The Advantage of Being Jewish:
The Objection That Paul Attacked God’s People

Romans 3:1-2

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.

(Verse 1-2) - Paul’s accusers continually charged him with teaching that the Lord’s calling of Israel to be His special people was meaningless. If that were so, the apostle blasphemed the very character and integrity of God. The design of the first part of this chapter is to answer some of the objections which might be offered by a Jew to the statements in the last chapter. The first objection is stated in this verse. A Jew would naturally ask, if the view which the apostle had given were correct, what special benefit could the Jew derive from his religion? The objection would arise particularly from the position advanced (Rom. 2:25-26), that if a pagan should do the things required by the Law, he would be treated as “if” he had been circumcised. Hence, the question, “what profit is there of circumcision?”  Paul knew the questions that some Jews in Rome would ask after they read or hear about the first part of his letter. “If our Jewish heritage, our knowing and teaching the Mosaic law and our following Jewish rituals such as circumcision do not make a Jew righteous before God,” they would wonder, “then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision?”

This actually speaks to a common human perception – that is, that God will accept any human submission so long as it is meant well and is offered earnestly.  If a person means or intends his offering to be real worship, God will accept it as such and thus it doesn’t really matter what name or fashion it is offered in – what really matters is the intention of the heart.  So long as they really wanted to worship – they are “OK”.  This is actually another form of human righteousness.  Men, at the root of their being, don’t want to do things God’s way – they want God to do things their way.  They want Him to do the bending and they don’t understand why their way isn’t good enough.  A discussion of why it isn’t good enough is beyond the cope of this study, but we will simply note that it clearly isn’t good enough because God very clearly and specifically says that the righteousness that He requires for entrance into His presence is righteousness that supercedes any righteousness that man can produce of himself.

Many Scripture passages would have come to the Jewish mind. Just before God presented Israel with the Ten Commandments, He told them, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). Moses wrote of Israel, “Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it. Yet on your fathers did the Lord set His affection to love them, and He chose their descendants after them, even you above all peoples” (Deut. 10:14-15). In the same book Moses wrote, “You are a holy people to the Lord your God; and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (14:2). The psalmist exulted, “The Lord has chosen Jacob for Himself, Israel for His own possession” (Ps. 135:4). Through Isaiah, the Lord declared of Israel, “The people whom I formed for Myself, will declare My praise” (Isa. 43:21).

Because of those and countless other Old Testament passages that testify to Israel’s unique calling and blessing, many Jews concluded that, in itself, being Jewish made them acceptable to God. But as Paul has pointed out, being physical descendants of Abraham did not qualify them as his spiritual descendants. If they did not have the mark of God’s Spirit within their hearts, the outward mark of circumcision in their flesh was worthless (Rom. 2:17-29).

Nevertheless, Paul continues, the advantage of being Jewish was great in every respect. Although it did not bring salvation, it bestowed many privileges that Gentiles did not have. Later in the epistle, Paul tells his readers, doubtlessly with tears in his eyes as he wrote, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh” (9:3-5).

The Jews as a people had been adopted by God as His children, with whom He had made several exclusive covenants. He had given them His holy law and promised that through their lineage the Savior of the world would come. The Jewish people were indeed special in God’s eyes. They were blessed, protected, and delivered as no other nation on earth.

But most Jews paid little attention to the negative side of God’s revelation to them. He proclaimed of Israel, “You only have I chosen among all the families of the earth:” but immediately went on to say, “therefore, I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). With high privilege also came high responsibility. This again is something that many people fail (or refuse) to understand and acknowledge.  God doesn’t just give things to people – He also requires them to be accountable for those things!  This accountability results in a time of giving account to Him for our stewardship of those things!  This is true of believers, and it is also true of unbelievers. 

In the parable of the wedding feast, Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a feast given by a king to celebrate his son’s marriage. Several times he sent messengers to the invited guests telling them that the feast was ready but each time they ignored the invitation. Some of them even beat and killed the messengers. The enraged king sent his soldiers to destroy the murderers and set their cities on fire. The king then sent other messengers to invite everyone in the kingdom to the feast, regardless of rank or wealth (Matt. 22:1-9).

That parable pictures Israel as the first and most privileged guests who were invited to celebrate the coming of God’s Son to redeem the world. But when the Jews, almost as a unit, rejected Jesus as the Messiah, God opened the door to Gentiles, those whom the king’s messengers found along the highways and in the streets. I believe that the guests who attended the feast represent the church, people in general who acknowledge Christ as God’s Son and received Him as Lord and Savior.

Through Isaiah, the Lord lamented of Israel, “What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?” (Isa. 5:4). The answer, of course, was that there was nothing more that God could have done for His people. He had bestowed on them every conceivable blessing and advantage.

Becoming more specific regarding their benefits, Paul said to his hypothetical Jewish objectors.  Chiefly - That is, this is the principal advantage, and one including all others. The main benefit of being a Jew is, to possess the sacred Scriptures and their instructions.  Unto them were committed - Or were entrusted, were confided of given. The word translated “were committed,” is what is commonly employed to express “faith” or “confidence,” and it implied “confidence” in them on the part of God in entrusting his oracles to them; a confidence which was not misplaced, for no people ever guarded a sacred trust or deposit with more fidelity, than the Jews did the sacred Scriptures.

The oracles - The word “oracle” among the pagan meant properly the answer or response of a god, or of some priest supposed to be inspired, to an inquiry of importance, usually expressed in a brief sententious way, and often with great ambiguity. The place from which such a response was usually obtained was also called an oracle, as the oracle at Delphi, etc. These oracles were frequent among the pagan, and affairs of great importance were usually submitted to them. The word rendered “oracles” occurs in the New Testament but four times, (Acts 7:38; Heb. 5:12; 1 Pet. 4:11; Rom. 3:2). It is evidently used here to denote the Scriptures, as being what was spoken by God, and particularly perhaps the divine promises. To possess these was of course an eminent privilege, and included all others, as they instructed them in their duty, and were their guide in everything that pertained to them in this life and the life to come. They contained, besides, many precious promises respecting the future dignity of the nation in reference to the Messiah. No higher favor can be conferred on a people than to be put in possession of the sacred Scriptures. And this fact should excite us to gratitude, and lead us to endeavor to extend them also to other nations; (compare Deut. 4:7-8; Ps. 147:19-20).

“You were entrusted with the oracles of God.” “Oracles” is a diminutive of the Greek word “logos”, which is most commonly translated “word”.  The form used here generally referred to important sayings or messages, especially supernatural utterances.

Although oracles is a legitimate translation (see also Acts 7:38; Heb. 5:12), because of the term’s association with pagan rites, that rendering seems unsuitable in this context. As we noted, in many pagan religions of that day, mediums and seers gave occultic predictions of the future and other messages from the spirit world through supernatural “oracles.” By observing the movements of fish in a tank, the formation of snakes in a pit, or listening to the calls of certain birds, fortune-tellers would purport to predict such things as business success or failure, military victory or defeat, and a happy or tragic marriage.

Such a connotation could not have been further from Paul’s use of the word in this passage. His point was that the Jews were entrusted with the very words of the one and only true God, referring to the entire Old Testament (cf. Deut. 4:1-2; 6:1-2). God’s revelation of Himself and of His will had been entrusted to the Jews, and that gave them unimaginably great privilege as well as equally immense responsibility.

As the poet William Cowper wrote,

They, and they only, amongst all mankind,
Received the transcript of the Eternal Mind;
Were trusted with His own engraven laws,
And constituted guardians of His cause;
Theirs were the prophets, theirs the priestly call,
And theirs, by birth, the Saviour of us all.

Tragically, however, Jews had focused much attention on their privileges but little on their responsibilities. During one period of their history they misplaced and lost the written record of God’s law. Only when a copy of it was found by Hilkiah the high priest during the restoration of the Temple did Judah begin again to honor the Lord’s commandments and observe His ceremonies for a brief time under the godly King Josiah (see 2 Chron. 34:14-33). Many believers today make the same mistake when they give prominent place to the Bible in their homes and lives, but spend little time actually reading and studying it!

For many centuries before the time of Paul, beginning during the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews’ reverence for her man-made rabbinical traditions and interpretations had come to far outweigh her reverence for God’s written Word.

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day prided themselves as being experts in the Scriptures. But when the Sadducees tried to maneuver Jesus into a corner by asking a hypothetical question about marriage in heaven, He rebuked them by saying, “Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God?” (Mark 12:24).

To a crowd of unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem the Lord declared, “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me” (John 5:39). In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man died and went to hell. From there he cried out to Abraham to send a special messenger to tell his brothers the way of salvation. But Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them” (Luke 16:29). In other words, the Old Testament contained all the truth that any Jew (or any Gentile, for that matter) needed to be saved. Jews who truly believed the Scriptures recognized Jesus as the Son of God, because He is the focus of the Old Testament as well as the New. But most Jews preferred to follow the traditions of the rabbis and elders rather than “the sacred writings which are able to give … the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).

That same attitude has characterized much of Christianity throughout its history. The teachings and standards of a denomination or of an exclusive group or sect have frequently overshadowed, and often completely contradicted, God’s own revelation in the Bible.

Belonging to a Christian church is much like it was to be a Jew under the Old Covenant. Outward identity with those who claim to be God’s people, even when they are genuine believers, is in itself of no benefit to an unbeliever. But such a person does have a great advantage above other unbelievers if in a church he is exposed to the sound teaching of God’s Word. If he does not take advantage of that privilege, however, he makes his guilt and condemnation worse than if he had never heard the gospel. “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment” (Heb. 10:26-27; cf. 4:2-3).

I need to be careful that I am working to conform my behavior and my heart to the revelation of God as given in the Bible – lest I be found to be a hypocrite!