The Stumbling Stone

Love for God and love for His people, as you know, does not come naturally to the human
heart. Our Catechism says that we are prone to hate God and prone to hate our neighbor
apart from the saving grace and the righteousness of Jesus. And that continues to be our theme
this morning as we continue in the book of Romans. If you have your Bibles, there page 150
of your New Testament sections of the Pew Bibles, we're going to read the last verses again
from Romans chapter 9, and then the first four verses of Romans chapter 10. Paul here
continues to explain why the Jewish people, so many of them rejected the Lord Jesus and
did not receive righteousness and why the Gentiles, many of them did. Verse 30 of Romans
chapter 9, what then shall we say, that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained
it. That is, righteousness through faith. But that Israel who pursued the righteousness,
which is based on the law, did not succeed in fulfilling that law. Why? Because they
did not pursue it through faith. But as it were based on works, they have stumbled
over the stumbling stone. As it is written, behold, I am laying in Zion, a stone that
will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall. And he who believes in him will
not be put to shame. And then he goes on, brethren, my heart's desire in prayer to God for
them is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God,
but it is not enlightened. For being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God and
seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ
is the end of the law that everyone who has faith may be justified. Christ, he says,
"The end of the law that everyone who has faith may be justified." Again, I encourage
you, keep your bibles open to that passage. Let's pray together for God to give us real
understanding. Father, we come to you this morning in the precious and the mighty name
of Jesus. And we are so glad that what we could not do is done, that he fulfilled all
the demands of all the law, that he was perfectly righteous before your face, and that by faith
in him you declare us righteous, acceptable in your sight, worthy of your love, worthy
of your blessings. We pray this morning, Lord, that by the power of the Holy Spirit you
will sweep through our hearts and through our lives and through this place, and that you
will convict us again of who it is that we are in Jesus. Help us, Lord, to give up our
own, tattered rags of self-righteousness. Help us to lay aside any in all areas where
we trust in and of ourselves. Help us to embrace Jesus in the fullness of His glory.
Bless your word, Lord. Help me this morning as I share it with your people. Help each of
us to hear it with the hearing of our hearts. Help us to rejoice and celebrate in the goodness
of our God. Thank you, Lord, for hearing us in Jesus' name. Amen.
When we were looking two weeks ago at the concluding verses of Romans chapter 9, I pointed
out to you the irony of the Gospel. Here you have two groups of people, Jews on the
one hand, Gentiles on the other, one group that is pursuing righteousness with everything
that is in it they want to please God. The other group has no interest whatsoever in pursuing
righteousness. They have no desire to please God. Which of the two groups finds the approval
of God? The irony of the Gospel is that it is not the Jews who are pursuing righteousness
but the Gentiles who are not. What shall we say then, Sid Paul? The Gentiles who did not pursue
righteousness have attained it. That is the righteousness through faith, but that Israel
who pursued the righteousness which is based on the law did not succeed in fulfilling that
law. He goes on to ask why? He goes on to answer that it's because the Jews did not pursue
their righteousness by faith, but on the basis of their own works. They saw the demands
of God. They said to themselves, if we work themselves, if we work at it hard enough,
we can be what God is wanting us to be. And when the Gospel came with its message that
they could not attain righteousness, they stumbled over the stumbling stone, the offense
of the cross because they had too much invested in their own ability to give it all out.
They had difficulty with the Gospel because they stumbled over the stumbling stone of
the cross. And so in those concluding verses of Romans chapter 9, Paul sort of summarizes
the bulk of his message in the whole book of Romans that we are saved by grace through
faith. And that salvation extends to anybody and everybody that will humble themselves before
the Lord and receive the Lord's forgiveness and receives the Lord's righteousness, both
Jew and Gentile. Now having established that in the concluding verses of Romans chapter 9,
Paul now goes on in the opening verses of Romans chapter 10 to give us a little further
insight as to what it is that makes the Jewish people tick. He says, I bear them witness
that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened, for being ignorant of the
righteousness that comes from God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit
to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law that everyone who has faith may
be justified. And in the time that remains this morning, I'd like for us to notice that
in those couple of verses that we've just read together, there are three characteristics
that Paul gives us that describe the Jewish people. Three characteristics that give us
insight as to why they had so much trouble with the message of salvation, that message
of good news, that so many of the Gentiles were able to embrace with hearts wide open.
Number one, Paul says, they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. Verse 2, I bear
them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. Now the word zeal,
if you look it up in the dictionary, is a word that means eager desire or enthusiastic
diligence. Comes from a Greek word that has, as it's root, the word to boil or to see.
And so the word zeal embodies an eager desire, an enthusiastic diligence, a throwing of oneself
into the service of God. And so we have here a most curious picture. We have here a picture
of people who have hardened their hearts. Remember that now, they have not opened their
hearts to the gospel. They are aliens and strangers on the whole from God and the promises
that God has. Now you would think, would you not, that people who are hardened in their
hearts over against the things of God would be indifferent, would be worldly, would be
living in sin. And indeed, very often, most of the time, probably, that's what happens.
But here we have a category of people who have hardened their hearts, but they are not
a non-religious people. They are a people who have a zeal for the things of God that is
to say they are anxious to be about the things of God. In modern terms, there are people
that go to church. In modern terms, there are people that are on the forefront of church
literature. In modern terms, they are a people who are conscientiously determined to live
the way that they believe God is wanting them to live. And they're doing it with enthusiastic
zeal, disconcerting, isn't it? People who are full of energy, totally committed to the
cause of God, and totally wrong. Paul, you'll recall, was one such person. Talks about
that in Philippians chapter 3 concerning his pre-conversion days. He says, "As to zeal,
I was a persecutor of the church." You see, it explains why you can have religious people
both in the Christian tradition and in other traditions, who are bound and determined
that what they're doing, they're doing for God, but they can be dead wrong in the process.
I myself have known people over the years who have a zeal for God. People who like
Paul of old did incredible damage to the kingdom of God, and they thought they were doing
it in the service of God. The Jewish people have a zeal, so to say, Paul, and eager desire
a diligent enthusiasm to serve God, but they're dead wrong. Why is that? Well, Paul goes
on to point out in the passage why there is. He says they have a zeal for God, but it
is not enlightened in the rest of the word. It is not enlightened. That is to say they
haven't received a true understanding of who God is and what it is that God wants. Because
you see the Bible teaches that you can't figure out who God is just because you're smart.
You can't figure out what God wants simply even just by sitting down and reading the Bible,
the world is full of people that have read the Bible. The Apostle Paul before his conversion
was knowledgeable in all the laws of Judaism. Had zeal for God, but zeal that was not enlightened.
How do you come to enlightenment? How do you get to understand who God really is? What
God really wants to do? How do you know what in the world is of God and what is not of God?
Well, you need to be enlightened. How do you get to be enlightened? By faith in Jesus.
We don't become wise in the things of God by becoming wise. We become wise in the things
of God by coming to Jesus. Jesus, too, is disciples. You will recall. He put it this way. He
said to the Father, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden
these things from the wise in the understanding and revealed them to babes. Yay, Father,
such was your gracious we all." Spiritual understanding, spiritual enlightenment only comes to us when
we repent of our sins, humble ourselves before God, embrace Jesus and Jesus gives us the Holy
Spirit, and the Holy Spirit begins to open our eyes and we see increasingly who God is,
and what it is that He wants us to do. Can you imagine what Paul went through in his
own life? When on the road to Damascus convinced that he was doing God a favor by killing all
the Christians, all of a sudden he met Jesus and discovered that he had been totally wrong
in his whole approach to life. It's no wonder that he sat in three days and didn't need
and didn't drink because his whole life must have passed before his eyes. They have a zeal
for God, says Paul, but it is not enlightened. Then he continues to expand on that when he
goes on to say, "For being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, they seek
to establish their own righteousness." He says, "They are ignorant of the righteousness that
comes from God." Now we often use the word ignorant in a bad attitude way. We say concerning
somebody what an ignorant soul and it's usually not a very complimentary isn't. But it
really literally means not to know. The English word agnostic comes from the same Greek word
from which we get the word ignorant. It means that you're a person who just doesn't know
any better. You see there are a lot of reasons people in the world reject the gospel of grace.
But one of them is they simply don't know it and they don't understand it. And that's
as Paul is the case with many of these Jews whom he carries in his heart and for whom he
prays constantly with unceasing anguish. He says they are ignorant of the righteousness
that comes from God. He says they don't understand that Christ is the end of the law. He talks
about that in verse four. Christ is the end of the law that everyone who has faith may be justified.
Let's talk about that for just a moment. What does that mean? What does it mean that Christ is the
end of the law? Well it means a couple of things. It means that Christ is the fulfillment of the
law. The law you will recall is really very simple. The law is God saying to people this is who I
am and this is what I want you to be. I want you to love me with all of your heart, soul,
strength, and mind all the time in every way and I want you to love your neighbor the way that
you love yourself. And the law says that if you could do that and could do it perfectly and
never fail once you would have God's approval. Simple as that. The law also says that if you
blow it even once your guilty before God and you cannot have is the approval. That's why the law
always brings you under condemnation because no matter how strong you are or how smart you are in
one area or another of your life there isn't a one here and indeed there isn't anybody that
lives ever has lived in all of the universe except Jesus who was able to keep that law. That's
why the Bible says we are guilty before God. We're under condemnation. But now along comes Jesus
conceived of the Holy Spirit born of the Virgin Mary, very God of very God yet very human
and Jesus Christ in his whole life and this always blows me away. Never once broke the law.
Once you'd understand the implications of that. Jesus in all of his life always loved God with
everything that is within him and everything that he did towards other people was always an
act of love. He never chose himself or his own way and so Jesus is the fulfillment of the law.
He did everything that you and I cannot do and when by the Holy Spirit our eyes are open to that
reality and we embrace Jesus as the fulfillment of the law his righteousness is now my righteousness.
That's why Paul talks about the righteousness that comes from God. Our righteousness that God
gives us in Jesus Christ. Our righteousness that stands in opposition to my own supposed sense
of self-righteousness and so by faith in Jesus I am righteous before God. Jesus fulfills the law.
That's what are the meanings of Christ is the end of the law. There's a second meaning I think
and that's this. In fulfilling the law the Lord Jesus Christ also disposes of the law
and that doesn't mean there are no longer guidelines for God's people to follow.
What it means is that he replaces a system of law with a system of grace because you see under
the law you get what you deserve. If you're good you get blessed. If you're bad you get cursed
and because all of us are bad at least some of the time under the law you always have this feeling
of condemnation. You never know if you're quite good enough. You never know if you've really
quite made it. There's a lot of people that live that way and there's a lot of people that want to
live that way because it gives them a certain measure of pride and a certain measure of self-satisfaction.
I'm not such a bad person. I can do it myself but I'll never get anywhere
because as you've heard me say many times God doesn't even give an e for effort. He gives you an
effort flunk and so the harder you try the worse it gets. Now Paul says Christ has come along.
He is the end of the law and he not only fulfills it but he replaces
this you get what you deserve system of relating to God with a system of grace. The kind of system
that says doesn't matter who I am doesn't matter what I've done doesn't matter how weak or
sinful I am Christ has taken it all into himself. It's all been nailed to the cross and now by faith
in Jesus I'm not only forgiven but I'm declared righteous before God. I am there not because I'm
striving to be there but because God has declared that I'm there. So months ago I said it's like
the difference between a slave and a son. A slave is to work his tail off to try to hold on to the
washes approval because he knows that if he doesn't perform he's out in his ear and on the auction
block always lives in fear and insecurity. A son belongs whether he's good or bad by virtue
of the relationship with the father and so while both of them are called to live up to a certain
measure of life they're coming at it from an entirely different perspective.
The slave slaves away in order to make sure that he can belong and that he can stay.
The son knows that he belongs and knows that he can stay and he works away out of love for his father
because his position is already secured. Now Paul says on this passage the Jewish people
because of their strong legalistic upbringing were ignorant of the righteousness
that comes from God. They didn't understand it. It didn't clue in because it didn't fit their
preconceived ideas of how you relate to God and how you get somewhere in the king. Now what happens
when you're a person who is ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God. Well the only
recourse that you have then is to try to declare your self-righteousness. That's why Paul now goes on
to say ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God they seek to establish their own righteousness.
Under the law if you get what you deserve you've always got to prove that you are worthy
of God and the blessings of God. It has some very practical implications because
it inevitably means that you can ever honestly look at your own faults because to look at your
own faults is to be declared guilty and so a person who tries to establish their own righteousness
is busy all the time trying to give the appearance of being better than what they are.
That means you can't allow truth into your life because that will threaten your relationship
with God. If somebody can discover what my faults are and if my faults will keep me out
that I want to hide my faults like Adam and Eve did many years ago with their big leaves.
I find you can always tell when somebody tries to establish their own self-righteousness. I
don't know if you've ever noticed this but I have never yet met anybody who apart from the grace of
God thinks their self-righteous. Do you know that? They think everybody else is self-righteous
but part of being self-righteous is that you can't see your own self-righteousness.
How do we get around that? How come we're so smart? You know how we do it? Here's how we do it.
Let me put it this way. The standards are God are this high, huh? And they encompass
all of life. They're not only external but they're also internal. That is to say God's not only
concerned about my having the right attitude, right behavior on the outside. Jesus and the
sermon and the mount goes on to point out God's more concerned even about what lives in the inside.
That's why he gets some out of the Pharisees. You know the Pharisees are so concerned about the outside
but they're like dead man's bones, a white washed sepulcher, he calls them rather uncomplimentary.
I often think it's no wonder they nailed him to the cross.
So when you live under the law and you see all of the demands that God makes on you,
none of which any of us can keep in total. You know what we do?
Is we bring the law down to where we can be comfortable with it.
And we zero in on some of the commandments where we have the natural strength and the natural
ability to be what we're supposed to be. And you can tell self-righteous people because what they do
is they take a certain aspect of God's revelation and they elevate. That is the most important
thing in the world because they're pretty good in that. And areas where they're not so good
themselves, they just consider not being very important. I think it's ingenious
because it enables you to hold on to your own image of yourself even though you're failing
in many areas of your life. Let me give you an example. Some of you have heard me told this story
before I have a good friend. It was a man with quite a temper. I seem to have a lot of good friends
with a lot of temper. I don't know what that is. This man of all the commandments of God,
you talk to him, you'd get the impression that the only commandment that mattered was the
commandment of keeping his Sabbath. He was the kind of person that was very black and white
about what you could do in Sunday and what you couldn't do in Sunday. Very judgmental of anybody
who broke his standards of what you could do on Sunday. And you would never catch him going
out to the store on Sunday or work on Sunday. Applied the law and applied it rigorously. And I'm
not judging him or condemning him for that or saying that was not a good thing to do. Don't
necessarily understand me. But he was very legalistic about people keeping the Sabbath. But as I
said, he had this temper and this temper got him into trouble over the years in relationships with
different people. And so he had a number of people whose relationships with him were estranged
and he made no bones about the fact that he absolutely disliked those people and was never
going to forgive them. You get the picture, huh? Very self-righteous in one area.
Totally the other way in another area where he was not strong, where he couldn't keep the law.
And the intriguing thing is that when I talk to him about that, you always get the same reaction.
He never hurt you. It never connected with him that God was probably more concerned about his
relationship with his estranged friends than he was about the externals of keeping the law.
And God had a deal with him and eventually I think he did to show him
that what was happening in his life was a self-righteousness,
that flowed out of areas of his own strength, where he refused to acknowledge his own failures
in areas where he was not strong. See, when you understand the grace of God in Jesus,
then you can be honest and say, "Lord, yes, I really am wrong in my relationship with that person.
My attitude is not a right attitude. Lord, I don't know how to change it, but I know that you'll
forgive me and an older by your spirit in me. You're going to work in me and change my life." That's
biblical Christianity. And that enables us to take the whole revelation of God. And to say, "Lord,
I want to be more and more like Jesus," because my position is already secure,
because of the righteousness of Christ. The Jews said Paul, they had zeal, but it was not enlightened.
They were ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and therefore sought to establish
their own. And then number three, he goes on to point out they did not submit to the righteousness.
That comes from God. They did not submit to the righteousness. That comes from God.
Now it's one thing to be ignorant, isn't it? It's one thing simply not-of-know,
and while as any judge can tell you ignorance of the law, as no excuse, God is amazingly tolerant
of people who don't know. Have you noticed that? God is amazingly tolerant.
Paul talks about that concerning his own life in. Now one Timothy chapter one, when he says,
"I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful by appointing me to his service."
Though he goes on to say, "I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him."
And then he says this, "But I receive mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief."
Paul persecuted the church not because he hated God, but because he was ignorant of the righteousness
that came from God, and he sincerely thought that he was doing the right thing, though he was dead
wrong, and he said, "God understood that. God gave me mercy because I didn't know what I was doing.
You'll find a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, and in not knowing what they're
doing, they can persecute the truth of God, and God will be very generous. Open the rise, change
their lives." They turn around and they say, "Well, how could I ever have done such a stupid
thing there?" But Paul goes on to point out in this passage, there's another category of people.
And he says here concerning the Jewish people, they did not submit to the righteousness of God.
That is to say, they stubbornly refuse to accept the truth of God in Jesus Christ, the word
"submit" in the greatest of the word, he kupotasal, it means literally to place under.
And to place oneself under the righteousness that comes from God means at least two things.
It means number one that I embrace the totality of my sinfulness.
All have sinned the Bible says, and they fall short of the glory of God.
The Bible says that every last one of us by virtue of Adam's sin and by virtue of our own
sin, we are rebels over against God. We are wrong through and through. People often act
surprised because somebody doesn't want to love God, or they're disappointed in themselves because
they're not what they think they want to be. They ought to understand that apart from God's grace,
that's the most natural thing in all of the world. There is nobody in and out of his or her own
self that wants to worship God, obey God, or follow God, or live according to his commandments.
Because we are conceived and born in sin, and apart from God's grace, all of my thoughts.
Our crooked and perverse, even my best wads. Apart from God's grace, my emotions, my feelings,
my body, it's all twisted in the wrong direction. I want to live for myself. I want to go my own way.
And the difference between a person who was a Christian and a person who was not a Christian
is not the fact that the person who was the Christian doesn't have those kinds of struggles.
No, the difference is the Christian has embraced his own sinfulness.
The Christian has by God's grace been brought to a point where he or she has come to understand.
There isn't a thing I can do. That's going to please go on. God's not impressed by my pedigree.
God is not impressed by my righteousness. God's not impressed by my religious service.
God is not impressed by my status. God is not impressed by my position. He's not impressed by
any of the things by which the world is impressed and by which I try to impress myself.
God's only impressed by a broken heart and a contrite spirit.
And to submit to the righteousness of God is to embrace biblical truth.
Now, that's hard for the worst of us.
But it's especially hard for the best of us because the more you have invested
in your own righteousness, the higher you've climbed on the ladder of your own efforts,
the more of a stumbling walk is the gospel that says before God, we're all equal and we all need
His grace. We used to have a man in a church that I pastored one time who was one of the nicest
people that you could ever meet. He and his wife were the parents, I think, of four or five teenage
sons. He ran a little store. He was a community-minded man. And as I said, you'd meet him and you
wish the whole church was like him. He'd give you the shirt off his back. He was that kind of an individual.
But he was, in theological terms, a small L liberal. That is nothing to do with Mr. Crachin.
That is to say, he was a self-made man. And he was fairly smug and secure
about the position that he had carved out in life. And when he sat in church
and was confronted by the truth of the gospel, he would become livid and furious.
Because though intellectually he would say Jesus died for me in his heart of hearts,
he couldn't accept the truth. That when God looked at him, he was no better.
Then the prostitute down the street, apart from the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
And it surfaced by his unwillingness to accept biblical truth. I remember he and his wife were
going through a very difficult time with their teenage children. It happened to coincide with the
time that I was preaching and child raising. I did a whole series of sermons on it. He wasn't
particularly impressed with that, unfortunately. I remember he came to church one day after he had
already stated his displeasure. Looked at the bulletin and saw that I was going to speak on the
rebellious adolescent. Through the bulletin down, walked out and said, "I'll see you next week."
But his whole family had a church. Went back home. And that's so tragic.
Because God's healing and God's grace is available to all of God's children.
If only we'll get down on our knees and say, "Lord Jesus, help me."
If he and his wife could have just said, "Lord, help us with our children. Help us to be open
to our own sense of responsibility." God's grace would have flowed like a river
and brought healing and restoration. So submitting under the authority of God means that you embrace
your own sinfulness. It means you're able to say, "God, I really am sinner, and I'm open to your
correction." But it doesn't stop there. It also means that we embrace the righteousness of Jesus.
It means that I come to the Lord Jesus and I understand that though I am a failure and I'm a sinner,
Jesus is righteous. I'm righteous in him. I lay aside all claim to my own life. I lay
aside all claim to my own self-righteousness. I give it all up like Paul did. In Philippians chapter 3,
he talks about all of his credentials and he says, "They're all garbage. They're all manure because
in Jesus I've got a whole lot more because instead of trying to climb this much up the ladder."
Jesus takes me from the bottom all the way up to the top and there's no question
but that I'm there by faith in Jesus. But you see that involves giving up my own self-righteousness.
It means laying aside my own garments of my works and my accomplishments.
And the question that I want to leave each of is with this warning because it's time to wind this up.
Is the question, have we been to the cross? I know intellectually we embrace the cross
but has God by the grace of this Holy Spirit brought us to a point where we could honestly and
truly embrace our sinfulness and say, "Lord, that's who I am." And if I live to be a hundred thousand
years of age, nothing I do will fundamentally change who I am. I cannot make myself a better person.
Have we been to Jesus? And said, "Jesus, thank you that I don't need to make myself a better person."
You are the fulfillment of the law. You've done it all in U.M. righteous. I give up the right
to control my own life, the right to be captain of my own soul, master of my own destiny.
And Lord Jesus, I receive the gift of Your forgiveness, I receive the gift of Your life,
I receive the gift of Your acceptance just as I am without one plea, but that I bloodly shed for me.
And Lord Jesus, I will trust Him by the power of the Holy Spirit, the works that you've begun in me.
You will bring to completion. If you've been there, then no matter what the struggles,
difficulties or shortcomings of your life, God says, "You are righteous before my face."
God says, "You were acceptable. You got nothing else to prove."
I'll take you by the hand. I'll lead you to glory. If you haven't been there,
the gospel will be a stumbling stone. God will always seem like He's your enemy,
because it will always seem that somebody is stepping on your fingers when you're trying so hard
to climb up the ladder to heaven. And it looks like somebody's always trying to knock you down.
And you'll be full of anger and full of resentment and full of bitterness,
because you can't understand why you're not accepted the way that you are.
Jesus, the Bible says, came to save sinners. Paul said concerning Himself,
"I am the foremost of sinners, but God showed me His mercy, that through me He might declare
to all the peoples the incredible riches of His mercy."
Beloved of God, it's the gospel of grace.