fulfilled prior to salvation, it is the primary justification that is meant. Upon the individual?s believing, repenting, confessing and being baptized, he is brought through such a response ?into Christ,? making him a child of God, whereupon he receives the Holy Spirit in consequence of his being a son (Gal. 4:6). This is not the final condition either of his sanctification or of his final justification at the last day, for that is also contingent upon his remaining ?in Christ,? ?quenching not the Spirit,? and being found ?in him? at the end of life. The skill and persistence with which people of marvelous intellectual endowments have tried to shout baptism out of God?s redemptive plan requires and demands the refutation of their contradiction of God?s Word. All of the conversions recorded in Acts of the Apostles make it clear that there was only one way by which people became Christians in that first age. Without exception, all heard the Word of God, all believed in Jesus Christ, all repented of their sins, and though it is not mentioned that all confessed Christ, necessary inference includes it and all were baptized into Christ. That is still the way to become a Christian. The widely-received, illogical salvation by faith only contradiction of the Word of God should not be permitted to deceive anyone. As the author of this epistle said, ?Let God be true, but every man a liar? (Rom. 3:4). ?Confess with the mouth? ... referring to this, C.K. Barrett wrote in his book, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (p. 200): ?The verb suggests that Paul may be using a recognized formula, and this is confirmed by 1 Cor. 12:3. The form of the sentence, ?If thou shalt confess ... and believe ... thou shalt be saved,? suggests that the formula may be a baptismal confession.? Therefore, Romans 10:9-10 refer primarily to obedience to the Gospel of Christ. The big point that Paul was making is this: the message of salvation is ?nigh? unto people; a message preached then (and ever afterward) to them, and a message which they were already obligated to accept and obey, and which needed not to be confirmed any further (by Christ?s coming down from heaven, or back from the dead), because it had already been overwhelmingly authenticated.
⁵ For a more in-depth study of salvation, see God’s Salvation section on contents page of this website.