Sometimes verses like Romans 12:1 fall into the Christian canyon of sanctified bumper-sticker sayings. Sometimes it’s a call to arms for hormone-crazed teens (or so youth teachers have often taught): in light of God being a good God, present your bodies to him—undefiled by immorality. Other times it’s phrased in such a way as if it were obligatory payback; kind of how you treat a good boss.
So what is righteousness anyway? What is God’s righteousness? What righteousness did the Gentiles attain and the Jews fell short of? I’ve spoken about this before and more often than not people say something like “Righteousness is goodness.”
But note the text states that the Gentiles were not pursuing righteousness: we can’t say they weren’t pursuing goodness. It would be ridiculous to state that for years upon years Gentiles were ignoring The Good and trying to attain only evil especially in light of the moral arguments of philosophers prior to Paul’s day.
Rather this righteousness was attained by faith and here people will be quick to interject their arguments about the Jews working for their salvation in the Law and the Law being useless and the Law detracting from Grace, but hold one minute. This is God’s Law, a perfect and holy and just law: how dare we.
Paul says that Israel was “pursuing a law of righteousness but did not arrive at that law.” Note what’s being stated here, the Jews were actually following the law of righteousness yet they didn’t grip the law, come to terms with it, arrive at it.
Here our Gentile minds start filling up arguments that Jesus was the only one that kept the entire law perfectly thus actually being the only man to have kept the Law.” And when we mention the Sabbath we get into sticky territory where we border on the edge of blaspheming the Lord by either supplanting the Sabbath or ascribing it to some tripartite division of the Law under the Ceremonial header or merely getting rid of the thing altogether.
They didn’t pursue God’s Law of Righteousness by faith but as though it were something to be attained by their doing so then they stumbled over the stumbling stone.
Here’s what Paul is actually saying. The Law wasn’t describing how to be good, although it did do that, nor was it describing what exactly you have to do to be saved on your own accord. The Law by making its propositions of do and do not is describing, by inference somebody who doesn’t have to be told all that.
I am reminded of the Father who tells the child “sit up in class, listen very well and take notes” knowing full well that such sort of actions point to an individual who will do well from that sort of attention—even if that individual is a myth in dad’s mind.
But the Law was perfect and belonged to God so there’s no hypotheticals about it. The Law was pointing to an individual–not to individuals who could actually earn the status the Law was pointing to. That’s where Israel stumbled, on the stone that was laid down and by its very existence points out that no one could attain that status: it can only be bestowed and that by faith (note Romans chapter 4 for further analysis on faith).
Therefore Israel is not saved because of the way they tried to attain a perfectly right righteousness: by earning it. With this fact in mind Paul finds himself still praying for their salvation!
Last time I said that God’s unmerited mercy was being poured out on vessels of wrath: stupid, pagan Gentiles who weren’t even looking for God in the first place—but what about Israel, these vessels that were prepared beforehand for glory? What about their fate?
Paul’s overarching point, if you recall, is especially concerned with the salvation of unsaved Israel—a point that seems to be quickly ignored in many debates. If the argument here is that God has decided not to save Israel there is truly a problem with God’s word which will always stand yet in Paul’s day (and presently) Israel as a whole does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
The evidence stands against them for the prophets had spoken about God’s mercy left and right (a fact that is overwhelmingly ignored when looking at God in the Old Testament). Speaking about a cast off Israel, God through Hosea says He will take those cast off Israelites and call them His People and they will thus be called living sons of the living God. Speaking about a chastised Israel, Isaiah says that the entire Israelite nation will not be wiped out but there would be a remnant, a small shoot, that will be saved and preserve Israel for God has left them this posterity instead of wiping them out like Sodom and Gomorrah.
So God did in fact show mercy to Israel that He hasn’t wiped them out and He doesn’t intend to wipe them out but currently Israel does not believe because in the way they pursued God’s righteousness.
“How can It be wrong if God made me this way?” That was the quote from a recent Law and Order Special Victim’s Unit where a gay Christian young man realized that his pastor father had killed his lover. The young man was part of an extremist group of Christians who performed plays depicting sinners screaming and burning in hell. But his question got me thinking: was he on point?
This material is Copyright © 1970 by the Trustees of the Estate of C.S. Lewis, All Rights Resered. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number, 70-129851 from God in the Dock Essays on Theology and Ethics Edited by Walter Hooper. I have placed it here for storage purposes since this section of my copy of the book is falling apart and as such I tried to keep as much of the original paragraph breaks, Brittish-isms and footnotes although I incorporated those into the text within brackets. I thought the essay spoke to Today particularly well. You can also see some of Lingimish’s comments here, here and here.