Paul has spent a chapter defending God's right to choose. Now he turns to the other half of the mystery, where human responsibility is entirely in view. 30"Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it," he writes, almost startled at his own sentence, 31"Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law." The people who were not chasing anything ended up with it, and the people running hardest ended up without. That reversal is the riddle of the passage.
Why? 32"Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works." Israel's zeal for the law was fierce and wholehearted. The word Paul uses for pursue is the one used for chasing down an enemy in battle, effort that leaves nothing in reserve. What the law was always meant to produce, trust, is what they missed.
32"They have stumbled over the stumbling stone." Paul weaves two prophecies from Isaiah, one about a stone God lays in Zion that offers safety to whoever trusts it, and another about a stone that trips whoever does not. It is the same stone with two outcomes, depending on what the person in front of it does. Peter reaches for the same pair of texts to say the same thing about Christ (1 Peter 2:6-8), which suggests the pairing was already a settled way the early church explained why so many stumbled over the Messiah the prophets promised.
Then Paul's tone softens, as it did at the start of chapter 9. 1"My heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved." He is not finished grieving, and he refuses to caricature the people he grieves over. 2"They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge." That is a compliment before the diagnosis. Paul shared that zeal himself before Christ found him on the Damascus road.
The diagnosis is precise and painful. Ignorant of the righteousness of God and 3"seeking to establish their own," they did not submit to God's righteousness. Their zeal aimed at building a righteousness they could call their own, when the only righteousness on offer was one they could only receive as a gift. Submission was the one move their zeal never made.
4"Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." The word for end can mean stopping point or goal, the finish line a race was always running toward. Both fit at once. The law's function as a path to earn standing before God has stopped, because the law's goal has arrived. Righteousness comes the way anyone receives a gift they could never have earned.
Zeal without knowledge is one of the most respectable spiritual conditions there is, and it looks like devotion from the outside, which is why it can go unexamined for a lifetime. Ask where your own zeal may have run ahead of knowledge, and what you have been trying to establish that was already given.
Prayer
Father, thank you that the righteousness we need was never something we had to catch on our own strength. Forgive us every quiet attempt to establish our own standing before you when you have already provided it in Christ. Where our zeal has run ahead of knowledge of you, slow us down and turn us toward the stone you laid in Zion, the one that will not put to shame whoever believes in him. In Jesus' name, amen.