Romans 11

Romans 11:1-36

Subdivision 3. (Romans 11:1-36.)How Israel’s portion will be made good to them. We are now to see how Israel’s portion is yet to be made good to them. We have seen already, that, in fact, the promises of God must be fulfilled. They are not, if we think of those to Abraham, conditioned upon any response on man’s part. God alone is the Speaker in them, and as the apostle tells us in the next epistle (Galatians) the law which was 430 years after could not be added, as a condition to what God had already unconditionally declared. Israel’s portion is then, yet to be made good to them; but this involves another thing. If the special place and privileges of the nation are to be restored, the church subsists only by the breaking down of these very distinctions.

In it there is neither Jew nor Gentile, but it is composed of both, united by one Spirit in the body of Christ. Thus, then, the Church must have passed away from the earth before Israel’s promises can be fulfilled. The two could not exist together at the same time, and so it is stated in this chapter; as concerning the gospel, with regard to that, Israel, although always beloved for the fathers’ sakes, is yet treated nationally as an enemy, and it is not, therefore, by the gospel as it goes out at present, that Israel as a whole can be brought back to God.

1. The apostle dwells first of all upon the fact of this present election of grace as declaring God’s unchanged favor towards them. “God,” he says, “hath not cast off His people whom He foreknew.” That foreknowledge embraced, assuredly, all the history of the people of His choice. He at least could not be disappointed, nor could the evil in them work change in Him. He could certainly never be deceived. The heart of man, which man indeed is incompetent to fathom, He Himself claims to know perfectly. If there is a remnant preserved among them at all, it is an election of grace, and therefore independent of works, as the apostle says here, -of works of any kind.

Grace, he adds, becomes grace no longer if works are mingled with it. Through all their history, even at the time of most complete national apostasy, still, as he reminds us here, there was ever a remnant. Elias, even, could make intercession to God, alas, against Israel. “Lord,” he says, “they have killed Thy prophets and digged down Thine altars, and I am left alone, and they seek my life”; but it was a mistake in every way. God had still reserved to Himself, as He says, 7,000 men who had not bowed the knee to the image of Baal. That was His work, and therefore no power of the enemy could overthrow it. The remnant in Israel is, according to the prophet, the sap of the tree, which, though the tree be cut down, shows nevertheless that there is life in it.

If there were no sap, there would be no life; but as long, therefore, as there is a remnant according to the election of grace, Israel still in that sense lives before God. 2. Blindness in part, however, has happened to them. That which Israel sought for, they have not obtained. We have already seen that the most zealous seekers were apparently those farthest from fulfilling the conditions of successful search. “The election hath obtained it,” says the apostle, “and the rest were blinded.” They have fallen under the judicial sentence of God, as again their prophets witnessed. God had given them such eyes as did not see, and such ears as did not hear. 3. They had stumbled confessedly over the Stumbling Stone. They had not eyes for Christ. They saw “no beauty in Him, that they should desire Him.” They had stumbled, but not that they might utterly fall, as is plain from the fact that the salvation of the Gentiles was in order to provoke them to jealousy. God still then was expecting from them what His own grace alone could produce. But then, if such consequences and blessings were the result of their fall, would not their fulness, when it should take place, be for still greater blessing to men at large?

If their casting away nationally resulted in the message of reconciliation going out to the world, will not their being received back again be life from the dead? This, as we know, in fact, has been abundantly promised. There is no blessing for the earth apart from the blessing of Israel. There could be no fulfilment of the prophecies of that time of the earth’s blessing without Israel being in the centre of it, as every picture shows Of course, if, for Israel in the prophet we are content to read the Church, then everything will be changed indeed, but God’s word, read in the simplicity of its ample statement, cannot possibly allow of this. 4. The present mercy to the Gentiles is, however, (and that of necessity,) the testing of these also. The witness of what man is must surely go on throughout the ages as man himself goes through them. Solemn it is to realize this in the case of Christianity, with all its fulness of blessing. Men are willing enough to forget what Scripture, however, so thoroughly assures us of. In Paul’s day, the mystery of iniquity was at work; and this was to go on to its end in an apostasy out of which the man of sin, to be destroyed at the coming of Christ Himself, will arise.

Grace indeed reigns in the gospel; but if we argue that this means that it is to conquer the world, this is directly denied by Scripture itself. “Let favor (or grace) be shown to the wicked,” says Isaiah, “yet will he not learn uprightness.” “When Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” It is that which we find in Judges with regard to Israel, the King must come. Nothing will do but the coming of the King; and this not because of the power of the enemy simply, for the power of God is with His people and there can be no failure there, but because of the wickedness and failure of God’s people themselves. The apostle in the type of the olive ignores all that is distinctive of Christianity and speaks of the Gentiles as simply grafted into the place of Israel’s broken off branches. These parables from nature are never pictures of grace in its fulness. In the tree, we have ever considered the responsibility for fruit; so with the vine, whether we look back to the prophet’s application of this to Israel herself, or in the Lord’s application of it to Christian profession now. The vine above all, perhaps, speaks of the necessity of fruit; it is of no use except for fruit; but here we find that there are branches also which are broken off, and in the Old Testament prophet, the vine itself is laid waste and trampled down. The fig-tree planted in the vineyard now desolate as such, refers to the remnant returned from Babylon in Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s time; but here again the Lord takes up that figure, in order to show God’s expectation of fruit from it, and how, when Christ Himself came, there was still none. Sentence was ready to go forth: “Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?” Still His own intercession causes it to be spared for a while yet. It is digged about and dunged; and now, if it will bring forth fruit, well; but, as we know, this was fulfilled when the Spirit of God came down amongst men at Pentecost, and still there was no answer from the people of that day. The olive again speaks naturally of that in which the Spirit is found, for the oil, as we know, is the type of the Spirit; but the same element of responsibility is found in it. What is looked for may not be there in fact. The branches are broken off for lack of a faith which they never had, and one may partake of the fatness of the olive-tree and yet not have this. The Spirit’s work, in a sense, is implied, but not, as we see, of necessity, any inward work. If the apostle speaks of the lump being holy as the firstfruit was, he is referring to Abraham as set apart to God, and Israel had the same setting apart, but it was not necessarily more than external. The branches and the root are similar. The root again was Abraham, and it is clear that in Abraham you have, in fact, the first separation to God out of the world that history furnishes. The nations had now gone off into idolatry, gone fully away from God, although we might find exceptionally a Melchisedec amongst them. Out of that general corruption, God separates Abraham to Himself, and thus begins a new principle upon the earth. Israel manifest still God’s principle, however little they realize the spiritual character of it in His thought; however little they might be indeed separate from the mass of the nations round about them. God acting indeed in His grace in this way has made Israel to be, as it were, the very tree itself into which the Gentiles have now been grafted. Here the New Testament speaks with the Old. As the vessel of the Spirit, who can deny Israel’s special place? Paul himself, the very apostle of the Gentiles, was, nevertheless, not a Gentile, as he puts it here, in the sense in which he is speaking. The Gentile is a wild graft, which, therefore, if grafted into the olive is “contrary to nature.” It is, as we know, contrary to nature to graft that which is wild upon the good. Faith is required now, and the branches are broken off, therefore, because they do not answer to this.

They are not competent to meet the claim which Christianity makes upon them, and they are broken off from their own olive-tree. Thus, if God be pleased to graft Israel back again, we need not be surprised. The Gentile cannot possibly claim, according to this, to have any necessary right in it, much less to be the whole thing, as he is apt to claim. Israel is only blinded in part until the fulness of the Gentiles is come in. 5. There is a limit to the present blinding; there is a limit to the time of blinding altogether. When, in God’s mind, the complete number of the Gentiles is brought in, Israel will, as a whole, be saved; not, as the apostle says here, by the gospel, but by the Deliverer coming, not now out of Bethlehem, as once He came, to be rejected; but out of Zion. He does not come as the Babe born to the nation any more, but as the King and Conqueror, and then it is when “Every eye” sees Him. “They also who pierced Him” shall see him, and the outburst of confession on the part of the people will be the beginning of their national blessing. Enemies indeed they now are, that is, treated by God as enemies; which does not, of course, refer simply to the enmity in their heart, but that God treats them for what they are, enemies, as to the gospel, -while it goes out, though still the gifts and calling of God abide for them unchangeable. For us there is a solemn consideration here. How fully that which is characteristically Gentile Christianity has come in the minds of the vast number to be considered the whole thing, scarcely needs to be insisted on. Israel are to be saved, no doubt, but simply by the extension of the blessings of the gospel to them. Christians are that spiritual Israel, which is to bud and blossom, and fill the face of the earth with fruit. Thus the Gentiles have become, in spite of the apostle’s warning against it, “wise in their own conceits.” They have indeed thought that they bore the root, rather than the root them, and ignored the conditional footing upon which we, in common with Israel, as the professing people of God, stand. But the apostle brings it out fully here. “Behold, then,” he says, “the goodness and severity of God: upon those that fell, severity, but toward thee goodness, if thou continue in His goodness, otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.” Now have we -could we venture to say we have -continued in God’s goodness?

Who will say so? Why then do we hear so much of revival, and the need of revival, except because of the constant tendency to decline?

But is it a tendency only? What does the very Reformation, which we rejoice over so much, bear witness as to the general condition of Christendom at the time in which this took place? What was that of the Romanism out of which the Protestant churches through the mercy of God emerged? Out of Rome, what could we say of the Greek and eastern churches, which God allowed to be smitten with the rod of Mohammedanism for their idolatrous abominations? To come closer home, what shall we say of the condition of the Protestant churches themselves since God broke the papal chain, and set them free? What of Unitarianism, Rationalism, and the hundreds of sects and heresies, which are the unanswerable reproach and witness against them?

What are we sliding into now, which allows Romanism today to boast herself, however foolishly and falsely, as being the preserver of Scripture? Alas, we have not continued in God’s goodness; and thus the sentence of excision is clearly upon us, “thou also shalt be cut off.” Thus when, according to Isaiah, the light shall arise again upon Israel, it will not be merely to add new splendor to a day already bathing with its brightness the nations of the earth, but on the contrary, as he -most unaccountably according to the dreams men are indulging in -most plainly says, when “darkness shall cover the earth, gross darkness the nations” (Isaiah 60:1-3). The Gentile church is become apostate, as Paul elsewhere shows (2 Thessalonians 2:3-12), the true saints having been removed to heaven. How important to realize the times in which we are, and what is before us, that we do not go with the mass in the smooth ways in which they are prophesying to themselves peace, but walk in separation to God from all that is bringing in the end in judgment! 6. But the victory over sin is thus, after all, God’s alone. Israel’s unbelief has been the occasion of His mercy to the Gentiles in this very way; through the impossibility of any claim on their part any more to the privileges that were theirs, they become objects of mercy merely. They had refused God’s mercy when it went out to the Gentiles. They are to be blessed finally as themselves mere Gentiles, having no claim beyond that. Thus, they are brought upon the common ground in which alone blessing can be found for any man.

God could not bless them in self-righteousness it is clear; and He must in all His ways show that man throughout is a debtor to mercy alone. This is the occasion for the apostle’s adoring recognition of the “riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” The plan is clearly His; man could never have thought it out in this way. Naturally, he would never put himself in the position in which, nevertheless, divine grace finds him. He has not even “known the mind of the Lord,” much less “been His counselor.” “Of God and through God and to God are all things, to whom be glory for ever!” The Epistle to the Romans.