Romans 10:8b-13
“No Distinction”
March 6, 2022 – First Sunday of Lent
For some of us, this text from Romans I just read is the end of the road. No, not the end of life, but the end of what evangelical Christians often called the “Roman Road” when I was growing up. It was a selection of four or five verses pulled from various places in Paul’s letter to the Romans and then read in a sequence which led up to verse 9 here, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” At that point someone sharing these verses with a non-Christian friend might ask that person to do just that, to pray a prayer confessing Jesus as Lord and professing belief in her heart that God raised Him from the dead. That moment of prayer would bring a person to salvation.
I am sure many people have come to Jesus along the so-called Roman Road. When I was 13 years old and earning a Boy Scout religious award, my pastor asked me to memorize verses 9 and 10, among several other Bible passages. These words are a powerful reminder of God’s grace and how simple it is to turn to Jesus. I don’t at all want to devalue how God used those verses to bring people to Himself. But there is much more to Romans and to these verses than merely a personal plan of salvation.
In our Gospel lesson this morning we heard Jesus respond to temptation by quoting the book of Deuteronomy three times, first from chapter 8 and then twice from chapter 6. His first quotation was Deuteronomy 8:3, “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Here in Romans 10:8, Paul also quotes Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verse 14, to point us to that same word of God, saying “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.”
Paul quotes a lot of Hebrew Scripture in Romans. He does it three times just in these five and half verses I read. A large part of his audience was Jewish. In the larger context, Romans chapters 9 to 11, Paul’s big concern around these verses is the status of his own people. As he ponders how good news, the Gospel of Jesus, took root and grew among non-Jewish, Gentile people, Paul wonders what it means for Israel, for Jews. These verses are part of his answer. The word is near them. They’ve learned it from childhood. It is actually and truly on their lips and in their hearts.
We see that Jewish connection to the word in the temptation of Jesus. He is the divine Son of God, but, in His confrontation with Satan, Jesus relied on a resource available to any faithful Jewish person, a deep knowledge of the Scriptures and an ability to call them to mind. The word was near Him and in His heart. He remembered and spoke that word in His time of need.
Paul constantly cites the Hebrew Scriptures here to make it plain to His Jewish readers that what he says about Jesus is prefigured and prophesied there. The Scripture, the word they have heard and learned all their lives, has been completed in Christ. Down in verse 17 he calls it “the word of Christ.”
So when we come to verse 9 and that simple direction, “confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,” there is more to it than just a plan of salvation. Paul is trying to show His Jewish readers that God’s salvation in Jesus includes them too. As he will argue in the next chapter, they and Gentiles are being grafted together, like branches from different trees, to grow up as one people in the Lord. The aim is a growing, thriving community of different kinds of people brought together in Jesus.
That kind of community has always been God’s purpose. Look at our Old Testament reading this morning, yet another passage from Deuteronomy, chapter 26. It is mostly a call for the people of Israel to bring an offering in remembrance of their history after they settle down in a land of their own. In verse 5 of that chapter, after giving a basket of produce to the priest, they are to say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” In other words, they are to remember they once had no land at all. Then they were slaves in Egypt. Then God and only God brought them out and gave them a place of their own.
It’s a public display, with words to say and history to remember and believe. That’s how Jewish faith was to be expressed. It’s still how Christian faith is expressed. We will say the Apostles’ Creed together this morning. But then remember how that text ended, “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and your house.” The aim, the point of it all, was a community which even included foreigners. They were to be people whose lives constantly demonstrated that God is good, not just to Jewish people, but to all people.
So Paul here in verse 9 calls his Jewish brothers and sisters to a public faith in Jesus. He puts the out loud part first: “confess with your lips.” We often tend to focus on the second part, the “believe in your heart” as though it’s most important, the only thing that really matters. In verse 10, Paul does put belief in the heart first as he says, “For one believes with the heart and so is justified…” But that’s not enough. He goes on, “and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”
Salvation is not a merely private, individual matter. God’s aim is not just your or my private salvation. His purpose, His goal is a visible community of people who follow Jesus. What we say out loud is key. Faith in Jesus was never meant to be what American civil religion would like it to be, some private matter we never talk about and which never affects how we live or how we vote. Faith in Jesus is meant to be publically displayed by a community of people who are different from people around them.
I know I keep saying this, but in Paul’s world everyone was expected to say, “Caesar is lord.” “Caesar is the one who rules my world, rules my own country, rules my life. Caesar is lord.” Christians came along and became a community of people known for a different politics. They refused to say, “Caesar is lord,” and would only say, “Jesus is Lord.” Like those brave Russians standing in the streets to defy Vladimir Putin by calling for an end to the war, early Christians defied the civil power of their day to declare a different allegiance.
Christian faith is a public faith, a faith spoken out loud and acted out together with others where everyone can see it. It’s good we are back together in-person, but even when isolating in the pandemic we worked hard to stay together on-line. It is simply wrong to think you can be a Christian by yourself, without a community of other believers. Bradley Wright, a Christian sociologist, says that Christians who regularly go to church are:
more likely to look to God for strength, believe that God is watching over them, carry their religious beliefs into other dealings, feel God’s presence every day, find comfort in religion, desire closeness to God, consider themselves to be very religious and spiritual, and have had a life-changing religious experience.[1]
There is something else about that community which God wants to create in Jesus. In the Old Testament it was open to both Jews and the “aliens,” the foreigners who lived among them. As you read the Hebrew story, you can see that some of those foreigners even became major figures in it. Rahab and Ruth are probably the most familiar of these, accepted into the people of Israel and even appearing in the lineage of Jesus in Matthew. No one has to be on the outside of God’s saving community, “No one,” says Paul quoting Isaiah 28:16, “who believes in him will be put to shame.”
Denial of shame takes a community, not just individual determination. One of the great lessons that Christians in this country had to learn was that they could not let brothers and sisters in Jesus be shamed by slavery. It took a civil war to make plain the injustice and hypocrisy of laws like Virginia passed which directed that becoming a Christian would not set a slave free. It took public, political action and a Christian community working together for abolition to end the practice of shaming part of Christ’s own Body.
We still must work together as Christian community to keep from shaming people. Right now as it was for Muslims after 9/11, people of Jesus must refrain from shaming Russians just because they are Russian. Instead, even as we sympathize with and send aid to Ukrainian refugees, we can follow the example of Ukrainians themselves who recently fed a young Russian soldier who surrendered, gave him something to eat, and loaned him a cell phone to call his mother.
In verse 11 we come to what is really at the heart of all this for Paul, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.” Now that “no distinction” is often taken to mean that racial differences are meant to disappear for believers in Jesus. We are all to become “colorblind” and not even see that we are different.
Yet colorblindness is not the goal of the Christian church. God made people different colors, with different languages and cultures. We should not try to pretend those differences do not exist. What Paul is saying is that God makes no distinction is how He loves and treats people of different backgrounds. He is Lord and Savior of them all. Over in Galatians 3:28 Paul says that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Take that last distinction. The difference between male and female doesn’t disappear for Christians. The point is that the differences no longer divide us, no longer keep us apart, because we all have the same relationship to the one who is our Lord.
And it’s political again. The Romans would say about Caesar that “The same lord is lord of all.” Caesar was lord and emperor of a diverse empire of many nations and races. Putin I’m sure dreams of being ruler of all the nations that were once controlled by Soviet Russia. But Caesar and Putin would rule by force, by power. Jesus rules by invitation, by welcoming all and anyone who willingly and freely comes to Him. So verse 13 quotes the prophet Joel just as Peter did on the day of Pentecost to a diverse audience from different nations, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Paul quotes the Old Testament over and over, all to show that what Christians say about Jesus is what Hebrew Scripture said all along. The promises God made to Israel are fulfilled and completed in Jesus. There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, Jew and Gentile, because the God of Israel has always been the God of everyone. Jesus came and made that plain. All anyone needs to do is call on Him, confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead.
I shouldn’t forget to dwell on that last phrase a moment. We believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. As war rages in Ukraine, and not just there but in Syria and Ethiopia and other places, it’s tempting to lose heart, to believe as Satan tried to convince Jesus, that evil is the real power in this world, the actual lord of all. But even death does not defeat our Lord. Putin and the poor soldiers whom he has deceived can deal out death. Some of them will also die in the process. But Jesus is not defeated. We believe that all those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, will be raised again with Him.
Let’s then do our best to see the distinctions among us as God sees them. We are white and black, Russian and Ukrainian, even, yes, male and female. Yet God is creating a community, a country, if you will, in which all those distinctions are loved and cherished in and through His beloved Son. In that country of the risen Lord, there is no hatred and no shame. There is no distinction in honor between a poor person and a rich person. Men and women are different, but God makes no distinction in how they may know and serve Jesus in the church. That’s what our Christian community is like. That’s how we all come before Jesus and call on Him. That is how we will receive Him with our mouths and with our hearts at His Table today.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites …and Other Lies You’ve Been Told (Minneapolis: Bethany House), p. 129.