False Security: Heritage

Romans 2:17

¹⁷ Indeed you are called a Jew, and rest on the law, and make your boast in God,

(Verse 17) – Behold - Having thus stated the general principles on which God would judge the world; having shown how they condemned the Gentiles; and having removed all objections to them, he now proceeds to another part of his argument, to show how they applied to the Jews. By the use of the word “behold,” he calls their attention to it, as to an important subject; and with great skill and address, he states their privileges, before he shows them how those privileges might enhance their condemnation. He admits all their claims to pre-eminence in privileges, and then with great faithfulness proceeds to show how, if abused, these might deepen their final destruction. It should be observed, however, that the word rendered “behold” is in many manuscripts written in two words instead of the usual one word. If this, as is probable, is the correct reading there, it should be rendered, “if now thou art” and would emphasize the temporal, almost happenstance circumstances of their being Jews.  It is almost as if Paul is arguing that their “Jewish” is as much as an accident of birth and not anything that will benefit them.  It ought to have been of great benefit, but, because of their unbelief, it was not of any benefit, and, instead, was a detriment, bringing judgment and punishment instead of blessing.

Thou art called - Thou art named Jew, implying that this name was one of very high honor. This is the first thing mentioned on which the Jew would be likely to pride himself. This is both a good thing and bad thing.  It is a good thing in that being a Jew in the OT age was filled with tremendous benefit and was a thing of which to be truly proud.  God had ministered to and blessed the Jews above all of the nations round about them.  They were exalted and honored above all men.  But it was also a detriment in that, because of their unbelief, chastening and judgment had come their way and they have become a byword for unbelief and sinful rebellion against the cause of God in Christ.

A Jew - This was the name by which the Hebrews were at that time generally known; and it is clear that they regarded it as a name of honor, and valued themselves much on it; (see Gal. 2:15; Rev. 2:9). Its origin is not certainly known. They were called the children of Israel until the time of Rehoboam. When the ten tribes were carried into captivity (It is important to note that the northern tribes are not “lost” – but rather they were incorporated into the identity of the southern tribes), but two remained, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The name Jews was evidently given to denote those of the tribe of Judah. The reasons why the name of Benjamin was lost in that of Judah, were probably,

(1)  Because the tribe of Benjamin was small, and comparatively without influence or importance.

(2)  The Messiah was to be of the tribe of Judah (Gen. 49:10); and that tribe would therefore possess a consequence proportioned to their expectation of that event.

The name of Jews would therefore be one that would suggest the facts that they were preserved from captivity, that they had received remarkably the protection of God, and that the Messiah was to be sent to that people. Hence, it is not wonderful that they should regard it as a special favor to be a Jew, and particularly when they added to this the idea of all the other favors connected with their being the special people of God. The name “Jew” came thus to denote all the peculiarities and special favors of their religion.

And so the chosen people of God took great pride in the name Jew. In centuries past they had been referred to as Hebrews, so called because of the language they spoke. They also had long been called Israelites, after the land God had promised and given to them according to His covenant with Abraham. But by the time of Christ, the most common name they had was that of Jew. As we noted, the term was derived from Judah, the name of one of the twelve tribes as well as the name of the southern kingdom after the division following Solomon’s death. But during and after the Babylonian captivity it had come to refer to the whole race that descended from Abraham through Isaac.

The name represented both their racial and religious heritage, and in their own minds it denoted their distinctiveness from all other peoples of the world. Despite the bondage and oppression they had suffered at the hands of Gentiles for hundreds of years, and were presently still suffering, they wore the name Jew as a badge of great honor and pride. The name marked them off as the unique and specially favored people of God. The root meaning of Judah, and therefore of Jew, is “praised,” and the Jews of Paul’s day considered that to be a well-deserved title and description of themselves.

Jews had long since lost sight of the purpose of their unique divine calling, however, which was to be the channel through which “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). They had no desire to share their God-given truths and blessings with the rest of the world, much less be used by the Lord as the means through which He would draw all nations to Himself. Jonah’s reluctance to preach in Nineveh because he feared they would believe in God and be spared judgment (Jonah 4:2) typified the attitude of many Jews toward Gentiles.

Instead of viewing those divine truths and ‘blessings as a trust from a gracious and forgiving God, they viewed them as their right by merit. They believed they were specially blessed not because of God’s grace but because of their own goodness. They felt superior and proud. Instead of boasting in their great God and in His gracious revelation of Himself to them, they boasted in their own supposed greatness for having received it. One writer observed that such an attitude “demonstrates … how close lies the grossest vice to the highest privilege and how the best can be prostituted to the service of the worst.”

The minor prophets repeatedly warned their fellow countrymen about arrogant boasting in their heritage as God’s chosen people, which caused many of them to think they could sin with impunity. As the heirs of God’s promise to Abraham, they believed they were automatically protected from judgment. But Micah declared that wicked, corrupt Jews who presumptuously said, “Is not the Lord in our midst? Calamity will not come upon us,” would one day find their holy city of Jerusalem “plowed as a field” and left “a heap of ruins” (Mic. 3:11-12).

Pride in their being the chosen people of God made some Jews absolutely blind to reality, not only religiously but politically. On one occasion when Jesus was teaching “those Jews who had believed Him,” He said, “If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32). When some of the unbelieving Jewish leaders heard those words, they were greatly offended. They were so self-deluded about their superiority and independence that they retorted, “We are Abraham’s offspring, and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You shall become free’” (v. 33). As the Lord explained, they completely missed His point. “Truly truly, I say to you,” He said, “everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin” (v. 34).

Even if Jesus had been speaking politically, as those leaders assumed, their response would have been ludicrous. For the past 100 years they had been brutally subjugated to Rome, and immediately before that to Greece. And during more than a thousand years before that they had been in periodic bondage to Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon.  This, by the way, is an important idea. 

What men perceive themselves to be and what they actually are is often two very different things.  In our society, we are often told that what we think is what we truly are.  We can create reality by thinking rightly.  The truth of the matter is that reality is what God determines, and has determined it to be and we are responsible to interact with that, not reject it and try and create our own “reality”.  Man has an astonishing capacity to deceive himself into thinking that he is better than he truly is.  We need to guard against these tendencies.

The Jewish leaders’ main confusion, however, was spiritual. Being Abraham’s physical descendants did not make Jews his spiritual descendants. They understood that spiritual blessing came by way of physical means or mechanism.  They understood that all that God wished to give them was their by means of a physical birthright.  “If you are Abraham’s children,” Jesus told them, “do the deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father.” When they replied indignantly “We have one Father, even God,” Jesus responded, “If God were your Father, you would love Me; for I proceeded forth and have come from God.… You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.… Abraham rejoiced to see My day and he saw it and was glad” (John 8:40-42, 44, 56). If the Jewish leaders had been spiritual heirs of Abraham and true children of God, they would joyously have received Jesus as their Messiah and King. Instead of receiving Him in faith, however, they sought to kill Him, reflecting the murderous character of Satan, their spiritual lord and father.

Infuriating the leaders still more, Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am” (v. 58). The root meaning of Jehovah, or Yahweh, is “I am” (see Ex. 3:14). Jesus therefore not only claimed to have existed before Abraham was born, some 2,000 years earlier, but even applied the covenant name of God to Himself. Because they rejected Jesus’ claims to Messiahship, the Jews considered His words to be inconceivably blasphemous, and “therefore they picked up stones to throw at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the temple” (John 8:59).

Jesus utterly undermined the Jews’ imagined security of racial and religious heritage. John the Baptist had done the same thing. While he was baptizing repentant Jews at the Jordan River, a group of Pharisees and Sadducees came to him for baptism. But John scathingly rebuked them, saying, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance.” Well aware that those religious leaders believed that merely being Jews protected them from God’s judgment, John added, “And do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you, that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matt. 3:7-9).

In a similar way, countless people since the time of Christ have considered themselves safe from God’s judgment simply because they have been born into a Christian family or have been baptized or belong to a church or have made a profession of faith. Some people consider themselves Christians virtually by default. In European countries that have been thought of as Christian for centuries, many citizens who do not specifically belong to another religion consider themselves Christians simply by virtue of their national heritage. Even in some countries of the Middle East, many citizens who are not Muslim think they are therefore Christian, simply because the other historically prominent religion in the country is the Eastern Orthodox brand of Christianity to which their ancestors adhered.

The Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli took the position that if a child of believers died while in infancy it was within the Christian covenant, in other words, it was saved. He did not believe, however, that children of unbelievers were saved if they died in infancy. With an illogic that was not typical of his thinking, the great Puritan John Owen believed that infant salvation could be passed down two generations, from grandparent to grandchild, sometimes skipping the intervening generation. One wonders how the in-between parents, being themselves children of believers, could escape being saved.  Just as a side note, this kind of illogic and inconsistent thinking is due to a misunderstanding of the relationship of Christianity to the New Covenant – something we will discuss at length alter in these studies.

The Roman Catholic Church believes that infant baptism actually confers salvation. As one Catholic writer has said, “The faith which the infant lacks is replaced by the faith of the church.” Some Protestant denominations, though denying that infant baptism in itself has power to save, nevertheless maintain that the ritual has direct spiritual benefit for the child. Martin Luther, for instance, believed that through this sacrament God miraculously grants saving faith to the infant, who itself is incapable of believing. Others view infant baptism as a confirmation of the child’s salvation by virtue of its being born into a Christian family and thereby into the New Covenant of Jesus Christ.

According to Scripture, however, a person who is raised in a Christian home and trained in a Christian environment is not saved by such a heritage, valuable as it is. The parallel is exactly that of the Jews in the first century.  Their physical happenstance, though of great benefit to them, was not what put them into the family of God.  Neither is the physical relationship of an infant to believing parents, or presence in a church body what conveys eternal life to that individual.  Eternal life comes only by means of the personal exercise of faith in the finished work of Christ.  Nor does baptism, Communion, or any other Christian rite in itself, possess or bestow any spiritual benefit. Apart from true faith held by the person receiving it, no ritual or ceremony has any spiritual value whatsoever. Baptism is not a sacrament and, without faith, it becomes a sacrilege.

Such ideas about covenant transferal of salvation and about the spiritual efficacy of baptism are merely extensions of the kind of thinking that caused the common Jewish belief in New Testament times that a person was saved simply by being a circumcised descendant of Abraham through the line of Isaac.

I need to preach and teach these things clearly and constantly and see to that, as best I am able, the people whom God has charged to my account are fully conversant with the truths of these great doctrines.