Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
Great Sorrow and Unceasing Anguish
Romans 9:1-5
1 I tell the truth in Christ. I am not lying, my conscience testifying with me in the Holy Spirit · WEB
The triumph breaks into grief without transition, and the man secure in unseparable love offers to be accursed for his kin.
I tell the truth in Christ. I am not lying, my conscience testifying with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart.
No transition stands between the summit and this. The sentence before was nothing can separate us; the next breath is a triple oath — truth in Christ, not lying, conscience co-witnessing in the Spirit — sworn to certify a grief. The oath is necessary because the claim that follows would otherwise be disbelieved: the apostle to the Gentiles, the man who argued the law cannot justify, carries unceasing pain over Israel.
And then the sentence that measures the pain: for I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brothers' sake, my relatives according to the flesh Romans 9:3.
Accursed from Christ — anathema, severed from the love just declared unseverable Romans 8:39. The wish is contrary to possibility and Paul knows it; the grammar holds it as a prayer he could pray if it could avail. It is Moses' prayer after the calf — blot me out of your book Exodus 32:32 — the intercessor offering to trade places with the people. Whatever chapters 9 to 11 will say about election, they are prefaced by this: the writer would be damned in Israel's place if such a trade were possible. No reading of the chapters that produces a colder posture than their author's has read them.
Then the inventory of privileges, held with both hands: who are Israelites; whose is the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service, and the promises; of whom are the fathers Romans 9:4–5.
Eight possessions, all in the present tense — whose is, not whose was. The adoption, the glory that filled the sanctuary, the covenants plural, Sinai, the liturgy, the promises, the patriarchs — everything chapter 3 called the advantage of the Jew Romans 3:2, stated at full value at the exact moment the argument must explain Israel's unbelief.
And the list crowns with the ninth and greatest: and from whom is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all, God, blessed forever. Amen. The Messiah is Israel's — from them according to the flesh — and the sentence rises into doxology over him. The grief of the chapter is precisely calibrated: the people of the nine privileges, and the ninth privilege standing among them unrecognized.
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