Romans 9:4

Paul is about to take up a painful subject: Israel’s unbelief, and the question of whether God has kept his promises to them. What he says could be heard as Paul turning his back on his own people, or as a charge that God had failed them. His readers in Rome were Jewish and Gentile believers, and how God’s promises to Israel stand beside the gospel was a live and often sore question between them. So before he says anything else, Paul assures them three times over that he means every word: “I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost.”

These are the words of a solemn oath. Among the Jews an oath was a serious thing, often made in God’s name, and Paul speaks in that way here. He uses a similar oath elsewhere, appealing to God, who “knoweth that I lie not” (2 Corinthians 11:31). The verb for “say”, légō, is the ordinary word for speaking or relating something in words. Truth, alḗtheia, comes from a word meaning “unconcealed” and stands for what is real and true, so Paul is declaring that what follows is the plain fact of his heart. “In Christ” places his words within his union with Christ. He speaks as one who belongs to Christ and stands before him. “I lie not” then says the same thing again from the other side.

“That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.” Heaviness, lýpē, is the general word for sadness or grief, and Paul calls his great. Sorrow, odýnē, is pain or anguish, grief that weighs a person down, and it is often a sharper word than lýpē. Continual, adiáleiptos, means unbroken or unceasing. This grief stays with Paul all the time, a constant ache. It is “in my heart”, kardía, and in Scripture the heart is the centre of a person, holding his thoughts, feelings and will. By setting two words for grief side by side, “great heaviness and continual sorrow”, Paul shows how heavy his burden is and how far down it reaches.

Paul grieves because his own kinsmen, who had received the covenants, the law, the temple service and the promises of the Messiah (verses 4 and 5), had for the most part rejected Jesus as their Messiah and were missing the salvation offered in him. Paul was a Jew himself and a former Pharisee, rooted in Israel’s history, and he felt this keenly. His people had been given every advantage and had stumbled at the very cornerstone of God’s plan. The same longing comes again in the next chapter: “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved” (Romans 10:1). Paul wept over those who live as “the enemies of the cross of Christ” (Philippians 3:18), and he carried the weakness of every believer as his own: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?” (2 Corinthians 11:29).

“For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” The “For”, gár, gives the reason for what came before, so this verse shows how great the sorrow of verse 2 is. The verb eúchomai means to wish, and also to pray to God, so the words carry the weight of a longing brought before God. “I could wish” puts it as a wish Paul would make if such a thing could be done.

Accursed, anáthema, means something under a religious ban, devoted to destruction. In the Greek Old Testament it often marks something set apart to God for destruction. To be “accursed from Christ” would be to be cut off from Christ and all his blessings under God’s curse, the very opposite of salvation. The contrast with the chapter before is sharp. Romans 8 ends in triumph with the love from which nothing can separate a believer, and the next thing Paul writes is that he could wish that very separation on himself for his people’s sake.

His brethren are his “kinsmen according to the flesh”. Here sárx, flesh, means physical descent, so Paul is speaking of his fellow Israelites, the people of his own blood and nation. For the Jews of his day kinship and national identity meant a great deal, and Paul, who spent his life bringing Gentiles into God’s family, still felt that tie deeply. In the next chapter he grieves that his people have “a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge”, and are seeking to establish their own righteousness (Romans 10:1–4).

Moses prayed in the same spirit after Israel made the golden calf: “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Exodus 32:32). Paul’s wish shows a love willing to bear a cost for the good of others, the love Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13. It also shows how serious unbelief is, and how great a loss it is for people who have received so much from God.

“Who are Israelites”. The name Israēlítēs means the descendants of Jacob, whom God named Israel, and Paul uses it for his own people as the ones who received God’s gifts. He lists six in verse 4 and adds two more in verse 5, the fathers and Christ. Each gift was God’s own, given to this one nation, and the list makes Israel’s present unbelief all the sadder.

Scripture speaks of Israel’s place in the same way elsewhere. Moses asked, “what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them” (Deuteronomy 4:7–8), and called Israel “an holy people unto the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 7:6). The psalmist says that God showed his word and statutes to Israel, and “He hath not dealt so with any nation” (Psalm 147:19–20). Paul had already written that the Jews’ chief advantage was that “unto them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:1–2), and Jesus said that “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). God worked through this chosen nation to bring salvation to the world, and these gifts prepared the way for Christ.

“Whose are the fathers” refers back to the Israelites. The fathers are the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who received God’s covenant promises. Then comes the greatest gift of all: “of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came.” Here sárx means Christ’s human nature and his physical descent. The Son of God was truly born into a human family, from this very nation. The Messiah was expected to come from Abraham’s seed, from Judah and from the house of David, and the promises to Abraham and to David that we met under verse 4 (Genesis 12:1–3, 2 Samuel 7:12–16) are fulfilled in him. Jewish believers would have heard this as the plain claim that Jesus is their Messiah by right of birth.

Because he shares our flesh and blood, he is our Kinsman-Redeemer. He could die, and “through death ... destroy him that had the power of death”, and he became “a merciful and faithful high priest” who is able to help those who are tempted (Hebrews 2:14–18).

Paul goes straight on to say who this man is: “who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.” The preposition epí, “over”, places Christ above everything and ruling it all. Theós is the common word for a deity, and in Scripture above all the name of the one true God, and here Paul gives it to Christ. Blessed, eulogētós, means worthy of praise, and in the New Testament it is said of God. “For ever” makes that praise eternal, and “Amen” seals the whole with a solemn yes. So the verse sets Christ’s human descent, “as concerning the flesh”, right beside his rule over all as God, and the wonder of the incarnation lies in the two together.

The rest of the New Testament says the same of him. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), and “All things were made by him” (John 1:3). “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), and he is the image of the invisible God, by whom all things were created and in whom all things consist (Colossians 1:15–17). He is the one who, being in the form of God, took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:5–8), and in him “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Both natures matter for our salvation. As a true man he could stand in our place, suffer, die and rise again. As God his sacrifice has infinite worth, enough to atone for sin and to conquer death. So the God who became man is the one we worship, blessed for ever.

These verses show us a heart shaped by the gospel. Paul had just written that nothing can separate him from the love of God, and the first thing that assurance brought out in him was grief for people who did not yet share it. He said so carefully and truthfully, in Christ and with the Holy Ghost as witness, and his love went as far as Moses’ prayer for Israel. The Saviour he served went further still. He wept over Jerusalem and became a curse in our place.

The list in verses 4 and 5 shows God’s faithfulness. Every gift on it came from him, given to one nation over many centuries, and every one of them pointed to Christ. Israel’s story shows that God’s gifts call for faith in the one they point to. For all who believe, those gifts reach us in him: adoption into God’s family, his glory seen in the face of his Son, a new covenant in his blood, and promises that are yea and amen in him.

And the passage ends in worship. Paul cannot name Christ without praising him as God over all, blessed for ever, and he closes with “Amen.” The one who came from Israel’s fathers as a man rules over everything, including the people Paul grieved for, and that is why his sorrow could sit alongside hope.