“Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God concerning them is for their salvation. I can testify about them that they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Since they are ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the most entertaining, but also frustrating experiences in life is having an argument with a toddler who is convinced she’s right when she’s really not. That little girl will passionately defend her position to the ground. It’s cute, really. The problem, of course, is that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. She has zeal, but insufficient knowledge. Knowing something with a lot of passion and even confidence doesn’t count for much when you’re still wrong. As Paul continues talking about Israel and the church here, he says one of those groups was in that position. Let’s talk about which one and why.

As promised yesterday, here in chapter 10, Paul takes a turn to explaining how salvation works. We’ll get into more of the details of that next week, but for now let’s put things in their proper context. We always have to do that – especially at chapter breaks – because Paul (or any of the other various authors of the documents we understand to be Scripture) didn’t write in chapters. They just wrote. Chapter and verse breaks were put in much later.

Do you remember what Paul was talking about at the end of our chapter 9 and which we just talked about yesterday? He was talking about the fact that Gentiles were coming into the church, that they were starting to take part in what God was doing to advance His kingdom, that they were obtaining the righteousness of God because they were approaching and receiving it by faith. On the contrary. members of the people of Israel were not doing so, they were being excluded from the righteousness of God, because they were attempting to obtain it themselves by works. The one way works to find and experience the righteousness of God. The other way doesn’t.

What we see out of the gate here in chapter 10 is that this wasn’t just some objective, academic fact to Paul. This was deeply concerning to him. He had already expressed that back at the beginning of chapter 9. He was so passionate to see his own people come to know and experience the righteousness of God by faith in Christ that he was willing to give up his own place if it would make sure they could get there. I don’t suspect he really meant that, but was rather speaking hyperbolically to emphasize just how great his passion toward that end was.

Here he repeats the idea. “Brothers and sisters” – and this opening word indicates Paul is talking specifically to fellow believers, other members of the body of Christ. “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God concerning them is for their salvation.” Paul wanted to see his people saved. Badly. He wanted to see everyone come to a saving knowledge of Jesus and the right relationship with God that comes from it, but he especially wanted that for his people, his family.

That’s right and good. Our first concern in terms of seeing the people around us saved should be our family. Those are the people to whom we have the greatest and most consistent access. If we are not sharing the Gospel effectively with them, we probably aren’t sharing it but so effectively with anybody else either. Learn to talk about Jesus with your family, and you’ll be able to talk about Him with anybody.

Notice the other thing Paul says here, though. His concern for Israel was for their salvation. In other words, he didn’t think they had it. They may have had the Law, and they may have had the covenants, and they may have fancied themselves as having a right relationship with God because of those two things, but it was all a delusion. They were still in their sins. The Law wasn’t saving them. It couldn’t save them. There was only one option available for that, and they had rejected it. Paul’s passion was to see them come around, and as we are going to see, he believed there would be a time eventually when many more of them would, but that day was not yet.

The problem for Israel – that is, the members of the genetic tribe of people called Israel who by and large had rejected Jesus as Messiah because they were too stuck on an understanding of the nature and plans of God that was incorrect – was that they thought they knew how God worked. The thing is, they weren’t hostile to God. They were just ignorant about Him. They had great passion, great zeal for God, but they were willfully ignorant of what He had done to finally bring them all permanently into a right relationship with Him. “I can testify about them that they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.”

So many people think they know who God is and what He is like, and they’re just not right. They have zeal, but not according to knowledge. Their zeal may be positive, or it may be negative. They may be positively passionate about God, but because they have been set for some reason on a path that is not consistent with the Scriptures, they are pursuing some other conception of God than what actually is, all the while imagining themselves to be going in the right direction. These situations are always tragic, and these are some of the hardest people to help see the truth. These are what a friend of mine once called the “unlost.” In order to get the unlost saved, you have to get them lost first. That’s tough.

Some people, though, are negatively passionate about God. Their zeal is against His goodness or even His existence. Once again, though, their zeal is not according to knowledge. They have adopted an understanding of God’s character that is not consistent with the full council of Scripture. They cherry pick passages that fit a conception they have convinced themselves is correct for some reason (usually a relational or an emotional one even though they will generally dress this in an intellectual gloss) and ignore or explain away the multitude of passages that present a fuller (and more easily seen as positive) picture.

The result of this is the irony that both of these groups do the same thing. They both buy into an incorrect picture of God and reject this. But because they are so convinced of their correctness, they are exceedingly difficult to persuade of what is actually right and true. They are confident toddlers arguing a point they don’t understand.

The particular point that was catching the people of Israel was how one obtains the righteousness of God. “Since they are ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness.” The Jews believed the righteousness of God was something they could obtain solely by their dedication to the Law of Moses. This wasn’t wrong in theory, but in practice it never worked. Sin was too great of an obstacle. More than that, sin was too fundamentally a part of our nature for the Law to be able to get us and keep us in a right relationship with God.

Because of this, what they imagined to be God’s righteousness, wasn’t really His righteousness at all. It was merely their conception of it. But because they were pursuing merely their conception of God’s righteousness rather than His actual righteousness which had been made freely available to everyone in Christ, they were missing it in their ignorance. Thus, salvation wasn’t available to them.

Friends, we’re really no different from that. Just like they did, we can convince ourselves that we can make ourselves right with God by our own effort. When we do this, though, we wind up pursuing our own righteousness instead of God’s righteousness through Christ. While that is a path we can pursue through life, there is no salvation to be found down that road. There’s only us living in a tiny, little, cramped universe that doesn’t extend much beyond the tips of our fingers. That’s no way to live. Literally. Let us make sure that our zeal for God is paired with a proper knowledge of God so that we can fully obtain the life that is truly life in Him through Jesus.