First Sunday in Lent

Romans 10:8-13

March 9, 2025

Is Romans 10:8-13 a new commandment, a new set of steps we must follow in order to be saved? When we read it, it sort of sounds like it, doesn’t it? “If you do this, and you think that, then you’ll be saved.” It sounds like a salvation by works, by keeping the law, doesn’t it?

But when we read this in the light of passages like John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:8 or even Romans 3:18, there seems to be a disconnect between what Paul is saying in this supposed 11^th Commandment and what is said elsewhere. Was Paul just wrong? Or maybe Paul’s right, that to be saved, we have to follow some rules and steps, and Jesus was wrong.

OR, maybe the Scripture isn’t wrong at all, and what’s wrong is how we read it. Let me offer you a hint. Sometimes the Scripture is prescriptive, and sometimes the Scripture is descriptive. Sometimes there is a clear prescriptive teaching such as “baptize and teach,” as we read in Matthew 28:19, and sometimes what is being taught is describing an event or describing reality. And to know the difference, you have to know the context of the passage. Pulling a verse or two out of Scripture, out of context, is dangerous and foolish, which is what often happens with passages like Romans 10, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

By itself, it sounds like a work we have to do, a choice we have to make, a willingness we have to have to say something or really, really believe something, and only then will Jesus come and save us. But if you look at the greater context, it is simply not at all what this passage is saying.

So, let’s consider this passage as a whole and let’s see if we can come to a proper, biblical, faithful, exegetical understanding of Paul’s words here.

To understand Paul’s words here in Romans 10:9, we start looking at context. The trouble with Romans is that it’s nearly impossible to just jump right into the middle of the letter; you almost have to start from the beginning because everything Paul says leads to the next thing he says and the next thing, and so on; each idea builds off the previous one. But time is limited so we’ll do the best we can with the time we have.

To get a grasp of Romans 10:9, let’s go back to chapter 9, it’s where the whole argument Paul is making begins. Paul begins with a rhetorical objection to Christ’s salvation being opened up to the Gentiles. Paul recognizes that his own brothers in arms, as it were, the Jewish people are being passed up as God is sending His Word out to the Gentiles. He surmises that some Jews might find this objectionable or unfair. After all, it was the Jews who had the covenants and the law and the worship and the land and the promises. They had Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, they had the blood line and the ancestry, and that it was through their ancestry that Messiah had come.

Paul sees that some Jews might get a bit turned off by the notion that Gentiles are being offered God’s mercy when they really don’t deserve it.

Paul says in chapter 9 verse 6 that not all who are descended of Israel are truly Israel, that not all are truly children of Abraham because for the Lord, it’s not about blood but about promise. God makes promises to people and it is through His promises where His offspring emerge.

And in verse 14, Paul writes that the Lord can do this. He is God and for the sake of His promises, He can show mercy on whom He wills, and He can have compassion on whom He wills. It’s not up to mere men to decide who benefits from God’s promises; it’s not the will of men that strives for His promises; it’s not the blood or lineage of men which makes them deserving of or rightful recipients of His promises. God is not unjust in this because He is God and He sees things far differently than we do.

He chose whom He chose and showed mercy as He willed so that His promises might be fulfilled, and most importantly the promise of Messiah. Christ is the Messiah of promise, not of lineage. And as we read in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, the lineage, the bloodline was broken on at least two occasions in Jewish history. That’s important. It was intentional when God broke the lineage so that His promise would prevail.

And see, the Jews, the Pharisees, they didn’t understand. They believed that it was their lineage that saved them, that they were “Children of Abraham,” and that made them free and saved. And what did Jesus say? He said their father was the devil, not Abraham, and that made them slaves. Paul is saying the same thing in Romans 9, that it’s not about blood, not about lineage, but about promise.

Paul writes that all people are from the same lump of clay, both Jews and Gentiles, and for the sake of His promises, His purposes, He will mold from that clay as He sees fit, and no one has a right to complain if God chooses to pass over the Jews in order to bring salvation to the Gentiles.

After all, Israel continued to reject the Lord, even as the Apostles preached the good news, Israel, the Jews, they continued to reject. And so, off to the Gentiles; God sends Paul out to the Gentiles to preach, and they heard and believed in spite of the fact that they had no real connection to the lineage of Abraham or Isaac.

That’s Romans 9. Now what about chapter 10?

In chapter 10, Paul first prays that His people be saved. He says that they have a great zeal for the Lord – and Paul would be the first to know it because he was one of them – but their zeal is based in ignorance and not truth. They believe in a righteousness that comes by the law, that if a person keeps the law, he will be righteous. Paul says that such righteousness is impossible because no one keeps the law, but that the righteousness that comes from faith is the only true righteousness because Christ kept the Law perfectly for us.

Thus, it is wrong to judge one another by how well we keep the law, because to do so is to circumvent Christ and His cross, to bring Him down from glory or to steal away His suffering and death. Instead, our righteousness is in Christ whom we confess and believe.

And how is this possible that we confess and believe in this Christ? It is because God’s promise has come to us, by His Word; it has enveloped us and made us alive in Him.

Christ confessed His Father, and believed with all His heart that His Father would not fail Him and we get a clear vision of this in the 40 days where Jesus was tempted. And now His confession and faith are ours because we, as Paul writes in Romans 6, have died in our baptisms with Him and been brought back to a new life clothed in Him.

The Jews cannot be saved by keeping the Law; it is only by faith in Christ. And we, the Gentiles who are being saved, it is not by keeping another law, but it is only by faith in Christ. What our hearts believe, our tongues confess; what our tongues confess, our hearts believe. It is not our doing, nor our will, nor our choice, but it is the work and promises of God for us.

And Paul even goes on and talks about how this promise is received. He doesn’t say it’s something each person must will to choose; he says that it is the Word and Spirit that does the work. We can’t call on the Lord if we don’t believe. We can’t believe unless we hear. We can’t hear unless the Word is preached to us. And we can’t have the Word preached unless someone is sent.

This is, in part, where we get the doctrine of the divine call as we read in Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, and Article XIV of the Defense of the Augsburg Confession. God “sends” from among His people, pastors to preach; He “calls” through the church, well-trained men to serve in this office (John 15:16, Acts 6 and 1 Timothy 2 and 3), and “sends” them out to do it. Why? Because it is by the preaching of His Word that both Jews and Greeks are saved, thus, as Scripture says, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.”

And what is it that we preach that brings you who hear to believe in your heart and confess with your mouth? Nothing more and nothing less than Christ and Him crucified. And Jesus’ crucifixion didn’t start and end on a Friday. It started the moment He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, the moment He came to us as a suffering servant to do His Father’s will, even to the point of death on a cross.

When Jesus was baptized, it wasn’t to set an example for us, or to prescribe for us the methods and means of baptism. He did it to “fulfill all righteousness.”

Jesus did not need to be saved from sin and Satan. He is God; He had no reason to be baptized. God’s use of water has always been for the saving of His people. Think back to the flood, think back to the parting of the sea, think back to the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land. Water was always the means by which God brought people from a place of slavery to a place of freedom. Even in creation, God used the waters to bring life and light to the void and darkness.

But in Jesus’ baptism, He went from life to death; He took on what we leave behind in our baptisms, namely our sin and judgment for our sin – death. He clothed Himself in you and your sins and evil thoughts, words, and deeds, and He wore you into the desert for those 40 days as He was tempted by the devil. He prevailed, only to be dragged by your sins through the mud and mire of this dark world all the way to the cross.

There, on the cross, He died and with Him your sins were buried deep in the earth, and on the third day Jesus rose from the dead without the garment of sin but fully alive and free and eternal forever.

And in your baptism, you take on His righteousness, His holiness, His godliness. You die with Him and are raised with Him and like Him, you are fully alive and free and eternal forever.

All this wonderful, good news is for you. It’s all the work of God for you; it’s not about the works you do for God, but about the work God has done for you. In fact, Jesus even says this in John 6 when the people ask, “What do we gotta do to be saved.” Jesus says, “It’s not about what you do, but what God is doing and has done for you.”

And this means we are all the more thankful and have every reason in the world to praise and honor our Lord and God. He has come and He has saved us, and our response can be nothing short of pure thanksgiving. And we give thanks by living our lives in prayer, discipline, and repentance. We acknowledge our sins, and we cling to His grace, and we love and serve our neighbor by striving to keep the commandments. To love God and love the neighbor is to abide in Christ and His teaching and not be dragged around by worldly passions and philosophies.

The world has so many distractions and tantalizing temptations; Satan offers us everything in the world to entice us to bend knee to him and follow him. But during these 40 days, during our wilderness walk, may we, by the strength and might of our Lord and Savior who conquered Satan and trampled him underfoot, may we not fall for the wares of this world and the wiles of the devil. May we instead daily repent and confess our sins to the Father, and grasp tightly to the robe of our Lord as He leads us through this wilderness to our new and eternal home. Amen.