Romans 10:3

This verse goes to the root of the matter, and explains the failure of the Gospel among the Jews. It was due to their ignorance of the righteousness of God. All men need and crave righteousness, and the Jews, in their ignorance of God's, sought to establish a righteousness of their own. Their own is the key to the situation. Their idea was that they could be good men without becoming God's debtors, or owing anything at all to Him. Such an idea, of course, shows complete ignorance of the essential relations of God and man, and when acted on fatally perverts life. It did so with the Jews. When the Gospel came, revealing the righteousness of God that for which man must be absolutely indebted to God's grace, and which he can never boast of as “his own” it cut right across all the habits and prejudices of the Jews, and they did not submit themselves to it. Paul interprets the position of his nation through the recollection of his own experience as a Pharisee no doubt rightly on the whole. For ὑπετάγησαν in middle sense see Romans 8:7; Romans 13:1; Hebrews 12:9; James 4:7; 1 Peter 2:13.

Romans 10:4. Further proof that the pursuit of a righteousness of one's own by legal observances is a mistake, the act of men “in ignorance”. τέλος γὰρ νόμου χριστὸς εἰς δικαιοσύνην παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι : For Christ is law's end, etc. The sense required a sense which the words very naturally yield is that with Christ in the field law as a means of attaining righteousness has ceased and determined. The moment a man sees Christ and understands what He is and what He has done, he feels that legal religion is a thing of the past: the way to righteousness is not the observance of statutes, no matter though they have been promulgated by God Himself; it is faith, the abandonment of the soul to the redeeming judgment and mercy of God in His Son. The meaning is virtually the same as that of our Lord's words in Luke 16:16. νόμου without the article is “law” in the widest sense; the Mosaic law is only one of the most important instances which come under this description; and it, with all statutory conceptions of religion, ends when Christ appears. It is quite true to say that Christ consummates or fulfils the law (hence Calvin would prefer complementum or perfectio to finis as a rendering of τέλος); quite true also that He is the goal of the O.T. dispensation, and that it is designed to lead to Him (cf. Matthew 5:17; Galatians 3:24); but though both true and Pauline, these ideas are irrelevant here, where Paul is insisting, not on the connection, but on the incompatibility, of law and faith, of one's own righteousness and the righteousness of God. Besides, in limiting νόμος to the Mosaic O.T. law, this interpretation does less than justice to the language, and misses the point of παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι : there is no believer, Gentile or Jew, for whom law, Mosaic or other, retains validity or significance as a way to δικαιοσύνη, after the revelation of the righteousness of God in Christ.

In Romans 10:5 ff. Paul describes more fully, and in O.T. terms, the two ways of attaining δικαιοσύνη law and faith. His aim is to show that they are mutually exclusive, but that the latter is open and accessible to all.