Confess and Believe Jesus is Lord
Romans 10:9-10
“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 expounds 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. For a Jew to say this would be blasphemous—unless Jesus was in fact YWHW.
As Charles Cranfield explains in his critical commentary, Paul used the LXX (Septuagint), which was the commonly used translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. And, in the LXX, 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 not κύριος until after the resurrection, which signified his connection to YWHW.
Additionally, it is notable that Paul applies the word Lord (κύριος) to Christ in his letters (e.g. Rom 10:12-14; 1 Th 5:2; 2 Th 2:2, 1 Cor 1:2, 1 Cor 16:2).
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…and Paul approves of calling upon the name of the Lord Christ… but, for a Jew, to pray to anyone other than the one true God was utterly repugnant.1
So to confess that Jesus is Lord is to believe the God has 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) is attained by faith in the Lord Christ alone, 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, saved, he means “salvation is from the wrath of God and for a share in the glory that is to come.”2
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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.
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.