Posted by Romans on Saturday, 16 May 2015
Romans 2:17-20
(17) Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest thy boast of God,
(18) And knowest his will, and approvest the things that are more excellent, being instructed out of the law;
(19) And art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness,
(20) An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law.
Paul undoubtedly had the Jews as well as moral Gentiles in mind in the group he addressed as “you who pass judgment on someone else” (v. 1). But there he did not refer to them by name as he did here—if you call yourself a Jew (lit., “if you are named a Jew”). In Greek this is a first-class conditional sentence in which the conditional statement is assumed to be true. Paul was addressing individuals who were truly called Jews and who, in fact, gloried in that name. This fact is followed by a list of eight other moral and religious details in which the Jews gloried in their sense of superiority to the Gentiles, all of these included as part of the “if” clause (vv. 17-21a).
The verbs used in this list are all in the present tense or have the force of the present, which emphasizes the habitual nature of the action:
(1) The Jews rely on the Law; they put their confidence in the fact that God gave it to them.
(2) The Jews brag about their relationship to God (lit., “boast in God”; cf. v. 23), which means they glory in their covenantal ties with God. As a result of these two things the Jews
(3) know His will (they have an awareness of God’s desires and plan) and they
(4) approve of (dokimazeis, “to test and approve what passes the test”) what is superior (diapheronta, “the things that differ and as a result excel”; the same Gr. word in Phil. 1:10 is trans. “what is best”). They have a concern for spiritually superior standards. These abilities of Jews exist because they
(5) are instructed (lit., “are being instructed”) by the Law. Their catechetical lessons as youths and the regular reading of the Law in the synagogues provided this continuing instruction.
Though the next verb (in Rom. 2:19) continues the first-class conditional structure begun in verse 17, it also marks a transition of thought. It is the perfect tense of a verb which means “to seek to persuade,” in which tense it has the meaning “to believe.”
(6) Many Jews were convinced and as a result believed certain things about themselves in relationship to Gentiles. Paul listed four of these: a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor (paideutēn, “one who disciplines, a trainer”) of the foolish, and a teacher of infants.
(7) This belief by Jews rested in their having in the Law the embodiment (morphōsin, “outline, semblance”; used elsewhere in the NT only in 2 Tim. 3:5) of knowledge and truth (the Gr. has the definite article “the” with both nouns: “the knowledge and the truth”).
