Interpretive Paraphrase of Romans 10:1-4

Romans 10:1-4

Precious ones, my deepest and most honest passion (and thus, deepest and most honest prayer to God) for them is for their complete rescue from their routine pain.

I will tell you what I know for certain: they are passionately religious, but their passion and religion arise from willful or habitual blindness.

They will not, or can not, seriously consider the unusual, inhuman, shocking, transcendent, rather bizarre kind of goodness that is appropriately associated with God. So - just like anybody else with coventional perceptions - they just try to demonstrate (serving their own agenda) their conventional, human, earthly (anemic) goodness which brings its kind of reward: glorifying themselves before others; not taking the radical life of God seriously.

Because those who have truly faced the fact, the history, the horror, the weirdness, the meaning of Christ's life and death

know how silly and pathetic their "principled" views of goodness and justice are (impressive as they seem to be to those they are trying to impress).

Why? Because Jesus Christ - rightly experienced - is the ultimate embarrassing ridicule of conventional "righteousness"

for anyone who meets him (rather than merely using him as a rhetorical tool).