When someone understands what the Bible calls “good news,” they usually respond with hesitation. The gospel message that Jesus bore the consequences of our sins at the cross sounds like good news, but a little too good to be true. When people hear that all they have to do to receive Jesus’ free gift of salvation is believe in Him, it feels a little like one of those emails telling us that we’ve received an inheritance from a wealthy benefactor. Sure, we have! Click, delete. The problem is that the words we use to describe our response to God are often heard without any context and they’re robbed of their meaning and impact as a result. I’d like to consider one of the key passages that describes how a person can respond to the gospel.
Romans 10:9-13 is, along with John 3:16, one of two passages that has been credited with bringing Queen Victoria to settled confidence in Jesus Christ for salvation. The verses brought her certainty and hope in the future that God had promised her because of what Jesus had done. Immediately preceding this section, Paul contrasts God’s means of being made right with Him with the various means that people dream up. He says in verse 3, “being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.” What he means is that people will come up with a million ways to persuade God and others that they’re really good people, but in so doing they inevitably reject God’s attempt to rescue them from their sins. We’re so busy trying to persuade God that we’re great swimmers that we never get into the rescue boat and the danger is that we’ll eventually drown. We work hard at showing how diligent, inclusive, progressive, generous, religious or moral we are, but we often never stop to ask, “Is that what God wants from me? Is that how God will judge me?” We reject God’s standard and try to set up our own.
In verse 9, Paul records the now-famous words, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” All I have to do is say “Jesus is Lord” and believe in His resurrection and I’m off the hook? Something doesn’t sound right. There’s something we must confess and something we must believe. Let’s consider both of these in turn.
Confessing Jesus as Lord is a foreign concept to us. Lord sounds like a term from medieval Europe. What does it mean? The word Lord is used over 600 times in the Old Testament to translate the personal name of God. So, confessing that Jesus is Lord is acknowledging that Jesus is God. But the term had wider implications than that. In first-century Rome, you heard the phrase most often in connection with the emperor. “Caesar is Lord” was a statement of his absolute authority. To declare that Jesus is Lord is an acknowledgement that He has the ultimate right to rule in your life. It’s like saying, “Jesus is in charge.” It’s an announcement that you’re under new management. Jesus is steering the ship now, not you. That’s the first of two ways that Paul describes a person’s response to the gospel in Romans 10:9.
The second part of our response is that we believe in our heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. Does that seem odd to you? Why would it be so important to God that we believe that? It shows that the Christian hope is particular. We love to grab vague concepts of God and fill in the blanks as we see fit. To respond to the gospel, however, we need to believe in God’s decisive action in history. Jesus’ resurrection is shorthand for His death on the cross for sinners and resurrection from the dead on the third day. To believe in Jesus’ miraculous resurrection is to accept that Jesus has power over life and death and will give eternal life to all who turn to Him. In the Bible, believing is never just an objective assent to certain facts, though. We respond to the gospel with trust. The facts of Jesus’ resurrection move us at a personal and relational level. We give our loyalty and our love to Him because we recognize who He is and what He’s done for us.
I can still remember the first time I came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection. I had skeptically and critically examined the witnesses and historical evidence that Jesus died and literally rose from the dead, appearing physically to both individuals and groups. For me, this fact changed everything. It provided unmistakable evidence that Jesus’ claims were true. It convinced me that God had come into our world and so all man-made attempts at religion were irrelevant. If God had spoken, nothing else mattered.
Have you confessed Jesus as your Lord? Is He in the driver’s seat of your life or have you left Him at the curb or safely in the backseat where you can ask for His input when you need it but otherwise go about your life the way you see fit? Have you believed in His resurrection? Has history’s greatest miracle defined how you understand God and the One who claims to hold the power of eternal life? As the old hymn of Isaac Watts says, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
In awe of Him,
Paul
