WWUTT 1307 Submitting to God's Righteousness (Romans 10:1-7)

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Every single one of us have tried to attain righteousness by our own good works, but we can't do it.

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This is sin to think that we can be good without God. It is only by faith in Christ that we have righteousness when we understand the text.

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You are listening to When We Understand The Text, an online Bible ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty.

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Find videos and more at our website, www .wtt .com. Now here's our host,

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Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. In our study of Romans, we're moving on to the next chapter,

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Romans 10 today. I'm going to start off reading verses 1 -13. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome, Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

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For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

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For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

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For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

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For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

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But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven?

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That is, to bring Christ down. Or who will descend into the abyss? That is, to bring

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Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.

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That is the word of faith that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

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Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

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For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

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For the Scripture says, Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame.

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For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. For the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing

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His riches on all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. So we're continuing the thought that Paul closed

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Romans 9 with, which we looked at yesterday, verses 30 through 33. What shall we say then?

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That the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it.

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That is a righteousness that is by faith. But that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law.

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Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. So remember we're talking about a difference between Jews and Gentiles there.

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The Jews tried to attain righteousness by their works, by their keeping of the law, which they failed at doing.

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The Gentiles did not even have the law. And yet Gentiles have come to faith.

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They have come to salvation in Christ. How? Because it wasn't based on their works. It was based on faith in Jesus Christ.

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We're not talking about all Gentiles here when we're talking about those who are saved, nor are we talking about all

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Jews when we're talking about the Jews being condemned. But the nation of Israel largely has not come to faith in Christ and is therefore condemned.

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And there are many Gentiles who have come into the faith, though they were not given the oracles of God.

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And it's because God was merciful to them. They heard the gospel and believed it.

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And the righteousness that they have received, imputed to them, has been by faith in Jesus and not by a keeping of the law.

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The Jews attempted righteousness by keeping of the law, but they failed at it and therefore heaped condemnation upon themselves.

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So as Paul is still referencing his kinsmen here, his fellow Jews, as we get to chapter 10, verse 1, he says,

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Brother, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them, talking specifically about the

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Jews, is that they may be saved. And again, going back to the start of chapter 9,

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Paul says, I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.

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They are the Israelites. He would find himself condemned for their sake, if it were possible to save them that way.

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He would condemn himself to save the Jews. But of course, that's not how salvation works.

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You cannot give yourself for the salvation of someone else. They have to, on their own, come to an understanding of their sin and their need for a savior and confess themselves before God and call upon the

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Lord for salvation, and they will be saved. So Paul is praying that that mercy of God would fall upon these

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Jews who had become hardened of heart, who thought that they could attain righteousness by their works.

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They cannot be saved that way. They can only be saved by faith in Jesus. So Paul prays for their salvation in Christ.

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For I bear them witness, he says, chapter 10, verse 2, that they have a zeal for God. And indeed,

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Paul can bear witness to that, because he was one who was zealous for God as a

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Pharisee before he became a Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ. In Philippians 3, verse 4, he says,

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I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks that he has reason for confidence in the flesh,

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I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a

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Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

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But then he goes on in verse 7 to say, But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

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Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing

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Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain

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Christ. So notice there where he mentions zeal in Philippians 3, 6, as to zeal,

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I was a persecutor of the church. So he was so zealous for the things of God, what he believed to be the things of God, that he was willing to put people to death who were proclaiming

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Christ as Lord, because he thought believing in Jesus as Lord meant that you were kicking out the law.

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Nobody's keeping the law anymore. They just believe it's by faith that they're saved. And so we have to punish these blasphemers.

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They need to be thrown in prison or they need to be put to death. This was how zealous Paul was for righteousness that comes by the law.

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But this is not how that righteousness is attained. Since this was Paul's attitude when he was a

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Pharisee, therefore he can testify to the zealousness of the Jews that they have forgotten his law.

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They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. It's according to ignorance, for being ignorant of the righteousness of God.

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They're ignorant as to what true righteousness is. It doesn't come by keeping the law.

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It's a misunderstanding of the purpose of the law. The law is to show us

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God's righteousness and our sinfulness, how perfect and righteous and holy he is, and how incapable we are of meeting that standard.

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God is holy and we are not. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as it says in Romans 3 .23.

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But we are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom

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God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. And even the law was pointing to that, that Jesus was going to be that sacrifice, fulfilling all of those laws of sacrifice in order for a person to gain righteousness.

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As it says in Hebrews, we were never going to be able to be saved by the blood of goats anyway. All of this was a type and a shadow of the one who was to come, the spotless lamb of God who came to take away the sin of the world.

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Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Anyone who doesn't recognize that, who doesn't recognize that the

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Old Testament is pointing to Christ, that he is the one who holds righteousness in his hand.

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And he is the one who by his grace gives righteousness to the ones whom he loves, who he has shown mercy to.

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Whoever does not recognize that or understand that is ignorant. They do not have true knowledge of God.

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They have knowledge of the law as they see it. And certainly there's a zealous for God in that.

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But it isn't knowing God truly. And God would say to them, depart from me, you worker of lawlessness.

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I never knew you on the day of judgment because they did not believe in his son. They did not see that the law pointed to Jesus.

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So therefore they're ignorant. They're ignorant of the true righteousness of God, which is in Christ.

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And friends, we were all there. We were all walking and stumbling in that ignorance. None of us should ever be sitting here and say, yeah, you

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Jews, what's your problem? You should know this better than anybody because you were the ones who received the oracles of God.

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We're no better. And especially if you live in the Western world where Christianity is so prevalent, when you've got churches every other block, there is memorials everywhere that point to the one who made us and the one who is deserving of our worship, and that is

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Christ. So no one in America, no one in Western Europe, no one in most

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English -speaking countries has any excuse to say that they did not know God. The evidence of God is everywhere, and there are buildings all over the place that were built as houses of worship unto him.

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And so the ignorance is now ours. Anyone who sees all of this declaration, hears all of this proclamation of the gospel of Christ and yet closes their ears to it and doesn't believe it, they are ignorant of where true goodness comes from.

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Persons will say, I can be good without God. They're ignorant to the righteousness of God. And they seek to establish their own.

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That's where Paul goes on here. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

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That's every atheist. Every atheist is that way as well. They seek to establish their own.

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They want to proclaim their own righteousness. I can be good. Watch how good I can be.

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And that's self -righteousness. I can't tell you the number of times that I've been called by an atheist self -righteous because I will point out to them their sin.

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You know, doing the questions according to the law. Have you ever told a lie before? Have you ever committed adultery before?

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Have you ever spoken God's name in vain? And as we start talking about these things and I get to where I'm sharing the gospel with them, they will often call me self -righteous.

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Well, that's just self -righteousness. You just think you're better than everybody else. No, you're the one who is self -righteous because you think you can be good without God.

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And I was that same way before I became a Christian. I thought I could be good without God. Same with you.

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We all were trying to establish a righteousness that was our own, our own set of rules, our own guidelines, and I can follow these rules and I can be a good person.

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But nobody can even keep their own standard of righteousness as we talked about when we were reading in Romans 2.

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Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges, for in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself because you, the judge, practice the very same things.

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If we were to stand before God in judgment, all he would have to do is lay out before us our own standard of righteousness and show how we weren't able to keep that, how we're hypocrites.

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The moral imperatives that we imposed on everybody else, we weren't living according to those moral imperatives either.

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So God could judge you and condemn you on your own standard of righteousness, which you were not able to keep.

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That's how messed up we are. That's how sinful we are down to our very core. The Jews tried to do this.

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We have so many other people that apart from Christ tried to do the same. They tried to establish righteousness apart from God.

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So they tried to do it themselves. They did not submit to God's righteousness. Verse 4,

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For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

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You no longer have to be burdened with the belief that you have to do everything right in order to enter into the presence of God.

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I have to be good enough. I have to do this. Oh, I've stumbled. I've failed at this part.

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Does that mean that I can't be with God? Yeah, you were never with God anyway, if that's the way that you are attempting to gain righteousness and enter into his presence or into eternal life.

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If you are trying to do it on your own, on your own merit, you were burdening yourself with something that you simply could not carry.

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It was going to lead to your destruction. It was not going to lead to everlasting life because you cannot get to God on your own merit.

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Christ is the end of the law for righteousness. Your attempts to gain righteousness by being a good person.

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Christ is the end of that. The end of that thinking. The end of those attempts, which you were never going to succeed at anyway.

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Everyone who believes in Jesus has the righteousness that one needs in order to be with God and live forever.

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And that is the righteousness that we have in Christ. Any other way, if you try to get to God through any means other than faith in Christ alone, it will lead to your destruction.

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The gospel is not faith and or Christ and. It is not faith and works.

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It's faith. It's believing in Jesus. That's how you get to God. It is not by our works so that no one may boast.

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Ephesians 2, 9. No one boasts in themselves. No one can say, I did it and I got here because of what

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I accomplished. It is because God was merciful to you. All of us, again, coming back to this again, all of us have at one point believed that we could be good on our own until the law revealed to us that we were not good and we had sinned against God and what we were deserving of was judgment.

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By faith in Jesus, we've been forgiven our sins and we have everlasting life with God. The Jews, the failure of the

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Jews to gain righteousness by keeping the law is to be an example to the rest of us that we cannot be good enough to be with God.

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He was merciful toward us and made a way for us to be with him. And that's the cross of Christ.

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I love those illustrations, those drawings of a cross bridging a chasm.

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And maybe you have shared the gospel with somebody with an illustration that looks just like that.

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You know what I mean? I often refer to it as the napkin gospel because you can just draw it out on a napkin.

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You're sitting there at a cafe or a restaurant talking with somebody about the gospel. You pull out a napkin and you draw that image of a ledge and we're on one side and then there's another ledge and God is on that side.

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And there's no way for us to get from there, to get from where we are to God. In between, that's death.

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That's hell. And the side that we're standing on is even crumbling and wasting away. So eventually there's going to be nothing left for us to stand on and we're going to fall into the abyss and we'll perish forever.

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So how do we get from where we are to where God is? How do we get from a life that is perishing to a life that is eternal?

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And then you have the cross that you draw between those two chasms. There's a bridge to cross the great divide as was once sung about in a famous 90s contemporary

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Christian song. That cross is the bridge that we can cross to get to God.

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And there's great paintings that have been made of this as well with that chasm in between and flames leaping up from the gulf below.

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And yet there's a cross that bridges that gap so that anyone who believes in Jesus can walk across that bridge.

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And that is how we get to the Father. That is how we have eternal life. Jesus saying in John 14, 6,

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I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.

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Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes in him. We do not get to heaven by our righteousness.

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We get to heaven by Christ's righteousness. We go on here in verse five to read, for Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

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Now this doesn't look like an exact quote here, but it is. Paul is actually referencing Leviticus 18, 5 where it says, the

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Lord says to Israel, you shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them.

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I am the Lord. However, remember that Paul has already pointed out that no one has done this.

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Not a Jew, not a Gentile. Romans 3, 23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

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And really starting back in Romans 1, 18, going through how the Gentiles have done wickedness, how even the

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Jews have done wickedness and then bringing that home with all have sinned. So no one has kept the law.

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If we did, if we had kept the law perfectly, then we would live by that law.

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Just as God says, Leviticus 18, 4, you shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them.

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I am the Lord, your God. Verse five, you shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them.

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I am the Lord. But we failed at it. So we perish by the law. The law that we could not keep is the law that is going to govern us on that day of judgment.

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And it is by that law that we will perish. As James says, if you've broken one part of the law, you're guilty of breaking the whole thing.

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But Christ kept the law. He did it perfectly. And so Christ's righteousness is imputed to us since he is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

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Therefore, it is through Christ that we live. He who kept God's statutes and rules and then through faith in Jesus, we have life.

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I am the Lord. Christ saying that of himself there as we have that in Leviticus 18, 5.

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So then going on, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy also. Verse six, but the righteousness based on faith says, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven, that is, to bring

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Christ down. So Paul explains the passage there. It's like he's exegeting the passage with the parenthetical reference.

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Do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven. That's from Deuteronomy 30, verses 12 through 14. Or who will descend into the abyss, that is, to bring

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Christ up from the dead. And it's not that we need to go bring Christ up from the dead. God is the one who has raised him from the dead.

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So you cannot bring Christ down from heaven to earth and you cannot go into the grave and raise him from the grave.

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God sent his son to earth. God the Father raised his son from the dead, receiving the sacrifice that Christ had made on our behalf.

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And this he showed by raising him from the dead. God does not require of you superhuman feats that you are incapable of, bringing

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Christ down, raising Christ up, but that you have faith in Christ who came for us, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

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We're not saved by our good works, but we're zealous for them because they are the works of God.

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Let's finish there. We'll come back and finish this section next verses 8 through 13 tomorrow.

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Heavenly Father, we thank you for the mercy that you have shown to us. For we were incapable of doing what was necessary to enter into your presence.

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But you were merciful to us. We deserve judgment. You showed us love. By sending

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Jesus to die for us, to rise again from the grave so that all who believe in him will not perish under God's judgment.

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But we have everlasting life. And even now we have fellowship with you and we will have fellowship with you forever in glory.

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By faith in Jesus, you have given us the righteousness of Christ that has been given to all who believe.

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May we demonstrate that righteousness today. Help us to walk according to your statutes that we may show by our actions, by our words, by our love that we are

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God's children. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes.

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If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com and click on the

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Give tab in the top right corner of the page. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study When We Understand The Text.