The Advantage of Being Jewish - Introduction

Romans 3:1-8

¹ What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? ² Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God. ³ For what if some did not believe? Will their unbelief make the faithfulness of God without effect? ⁴ Certainly not! Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: “That You may be justified in Your words, And may overcome when You are judged.” ⁵ But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? (I speak as a man.) ⁶ Certainly not! For then how will God judge the world? ⁷ For if the truth of God has increased through my lie to His glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner? ⁸ And why not say, “Let us do evil that good may come”?—as we are slanderously reported and as some affirm that we say. Their condemnation is just.

(Introduction) - Looking at the rather tragic history of the Jewish people, one is not inclined to think there has been any advantage in being a Jew. Ther4e is a strong temptation for us to conclude that it would have been better off for the average person to have been born non-Jewish and to be thankful that we were not born Jewish and that we lived our lives as Gentiles.  In spite of the reality that they are such a noble strain of humanity and chosen by God, their history has been a saga of slavery, hardship, warfare, persecution, slander, captivity, dispersion, and humiliation.

They were menial slaves in Egypt for some 400 years, and after God miraculously delivered them, they wandered in a barren wilderness for forty years, until an entire generation died out. When they eventually entered the land God had promised them, they had to fight to gain every square foot of it and continue to fight to protect what they gained. After several hundred years, civil war divided the nation. The northern kingdom eventually was almost decimated by Assyria, with the remnant being taken captive to that country. Later, the southern kingdom was conquered and exiled in Babylon for seventy years, after which some were allowed to return to Palestine.

Not long after they rebuilt their homeland, they were conquered by Greece, and the despotic Antiochus Epiphanes reveled in desecrating their Temple, corrupting their sacrifices, and slaughtering their priests. Under Roman rule they fared no better. Tens of thousands of Jewish rebels were publicly crucified, and under Herod the Great scores of male Jewish babies were slaughtered because of his insane jealousy of the Christ child. In the year a.d. 70, the Roman general Titus Vespasian carried out Caesar’s order to utterly destroy Jerusalem, its Temple, and most of its citizens. According to Josephus, over a million Jews of all ages were mercilessly butchered, and some 100,000 of those who survived were sold into slavery or sent to Rome to die in the gladiator games. Two years previously, Gentiles in Caesarea had killed 20,000 Jews and sold many more into slavery. During that same period of time, the inhabitants of Damascus cut the throats of 10,000 Jews in a single day.

In a.d. 115 the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rebelled against Rome. When they failed, Emperor Hadrian destroyed 985 towns in Palestine and killed at least 600,000 Jewish men. Thousands more perished from starvation and disease. So many Jews were sold into slavery that the price of an able-bodied male slave dropped to that of a horse. In the year 380 Emperor Theodosius I formulated a legal code that declared Jews to be an inferior race of human beings - a demonic idea that strongly permeated most of Europe for over a thousand years and that even persists in many parts of the world in our own day.

For some two centuries the Jews were oppressed by the Byzantine branch of the divided Roman empire. Emperor Heroclitus banished them from Jerusalem in 628 and later tried to exterminate them. Leo the Assyrian gave them the choice of converting to Christianity or being banished from the realm. When the first crusade was launched in 1096 to recapture the Holy Land from the Ottoman Turks, the crusaders slaughtered countless thousands of Jews on their way to Palestine, brutally trampling many to death under their horses’ hooves. That carnage, of course, was committed in the name of so-called Christianity.

In 1254 King Louis IX banished all Jews from France. When many later returned to that country, Philip the Fair expelled 100,000 of them again in 1306. In 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain even as Columbus began his first voyage across the Atlantic, and four years later they were expelled from Portugal as well. Soon most of western Europe was closed to them except for a few areas in northern Italy, Germany, and Poland. Although the French Revolution emancipated many Jews, vicious anti-Semitism continued to dominate most of Europe and parts of Russia. Thousands of Jews were massacred in the Ukraine in 1818. In 1894, because of growing anti-Semitism in the French army a Jewish officer named Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason, and that charge was used as an excuse to purge the military of all Jews of high rank.

When a number of influential Jews began to dream of re-establishing a homeland in Palestine, the Zionist movement was born, its first congress being convened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. By 1914, some 90,000 Jews had settled in Palestine. In the unparalleled Nazi holocaust of the early 1940s at least 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated, this time for racial rather than religious reasons.

Although in our society anti-Semitism is seldom expressed so openly, Jews in many parts of the world still suffer for no other reason than their Jewishness. From the purely historical perspective, therefore, Jews have been among the most continuously and harshly disadvantaged people of all time.

Not only have Jews historically had little social or political security, but in Romans 2:17-20 Paul declares that, although they are God’s specially chosen and blessed people, Jews do not even have guaranteed spiritual security - either by physical lineage or religious heritage. Being born a descendant of Abraham, knowing God’s law and being circumcised did not assure them a place in heaven. In fact, rather than protecting Jews from God’s judgment, those blessings made them all the more accountable for obedience to the Lord.  We need to understand that it was and is important that the Jews (and all men) come to see and understand that their standing before God does not depend on anything human such as lineage or human capacity.  It is critical that all of those cherished ideas of human savability and worth be cast aside if we are to come to salvation.  It is not sufficient that we see ourselves as damaged and in the need of help from God.  It is essential that we see ourselves as disabled and completely lacking in any ability to commend ourselves to God.  This is the argument on which Paul has set out in the Book of Romans.  As is the case in most areas of life, the strongest objections come from those who are the most dramatically addressed – in this case, the Jewish people.

After having demolished the false securities on which most Jews relied, Paul anticipated the strong objections his Jewish readers would make. The truths he sets forth in the book of Romans he had taught many times before in many places, and he knew what the most common objections in Rome would be.

Paul had confronted Jewish objectors from the beginning of his ministry when Paul took the four Jewish Christians into the Temple to fulfill a vow for example. The leaders seized him and cried out to the crowd that had gathered, “Men of Israel, come to our aid! This is the man who preaches to all men everywhere against our people, and the Law and this place” (Acts 21:28). It was because Paul had a reputation for teaching such things that the Christian elders in Jerusalem persuaded him to take the men into the Temple for purification, thinking such an act would convince the leaders that Paul had not forsaken the teaching of Moses (see vv. 21-24).  the problem wasn’t really that Paul was bringing Gentiles into that holy place, it was the whole idea that men were commended to God by something other than being Jewish!  The Temple and the sacrifices were theirs!  They weren’t for the Gentiles!

In his defense before King Agrippa, Paul said,

I did not prove disobedient to the heavenly vision, but kept declaring both to those of Damascus first, and also at Jerusalem and then throughout all the region of Judea, and even to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds appropriate to repentance. For this reason some Jews seized me in the temple and tried to put me to death. And so, having obtained help from God, I stand to this day testifying both to small and great, stating nothing but what the Prophets and Moses said was going to take place. (Acts 26:19-22)

The apostle did not teach that Jewish heritage and the ceremonies of the Mosaic Law were not important. Because they were God-given, they had tremendous importance. But they were not in Paul’s day, and had never been, the means of satisfying the divine standard of righteousness. They offered Jews great spiritual advantages, but they did not provide spiritual security.  They were the advantages of revelation and gracious provision of opportunity, not the advantage of guaranteed spiritual standing.  They were never intended to be of any such character.  They were always intended to be of the nature of that which led men to a dependence on the grace and mercy of God rather than upon their own merit and their own righteousness.

After his conversion, Paul continued to worship in the Temple when he was in Jerusalem and faithfully practiced the moral teachings of the Mosaic Law. He personally circumcised Timothy who was Jewish on his mother’s side, as a concession to the Jews in the region of Galatia (Acts 16:1-3). He even continued to follow many of the ceremonial customs and the rabbinical patterns in order not to give undue offense to legalistic Jews, as noted in Acts 21:24-26.

But the essence of his preaching was that none of those outward acts have any saving benefit and that a person can become right with God only through trust in the finished work of His Son Jesus Christ. It was that truth of salvation only by God’s grace working through man’s faith that the unbelieving Jews found intolerable, because it exposed the worthlessness of their traditions and the hypocrisy of their ostentatious devotion to God.

Self-righteous, self-satisfied Jews could not stand any attack on their supposed Abrahamic security and their man-made legalism. The apostle had learned from all these experiences that unbelieving Jews would always accuse him of teaching against God’s chosen people, against God’s promises to His people, and against God’s purity. It is therefore those three objections that he confronts in Romans 3:1-8.

This truth will always be attacked.  It is the nature of man to rely on his own ability and his own worth, and, thus, by default, fail to recognize and rely on the righteousness revealed by God from heaven in Christ.  Men want to be established on the basis of their own worthiness and they are angered by any suggestion that they are not, at root, sufficient or able, at the least, to assist God in saving them.  The longer the established history of the religious group, the more fervent this opposition and this clinging to historic identity becomes.  Instead of embracing the grace of God and humbling admitting their lack, they cling to any shred of human righteousness and human ability that they can find and wrap themselves in the tattered rags of human ability rather that confessing and submitting to God’s righteous verdict concerning their condition and receiving new, spotless clothing from His merciful hand. 

This was not only the tack that Israel took in their history; it is the tack that many in professing Christianity take today as well.  Rather than submit to the Gospel as it is revealed to us in the Bible, they insist on re-imagining it in their own terms and clinging to the idea that man can and must have something to do with his salvation – it can’t possibly be all of God!  Surely man is good enough, able enough, or has sufficient capacity to at least co-operate with God in the salvation process?  It seems unfathomable to many who profess Christ that man is entirely the recipient in the salvation process.  They put forth many of the same objections that the Jews put forward in Paul’s day, and so we will take some time to examine this passage and see how Paul answers them, and thus, learn how we can answer them in our own time.

I need to incorporate this view of man into my preaching and teaching and be sure that I am completely and faithfully upholding the true Gospel of God’s grace.