Fr. Stephen De Young: “For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law. The man who does these things shall live by them.” So he’s saying, again, this isn’t a new thing; you should’ve understood this from the beginning. Now, he’s saying that as someone who didn’t, so it’s more of a not a you should have: we should have. We should have seen this coming. This is one of St. Paul’s positions; that’s why he keeps quoting Old Testament Scripture. This isn’t—it shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was. There are all these places, if we read the Hebrew Scriptures, where God said what he was going to do and how he was going to do it, and we missed it. We missed it, but, he said… and so Jesus is the Messiah actually fits in perfectly with everything God has done in the past and said in the past, but we missed it.

So he’s going to give some examples here of how we missed it. So Moses says concerning the Torah, “the one who does these things will live by them,” and that’s in Leviticus 18, so that’s in the middle of the holiness code. And what that means is not… I mean, that seems to be like a circular statement: the person who lives according to these things will live according to these things. But that’s not it. The one who does these things will have life, will have life through doing them.

Q1: But that seems almost to be saying that keeping the law is how you have life.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he’s not done. [Laughter] So Moses… This is one of St. Paul’s argument techniques. He’ll say something you have to agree with and get you to nod your head. Remember we saw him do this in Acts 17, when he’s in Athens and he’s talking to the philosophers and he starts out with a whole bunch of stuff that they have to agree with: the God who created everything, made all humans from one human: he doesn’t live in a house that humans build for him—and they’re all like, “Ah, yes, we’re philosophers, yeah, yeah, you’re right.” And he goes on and on and on until he gets to the whole: “He’s going to judge the world by the man whom he raised from the dead,” and then they’re all like, “What?” [Laughter] Like: “Hold on. Time out. We were with you…” So he’s doing that a little here. So the Pharisees would have totally agreed with that. They would have said, “Well, yeah!”

“But the righteousness of faith”—now again, he said the righteousness which is of the law, which comes from the Torah, which comes from the law—“this is the righteousness that comes from faithfulness speaks in this way: Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down from above) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). For what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach).”

Now those are quotes from Deuteronomy. So the other quotes are from the Torah, too. The other quotes are from the Torah, too. So what’s St. Paul saying? He’s saying, “Yes, the Torah talks about the importance of keeping the commandments.” St. Paul isn’t denying the importance of keeping the commandments. He isn’t denying that there is life in the truth and the commandments of God, or that the Torah is a bad thing. Again, what did he just say? He said Christ is the purpose of the Torah; Christ is what the Torah was aiming at the whole time. So St. Paul loves the Torah, just as much as the Pharisees do, even though he understands it differently.

So then he quotes the Torah again to say, “Do not say, ‘Who will go up into heaven? Who will go down into the abyss?’ The word is in your mouths and on your heart.” And this is… Remember Deuteronomy is sort of the concluding sermon; it’s the sermon that Moses gives right before they go into the land, right before Moses dies and right before the people go into the land, so it’s sort of his final sermon to them. And what he’s saying here is: God has revealed these things to you. He’s revealed to you these mysteries. You don’t need someone to go up into heaven to find them out. And there’s all kinds of literature, all through the Old Testament period, especially the Second Temple Jewish period, about people going up into heaven and seeing visions and seeing things, both pagan and Jewish, and finding out the secret mysteries when they took this trip into heaven.

“Or who will go down into the abyss?”: the abyss, the depths of the sea, which is basically hell. Who will go down there and find out the mysteries of death and come and tell us? Because God is saying, “I’ve revealed this to you.” But what St. Paul does here is he says, “Yes, God has revealed himself to us and revealed these mysteries to us and revealed life to us and revealed righteousness to us, but he’s done it in Christ.” Because he says, “Why don’t we need someone to go into heaven and see? Because Christ came down from heaven.” Christ is God; he was there. He knows all of the mysteries, and he came here to reveal them to us. And the reason we don’t need to ask, “Who will go down into the abyss, who will go down into the grave, who will go down into Sheol for us, to Hades?” is because Christ went there, and then he rose from the dead.

So he says, see here, what Deuteronomy is saying is presupposing what Christ was going to do. So he’s saying, “I’m not just saying this; this is not just a theoretical thing. Christ is the end of the law; Christ is the purpose of the law.” He gets to the point: here’s an example. Here’s an example. And he says, “The word being in our mouth and in our heart.” That’s referring to what? To the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to the report of what Christ has done, which he preaches and which they all know. And that means both Jews and Gentiles in the Church in Rome who have heard the Gospel, who have come to know Christ, know all the mysteries of heaven, all the mysteries of Hades; all the knowledge, all the wisdom is available to them immediately in Christ, not through means of keeping all these detailed laws of the Torah. They’re already there, and they’re there because of what Christ has done, because God has kept those promises in Christ, not because they all managed to keep the Torah perfectly. Obviously, the Gentiles didn’t, but even in the case of the Jews, it’s not because they did.

With St. Paul, it wasn’t because he did. He’s going to say later in one of his epistles that according to the law he was blameless, that he pulled it off. He was a good Pharisee; he kept all the rules. That didn’t get him to righteousness; that didn’t get it. Jesus Christ had to come and appear to him directly, and it was in Christ that he found real knowledge and righteousness and truth, and became an heir. So that’s what he’s getting at here. That’s what he’s getting at here: Deuteronomy right there was talking about Christ and what Christ was going to do. So the Torah presupposes it; it’s aimed at it. You can’t understand the Torah without Christ. If you try and read it without him, you’re going to end up reading it as an end in itself and it’s going to take you away from him.

Then he goes on to talk about: What is the context of the word of faith, the word of faithfulness that he preaches? “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.” So what do you need to do? Do you need to keep all of the regulations of the Pharisees? Is that what is required for faithfulness and to become an heir? No. It’s that you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

Notice “you will be saved” is in the future tense; it doesn’t say if you do that you are saved or you’ve gotten saved or any other of that language that we use today. It says, “you will be.” Why? Because we’re looking ahead to the day of judgment, remember? We’re looking ahead to the day of judgment; we’re looking ahead to who will be on the right hand at the judgment.

So that means a couple of things right off the bat. This “believe” is not like a one-time thing, like: “Okay, I checked the box. I prayed this prayer, I wrote the date, now I’m good. No matter what I do the rest of my life.”

Q1: It’s not like I had this big mystical experience, either.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s not a one-time… “Believe” here is present tense; it’s ongoing. And the “saved” is future tense. And it’s not just “believe”—again, this is not just a mental flip, and to make that clear, we have “confess,” that’s also present tense; that’s also an ongoing thing. So believing and confessing Christ is something that goes on throughout our life, and when we do that, when we do that, then, at the end, we’re on that right-hand side. And that involves a whole lot of actions. It involves keeping commandments. Remember Christ says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” It involves all those things.

Just like we talked about with Abraham earlier in Romans, when God comes and says to him, “I’m going to give you this big tract of land over on the other side of the Levant,” Abraham can’t just sit there and say, “Oh, okay, I believe you.” [Laughter] And sit there in Ur. If he did that, we’d know he didn’t really believe it. If you really believe it, you’re going to go claim it; you’re going to go over there, move to that land that God is giving you, which is actually what Abraham eventually does. There’s some missteps there, but he eventually does. That, and Abraham there is the big example St. Paul uses of faith, of faithfulness, of belief that God is going to keep his promises.

And so if you believe that Christ is going to come to judge the living and the dead and to reward those who are faithful, how are you going to live your life if you really believe that? You’re not going to just sit there and say, “Oh yeah, I believe it.” [Laughter] It’s going to require you to live your life in a certain way. That’s this believing and confessing that St. Paul is talking about; it’s sort of inclusive of this whole way of living our lives.

And he says, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the—” and that’s an interesting translation: New King James in our Orthodox Study Bible. It literally says, “For with the heart one believes and is justified.” And remember, we talked about the word for “justified” in Aramaic: it means “cleansed” and “purified.” It’s used in Daniel in that respect, when it talks about the Temple being justified after it’s been trampled underfoot for a time. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to get saved and go to heaven; that means it’s going to be purified and cleansed and restored. So saying, “with the heart one believes and justified,” it’s purified. Your heart is cleansed and purified, through faithfulness to Christ.

“And with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” And this is related to what Christ does. Remember: “He who denies me before men, I will deny before the Father; he who confesses me before men, I will confess him before the Father,” talking about the judgment. St. Paul is echoing that; he’s echoing that.

“For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on him will not be put to shame.’ ” He goes back to that quote from Isaiah. That’s the last verse, remember: the stumbling-block: “the stumbling-block to some, but whoever believes on him will not be put to shame.” It’s literally who trusts in him: whoever puts their trust in him will not be put to shame. So this is the positive side of that.

“For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon him. For ‘whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ” So he says there’s no distinction between Jew and Greek. Why does he say “rich”—he’s rich or wealthy to all? Because we’re still talking about inheritance. We’re still talking about inheritance. God gives generously: Jew, Gentile, doesn’t matter. He gives generously.

Now in the “who call upon him,” remember, calling upon the name of the Lord is an expression in the Old Testament that refers to sacrifice; it refers to worship, specifically sacrificial worship. So this isn’t just anybody who says the name of Jesus like it’s magical and now I’m saved; it’s talking about: this is the context of worship, so again this is this ongoing… this is this life of… All who worship God, all who follow God, all who seek to follow him, all who live this life of faithfulness, of belief and confession—all of them are saved. So he’s already made the argument that this isn’t mechanical; you can’t do something that indebts God to you and makes him… now he’s going to hold up his end of the bargain. But at the same time, God is faithful. You’re not going to live your whole life—as returning to some of what he talked about in chapter eight about our hope—we’re not going to spend our whole life trying to serve God as best we can and worshiping him and confessing him and then, at the end, find out we didn’t make the cut or “no vacancy in heaven right now; we’re full up”: that’s not going to happen. God is righteous; he will be faithful to keep his promises, to all the heirs of his promises, because he’s rich to all. And this is then how we become an heir. We become co-heirs with Jesus Christ, the firstborn, through faithful service to him.

We need to keep going a little bit. I think we can get to the end of chapter ten.

“How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?” So he’s going to make a bunch of pretty basic arguments. How can you worship someone whom you don’t believe, whom you don’t know, you don’t trust in, whom you don’t have an awareness of?

“And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?” Well, if you’ve never even heard of him, how can you believe in him?

“And how shall they hear without a preacher?” Well, you can’t hear unless someone comes and talks. Someone’s got to tell you about him for you to hear about him.

“And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” Somebody’s got to be sent out to go and tell people. And remember the word for “sent” here is the same root word as the word “apostle.” “Apostle” literally, apostolos, means someone who is sent on a mission. So someone has to be sent to preach the Gospel, so they can hear it, so they can accept it, so they can worship, worship God.

“As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!’ ” This is Isaiah again. But if you go and read that—I won’t right now, but if you go and read that in context, it goes on to say what they’re proclaiming is that the end of the exile, and that God now reigns over the whole world, which St. Paul is applying to Christ, his accession and enthronement. This is the Gospel, the news of Christ’s victory, and that he’s the king of the world. He says this—the ministry that St. Paul was carrying out, and the other apostles—was part of Isaiah’s prophecy. Again, this is this—this shouldn’t be this radical new thing that you don’t understand; if you read the Scriptures, read the prophets—the prophets are talking about this, are saying that this is what’s going to happen, that’s God’s going to win this victory and be enthroned, and he’s going to send people out to announce that to the whole world, not just to the people who happened to be in Zion and Jerusalem and hear about it, but he’s going to send people out. Saying: What do you think that was talking about? That’s being fulfilled right now in what St. Paul is doing and the other apostles are doing.

“But they have not all obeyed the Gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our report?’ ” So he says, “Look, yeah, we know. We’re going out, and we’re bringing this news to the whole world, and there’s a whole bunch of you, including a lot of Judeans, a lot of Jews, who don’t believe, who aren’t accepting it, who aren’t accepting the report that we’re bringing to them.” He says, “But you know what? Isaiah predicted that, too. Isaiah predicted that, too.”

“So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Now, notice once again, “word of God” is not referring to the Scriptures here. That is important. “Word of God” is never used in the Scriptures to refer to the Scriptures; it’s used to refer to Christ and it’s used to refer to the Gospel, and the Gospel is the report about Christ, so those are related to each other. So the word of God he’s talking about here is the Gospel. It’s the Gospel, and, through the Gospel, Christ himself.

“But I say, have they not heard? Yes indeed: ‘Their sound has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.’ ” So this is interesting. This is interesting, because if you look up Psalm 19, of which this is a quotation, or from which this is a quotation, the first half, the first six verses, are talking about the sky.

Q1: The sky?

Fr. Stephen: The sky. [Laughter] It starts out: “The heavens declare the glory of God. Day after day they pour forth speech.” And then it goes on; it talks about this: “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, their words to the end of the universe.” That’s the first six verses. Verses seven and following are talking about the Torah and how beautiful and wonderful that is. Now notice—I’m not going to read it yet, but notice where St. Paul goes next.

“But I say, did Israel not know?” So who’s the they when he says, “But I say, have they not heard?” Because he’s about to say, “Did Israel not know?” They is what?

Q1: “They” is everybody who’s heard.

Fr. Stephen: The rest of the world. Has the rest of the world not heard? And he refers to this verse that talks about—or these verses, this section of the psalm, that talks about the heavens—the sun, moon, and stars, because it talks specifically about the sun, and I’m going to get to that in a second—the sun, moon, and stars communicate to the whole world on behalf of God.

And what this gets into is the Jewish understanding of astrology. That may sound crazy to you, because we’re used to thinking of astrology as a pagan thing, but there was such a thing as Jewish astrology. It’s not the same. It’s not the same, but… So in pagan astrology… The basis of pagan astrology is that the sun, moon, and stars are gods. Those lights that you see in the heavens are specifically the bodies of certain gods. And so these gods, being gods, have the power to control human life and human destiny, and so you can predict the future and do all these things by reading the stars and what these gods are doing.

So Judaism rejected the idea that these were gods that should be worshiped, obviously, but they didn’t reject the idea that there were spiritual beings associated with these objects. In fact, all over the place in St. Paul’s epistles and all over the place in the Old Testament, it talks about angelic beings being stars, and stars being—they’re connected, the stars in the heavens. So they believed that what you actually saw, these bodies moving around, that these were animated and under the authority of these angels, who were under the authority of God. And what that means is that God could communicate through them. So this wasn’t that they had some control over humanity and its destiny or anything, but it’s that God could communicate and send a message using them. And this became the basis for the way Jewish folks did and understood astrology.

This is what lies behind—this is why they weren’t uncomfortable with the idea that these Magi in Persia saw a star and figured out that the Messiah had been born. You might think: Well, wouldn’t that make Jews uncomfortable, this whole astrology thing? Well, no! See, because that’s how they understood it. They said, no, look: God is communicating to the whole world that his Messiah had been born, using this star. So God could use it to communicate, the same way he always used angels to communicate: would send an angel.

So that was totally normal in their understanding. Remember in Romans 1, St. Paul has already talked about the fact that the Gentiles who were out there saw the invisible things of God or knew them from his creation. God was communicating to them, but they rejected what God was communicating, and started worshiping those things, including worshiping the stars themselves, these created things, rather than the One who created them, rather than hearing what he was telling them.

So what’s happening in Psalm 19, both originally and as St. Paul here understands it, is that there’s this one communication that goes out to everyone on earth, because everyone on earth has access to the heavens—God is communicating from the heavens to everyone, all the time, to the ends of the earth—and then also, the second half of Psalm 19 is talking about the Torah, which he gave to Israel in particular. So St. Paul here is citing it. He’s about to talk about the Torah when he talks about Israel, but now he’s talking about the Gentiles, and so he says: Look, “day after day they poured forth speech.” He was communicating to all of them, even though they rejected it, as he said in Romans 1. Because why? Because someone could ask him the question: Well, yeah, how were they supposed to believe and how were they supposed to be faithful to God if they didn’t know who he was and no one had been sent to them yet? He’s saying, “Oh no! They had heard. God had communicated to them, and what he had communicated to them, they had not been faithful to.”

Now the interesting thing that I haven’t quoted yet in Psalm 19 is in the midst of this discussion of the heavens declaring the glory of God, it talks about how the sun hides itself away and then rises up as from a bridal chamber. Does that language sound familiar to anybody? We’re not that far past Pascha.

Q1: Yeah. It’s a resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So St. Paul, by citing that, what’s he saying? In a way, even the basics of the Gospel—which he’s just defined as what? the resurrection of Christ, that God raised him from the dead—was there for them to see, in a way. In a way. But they didn’t understand it, and they rejected it. He’s paralleling that, because remember he’s trying to argue: the whole basis of this letter is we don’t want a Jewish community and a Gentile community; they’re on the same footing. He’s been talking about how the Jewish people, and he’s going to continue to talk about how the Jewish people didn’t understand and didn’t accept the revelation of God that they were given. Well, by the way, the Gentiles didn’t either. What they were given was a little different, a lot less, but they weren’t faithful to and didn’t accept that.

So now he turns, the same way Psalm 19 does, and says, “But I say, did Israel not know?” So they all, everyone in the world, had access to this communication from God, but did Israel not know?

“First Moses says, ‘I will provoke you to jealousy by those who are not a nation; I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.’ But Isaiah is very bold and says, ‘I was found by those who did not seek me; I was made manifest to those who did not ask for me.’ But to Israel he says, ‘All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’ ”

So the first quote is from Deuteronomy, from the Torah itself, where God said to Israel… At the end of Deuteronomy it’s interesting, because at the end of Deuteronomy it’s Moses telling them exactly what’s going to happen, including: You’re going to get into the land, you’re going to forget about God, you’re going to become wicked, he’s going to be patient with you for a while, and then he’s going to send you into exile. Like, before they even… This is what’s going to happen. He says: This is what’s going to happen. And this is part of that. And part of that being sent into exile, at the end of it, what does he say is going to happen? “I will provoke you to jealousy by those who are not a nation; I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.” So he prophesied there’s going to be this other people. There’s going to be this other people whom I’m going to bless, whom I’m going to make heirs of the promise, in this case. And that’s going to make you really jealous.

But why is he doing it? God’s doing it why? To call them back. They’re going to be jealous. They’re going to say, “Look, they’re receiving these things that were promised to us, and we’re not receiving them. We need to repent so that we can receive them, too.” That’s the goal, not to put them down. It’s not saying, “I’m done with you. I’m going to take it away from you and give it to somebody else who’s better than you.” [Laughter] He’s saying he’s doing it why? To provoke them to jealousy.

He says Isaiah is very bold, so he quotes Isaiah, saying something similar. “I was found by those who did not seek me; I was made manifest to those who did not ask for me.” That’s the Gentiles. “But to Israel he says, ‘All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’ ” That’s not condemnation. St. Paul could have quoted something like that. There’s plenty of verses in the Old Testament, where you could say, “You are a stiff-necked people!” [Laughter] There’s tons of them that he could have quoted there. That’s not what he says. What he quotes to the Jewish people is: “All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient people.” Why? To welcome them back if they’ll turn and return.

So St. Paul is saying God hasn’t done this as his wrath against you or to punish you. God has done this to try to, as one means to try to draw you back to repentance.

Q1: It doesn’t say he stopped doing it.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Q1: It says it… The implication is that the hands are still outstretched.

Fr. Stephen: He has been doing it and is still doing it, yeah. He has been doing it and he’s still doing it.

So this is probably a good place to end before we start chapter 11. Chapter 11, we’re now going to get into the nitty-gritty about who Israel is for St. Paul and what its destiny is. So nothing real controversial at all. [Laughter] Thank you, everybody.

Q1: Thank you!