The Jews Missed The Forest For The Trees

 

Romans 10:1-4

10 Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. 2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. 4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

 

 

Remember, it seems that some of the Roman Gentile Christians had come to believe that God was replacing the Jews as His chosen people with the Gentiles as His chosen people, and so Paul is giving a long, complicated response to that issue.

Here, he says that he really wants the unbelieving Jews to be saved.

1Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved [Romans 10:1].

The reason the Jews aren’t believing is not because they don’t care, but that they care about the wrong things:

2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness [Romans 10:2–3].

The Jews had the Law of God, and they thought this made them superior to the Gentiles, but when the Messiah came in a way different than their expectations, they missed Him. Israel’s problem is that they missed the forest for the trees—they were “zealous” but not for the right cause. Think of the Pharisees, arguing with the Son of God and totally missing Him. The Jews were so concerned with the Law that they were unable to see that: 

4Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes [Romans 10:4].

This is a beautiful, profound point. The Greek word telos means “end” as in “The End” at the end of a movie, and it also means “goal” as in the phrase “the ends justify the means.” So, Paul means two things here:

1. Christ is the goal of the Law, its destination—everything was always moving toward a culmination in the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.
2. Christ is the final act of the Law. As Paul has already said in Romans 8:2–4, the death and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled the Law’s purpose once and for all so that now we live in the freedom and life that the Law was always meant to bring.

Paul’s point: the Jews have missed seeing that in Christ God didn’t abandon the Law, He fulfilled it and brought it to its completion.


Be careful not to miss Jesus today.