“because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” -Romans 10:9–10
Continuing to draw from Moses as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy, Paul explains what is the word of faith that he is preaching. Moses says, “But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14).
There must be a confession with the mouth that is believed in the heart. These are not meant to be understood as two separate things or specifically happening in this order. Rather, Paul is simply following the structure of Moses to argue for a sincere confession that is both spoken and believed in the heart.
If one was to “believe” without being willing to confess what was believed, it would not be a true confession, namely because it is not real belief if one cannot stand by it publicly. Alternatively, one would be a hypocrite to profess publicly what one does not sincerely believe in the heart.
The confession then is that Jesus is Lord. And the belief is one that naturally coincides, because God has raised him from the dead (he is the firstfruits of the resurrection).
For a Jew to say this would be blasphemous—unless Jesus was YWHW. As Cranfield explains in his critical commentary, for Paul, who used the LXX (Septuagint, the commonly used translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), the word Lord (κύριος) is used as a translation for YWHW more than six thousand times. And while the use of the word κύριος could also be applied in non-religious terms, Jesus was often referred to as teacher, or rabbi by his disciples before his crucifixion and κύριος after the resurrection, which signifies their belief about his being the incarnation of YWHW.
Further, Paul refers to Christ as κύριος in his letters. Consider Cranfield’s explanation:
What then did the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ mean for Paul? The use of κύριος more than six thousand times in the LXX to represent the Tetragrammaton must surely be regarded as of decisive importance here. In support of this view the following points may be made:
(i) Paul applies to Christ, without—apparently—the least sense of inappropriateness, the κύριος of LXX passages in which it is perfectly clear that the κύριος referred to is God Himself (e.g. 10:13; 1 Th 5:2; 2 Th 2:2).
(ii) In Phil 2:9 he describes the κύριος title as τὸ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα, which can hardly mean anything else than the peculiar name of God Himself.1
(iii) He apparently sees nothing objectionable in the invocation of Christ in prayer (the μαράνα θά of 1 Cor 16:22 is, as we have seen, probably to be understood as a prayer; and Paul approves of calling upon the name of the Lord Christ—see 10:12–14 and 1 Cor 1:2—though ἐπικαλεῖσθαι is a technical term for invoking in prayer); but, for a Jew, to pray to anyone other than the one true God was utterly repugnant. ((C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, International Critical Commentary (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 529.))
So to confess that Jesus is Lord is to believe the God had raised him from the dead. Paul makes it superbly clear that the word of faith he is preaching is that justification before God (i.e., possessing the righteousness of God that could not be achieved by trying to keep the law) is attained by faith in Christ alone, the one who died for our sins and rose again for our justification.
By believing, one is justified and by confessing, one is saved. And in Paul’s use of the term, “salvation is from the wrath of God and for a share in the glory that is to come.” ((Colin G. Kruse, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. D. A. Carson, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Cambridge, U.K.; Nottingham, England; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Apollos, 2012), 410.))
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