The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Tracing one’s ancestry is big business today. Genetic analysis is a popular thing to do. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe provide a detailed analysis of your connection to your personal past. Learning about the historical and genetic connections to the stories about ancestors can be both meaningful and helpful. It can help you find long-lost relatives, alert you to inherited medical conditions, answer questions about why you came to be where you came to be.
That was the problem Paul was addressing, in part, in the epistle to the Romans. The Hebrew bloodline was sacred to the Jews of the Old and New Testament. In the minds of most Israelites, to be a pure-blooded Hebrew entitled one to God’s favored treatment and eternal access to God’s heavenly kingdom. So Paul’s treatment of the genetic ancestry of the Israelites takes up a great deal of space in his epistle to the Romans. Chapters 9 through 11 form a unit dealing with Israel’s rejection of Jesus as the Old Testament promised Messiah.
In chapters 1 through 3, Paul teaches Jew and Gentile alike that they are under the law, under God’s judgment, guilty of sin universally, regardless of their genetic composition. No one escapes the law. In chapters 4 and 5, he follows up the law’s condemnation with the gospel, the good news of God’s universal grace in justifying the sinner, be him or her Jew or Greek. Chapter 6 teaches that all the justification, the person, the work, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is given and present in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, and Baptism results in our status as both saint and sinner in the same moment. That’s what chapters 7 and 8 teach.
Given the place of the Israelites in the history of salvation, Paul responds to the inevitable questions raised about the status of the Israelites before God: Why do Israelites not believe? What advantage is there to be an Israelite? Is the bloodline and the customs of the law, quote, don’t matter for salvation after all? Paul says in Romans 1:16, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek,” the gospel is the power of salvation. The answer to such questions is found in two dominant themes in the Old and New Testament that most of the Christian church never really embraced: the law and the gospel.
Luther had a lot to say about the law and the gospel. Here’s a famous quote: “The law discovers the disease; the gospel gives the remedy.” The law tells a person who they are, what they are, what they are to do and not to do, knowing full well that none of us can actually keep the law, not even one of the Ten Commandments, even closely or remotely. We violate the law with almost every breath of our being as we go about the day.
You know the law because it’s usually spoken in the form of a command. Even the command to believe is law; it’s a command, and we don’t even fulfill that rightly, because faith is a gift from God, something He creates and sustains in us. You know the law because it gives commands: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not murder.” “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And so on. The law comes in commands, not comforts.
As sinners in a sinful world, we live by the law. We rely on the rule of law in order to have a fundamentally orderly society. Those who obey the law usually find a better and easier time in this world. Life isn’t quite as hard or tumultuous if you follow the rules and try to comply. The law keeps things together. As we continue to be reminded by the daily news, without laws and the enforcement of laws, there is no order in society. It begins to break down, and riots and thefts and murders and violence multiply greatly, because the law is not enforced and upheld among us.
The law is so much of our lives that it affects how we think and speak about the gospel. But the gospel at its core is the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ: unmerited forgiveness, love to the loveless, grace to the undeserved. Under the influence of sin and the law, the gospel doesn’t make sense to people. Obeying the rules makes sense to your average, common, decent human being. Doing good, being good, going to good churches: these are the things people think God rewards, and thus allows entrance into His heavenly kingdom.
Think of the law this way: we experience and make use of the law in our daily lives constantly, on a horizontal level. The law governs our relationship to one another, to our neighbors, to the state, to foreign countries. The law gives order to life in this world. Traffic laws help us navigate with minimal risk our journey from one place to another. Horizontally, it governs how we act and behave in the world; it enables us to live with each other in relative peace. Laws, customs, traditions, even common courtesy help us to live together horizontally.
The problem comes when people take that horizontal application and try to apply it vertically. They take what applies and works in society among human beings, and then assume that’s exactly how God works in heaven above. There’s a Latin phrase, coram hominibus: before men. The law works before men, horizontally, one to another. But the law does not work vertically, that is, coram Deo, before God. That is a vertical relationship that is fundamentally different, and that’s the relationship Paul is distinguishing in his epistle to the Romans. God doesn’t deal with us by the same set of rules that we deal with one another.
That’s the problem with the Israelites in the epistle to the Romans. The Israelites, like everybody else, tried to live by the law, both the ancestral bloodline and by doing good works, following laws and customs before God, rather than relying on grace through faith in the promised Messiah. When the promised Messiah God made to Israel came true, when Christ came, most of the Israelites in the New Testament period rejected Christ. In Christ, pure grace is found, but they didn’t see it. They were too busy, still stuck on the horizontal level of the law and their bloodline. They clung to the thing that most people cling to today: “I’m basically a good person. I belong in the household of God.”
For Saint Paul, it wasn’t a problem of national pride. The question of the Israelites and God’s disposition to them was deeply personal for Saint Paul. His people, even many of his very own relatives, rejected the gospel and the ministry of Saint Paul, of preaching and teaching and baptizing people into the Christian faith. They relied on their bloodline and their obedience to the customs of the day. So in verse 2 Paul begins, “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.” In other words, he wants to trade places with them, so that they would be saved on account of his condemnation.
After all, the Israelites had it all. What advantage was there to be an Israelite? Paul lays it out: they had the Torah, the written Scriptures, the prophets and the promises, the covenants, the worship. He even makes clear that God gave them the form of worship; it wasn’t something they made up. God gave them the tabernacle first and the temple second, and He elected them and gave them a unique status as a nation in His eyes, His chosen people among all the nations of the earth. Yet when the promised Messiah arrived, they did not believe in Him. And Paul was so troubled he wanted to swap places with them. But Jesus had already done that, and they still did not believe. And if Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension had not produced faith in the Israelites, then Paul’s death certainly wouldn’t produce anything.
The failure to believe the gospel, though, is not the failure of the Word of God. Paul wants to make that clear, and he did in Romans 1:16. The gospel is different from the law. The gospel is what God has done for us; the law is God’s demand that we be perfect. Again Luther: “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. The gospel says, ‘Believe this,’ and everything is already done.”
You see, faith is not genetic. It’s not hereditary. It’s not in the genes. Christian parents don’t automatically produce Christian children. We bring them to Baptism, we bring them to church, we teach them, we speak to them, and yet many don’t stay with it. They’re like the parable of the seed and the soils: faith begins, but something along life’s path begins to crowd it out, or strangle it, or dry it up. Paul’s way of expressing this truth is this: “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” Tracing your genealogy back to Abraham, he argues, doesn’t make you an Israelite in the true sense of the word. That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise who are counted as offspring.
In chapter 4:13, Paul writes, “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” The contrast is between works of the law here in Romans and works of the promise of God, the gospel, the promise given, for example, to Abraham and Sarah by the Lord God. And Paul offers up for the Jew and Gentile alike two examples to prove his point.
Number one begins in verse 7: “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” Abraham had two sons: Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael was the legal firstborn son of Hagar, the servant of Sarah. He was entitled to the inheritance of the firstborn son according to the law and custom of the ancient world. But Ishmael was conceived out of unbelief; Abraham and Sarah in that moment simply did not believe that God was going to fulfill His promise. They had waited a very long time; they couldn’t imagine that Sarah, an old woman, would conceive and bear a son in her old age. But the promised seed of salvation did not fall to the line of Ishmael; it fell to Isaac. He was the son of the promise, born miraculously to Abraham and Sarah. In God’s economy of salvation and faith, God is not governed by natural law, not by the natural laws of anything, especially biology.
In his second example, he underscores the theme of faith versus good works: “And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls, she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.'” The law of the land is the younger serves the older, but here it’s reversed. In the womb, Jacob the younger was chosen over his elder twin brother Esau. Jacob would be Isaac’s heir and forerunner to Christ, not Esau, even before either of the sons could do anything bad or good. God chose Jacob. Jacob’s place in salvation history was established by the Word of God alone. Merit had nothing to do with it. The Word of God always prevails over nature.
This was true in the life of Jesus as well. A virgin conceived and bore a son. That violates everything you ever learned about biology. But God does not work by law, not by moral law, not by civil law, and not by the laws of nature. He doesn’t work the way we work. His ways are a mystery to us, often hidden, sometimes quite frankly unexplained to us.
Ishmael and Isaac remind us that salvation is not hereditary, that we must be born again as children of the promise. Jacob and Esau show us that before the twins were born and had done anything at all, neither good nor bad, God chose Jacob by grace. “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” It’s a tough statement. People often misread it. The statement “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” is the language of preference; it’s not an emotional statement. Paul is actually quoting Malachi 1:2-3, where the reference is to Jacob, also named Israel, and Edom, also named Esau. It’s not about the eternal destination of either Jacob or Esau; it’s about which one salvation history hinges upon. And the one that is greater is Jacob. In the plan of salvation, God is working out the world’s salvation through Jacob, not Esau.
Those two remind us that God’s election is a gift of grace, without any merit or worthiness or anything that we do. So also for you. We are here this morning, listening to the Word of God and receiving the gifts of Christ as Christians, solely because of God’s choice, by God’s grace. Ephesians 1:4-5, Paul wrote that too: “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.” You can no more boast of being here or believing in Christ than clay can boast of being formed into a vase. The Potter does this; the clay does nothing.
The rule of law is meant for the sinful world, and when people of this world ignore it, they do it at their peril and at others’. But the law cannot bring you into the kingdom of God. That is entirely done by grace, through the Word and Sacrament ministry of Jesus Christ, who bore the sins of the world: the sins of Ishmael, the sins of Isaac, the sins of Esau, the sins of you and me. You were born on the right side of eternal history, the side that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus took: the gospel side. It is the power of salvation to all who have been called to believe.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.