What’s the Deal with Israel?
Romans 11:1-32
May 24, 2009
Paul asks, “Has God rejected His people?” Paul was specifically the “apostle to the Gentiles”; was it the case that God was finished with the Jews, had had it with their obstinacy, was pitching them on the ash heap of His salvation history, finished with them forever? Though we might like to imagine that the early church was without its prejudices and jealousies, our knowledge of human nature must dictate otherwise—and so there were some Gentiles who imagined that they now occupied first place God’s affections. Has God rejected His people? Paul responds in the negative, in emphatic terms. What triggers this question? Paul has said that Israel stumbled over the Stumblingblock, Christ, and that Israel had willfully rejected God’s righteousness, instead attempting to demonstrate their own. But God has not fully rejected Israel. Rather,
I. Israel’s fall is partial – “remnant” (:5)
Paul offers several rationales for this:
• Paul is himself an Israelite, and he is part of the saved in Christ. He had been chosen by God to be apostle to the Gentiles, evidence of God’s concern not only for Gentiles, but for Jews as well.
• God “foreknew” His people, which suggests His sovereign choice to love Israel. True, God’s foreknowledge of Israel was generally understood to apply to the entire nation, and not just a small part of it, but that decision on God’s part is used as evidence that foreknowledge and rejection are incompatible.
• God has chosen a remnant out of Israel who will be part of His covenant people.
Paul uses the example of Elijah, who on the run from Jezebel lamented that there was no one else left following God—to which God responded that there were 7000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal, 7000 whom God had preserved from the ruin of idol worship. Just like then, Paul argues, there existed a remnant among national Israel whom God had preserved—and the sole basis for this is the grace of God!
• Paul also uses a contemporary example, arguing in :5 that there existed a “remnant, chosen by grace”; there were certainly a good number of Jews, small as a percentage, but still significant, who had become followers of Christ.
II. Israel’s fall is serious – “stupor” (:8)
God “gave them a spirit of stupor”; He blinded their eyes and made them deaf to His truth. Question: why? Was this arbitrary? No, not at all; God was responding to the hardness that was in their hearts to the gospel of Christ. This is serious; note the wording of :8-10. They heard the message but failed to respond to it, so God hardened their hearts, and therein lies a caution for us: we can be hearers of the Word but not doers of it for long enough that eventually, we become dead to the Word of God, incapable of responding to it. That’s a dangerous situation to be in—but it’s the one that the majority of Israel found itself in.
III. Israel’s fall is temporary – “full inclusion” (:12)
We need not belabor this point, but Paul argues that the hardening of Israel brought about by God in response to their unbelief is one which is temporary; there is coming a time of “full inclusion” of the Jews in God’s kingdom blessing.
IV. Israel’s fall opened the door to Gentiles – “grafted in” (:17)
Paul’s pattern, if we remember from Acts, was to go into a new city and first search out and preach in the Jewish synagogue. Usually, he was rejected by the majority of the Jews—and then, he would turn to the Gentiles and preach the gospel, often finding a receptivity lacking among the Jews. Paul now turns history into theology, arguing that this lack of receptivity on the part of Jews was God’s ordained way of clearing the way for Gentiles to hear and respond to the gospel.
One can argue, as has Ray Stedman, that the converted Jew is the only normal human being on the planet; everyone else is a special case, in that sense, dealt with under emergency conditions. We Gentiles ought to live so as to create a kind of thirst for Christ among all we meet, whether Gentile or Jew.
Paul issues teaching and warning to the Gentile believers in several ways:
• You depend on the root, because a branch has no life in itself.
• Your stability is due to your faith alone, and not because you deserve it.
• Don’t be arrogant, because you could be cut off as was Israel.
• Consider God’s character, both His kindness and His sternness.
We can summarize verses 11-24 in this way, as Paul makes clear by a series of statements: because of Israel’s unwillingness to humbly accept Christ as Messiah, the Jews had suffered loss, which meant riches for the Gentile world—but the Gentiles had better not get cocky about it, because of at least two truths: one, the reason for God’s acceptance of Gentiles was, in part, to provoke jealousy in the Jews, that they might come to Christ, and two, just as the Jews had been (symbolically) broken off, so could the Gentiles, were they not to act with humility, be themselves broken off as well. Gentiles didn’t earn their way into being grafted into the vine—it was God’s doing—and thus there is nothing bragworthy about it!
V. Israel’s fall is coming to an end at Christ’s return – “saved” (:26)
When we come to verses 25-32, we must tread a bit lightly, because a little misreading here or there, a little misunderstanding at this point or that, and we’ve headed down a path to heresy, if we’re not careful. What Paul is doing here is bringing to a climax an argument that has been building to this point: the Jews rejected the Messiah; as a result, the Gentiles were included in the salvation picture (and continue to be to this day); at a point of God’s choosing, the Jews will be included again in a prominent place in His plan.
God’s church is advancing around the world at an unprecedented pace, at least in the last millennium; does this signal the return of Christ? And at that time, the Jews will respond to their Messiah with acceptance at last.
Two contemporary issues surface here:
• Anti-Semitism – Is it anti-Semitic to suggest that Jews must accept Jesus as Messiah?
• Universalism –The spirit of the age suggests that it’s divisive, legalistic, mean-spirited, and intolerant to claim that Jesus is the only way to salvation; pluralism suggests that there must be many paths to God, and its modern-day prophets like Oprah Winfrey put a happy face on such teaching.
How does the Christian respond to these, and what do these verses say to us?
First, to the anti-Semitism idea, we must insist that if the Bible teaches that Christ is the only way—and it does—then we can hardly be anti-Semitic when we insist that this is true for Jews as well as for anyone else. The idea that we ought not evangelize Jews, out of fear of anti-Semitism, would have been rejected by Paul in the strongest of terms. Tom Wright’s take on this is of value to us: “The irony of this is that the late twentieth century, in order to avoid anti-Semitism, has advocated a position (the non-evangelization of the Jews) which Paul regards as precisely anti-Semitic”.
Second, to the idea of universalism, we ought to be on our guard not to swallow it ourselves, lest our concern for those without Christ dim. Advocates of universalism would point to :26, which says “all Israel will be saved”, and then as well to :32, which says God will “have mercy on all”. I remember on more than one occasion hearing a well-meaning preacher will intone, “’all’ means ‘all’, and that’s all ‘all’ means”. But sorry to burst your bubble if you’ve heard a preacher say that; it’s simply not true. “All” doesn’t always mean “all”, and such is the case here in these verses. There is ample Scriptural precedent for using a word like “all” to mean “most”, or “many”, or to speak in general a situation without meaning “all” in the strictest sense of the word. God has elected Israel as His own people, and because of the pledge He made to the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph), He will save a significant number of the Jews at the time of Christ’s return.
VI. Israel’s fall demonstrates God’s plan to be merciful to all – “mercy” (:32)
The point is that God has shown mercy to all kinds of people, at different times, for His own purposes and glory.
• We ought to be reminded of the appropriate stance toward other believers who are “different” from us.
The Gentiles were feeling their oats toward their Jewish brethren; the societal prejudices against the Jews were finding their way into the church at Rome, abetted by the reality that the proportion of Jews who were believers was by this time pretty small. For whatever reason, we ought not look down our noses at sincere Christ-followers from across the spectrum of faith.
• We are reminded once more that there is no place for personal boasting in the life of the Christian.
It’s all about God’s grace, through and through, and this passage reminds us again of that truth!
