“So what advantage does the Jew have? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? Considerable in every way. First, they were entrusted with the very words of God. What then? If some were unfaithful, will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? Absolutely not! Let God be true, even though everyone is a liar, as it is written: ‘That you may be justified in your words and triumph when you judge.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things that new and still-learning followers of Jesus sometimes struggle with is whether they’ve done something to mess up God’s plans. It’s an easy thought to understand. If God planned for me to go left, but I go right instead, have I somehow set Him back or even derailed things He had previously set in motion? As Paul keeps up his condemnation of sin here in Romans, he starts this next section by dealing with some hypothetical questions that may be coming up in the minds of his audience. Let’s wrestle with him through the first one here.

If you were a Jewish background believer in Paul’s original audience in Rome, the last part of his letter was pretty bruising for you. I mean, Paul has spent the last couple of minutes (in the sense that Paul’s original letter didn’t have convenient chapters and verse numbers) telling you that being a Jew gave you absolutely no advantage on being right with God. This flew directly in the face of everything you had ever been taught your entire life. It was the equivalent of someone coming along and telling you that up is down and down is up. This would have rocked their world in a way that left their heads spinning pretty hard.

It’s completely understandable that there may have been some folks in the room – and later rounds of hearers as well – asking what the point of being a Jew was? I mean, sure you were born into it, and so really didn’t have any control over it in that sense, but had everyone been lying to you for all these years? “So what advantage does the Jew have? Or what is the benefit of circumcision?” To put that in the way Paul’s audience likely would have heard him, “What is the point of being a part of God’s covenant people if it doesn’t bring us any kind of advantage with Him?”

Paul anticipated these questions and offered a response to them. Well, he offered the beginning of a response. Paul does that sometimes in his letters. He’ll start off down a path, but then something he says triggers another thought in his head, and he darts off in pursuit of that. Then, he never comes back to finish the original thought. I understand. My mind works that way sometimes too. I occasionally drive my bride crazy because I’ll start talking about one thing, switch topics on her, and never come back to the original point. That’s kind of what happens to Paul here. Thankfully, God’s Spirit was gently directing his writing and using his ADD-like tendencies to get him to where he needed to go so we received the words we needed to hear.

Paul’s response to these Jewish-background folks who were questioning the point of their Jewishness is that it brought them “considerable [advantages] in every way.” Really? Great! So, what are these advantages? Well, Paul gives us one. This leads him to anticipate another potential objection to which he starts to respond, but then this leads him to yet another potential objection. Finally, he just lands back on the point he was making in the beginning of the letter before getting to the really good news. That’s where we’ll go over the next few days, starting next week.

Okay, but again, what is this first advantage? Well, “they were entrusted with the very words of God.” The people with whom God made a covenant of blessing and life for them and through them for the rest of the world were the recipients of God’s words through the prophets. They got direct access to God’s thoughts. They were shown what God expected in terms of how we could be in a relationship with Him. No other people got this. God did for one what He intended to do for everyone, and they were the one.

Now, we can speculatively debate and question God’s wisdom in taking this approach, but the fact is that He’s God and we’re not. He is the source of all wisdom. He knows and sees what we cannot even begin to imagine. He can anticipate twists and turns and bumps in the road that wouldn’t even register on our radar. We can trust that if He chose to do it this way, this was the very best way it could have been done. No other way would have accomplished His ends as directly as this way did. And, given how convoluted and twisted this path wound up being, that’s really saying something.

Paul’s offering up this first advantage prompts another rhetorical round of pushback. “What then? If some were unfaithful, will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?” In other words, “Sure, they got ‘the very words of God,’ but they didn’t do a very good job of keeping them. That’s the point you were just making a second ago. And if they did such a bad job of keeping them, if they were so unfaithful with them, wouldn’t this have gotten in the way of and otherwise made a mess God’s plans, nullifying His intentions of faithfulness to His words?”

That seems like yet another fair question. So, did it? No, it did not. “Let God be true, even though everyone is a liar [that’s from Psalm 116:11], as it is written: ‘That you may be justified in your words and triumph when you judge.'” That last part is a quote from Psalm 51:4. And if you go and look them up to see for yourself, and find them to be worded differently, Paul’s quotes would have been from the Greek version of the Psalms, known as the Septuagint, and your Bible’s translation is based on the Hebrew version, known as the Masoretic Text.

Paul’s point here is that our unfaithfulness cannot interrupt or undermine God’s faithfulness. His words are true even when we don’t handle them properly. If we misapply them, they’re still true. We just messed up in our application. If we misunderstand them, they’re still true. We just didn’t understand them properly. If we ignore them and don’t keep them, they’re still true. We just didn’t listen to them.

God is the source of truth. His words reveal truth to us. He communicates clearly and pretty directly. Our misunderstanding, misapplication, and downright disobedience don’t change that fact. It means we need to do a better job listening to Him. We need to work harder at taking His words on their own terms and understanding them through the lens of the culture into which they were written rather than insisting on understanding them through the lens of our preferences, desires, or personal cultural worldview.

God can, does, and always has accomplished His purposes even through the bumbling idiocy of uneven and unfaithful servants. Far from diminishing the wisdom of His words or the weight of His glory, this fact actually magnifies both. If God can still see His plans accomplished even through the likes of servants like us, He really must be a great God. If He can redeem and transform our brokenness no matter how broken it happens to be, He really is a powerful and gracious and compassionate and just God. He’s the kind of God who is worthy of our service and devotion.