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If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9)

This is a familiar verse. But there tends to be some misunderstandings here that I would like to clarify.

Much of the modern teaching goes something like “You must accept Jesus as your savior, but you also must accept him as Lord…”

The idea is that it isn’t enough to “simply believe”, you also have to do what he says and acknowledge him as your Lord.

Although it is certainly true that if we love Jesus we will seek to do those things which please him, and it is certainly true that he, as our creator and redeemer, is our sovereign king and lord, I don’t believe that is what Paul is getting at in this passage.

Here is the whole thing in context:

Moses writes this about the righteousness that is by the law: “The person who does these things will live by them.” But the righteousness that is by faith says: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the deep?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the message concerning faith that we proclaim: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Paul compares the message of righteousness by faith to the righteousness which comes by the law. The law is anything that teaches “If you do these things, you will live.”

The law teaches that if you do good things, you will be blessed. If you do bad things, you will be cursed. The law is woven in our being, created in our psyche, unavoidable.

It also leaves us all under the curse, for who can say that they have done enough to earn the blessing of God?

The fact is that if we are aware of our condition, we know we are in trouble. We know that God is just and that we are sinners. Our consciences plague us on our beds late at night. This is the doing of the law, whichever law you believe will give you life.

If you believe that life comes from doing the right thing, you will never rest, never be at peace, and live in fear – either of the judge coming for you, or fear that the others are going to mess up God’s blessing for your community.

So you either live in terror and despair, or you live judging others and calling down fire and brimstone on the sinners.

Paul is not contrasting the “law” with the “law”. The problem is NOT that the Jewish people of Paul’s day got the law wrong. They didn’t just need to substitute the law of Moses for the law of Jesus. Paul’s point is different.

Let’s look at the word “lord”. In the Hebrew Scriptures, we read that God gave his personal name to his people (Exodus 3). That name is unique to the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It didn’t belong to any other gods, it was the true God’s personal name. It was spelled YHWH. But we forgot how it was pronounced, because centuries before Jesus came into the world, God’s people considered the name too holy to be pronounced.

So whenever they came across that name in their readings, they substituted the Hebrew word “my lord” – adonai. Adonai means my lord, my master, my husband, my sir.

A few centuries before Jesus, scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew bible into Greek. It was called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). They followed the custom of the Jews, and every time they came across the word “YHWH” they translated it “kyrios”, which is Greek for Lord, mister, sir, owner, or master, just like adonai.

But whenever they came across adonai, they also translated it “Lord”.

When the Bible was translated into English, the translators followed the same pattern, but they used small caps for YHWH and lower case for adonai.

Look, for example, at Psalm 110:

The LORD says to my lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”

The first word is the personal name of the One True God, creator and redeemer, maker of all things visible and invisible, who redeemed Israel from Egypt.

The second word is a common title for royalty, husbands, owners, slave-masters, bosses.

Remember here that we are speaking only of the OT scriptures. You can easily tell the difference between YHWH and adonai by the way the translators have spelled it.

But when we come to the New Testament, it is a little different. The inspired writers used “kyrios” for both concepts and the only way to tell which was meant was through the context.

In our familiar passage, is Paul’s point that Jesus is our lord and master to be obeyed (as true as that is), or is his point something else?

If he means what is commonly called “lordship salvation”, then one is hard pressed to find a difference between that and the law of “do this and live”.

But look a bit further down, when Paul quotes the Hebrew scriptures. He quotes Isaiah 28 from the Septuagint, about believing in the heart, and then he quotes Joel 2.

“Whoever will call upon the name of YHWH will be saved”. The difference in the Greek text is hard to spot, but if you look up the quote in Joel it is clear. If you call on the name of YHWH you will be saved (Notice the all-caps of LORD). Paul’s point is that confessing with your mouth is the SAME concept as “Calling upon the name of the YHWH.”

The contrast is between those who seek their salvation through “doing” – “do this and live”, and those who understand their desperate need, and call out in the middle of the storm “Save me, Jesus, YHWH God, creator and sustainer of the universe who conquered death and the power of sin.”

Of course, that cry is when we are lucid. In the middle of the locust storm destroying everything (which is the context of Joel), all we can manage is “hosanna” – “Save us, we beg you”.

And now, here is the point of all of this.

If you, like me, have tried over and over again to live a better life, to love more, to cast off your fears and doubts, to flee the lusts of the flesh, and to do better – you know the agony of the spirit. The person that you long to be and the person that you are seem to be forever separated.

The body of death seems to be winning.

The “lordship salvation” purveyors want you to work harder, feel more guilty, exert more will-power, give more money, get up earlier…

But the Good News is this – Call on the name of Jesus, for he is the creator and sustainer of all, he is the giver of life, eternal and true God, who became flesh and took our grief upon himself, so he knows our pain and struggles. Call upon him. No conditions. Just call.

Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female…just call. And you will be saved, for his name means “YHWH saves.”

(as a side note, this doctrine is continually under attack, for if Jesus is somehow lesser than YHWH, or a different God, then we are back to attempting to earn salvation by submission, which means that we are back in bondage to fear and misery. It is no coincidence that modern patriarchy and their attempt to keep women in bondage is built on “Eternal subordination.” If even the second person of the eternal trinity is subordinate to YHWH, then he is NOT YHWH (their duplicitous protestations notwithstanding), and salvation is again “do this and live”.  Many of my sisters are living this reality every day. ESS is a monstrous evil, and leads only to bondage).

YHWH is not divided. And Jesus is the One True eternal God, who with the Father and the Spirit is to be worshiped. Call upon him, and be delivered. This is the good news. He delights to hear and delights to save, if only we will call.