Lecture 28: Paul's Gospel: The New Exodus, the True Israel, and the Root of Sin

The lecture, section by section

1. Paul the missionary

   Paul is first a missionary, not first a theologian and not even first a pastor, a fact academics forget at their peril. The man's sheer physical strength must have been remarkable, five times beaten with rods, endlessly on the road. Schreiner commends the forthcoming pastoral epistles commentary by Robert Yarbrough, with its fine section on work: pastors, with due rest, are called to labor hard, and Paul is the pattern. His kingdom work he describes in stacked metaphors: he planted the church, an agricultural figure; laid its foundation, an architectural one; gave it birth, a biological one; and betrothed it to Christ, a marriage figure. All four say one thing: the church established.

2. The gospel as second exodus

   Paul's gospel is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, as his constant citations show, and he casts it as a second exodus. Jesus gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age: rescue is exodus language, the vocabulary of freedom and liberation. The new exodus has come in Jesus, and it rests on his death, his giving of himself for us.

3. The seed who never sinned

   Who is the true offspring of Abraham? The Old Testament pointed to a king in David's line, and every king failed; even the godly ones, David, Hezekiah, Josiah, were sinners. Paul's argument in naming Jesus the one true seed, Schreiner suggests, is that the only true son of God at the end of the day is a son who always obeyed, who never sinned. So the way into Abraham's family is to belong to Jesus, and every believer is a child of Abraham: Galatians 3 says those of faith are Abraham's sons, and Romans 4 makes Abraham the father of the circumcised who believe and of the uncircumcised who believe, since he himself believed before he was circumcised.

4. Circumcised hearts in Romans 2

   Romans 2 presses hard: circumcision benefits the law-keeper, but the lawbreaker's circumcision has become uncircumcision, he stands outside the covenant; and the uncircumcised man who keeps the law's requirements is counted as circumcised, and will judge the circumcised lawbreaker. Is that obedience hypothetical or actual? Douglas Moo, for whom Schreiner has enormous respect and real friendship, reads it as hypothetical, since the section's point is that all have sinned. Schreiner disagrees, on the strength of verses 28 and 29 and the connective that binds them in: a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit. The obedience in view is genuine, not merit but the result of the Spirit's work; Gentiles in whom the Spirit works are true Jews, the true circumcision. And its purpose in Romans 2 matches Romans 9 through 11: to provoke Israel the way a runaway son is provoked when he sees the adopted son basking in the love that could be his if he came home.

5. True Israel and a future for Israel

   Are believers in Jesus the true, spiritual Israel? Yes: Philippians 3:3 says we are the true circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God, and the true Jews are those with the Spirit's work in their hearts, Jew and Gentile alike. And that is not an either-or, for Schreiner also reads Romans 11:26, all Israel will be saved, of ethnic Israel, a future salvation at or near the second coming; in Romans 9 through 11 the word Israel is consistently ethnic, and context is king. Jews who believe now belong to the spiritual Israel as well.

6. One new man

   Ephesians 2 tells the Gentiles' story: once excluded from the citizenship of Israel, foreigners to the covenants of promise, now brought near by the blood of Christ; the dividing wall torn down, both reconciled to God in one body, fellow citizens with the saints, members of God's household. Ephesians 3 names it the mystery now revealed: Jews and Gentiles co-heirs, members of the same body, one people of God in the church of Jesus Christ, which is exactly the promise to Abraham, all nations blessed, being fulfilled.

7. The Israel of God

   Galatians 6:16's blessing on the Israel of God is disputed, and the grammar genuinely could go either way. What decides it, Schreiner argues, is the whole book. The Judaizers demanded circumcision, the mainstream requirement for any proselyte: become a Jew to be Abraham's child. Paul strikes back: the only circumcision you need, the only cutting off, is the cross of Christ, for if righteousness came through the law, Christ died for nothing. The letter's one point is that all who believe are Abraham's children; to end it by reserving the Israel of God for Jews would be terribly confusing. In the final paragraph, where Paul rings the changes on everything he has said, the Israel of God is the church, Jew and Gentile together, though he grants that good interpreters read it otherwise.

8. An everlasting covenant and a new creation

   But Genesis 17 calls circumcision an everlasting covenant, in the flesh, for the generations, binding even on foreigners; how can Paul set it aside? Because everlasting means for as long as the old creation lasted, and the old creation's clock has struck. The cross and the resurrection introduced a new world: the world has been crucified to me, Paul says, and the letter's very first verse, God the Father who raised him from the dead, already wins the argument, for when the resurrection arrives in history the new creation has arrived. Hence the closing verdict: neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what matters is the new creation. The Israel of God is drawn around the new creation now. So the church wears Israel's own titles, assembly, holy, elect, beloved, which is why Romans 9 must ask whether God's promises to Israel have failed, and answers with both fulfillment and a future.

9. The fundamental sin

   Romans 1 locates the root: they did not honor God or give him thanks, and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator. The fundamental sin, from which all other sins flow, is de-godding God: the creed that says, I can make it in life without God. Schreiner remembers a Jewish neighbor, apart from his wife perhaps the kindest person he has known, who held exactly that creed in its standard modern form, that one can be a good and complete human being without God, and he names it for what Paul says it is: the height of arrogance, spoken of a woman he loved and still loves. Truth and love travel together.

10. Symptoms and the cause

    From that root Paul moves immediately to same-sex sin, because as worship of the Creator is the creature's natural posture, so the created order of male and female mirrors it, and its overturning mirrors the deeper distortion. Its increase is a symptom, and the cause is idolatry, as adultery, cohabitation, and lying are also symptoms: real sins, to be addressed as Paul addresses them, but never mistaken for the root, for a ministry that fixates on symptoms has misdiagnosed the disease. In passing Schreiner states his position on justification: it is forensic, in the traditional sense.

11. Sin as a power, the law in its orbit

    Paul also speaks of sin as more than acts: sin and death are powers, and the apocalyptic reading of Paul, overdone by some, is right that two dominions are in view, humanity in Adam, in the flesh, captive to the world, the flesh, and the devil. What then of the law? Israel hoped that keeping Torah would bring the blessing. Schreiner's image: sin is like a sun that draws the law into its orbit. The law is a fine planet, nothing wrong with it at all, but sin's gravity captures the good thing, and the commandment, as Romans 7 shows, arouses the very desire it forbids. The law is good, and the law is not the answer.

12. Everyone believes in law

    Here Paul cuts across every culture. Liberal Christians, Schreiner says provocatively, are all Judaizers: not for God's law, but for law, the creed that education and the right rules will produce a just and peaceful society. Education helps; it cannot reach the fierce resistance to God at the root of the human heart. Fundamentalism, when it strays from the gospel, and not all of it does, makes the same trade in the other direction: keep the rules and all will be well. Muslims, Hindus, every system outside the gospel lands on the same answer in different dress: the rules, the law. And Paul says it will not work, not because laws and commands are needless, but because rules cannot cure the cancer at the heart of human beings. The answer is the gospel.

13. Original sin and the one human race

    We were dead in trespasses and sins; the natural person does not welcome the things of the Spirit. Romans 5 says all people enter the world condemned before God, guilty, spiritually dead, and headed for physical death: original sin, the doctrine Bernard Ramm's title frankly called an offense to reason, since everyone would rather enter the world poised like Adam than spring-loaded to sin, and the doctrine Chesterton pointed to as verified by simple observation. Schreiner offers the household proof with a grandfather's delight: the sweetest of grandchildren, never taught to sin, in time reveals the strong little will she inherited from her parents, who inherited it from theirs, which is our story too. The human race is an organic unity; God did not constitute life as a series of fresh starts, and it would be a strange existence if we were unrelated to the whole human family. Hence the historical Adam is a huge deal, not to be compromised. And the doctrine carries a mercy with it: one race from one man closes the door that racism tries to open, for we are one humanity, all together in this.

1. Paul establishes churches as planter, builder, mother, and matchmaker: all of it labor. Where has your service of Christ's church grown passive, and what one act of labor could you take up this month?

2. The fundamental sin is living as if we can make it without God. Where does your ordinary week quietly run on that creed, in schedule, money, or worry, and what would honoring and thanking him there look like?

3. Rules restrain, but they cannot cure. Where are you managing a sin with rules that only the gospel can heal, and what would bringing it to the cross instead of the rulebook mean this week?