Daily Bible Reading: Jeremiah 35 and Romans 3

Jeremiah 35 - In the days of Jehoiakim (609-598 BC), Jeremiah said go to the Rechabites and take them to the Temple, give them wine.  The Rechabites were a nomadic clan that upheld the ancient religious practices of the desert. They didn’t live in houses but in tents close to the soil.  They had been driven into Jerusalem around 605 BC, by bands of Syrians sent out by Nebuchadnezzar to harry the countryside according to JB note.  Jeremiah does what the Lord commands - takes them to a room in the Temple and offers them the wine. They refuse to drink and remind Jeremiah of the promise made long ago by their ancestor Jonahdab.The Lord wants the Judaeans to notice the faithfulness of the Rachabites to the commitments they made in the past NOT to drink wine, and NOT to settle down in villages. Jeremiah reminds his people that they too made promises in the past and they too will be held to the same standard of faithfulness.  He reminds them that the Lord will bless the Rechabites and bring destruction to Judah and Jerusalem.

Romans 3 – Paul asks, then, if all will be judged according to the standard by which they have chosen to live (or by which they have been given by virtue of where they come from, what group they are part of), then of what benefit is it to be a Jew.  Paul says it is a great advantage.  “The utterances of God were given to the Jews” (3:3). His promises to them, His constant faithfulness to them is their advantage, not their faithfulness to Him. 

Everyone is deserving of God’s judgment—we all are “under the domination of sin” (3:9), and he quotes a medley of scripture verses [mostly psalms—14, 53, 5, 10, 140 and 36] that link man’s different faculties: his understanding, his desire, his deeds, his speaking, his propensity to run to do evil, do violence, his lack of fear before God (3:11-18). The Law itself does not bring release from sin (justification) but mainly “consciousness of sin” (3:20). The JB note says there is allusion here to psalm 143:2, which emphasizes that “no one is virtuous by your standard.”

But now, that time of man’s history is past: “the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law” (3:21). Now all people can be “justified freely by [God’s] grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood, to prove his righteousness because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed” (3:25).

A person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law, and this justification is available to all men—Jew and Gentile (3:28-29). The concept is the same here as when he says the advantage of the Jews lies in God’s faithfulness to them, not in their obedience to Him in the law.  The world’s “benefit” or justification comes in God’s grace to us, not our works for Him.