Written by Michael Kelley, Guest Contributor

“Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.”
Romans 10:1-4

I didn’t used to read the instructions.

I would get a piece of furniture or some electronic equipment or decide to take on some kind of home repair and start in on it. In my younger days, I didn’t have the time for the whole “measure twice, cut once” principle; it was more of a “just get started and figure it out along the way” kind of vibe.

So why did it take me so long to start reading the directions?

Lots of reasons probably – impatience, the need for activity, the desire for something tangible to show my work – these are some of them. But perhaps in some way, if you look deeper, there was also pride lurking there. Pride that said, I could figure it out. Pride that thought more of my own intelligence and ingenuity. Pride that my way would be fine if I got close to the end result.

I was thinking about these projects when I read these words from today’s scripture, where Paul talks about his countrymen, the Israelites, in Romans 10.

Paul loved these people. And no doubt, they were zealous. But there was an ironic quality to their zeal – they were missing the very God for which they were so zealous. In his words, their zeal was not based on knowledge. The Israelites of his day were operating under the assumption that they knew all there was to know about God, and to be fair, they had a tremendous amount of knowledge through the law, the prophets, and the like. But despite all this knowledge, they missed the crucial piece that tied it together – Jesus Christ.

Jesus was (and is) the source of true righteousness because it’s only through Christ that our hearts can be made new. Without Him, all the righteous acts we might perform are just window dressing – they are like hanging pieces of fruit on the branches of a dead tree. 

But to get this missing piece, the Israelites had to submit their knowledge to what God revealed in Christ. To put it in terms of the illustration, they had to stop working on their own version of the project and start embracing its prescribed nature. The one given by the Designer Himself, not their interpretation of what that end product should be. And in some ways, not much has changed.

There is still within all of us a deep desire to prove ourselves. To justify ourselves by our actions. To make a go at righteousness on our own without submitting to the design for true righteousness. And when we do that, we make a startlingly bold claim: My version of righteousness is better than God’s.

And here we run up against the ironic nature of that claim – true righteousness is available to us. It’s available not through achievement but through faith, not through our works but through the finished work of Christ. 

So, we come again today to the question of what project we are working on—are we going at it on our own, convinced that through our own effort and ingenuity, we can come up with something closely resembling the design? 

Or are we submitting ourselves to the Designer’s intent? 

The gospel demands the latter.

DIG DEEPER
Read “What is Righteousness?” by Bryant Wright