NOTES for Rom 10:6-8

Paul recalls a passage from the Book of Deuteronomy that says the Torah is not in heaven and not on the seabed, that it is accessible to a person if only the person himself wants to follow it. The meaning of the passage is quite transparent: a person does not have to justify himself by saying that the Torah is too difficult for him, or that it is too high or too deep for his understanding. It can and must be in a person's heart and on his lips. Here it is quite possible that the issue is not only following the Torah, but also witness.

The apostle in this context allegorically interprets the words about heaven and the sea abyss as referring to Christ's death and His resurrection from the dead. By this he makes clear that people who do not want to see the reality connected with Christ and the Kingdom are, most of all, being dishonest. They precisely do not want to see what they could easily see if they wished. Paul also points to the reasons for this unwillingness. The matter is how a person understands righteousness. The apostle does not deny the zeal of his compatriots and fellow believers in what concerns God and religious life. But this zeal is often connected with a misunderstanding of foundational things. In particular, of what righteousness is.

Paul contrasts God's righteousness with human righteousness. It is obvious to him that the fullness and completion of the Torah is the Messiah, Christ. In any case, if we are speaking about the inner Torah: for the path of the inner Torah ends with a person's becoming a living Torah, and apart from Christ no one has ever shown the world an example of a living Torah. Therefore one who seeks the fullness of righteousness and the living Torah must inevitably go after Christ, if only he is honest with himself: for precisely and only together with Christ and in His Kingdom can he hope to find what he is seeking. But this is only if the search is honest and uncompromising. Meanwhile, in Paul's time it had become a commonplace of Jewish religious life to point to the obvious fact that the living Torah is an ideal unattainable for a person.

Everyone reconciled themselves to this as inevitable, making the inner Torah the goal, which was at least somewhat realizable in the life of an ordinary person. And righteousness came to mean not the unattainable ideal, but the real practice of real spiritual and ascetic life. Religious people approved such righteousness, although not all chose this path for themselves: after all, it was a kind of competition in which anyone could take part, but in which no one could hope to win the prize.

Religious and ascetic sport in a religious environment is an entirely respectable and encouraged occupation. But only until someone lays claim to the main prize. Until someone begins to play seriously, with the main goal in mind. At best everyone will look at such a person as a daring upstart, and at worst as an enemy of the religion whose boundaries he has outgrown, daring to do what others do not dare. This is understandable: the goal is always beyond religion. Any religion. It is in the Kingdom. Where Christ is, the Son of God, rejected by the religious people of His era, who preferred their religion to Him.