Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started, and when we get started here in just a moment, we’re going to be picking up near the end of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter nine, and we’re going to be picking up in verse 30. So we just have this last little bit here in chapter nine, which I probably should have gone over last time, but that’s okay. We’d gone a long time last time, and this does lead into what we’re going to get into in chapter ten.

So to get us caught up, we had a little bit of a transition in chapters eight and nine, so I won’t go all the way back to the beginning, but just to sort of reorient us in this section of the epistle that we’re in… In chapter eight, we saw that St. Paul was sort of directly addressing the theme of inheritance and us as heirs, co-heirs with Christ, Christ being the Son of God proper and us becoming sons of God through grace. And we talked about what that means in relation to the sons of God as the angels in the Old Testament, who served in God’s council and how human beings are now placed into that role when they’re glorified, and how that relates to our understanding of sainthood, and how this is sort of the destiny and the promise of humanity, for which humanity was created in the first place.

And now, in chapter nine, St. Paul has sort of moved on from there to talking about the whole issue surrounding what’s happened with what he calls Israel according to the flesh, and this would be not just the people who— The word that’s translated as “Jews” in the New Testament is actually “Judeans.” It means the people of Judea, the Roman province, very literally. And technically, that’s even distinct from Galileans, because that was a different province, but it’s Judeans. So when St. Paul talks about Israel, even Israel according to the flesh, that’s a bigger category. He’s going back into the Old Testament, and he’s talking about it—and he’s talked about this in the context of the descendants of Abraham. We saw he focused on Isaac, and then Jacob and Esau, at the beginning of chapter nine. So this is going further back than that. Yes, now there’s just this sort of Judea left. Ten and a half tribes are gone completely at the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians. There’s only this portion left.

So he’s talking about Israel as a whole, and what do we say about God’s promises, starting with to Abraham? Has God not kept his promises? And the term he’s used—now, this is going to be important as we go forward here—to describe that is whether God has been righteous or not, because God’s righteousness is a matter, in this context, of him keeping his promises. God makes a promise, he fulfills that promise, and so that shows that he is righteous. He is just; he keeps his promises.

And so did that not happen? Because, look, all these people—the majority of the Judeans who are around now—have not embraced Jesus as the Messiah. They’ve turned their back on him, and so they haven’t—they aren’t, as he began chapter nine, they aren’t on a path that leads to salvation, because they’ve cut themselves off from God by cutting themselves off from Christ. And this is something that St. Paul is sorrowful about. So in what we read so far of chapter nine, he’s been describing how that happened. And he says, well, number one, this shouldn’t be so surprising, because it was never everyone born, descended from Abraham, who was a part of the covenant and was a part of the path of salvation in the first place. So he says: you’ve got Isaac and Ishmael who were born from Abraham, and it’s Isaac who’s considered the firstborn and who’s the heir, the heir of the promise, the one who inherits the promises. And then he turned to Jacob and Esau. Even though Esau was technically older by a few seconds—they were twins—but even though Esau came out first by a few seconds, was older by a few seconds, it’s Jacob who’s considered the heir and the inheritor of the promises.

Now we saw that, knowing the Old Testament as he does, St. Paul is not saying that Esau or Ishmael were cut off from the love of God, went to hell, were evil, any of those things, because the Scriptures contradict that. Ishmael received promises from God. His mother did; he didn’t hear them directly, but they were passed onto him from Hagar, his mother. And we talked about—we went through it in a little bit of detail, the sort of historical road that Esau and his descendants traveled, which was one where they also received a portion of the inheritance, a portion of the land promised to Abraham.

But the point that St. Paul has made is that Esau and his descendants received that inheritance as co-heirs with the firstborn. It was through Esau’s relationship with Jacob his brother that he became a co-inheritor. It was from the Edomites, their descendants’ brotherhood with Israel that they received a share. And so St. Paul made this point by giving two quotes. Remember, he quoted Genesis, where at the time of the birth of Jacob and Esau it said, “The older shall serve the younger,” and so that relationship is described as service. Esau becomes Jacob’s servant, because he’s the firstborn, and so becomes a co-inheritor. And then he gives another quote, from the other end of the Old Testament Scriptures, from Malachi—he could have quoted Obadiah, because that’s all oracles against the Edomites, too, but he quotes Malachi—that says, “Jacob I have loved; Esau I have hated,” which is then judgment comes upon the Edomites, comes upon Esau’s descendants because they turned on Judah. When Judah, their brother, was falling, when the Babylonians… they took that opportunity to rob them, to seize their territory; they turned on them. And so, because they turned on God’s firstborn, they cut themselves off from the inheritance, and God ended up expelling them from their land.

And so he’s using this as an analogy for what’s happened now. In order to be a co-heir, in order to inherit the promises of God, that started with Abraham and then came all the way down, you do that through your relationship to Christ; you do that through serving Christ. By serving Christ, you become a co-heir. He shares his—because he inherits everything as the firstborn. He shares that with those who serve him. If you, like many of the Judeans did, reject him, reject God’s firstborn, cut yourself off from him, you also cut yourself off from that inheritance, the same way the Edomites ultimately did. So that’s the analogy he’s made.

And he’s sort of concluded the section of chapter nine that we read with a whole series of quotes from the Old Testament that talk about the fact that all of those promises toward Israel, all of Israel’s history, was aimed at producing this seed, was aimed at producing Christ as the one who would finally inherit. And so it was bringing forth Christ that was the reason for all these things that happened in the Old Testament. And it’s also important to remember, because it’s going to come up again here in a minute, he talked about—he spent some time addressing what he called vessels of wrath. He appealed to the imagery of Jeremiah, that talked about God as a potter with a potter’s wheel, and he makes a nation and one of them gets used to drink water out of and another one gets used as a chamber pot. [Laughter] One’s for honorable, and one’s for dishonorable use. And he talked about Pharaoh in the Old Testament having been raised up and made this glorious king on the earth so that God could defeat him and humiliate him in the exodus.

And this is St. Paul responding to the question: Well, is God just playing games? Why did God bring twelve tribes out of Egypt if ten and a half of them were just going to get wiped out, and he knew it? If he knew that the vast majority of people in the old covenant were not going to be faithful and were not going to inherit these promises, why did he bother to bring them out and do all this? Why bother raising Pharaoh up if you’re just going to knock him back down? And so then, in the present time, for St. Paul, why is there this Jewish nation, if only this tiny little remnant was actually going to accept the Messiah when he came? Why did these people even live? Why did these…?

And it is in response to that question that St. Paul has said—and he hasn’t elaborated on it yet; he’s going to; that’s why I’m bringing it up again—that in each of those cases there were reasons. And he talked about the reason in regard to Pharaoh: because through the exodus and through the defeat of Pharaoh and the other gods of Egypt, God’s name was made known; Yahweh’s name was made known to the whole world. When the spies get to Jericho and they’re with Rahab, Rahab says, “Oh, yeah, we heard about you guys and your God and what you did to Egypt!” because they were the most powerful nation in the world at the time. So there was a purpose there with Pharaoh. And could Pharaoh really complain about all the blessings he’d received? “Why’d you give me all these incredible blessings if you were just going to take them away?” He wasn’t entitled to them in the first place.

And so St. Paul hasn’t defined what it is yet, but he has suggested already that there is a reason why those ten and a half tribes, for example, that were just going to fall away, were brought out of Egypt. And there is a reason why now those other Judeans are out there, even though they haven’t yet accepted Jesus as the Messiah. So he’s kind of left that hanging, and we’re going to get— He’s going to explore that more as we go forward. So just to set that up again. He said there is a reason; just like there was a reason with Pharaoh, there is a reason for this.

And so that’s one side. The flip side, then, are those quotes that he gave just before we ended, where he talks about, for example, if it wasn’t for a seed, that singular seed of Christ, we would have been like Sodom. God would have wiped them out in his wrath a long time ago if it was based on their obedience or disobedience purely. And we see that again and again in the Old Testament. St. Paul isn’t just coming up here—not only in that quote that he uses, but over and over again, for example, when Judah is in sin, it’s always, “Well, for the sake of my servant David…” [Laughter] “I will preserve a remnant.” And of course David is the first anointed king who’s the paradigm of the Messiah who’s coming. So St. Paul is picking up on all this through what we call the Old Testament, through the Hebrew Scriptures, and is now making this argument, to Jews and Gentiles both, that this was part of God’s working all along.

So unless we have any question or comments or hurled insults or limericks or anything, we’ll go ahead and get started here in chapter nine, verse 30.

“What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained to righteousness, even righteousness through faith; but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness?”

So he’s saying it looks like these Gentiles out here who have now heard the Gospel, who have embraced Jesus as the Messiah, as the Savior of the world, they’ve now received righteousness. Now remember, we talked about when “righteousness” is talked about in terms of people what that means. It means that on the day of judgment, you’re on the right hand rather than the left hand; you’re a sheep, not a goat. So these Gentiles weren’t thinking about the day of the Lord, the day of judgment; they had no idea that was even a thing, and yet they somehow now, through their faithfulness to Christ, have received that status. So when the day comes when Christ returns, they’re going to be on the right hand; they’re going to inherit.

And St. Paul says, well, on one hand, that’s happening, and on the other hand, these people who had received the Torah, these Jewish people who were very concerned about the day of the Lord, the day of judgment, and who have been trying to—at least some of them—keep the Torah, trying to draw near to God, somehow they’ve ended up on the wrong side of the equation. Well, how do you explain that? How do you explain that?

He says, “Why? Because they did not speak it by faith but, as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling-stone, as it is written, ‘Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling-stone and rock of offense, and whoever believes on him will not be put to shame.’ ”

So that’s a quote from Isaiah again. So first he says, “Why? How did this happen? Because they”—the “they” being the Judean people who were seeking it—“did not seek it by faith, but, as it were, by the works of the law.” What does that mean? [Laughter] I’m not asking you to tell me! [Laughter] Okay, so how were they trying to establish their status as an heir of the promises?

Q1: By following all the laws exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, by keeping the Torah. They’re trying to establish it themselves, by keeping not just the commandments that are actually in the Torah, but all of the interpretations and all of this besides. They were not trying to do it through— Remember, we talked about how—and this has been skewed because of our Protestant friends: what faith is. “Faith” is: I checked the true/false box. “Jesus is the Son of God: True.” Faith implies faithfulness; faith implies obedience. And this is in the context, remember—we’re in Romans 9 still; St. Paul’s talking about service. Rather than by trying to be faithful to their God, rather than trying to be faithful on their side to the promises and serve God, and therefore receive the gift of being made an heir, they’ve been trying to do what they’ve worked out will entitle them to be an heir. So if I keep all this perfectly…

Q1: God is forced…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, then God’s going to come and do this for me. Then God’s going to come and do this for me. And we’ve talked before, when we were going through the gospels and even in Acts a little bit, about the view of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were doing the math, and they said, “Well, look. The reason we got sent into exile, the reason everything went south and we lost the kingdom, is because we were disobedient.” And they were right about that. That’s pretty clear when you read the prophets. “We didn’t keep the Torah. We didn’t do what we were supposed to be doing. We were disobedient to God. So we’re still in this situation. Even though we’re back living in Palestine, we’re still in this situation where God hasn’t returned to the Temple. These promises haven’t really been fulfilled yet, and so the way to get God to keep his promises, the way to get God to send the Messiah is for all of us to obey it perfectly.”

This is why they hated and labeled people as sinners, because those people, by sinning, by not following the Torah, are responsible for all the problems. The Romans are here and oppressing us not because the Romans are no good, but because we’ve got all these sinners here, and God is using them to judge us for their sins, and we’re suffering, too.

Q1: This is why they couldn’t accept Jesus for healing on the sabbath.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and for hanging around with them, why they’re going to stone the woman to death for committing adultery, because we’ve got to remove these sinners, and then God will send his Messiah, in response to what we’re doing, because we’ve finally gotten it right.

And so this is why the quote that St. Paul uses here is important, because he’s quoting Isaiah, and in this quote in Isaiah, if the rock, the stone that he’s talking about, is placed by God… meaning God didn’t send the Messiah in response to them doing something. He didn’t send the Messiah as a reward; he sent the Messiah in his timing. As St. Paul has already said, “While we were still sinners, Christ loved us and died for us.” So in his own timing, God sent the Messiah and placed him in Zion, Jerusalem, Judea, in the midst of his people. And he’s saying they’ve tripped over him, because they weren’t willing to accept him and who he was and what God was doing through him, because they had the idea that he should have been doing something different, and it should have been related to what they were doing, which was different. And so they failed to understand that, and so they tripped. They sort of tripped over the rock rather than that rock serving as a foundation for them.

And they were set up for that by the fact that they were approaching the whole thing the wrong way in the first place.

Q1: What would be…? Can you describe a little bit what would be the…? They did not seek it by faith. What would it be like if they had sought it by faith? What would they be doing?

Fr. Stephen: Well, those are the people whom we see who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Remember, that’s one of the major themes in St. John’s gospel, for example, is that the people who have already been faithfully serving God…

Q1: They recognize.

Fr. Stephen: ...they recognize Jesus and who he is when they encounter him. So they’re listening. They’re actively following God. And this is a theme in St. Luke’s gospel, too. I mean, it’s all through the gospels in general, but, for example, St. Simeon and St. Anna. He’s a baby. How many babies were probably brought to the Temple every day to be dedicated, from all over Judea and Galilee? Yet they see this baby, and they know it’s the Messiah. He wasn’t glowing. [Laughter] He just looked like… But they were attuned. They were seeking the kingdom of God. They were faithfully following God, and so when they saw Jesus even as a baby, as an infant, [Snap] they knew who he was. They recognized who he was.

Yeah, so this is what he’s talking about. And he includes himself in this, in his former life as a Pharisee, that he had these ideas, he had these traditions, and these traditions were the “right way” to live: he was doing it right. And because Jesus didn’t fit into his paradigm of who the Messiah was going to be and what he was going to do, he rejected him, and so thoroughly rejected him he was out murdering Christians. He was out murdering his followers. So he’s including himself in this. He knows exactly what that’s like.

But this is what Jesus was trying to get across to them all the time, too. When he talked to them about having their traditions that nullified the Torah, the problem wasn’t the Torah; the problem is the way they were using it, the way they were interpreting it, what they were adding to it. And in another place that we read during Holy Week, he says to them, “You tithe of mint and dill and cumin,” meaning: You’re so fastidious about tithing, you go out there and take ten percent of your herb garden, little snippers… and put them in little bags… and you bring those to the Temple, because: the tithe, right? Got to give ten percent! Got to give the firstfruits! He says, “But you neglect the deeper things of the law: mercy, truth, justice, compassion.” And Jesus doesn’t say, “Those things are important and tithing isn’t.” He says, “These things you should have done while not neglecting the others either.”

So the problem isn’t with the Torah itself. It isn’t even with works of the law or works of the Torah. It’s when you try to use them for something for which they were never intended. That’s another thing, remember, that St. Paul has talked about already in Romans, is what the original purpose of the Torah was. The purpose of the Torah is not to make people sons of God. It can’t do that! The purpose of the Torah always was as this sort of, as we talked about, sin-management system: to manage the sin of the people, to allow God to stay in their midst, to allow them to stay close to God and to sort of manage the problems of sin and evil and corruption and death in the world until the Messiah came, to deal with death and sin once and for all.

And so that’s why there’s now a shift in the way the Torah works. It’s not done away with, but there’s a shift in how it works, because it’s not performing that function any more. So we don’t need to keep doing sin-offerings and sacrificing goats at the Day of Atonement and killing all the animals, because Christ has taken care of the sin and the guilt, that those were taken care of, and the stain of sin left behind that the Day of Atonement took care of. Christ has taken care of that once and for all. So that isn’t all done away with—we now have the Eucharist, which is the fulfillment of all those offerings, and the grain-offerings and the drink-offerings and the thank-offerings: all of that finds its fulfillment in the Eucharist, which continues. So it’s not done away with; it’s fulfilled and elevated to a new level.

And so he’s saying that they’re trying to use the Torah for something for which it was never intended, and what they’re trying to use it for is to establish their own righteousness, to establish their own status at the right hand of God, through their own efforts, by keeping the Torah as they have interpreted it perfectly. And then they’re there, and everyone else is over there.

Q1: It’s interesting that the prophets who are telling the people, “God’s going to punish you for not following the law,” always talk about things like taking care of widows and orphans and being compassionate and merciful and things like that. They never talk about…

Fr. Stephen: “You ate pork.”

Q1: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “Stop with the pork-eating,” yeah, that’s never their focus. It was the deeper things. They’re probably eating pork, too, but, you know, if you’re sacrificing to Baal and stealing the land of orphans and widows and eating pork, two of those are more important than the others! [Laughter] [They’re] more serious! We can deal with the pork-eating later, once we’ve dealt with the other massive things.

And, yeah, that’s not just a subjective judgment of what’s a serious sin and what’s not a serious sin. Remember when we talked about Acts 15 and the specific rules that were put on the Gentiles, the portions of the Torah that applied to the Gentiles. We went back and we talked about, in Leviticus 21, the holiness code, that there were specific sins—there were a whole bunch of things that the Israelites were commanded to do, like not eat pork, like all the food laws, all those things; there were only certain commandments that applied to everyone who lived in the land—Jew, Gentile, believing, unbelieving: it didn’t matter; anyone who lived in the land had to follow these, because these sins actually corrupted and tainted the land. It uses the language of “the land will vomit you out to get rid of you if you do these things,” and so no one could be allowed to do these things.

And so those are the sins, for the most part, that the prophets talk about. These things are unacceptable to anyone. And, not to make too much of a social comment, but the two big ones, of course, are idolatry and sexual immorality, both of which are deeply protected freedoms in our country. Make of that what you will. [Laughter]

But yeah, so that there is this other category, that is of greater consequence. And that language isn’t just used in the Old Testament and isn’t just reflected in Acts 15, but if you read the pieces we have of St. Justinian’s Nomocanon, that’s the basis for the whole Byzantine idea of the Nomocanon, which is canon law and civil law brought together. The pieces of canon law, the pieces of Church law, that apply to everyone, that become civil law, it uses the language of they’re “the sins that corrupt the ground.” Those can’t be allowed at all. At all. And so, yeah, if you have somebody who’s come here from the court of the caliph and he doesn’t fast on Wednesday? Okay, we can live with that. But he can’t commit acts of idolatry or sexual immorality while he’s here. Those are a different category. But so that understanding carries through centuries and centuries into Christianity, that there’s that different class, that different class of sins.

But so, yeah, St. Paul is focusing here on the idea that rather than trying to faithfully follow God and being rewarded with the gift of his inheritance, they were sort of approaching it like a contract. “Here’s the requirements on my end.” And they would say, “God is righteous, so he’s going to live up to his side of the bargain, as long as I keep mind.” And so that’s what creates the whole dilemma that Paul talks about. A Pharisee who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah could stand in front of St. Paul and say, “Hey, I’m keeping the Torah perfectly. I don’t think this guy is the Messiah. And if he is the Messiah, he should have come here to save me, because I’m keeping the Torah perfectly.” And so this is St. Paul’s answer to that. That’s his answer to that.

And then implied is the flip-side, that the reason these Gentiles have actually become heirs now is because they’re trying to faithfully follow God and Jesus Christ, even though they’re not keeping all the details—they’re not getting circumcised; they’re not doing all of these other things.

So chapter ten, verse one: “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” So this is how—again, St. Paul’s including himself in this. So he says, “Look, they have all this zeal…” And zeal is not just excitement or enthusiasm; zeal is sort of a technical term at this point. There’s zealots. Zealots are a thing at this time in history.

The tradition of zealotry goes back to… probably the prime motivator of it is Phinehas in the book of Numbers, and there was this episode, this really unfortunate episode, when the Israelites were nearing, entering into the land, they came into this place called Peor, and there was a high place there where they worshiped Baal, Baal of Peor. And Baal of Peor had some priestesses is the polite way to say it. The more accurate way would be what we would call temple prostitutes, who took care of that high place. And they came to some of the men of Israel and enticed them with various enticement, which you can imagine, which got them to not only engage with them sexually but also do that in a ritual context related to Baal-worship.

This is obviously very bad, and when Moses and the other elders of the people did not immediately take action about this, God sent a plague on the camp to try to indicate: “Hey, something’s wrong; you need to take care of this.” Despite that, there’s then this incident where an Israelite man and one of these women are so brazen that they walk past Moses and Aaron and the elders who are standing in front of the tent of meeting where they meet with God, walk right past them together, and go into a tent and have sexual relations where people knew that was happening in the tent right in front of them. And so Phinehas picked up a spear, walked into the tent, and put the spear through both of them and killed them. And as soon as he did that, the plague lifted.

So this story—and because of that, because he was the only one who did anything about it, Phinehas was given a promised priesthood by God. Interestingly, Phinehas has an Egyptian name, Pin-has, so technically he wasn’t a child of Abraham. He had become part of Israel the other way when they had left Egypt. So the way he was sort of held up as an example of faith and faithfulness started this tradition of zealotry, that it’s not enough for a person to themselves not sin. If they see sin going on in the presence of God, they need to do something about it. They need to act, including violent action. And the zealots of this time—Simon the Zealot, remember, was one of Jesus’ disciples, one of the twelve; it’s likely Judas Iscariot that the “Iscariot” is related to him being one of the Sicarii, who were also a zealot faction who were basically assassins, murdered a lot of Romans—they were there to, again, take action. While the Pharisees were waiting for God to come and act—“when we get this all right, God will act”—the zealots were taking this into their own hands: “No, we need to rise up and get rid of these Romans, these pagans. That’s what God wants us to do. They’re pagan idolaters; they’re oppressing his people. We need to be like Phinehas. We need to be like the judges in the book of Judges. We need to take these guys out through violence if necessary.”

So when St. Paul appeals to zeal, he’s appealing to this tradition, which is a tradition he was located in. Remember, he’s been going out, murdering Christians for being heretics. So he was in there. He was out there taking— He wasn’t just sitting around saying, “Oh, these no-good heretic Christians!” He was out there going from city to city with orders from the high priest, having people imprisoned, having people killed, as St. Stephen was stoned to death. So he’s saying, “Look, there’s a lot of zeal out there! They’re zealous! They’re willing to take action, but it’s not according to knowledge. They don’t understand what they’re doing.” And therefore, relatedly, St. Paul is saying, “That guy, Saul of Tarsus, didn’t understand what he was doing. All the zeal in the world, but I didn’t have the knowledge to know what I was doing. It was misdirected, completely misdirected.”

“For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God.” So they don’t know the righteousness of God, which is who?

Q1: Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Christ. He’s already said that in chapter three. Christ is the righteousness of God. So not understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, not understanding what God is doing in Jesus as the Messiah—because they don’t understand that, they’re trying to become righteous through this other way. And because they’re trying to do it this other way, they’ve missed out on what God is doing. They’ve missed out on what God is doing. And he uses this language of submitting themselves. Remember that “the older shall serve the younger,” this idea of you have to serve the heir. They won’t submit. God has to do things the way they think he should do things, and so they won’t accept: This is the Messiah whom God has sent, this is what he was doing, this is how he’s doing it; I’m going to submit myself to that. They refuse, and so they’ve missed out. They’ve missed out.

He says, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for everyone who believes.” The word “end” there is not “end” like “it’s over now: Christ came, so chuck the law out in the trash can”; it’s “end” that’s the Greek word telos: “end” as in purpose. “End” as in purpose. Christ is the purpose for which the Torah was given; it’s what the Torah was pointing to. It wasn’t pointing to itself. The Torah was not just about how great the Torah is. The Torah had an aim, and that was Christ, and so it’s in Christ that we find God’s righteousness; it’s in Christ that God keeps his promises. It’s in Jesus Christ; that’s where God keeps his promises.

Q1: The efforts of the Pharisees to keep all the laws exactly, that’s actually the stumbling-block, isn’t it? That’s what keeps them from having their eyes… Their eyes are so fixed on this, they can’t see…

Fr. Stephen: They’re pursuing the law as an end in itself; they’re pursuing the Torah as an end in itself. This is the righteousness of God; this is where God keeps his promises: is the Torah, and keeping it perfectly.

Q1: The Gentiles, who don’t have that focus, in a sense have it easier. They can see it more readily.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They don’t have that competition. Now, they have other issues, but they don’t have that big stumbling-block, yes. And so Christ is the place where God keeps his promises to everyone who is faithful. Remember, we talked about faith and belief; this is the same word in Greek. To all the faithful—and by “all,” he means Jews, Gentiles: doesn’t matter. If you’re faithful to Christ, if you submit to Christ, who is the righteousness of God, then that’s where you receive God’s promises, because he was the purpose of the law in the first place. And it wasn’t an end in itself; that’s now where the promises were kept.