Friday DIVE – December 6, 2024 – Romans 2:17-29

Romans 2:17-29  NKJV  

^17 [t]Indeed you are called a Jew, and rest^[u] on the law, and make your boast in God,  ¹⁸ and know His will, and approve the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, ¹⁹ and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, ²⁰ an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having the form of knowledge and truth in the law.  ²¹ You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself?  You who preach that a man should not steal, do you steal?  ²² You who say, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?  You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?  ²³ You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law?  ²⁴ For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” as it is written.  

²⁵ For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.  ²⁶ Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision?  ²⁷ And will not the physically uncircumcised, if he fulfills the law, judge you who, even with your  ^[v]written code and circumcision, are a transgressor of the law?  ²⁸ For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh;  ²⁹ but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter;  whose ^[w]praise is not from men but from God.  

Romans 2:17-29  NKJV  

^17 [t]Indeed you are called a Jew, and rest^[u] on the law, and make your boast in God,  ¹⁸ and know His will, and approve the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, ¹⁹ and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, ²⁰ an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having the form of knowledge and truth in the law. 

²¹ You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself ? 

• You who preach that a man should not steal, do you steal? 
• ²² You who say, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery? 
• You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? 
• ²³ You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law?  

²⁴ For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” as it is written.  

• Verse 24 suggests that they (Jews) were doing the things they were telling others (Gentiles) not to do … and blaspheming (giving God a bad name) in the process.
• From William Barclay’s commentary on Romans 2 …
  • To a Jew a passage like this must have come as a shattering experience.  He was certain that God regarded him with special favour, simply and solely because of his national descent from Abraham and because he bore the badge of circumcision in his flesh. (Barclay) 
  • But Paul introduces an idea to which he will return again and again. 
    • • Jewishness, he insists, is not a matter of race at all; it has nothing to do with circumcision.  It is a matter of conduct. 
      • If that is so, many a so-called Jew who is a pure descendant of Abraham and who bears the mark of circumcision in his body, is no Jew at all; and equally many a Gentile who never heard of Abraham and who would never dream of being circumcised, is a Jew in the real sense of the term. 
  • To a Jew this would sound the wildest heresy and leave him angry and aghast. (Barclay)

²⁵ For circumcision is indeed profitable if  you keep the law;  but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.  ²⁶ Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision?  ²⁷ And will not the physically uncircumcised, if he fulfills the law, judge you who, even with your  ^[v]written code and circumcision, are a transgressor of the law?  ²⁸ For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh;  ²⁹ but he is a Jew who is one inwardly;

and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter;  whose ^[w]praise is not from men but from God.  

Romans 2:29 contains a pun which is completely untranslatable.  “The praise of such a man comes not from men but from God.”  The Greek word for praise is epainos.  When we turn back to the Old Testament (Genesis 29:35; Genesis 49:8), we find that the original and traditional meaning of the word Judah is praise (epainos).  Therefore this phrase means two things. (a) It means the praise of such a man comes not from men but from God. (b) It means the Jewishness of such a man comes not from men  but from God. 

• The sense of the passage is that God’s promises are not to people of a certain race and to people who bear a certain mark on their bodies. 
• They are to people who live a certain kind of life irrespective of their race. 
• To be a real Jew is not a matter of pedigree but of character; and often the man who is not racially a Jew may be a better Jew than the man who is.  

In this passage, Paul says that there are Jews whose conduct makes the name of God ill-spoken of among the Gentiles.  It is a simple fact of history that the Jews were, and often still are, the most unpopular people in the world.  Let us see just how the Gentiles did regard the Jews in New Testament times.  

• They regarded Judaism as a “barbarous superstition” and the Jews as “the most disgusting of races,” and as “a most contemptible company of slaves.”  The origins of Jewish religion were twisted with a malicious ignorance.  It was said that Jews had originally been a company of lepers who had been sent by the king of Egypt to work in the sand quarries; and that Moses had rallied this band of leprous slaves and led them through the desert to Palestine.  It was said that they worshipped an ass’ head, because in the wilderness a herd of wild asses had led them to water when they were perishing with thirst.  It was said that they abstained from swine’s flesh because the pig is specially liable to a skin disease called the itch, and it was that skin disease that the Jews had suffered from in Egypt.  
• Certain of the Jewish customs were mocked at by the Gentiles.  Their abstinence from swine’s flesh provided many a jest.  Plutarch thought that the reason for it might well be that the Jews worshipped the pig as a god.  Juvenal declares that Jewish clemency has accorded to the pig the privilege of living to a good old age, and that swine’s flesh is more valuable to them than the flesh of man.  The custom of observing the Sabbath was regarded as pure laziness.  
• Certain things which the Jews enjoyed infuriated the Gentiles.  It was the odd fact that, unpopular as they were, the Jews had nonetheless received extraordinary privileges from the Roman government.  

(a) They were allowed to transmit the temple tax every year to Jerusalem.  This became so serious in Asia about the year 60 B.C. that the export of currency was forbidden and, according to the historians, no less than twenty tons of contraband gold was seized which the Jews had been about to despatch to Jerusalem.  

(b) They were allowed, at least to some extent, to have their own courts and live according to their own laws.  There is a decree issued by a governor called Lucius Antonius in Asia about the year 50 B.C. in which he wrote: “Our Jewish citizens came to me and informed me that they had their own private gathering, carried out according to their ancestral laws, and their own private place, where they settle their own affairs and deal with cases between each other.  When they asked that this custom should be continued, I gave judgment that they should be allowed to retain this privilege.”  The Gentiles detested the spectacle of a race of people living as a kind of separate and specially privileged group.  

(c) The Roman government respected the Jewish observance of the Sabbath. 

• • • It was laid down that the Jew could not be called to give evidence in a law court on the Sabbath. 
    • It was laid down that if special doles were being distributed to the populace and the distribution fell on the Sabbath, the Jews could claim their share on the following day. 
    • And — a specially sore point with the Gentiles — he Jews enjoyed astrateia, that is, exemption from conscription to the Roman army.  This exemption was directly due to the fact that the Jewish strict observance of the Sabbath obviously made it impossible for him to carry out military duties on the Sabbath.  It can easily be imagined with what resentment the rest of the world would look on this special exemption from a burdensome duty.

There were two special things of which the Jews were accused.  

(a) They were accused of atheism (atheotes).  The ancient world had great difficulty in conceiving of the possibility of a religion without any visible images of worship. 

• • • Pliny called them, “a race distinguished by their contempt for all deities.” 
    • Tacitus said, “The Jews conceive of their deity as one, by the mind alone …. Hence no images are erected in their cities or even in their temples.  This reverence is not paid to kings, nor this honour to the Caesars.” 
    • Juvenal said, “They venerate nothing but the clouds and the deity of the sky.” 
    • But the truth is that what really moved the Gentile to such dislike, was not so much the imageless worship of the Jews, as the cold contempt in which they held all other religions. 
    • No man whose main attitude to his fellows is contempt can ever be a missionary.  This contempt for others was one of the things which Paul was thinking of when he said that the Jews brought the name of God into disrepute.  

(b) They were accused of hatred of their fellow-men (misanthropia) and complete unsociability (amixia).  

• • • Tacitus said of them: “Among themselves their honesty is inflexible, their compassion quick to move, but to all other persons they show the hatred of antagonism.” 
    • In Alexandria the story was that the Jews had taken an oath never to show kindness to a Gentile, and that they even offered a Greek in sacrifice to their God every year. 
    • Tacitus said that the first thing Gentiles converted to Judaism were taught to do was “to despise the gods, to repudiate their nationality, and to disparage parents, children and brothers.” 
    • Juvenal declared that if a Jew was asked the way to any place, he refused to give any information except to another Jew, and that if anyone was looking for a well from which to drink, he would not lead him to it unless he was circumcised. 
    • Here we have the same thing again.  The basic Jewish attitude to other men was contempt and this must ever invite hatred in answer.  

It was all too true that the Jews did bring the name of God into disrepute, because they shut themselves into a rigid little community from which all others were shut out and because they showed to the heathen an attitude of contempt for their worship and complete lack of charity for their needs. 

Real religion is a thing of the open heart and the open door; Judaism was a thing of the shut heart and the shut door.