Romans 10:3-4

“ For they not knowing God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. ”

These verses are meant to explain the terrible misunderstanding which weighed on the mind of Israel, and which now brings about the separation between God and His people. Not understanding that it was from God their righteousness was to come, Israel were led to maintain their legal dispensation at any cost, and to mistake the limit which God had purposed to assign it.

The term ἀγνοοῦντες, not knowing, is directly related to the preceding expression: not according to knowledge. Under the discipline of the law, the discernment of true righteousness, that which God grants to faith, should have been formed in them. For, on the one hand, the conscientious effort to observe the law would have brought them to feel their weakness (comp. chap. 7); and, on the other, the profound study of the Scriptures would have taught them, by the example of Abraham (Gen 15:5) and by sundry prophetic declarations (Isaiah 50:8-9; Hab 2:4), that “righteousness and strength come from the Lord.” But through not using the law in this spirit of sincerity and humility, they proved unfit to understand the final revelation; and their mind, carried in a false direction, stumbled at the divine truth manifested in the appearing of the Messiah (Romans 9:32). Several commentators understand ἀγνοοῦντες in a very forcible sense: misconceiving. Meyer insists on retaining the natural sense: not knowing. This latter sense may suffice, indeed, provided it be not forgotten that in this case, as in many others, the want of knowing is the result of previous unfaithfulnesses; comp. 1 Corinthians 14:38 and Acts 17:30.

Though we did not know from the first part of the Epistle the meaning of the term: righteousness of God, it would appear clearly here from the contrasted expression: their own righteousness. The latter is a sentence of justification which man obtains in virtue of the way in which he has fulfilled the law. God gives him nothing; He simply attests and proclaims the fact. The righteousness of God, on the contrary, is the sentence of justification which He confers on faith of His own good will.

In the first proposition the subject in question is the notion of God's righteousness, which has not succeeded in finding an entrance into their mind; in the second, the word is taken in the concrete sense; the subject is righteousness, as it has been really offered them in Christ. Στῆσαι, to establish; this word means: to cause to stand erect as a monument raised, not to the glory of God, but to their own.

This proud attempt has issued in an open revolt, in the rejection of Christ and of the righteousness of God offered in Him. The verb οὐχ ὑπετάγησαν, they have not submitted themselves, characterizes the refusal to believe as a disobedience; it is the counterpart of the passages in which faith is called an obedience (Romans 1:5, Romans 6:17). This verb may have the passive or middle sense; here it is evidently the second (Romans 8:7, Romans 13:1).

But this voluntary revolt has cost Israel dear; for this is precisely the cause of their rejection.