Romans 11

13. For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine 14 office: if by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might 15 save some of them. For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what 16 shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? For if the firstfruit be holy, the 17 lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches. And if some of the 18 branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and 19 with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; boast not against the 20 branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say 21 then, The branches were broken off, that I might be graffed in. Well; because of unbelief 22 they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: for if 23 God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. 24 Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but 25 toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut 26 off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able 27 to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, 28 and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, 29 which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree? For I would not, 30 brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own 31 conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be 32 come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion 33 the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this is my covenant unto 34 them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for 35 your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the 36 gifts and calling of God are without repentance. For as ye in times past have not believed 37 God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: even so have these also now 38 not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. For God hath con- 39 cluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. 40 O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable 41 are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the 42 Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be 43 recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: 44 to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

THE burst of exultation uttered by the apostle in the closing verses is the conclusion of a chain of reasoning which is carried on uninterruptedly from the 9th to the 11th chapter. The exclusion of the Jews from the blessings of God’s kingdom, in contrast with the reception of the Gentiles, presents an apparent problem in God’s government. By the light of Scripture and experience he gradually comes to the conviction that this mode of action is in no degree at variance with God’s faithfulness, since his ancient promises were only to the true, the believing Israel: even less with his holiness, since the rejection of Israel is merely the righteous punishment of their unbelief; and least of all with his truth, mercy, and grace, since the fall of Israel was the receiving of the Gentiles, and should afterward be followed by their rising again. Thus the whole divine scheme passes in broad outline before his eyes. He discovers what men regard as evil brought through a higher hand to good. God has—behold the result of his hallowed meditation!—concluded the whole world, both Jew and Gentile, under sin, in order that he in his own good time may have mercy on all. But now, when the apostle’s eye has beheld this light, he can no longer restrain his exultation. From the dazzling summit of faith he gazes into a depth which causes him to sink down in adoration. It is a depth, first of riches, that is to say, of grace, which thus has mercy on sinners without distinction; then of wisdom, which chooses the best means for this highest aim; lastly, of knowledge, which is here determinate prescience, which in the repose of eternity has foreseen and foreordained all, in order that in the fullness of time it may come to pass. The conclusion from this can only be, the origin, the progress, the end of all salvation was foreordained by God in Christ: “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen.” Men in all ages praised this exultant expression of Paul’s, as one of the most beautiful and sublime in all his epistles. It is the epitome of faith, as often as it glances on God’s guidance both of individuals and of all within the sphere of redemption. Van O.

AGE has followed age, and the Jews remain to this hour spread over the face of the earth, a fearful and affecting testimony to the truth of God’s word. They are without their sanctuary, without their Messiah, without the hope of their believing ancestors. But it shall not be always thus. They are still “beloved for the fathers’ sake.” When the “fullness of the Gentiles shall come in,” they too shall be gathered. They shall discover in our Jesus the marks of the promised Messiah, and with tenderness proportioned to their former insensibility shall cling to his Cross. Grafted again into their own olive-tree, all Israel shall be saved. It was through their fall that salvation came unto us Gentiles. And “if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?” What ecstasy! the Gentile and the Jew taking sweet counsel together, and going to the house of God in company; the path of the swift messenger of grace marked in every direction by the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ. J. M. M.

17,18. The Church of God is here spoken of under the figure of an olive-tree, a tree remarkable for its beauty, fruitfulness, and usefulness. This mystical olive is represented as growing out of the root of the patriarchs of the Israelitish people, with whom, as believers, the covenant was made that God would be their God and the God of their seed. The Jews are considered as the natural branches, being descendants of these patriarchs; and, till Christ came, the true members of the Church of God were to be found almost exclusively among them. The rejection of the greater part of that people in consequence of unbelief is represented as the breaking off of a portion of the natural branches, and the conversion of some of the Gentiles as the grafting into the mystical olive of a number of branches of a wild olive so that they become partakers of its root and fatness—so that they are so connected with Abraham as to be blessed with him. The conclusion drawn is (v. 18) that the converted Gentiles should not think contemptuously of the Jews, whether converted or unconverted, for the Gentiles were much indebted to the Jews, and owed everything to that society which had the Jewish patriarch for its root. J. B.—The Christian Church was no new thing in the earth; it was the continuation of the one body which began to be formed when first the seed of the woman was announced, and was afterward more fully developed under the Abrahamic promise; and yet more fully developed when the ascended Christ shed down his Spirit, first on Abraham’s sons, and then on the far-off Gentiles. When Gentiles come into the Church they are accounted as Abraham’s seed, for “they that be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham”; they are the wild branches grafted into the good old olive-tree, which has never been uprooted nor cast away. The New Testament Church gets its sap, its vitality, from this connection; and New Testament saints are what they are by reason of their being made “partakers of the root and fatness of the olive-tree.” Bonar.

21. Lest he also spare not thee.** They were broken off because of unbelief, and thou standest through faith, but yet only because and in so far as thou believest. The loving care of God calls loud and long, but not for ever; a time may come when he must give up nations and individuals to their own blindness, because, however powerfully he urges, he constrains no one to be saved who stubbornly refuses to profit by the work of his redeeming love. Van O.

22. Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God.** The Jews who had so long been a barren branch on the olive-tree of his Church—putting forth, indeed, the leaves of religious profession, but no fruit of true holiness—God had cut off and cast away. The Gentiles—originally “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise”—he had inserted, as a new wild graft, into the cultivated olive-tree. These two contrary dealings are traced up to their source in different attributes of the Most High; the one testifies to his severity, the other to his goodness. It is this essential character of the divine being which forms the basis of the great doctrine of the atonement. God presents us in the atonement with the highest illustration of both his attributes. He may be conceived as standing by the Cross of the Lord Jesus and pointing to it in exemplification of his character, as set forth in the text, “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God.” E. M. G.—In most cases the goodness is illustrated by one kind of events, and the severity by another, but in Christ’s work the same event of his death displayed the two sides of God’s character alike and at once, and thus pardon was never offered to the guilty without a loud protest against sin. T. D. W.

Christ’s gospel gives out the forgiveness of sins; and the tone of encouragement, of mercy, of loving-kindness to sinners is ever predominant. But yet there is another language, which is to be found alike in the Old Testament and in the New; a language not indeed so common as the language of mercy, but yet repeated many times; a language which we also need as fully as it was ever needed, and of whose severity we can no more spare one title than we can spare anything of the comfort of the other. T. A.

25-32. God’s object has been not to reject any, but to show mercy upon all mankind. His purpose has been to make use of the Jewish unbelief to call the Gentiles into his Church, and by the admission of the Gentiles to rouse the Jews to accept his message, that all might at length receive his mercy. C.

25. Gentiles come in.** Let us celebrate the beginnings of our blessed hope with exulting hearts; for from this time forward we begin to enter into an eternal inheritance, and the secrets of Scripture, speaking of Christ, have been laid open to us, and the truth, which Jewish blindness does not receive, has carried its light into all nations. Leo.

26-28. The meaning of the prophecy still remains veiled to the unhappy posterity of Jacob; but the time will at length come when, the veil being taken away, they as well as we will clearly comprehend the words. A. V.—Take up a volume of the history of any country, at any age since the fall of Jerusalem, and you find the Jews just as we now find them—dwelling in the seclusion of their own communities. “The restless feet” of this ancient people of God are pressing every inhabitable region of the world. They are met in every city, in every mart of business, in every climate, among people of every language. Amid all their sufferings and wanderings, in harmony with prophecy, they have remained a distinct and peculiar people. With neither a country nor a nation that could be called their own, they have uniformly preserved a distinct nationality. Though they have looked upon the mightiest revolutions among the Gentiles; though they have been moving among extensive migrations, from east to west, and from north to south; though they have been dwellers in different empires while in their ascendant, supremacy, and decline; though we have seen them passing through all those political and civil convulsions which have destroyed every nation around Judea, except the Persians alone, who restored them from their Babylonish captivity—yet for eighteen centuries they have remained, in all essential features, the same. They maintain the same laws, and have continued to preserve their own and their old identity. L. T. T.—The Jews exist not only as a monument and a miracle; Jewish mind has exerted a powerful influence on the world. In money power, the Jews hold in their hands the destiny of kingdoms and empires, whose governments become bankrupt and their sovereigns turn beggars at a Hebrew’s nod. Among the most distinguished scholars and men of science, we find the Jews prominent. The most renowned in astronomy have been Jews, as the Herschels in England and Arago in France. Of Christianized Jews are Hengstenberg, Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Gesenius, Neander, Niebuhr, and others, whose learned treatises, Biblical criticisms, didactic theology, and general sacred literature, are found in the library of every theological student. An.

29. Are without repentance.** Read “can not be repented of.” A.

32. The man who thoroughly understands this single verse has the key to the whole Bible. The doctrine of the Bible has these two fundamental articles: The Misery of Man—The Mercy of God. The text mentions them both, and sets them over against each other. “God hath concluded them all in unbelief”—here is man’s misery; “that he might have compassion upon all”—here is God’s mercy. Monod.—To sinners of every kind, to us all, to the whole world, the man of God cries in the Scriptures, “God hath concluded all in rebellion, that he may have mercy upon all.” With him there is no respect of persons, no respect of sins; he stops not at some shades of difference; he does not apply to us our own vain measures; for the original crime is equal in all; and since he has included all in rebellion, he includes all in mercy. The amnesty is for all equally; but it must be accepted just as it is offered; not as a right, but as a gift; not as an abandonment of the principles of the divine government, but as the price of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as a return for the ransom he has paid and the pledge he has offered. A. V.

33. It was the destiny of Israel, after a brief period of prosperity, to separate into rival dynasties, to run through a course of much iniquity, to despise constant, reiterated warnings, and at length to merge in utter ruin, undestroyed indeed, but preserved only as a monument of God’s abiding vengeance. But mark the unsearchable depths of the purposes of Providence! These national misfortunes brought in universal blessedness. Israel fell to prepare the salvation of mankind; and the “rest,” which the Lord God denied his people, was denied only that an everlasting rest might be secured to his spiritual people for ever! Well might the apostle, who was chosen as the chief laborer in this extension of the kingdom of God, exclaim when he contemplated that great revolution, “Oh! the depth of the riches, and the wisdom, and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” W. A. B.

34. If none hath been his counselor, it is plain that none can know his mind till he shall be pleased to reveal it; nor even then can it be known any

further than it is revealed. To supply what is concealed, with conclusions drawn from the reasonings of our own minds, would be the height of presumption: We must take his counsel as it lies before us in the record he hath given us, without adding to it or subtracting from it. R. W.

mind of man contrived to give it, so that in some forms of Christianity you can hardly at all recognize the original draught, as it came from the divine mind! What follies, fancies, superstitions, licentious doctrines, have founded themselves—not justly of course, but with a most perverse ingenuity—upon the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament! It would be interesting to consider every heresy which has hitherto arisen, and see how in each case it has been a caricature of some one point of Christian truth—an exaggeration by which the fair proportion of the faith, of which Paul here speaks, has been distorted, and a single passage of Scripture or a single class of passages brought into undue prominence. E. M. G.