The necessity of faith and the guilt of unbelief
Paul has spoken of Gentiles as being the new people of God, whereas the Jewish race, historically chosen as God’s people, has been reduced to a “remnant.” “What then shall we say?” Paul asks. What conclusions can be drawn of the basis of the widely differing status in which these two groups now find themselves? Paul supplies the proper answer for both.
What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; 31 but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. 32 Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the “stumbling stone.” 33 As it is written: “See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”
“What then shall we say [about the Gentiles]?” Paul asks. He answers, “[We should say] that the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith.”
At no time in history was there ever a major repentance or a general change of heart among Gentiles that led God to say that it was now time to bring in the Gentiles and have them become a major component in his church. No, they were going on their merry way with no special concern for earning righteousness with God. They were not looking for God. It was entirely the other way around! God found them. From eternity God in his grace had already chosen them. Now in time God sent messengers of the gospel to them to proclaim the righteousness Christ had earned by his perfect life and his innocent death on the cross. In Christ, God proclaimed forgiveness to Gentiles for the sins they were wallowing in. By the working of the Holy Spirit, he led them to repent of their sins and in faith to accept the gift of God’s forgiveness. They accepted this righteousness from God as their only claim to stand before a just and holy Judge. The Gentiles did nothing good; they brought nothing of value. They merely accepted salvation as a gift from God.
Paul then moves on to the next group. “What then shall we say [about Israel]?” He answers, “[We should say that] Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the ‘stumbling stone.’”
In contrast to the moral indifference and carelessness of the Gentiles, the Jews were very concerned about righteousness. They pursued it vigorously. But they went about it in the wrong way: “They pursued it . . . as if it were by works.” They felt they needed to do what God required in his holy law. Hence they tried very hard to serve him with a law-righteousness. But, unfortunately, they tried to the degree that they felt that they had kept God’s law and were therefore acceptable to God on the basis of their own merit; they rejected the idea of needing a redeemer or savior from sin. They resented the suggestion that they needed help from the outside. When Jesus confronted them with their sin and demanded that they repent, they were incensed. When he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), they took offense. When he claimed to be the bread of life come down from heaven that had to be eaten (accepted by faith), they said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” (John 6:60), and as a result “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (verse 66). For them, Christ and his teachings had become a “stumbling stone.”
Such rejection, however, should not come as a total surprise to Paul’s Roman readers. After all, the prophets had foretold it in the case of unbelieving Israel, as Paul points out by putting together two quotations from Isaiah. Combining Isaiah 8:14 and 28:16, he writes, “They stumbled over the ‘stumbling stone.’ As it is written: ‘See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’”
The NIV translation, which speaks of God’s setting up Christ as a stone “that causes men to stumble,” could be misleading, as though God’s intention from the start was that people should stumble over the stone and be lost. As indicated earlier, Scripture does indeed speak of God choosing people from eternity for salvation, but it never says that God elected others for damnation. And we don’t have that thought in Isaiah, either—even though at first sight it might seem that way.
It helps to know that in the Greek original, the same two words for “stumbling stone” are used in both verses 32 and 33. Literally, the phrase in question is the two-word expression for “stone of stumbling.” That’s well translated in verse 32 as “stumbling stone,” and that translation could have been retained in verse 33, “See, I lay in Zion a [stumbling] stone” rather than “a stone that causes men to stumble.”
A similar two-word expression occurs also in the next line—dubiously translated as “a rock that makes them fall.” Here the two-word expression literally means “rock of offense.” Hence Christ is described as a rock people take offense at and therefore trip over.
Before we attempt a paraphrase of the complete Isaiah quotation, let’s look at one more thing. We noted that Paul is actually combining two passages from Isaiah. The second and (first word of the last line in verse 33) is the connecting word that joins the two quoted passages. However, this word is not connecting two parallel thoughts, but it is expressing a contrast between the two parts of the Isaiah quotation. Hence the connecting word would be translated better as but rather than and.
Incorporating these ideas into a paraphrase or expanded translation, we hear God say through Isaiah:
See, I am setting Christ up in my church as a stone people stumble over and a rock they take offense at and trip over (Isaiah 8:14),
but the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame (Isaiah 28:16).
Paul’s question was, What then shall we say? His twofold answer: The Gentiles, without any effort on their own part, have been brought into God’s fold purely by his grace, through faith in Christ. The Jews, on the other hand, have lost their favored status because in blind unbelief they have insisted on trying to gain salvation on their own terms, through keeping the law, rather than trusting in Christ’s merit.
Unsatisfactory as it is to human reason and logic, the inescapable truth the apostle is sharing with us is that if we are saved, it is solely by the grace of God. If we are lost, it is our own fault, the result of our unbelief.