Romans No.26 God and Israel

Let's pick up the reading from where we left off last week. Paul is talking about his concerns for Israel. In fact, that's been the sum total of the contents of chapters 9, 10, and 11.

Here he sort of sharpens his point and brings in some very interesting conclusions. And I do ask you to read very carefully what Scripture is he is saying, because there is a tendency sometimes for you to incorporate ideas into Scripture and to read the ideas as though they're part of the text. Well, let Scripture always correct your ideas.

That applies to myself as well. I have to come before the Word of God and ask the Lord to show me what the Word is saying and not what I may have assumed that it was saying because of teaching and reading that I've done in months or years gone by. All right, here's then Paul referring to the dilemma of his people, the Jewish people, largely unresponsive to the gospel.

Whereas he, the ambassador to the Gentiles and also a Jew, has found great fruitfulness in his ministry. And he's already told us in the first verse of the 11th chapter that his heart's desire is that his people will be saved. Tells us that actually in the 10th chapter.

And in the 11th chapter, the first verse, he tells us that God has not rejected his ancient people. All right, verse 17. If some of the branches have been broken off and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches.

If you do, consider this. You do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in, granted.

But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.

Consider, therefore, the kindness and sternness of God. Sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off.

And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature and contrary to nature, were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.

And so all Israel will be saved. As it is written, the deliverer will come from Zion, he will turn godlessness away from Jacob, and this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins. As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account.

But as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts in his call are irrevocable. Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you. For God has bound all men over to disobedience, so that he may have mercy on them all.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be glory forever. Amen. They're an interesting people, the Jewish race, aren't they? Frustrating people in some ways.

They can be quite annoying. They have very interesting characteristics. I've known Jews who really won my heart because of their warmth and their humility.

I've also appreciated the comments of folks who've lived in Israel or who've visited Israel and have found Jewish people hard to get on with. And I was reminded when jotting down some notes of a comment that I read from Bertrand Russell some years ago when he was quoting an evaluation of the Jews, how odd of God to choose the Jews. But how odd is still of God to choose you and to choose me.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Now, if you've trusted the Lord Jesus as your savior, one of the things that has become clear as we've read through the epistle of Paul to the Romans is that you are numbered amongst the children of God. God doesn't have two families, the Old Testament people and the New Testament people, the Gentile people and the Jewish people.

There's only one family of God, the people of God, and you enter into that family through expressing faith. In New Testament times, faith in our Lord Jesus. In Old Testament times, faith in the person and the character of God and some acknowledgement of your sins through the symbolic offering for sins in the sacrificial system.

So here is the apostle Paul, and he's got this dilemma. He knows that his people are difficult. He knows what Moses meant when he referred to the Israelites as a gay and sane and a disobedient people.

Paul is facing two ways in one sense. Emotionally, he's very much attached to his own nation and he wants them to be saved. But as far as God is concerned, he's been given this particular task of taking the gospel to the Gentiles and he's doing extremely well.

But now he's stopped in these 9th, 10th and 11th chapters and he's looking more in a Jewish direction than in the Gentile direction. And as we see, as we remember from our studies last week, Paul really is talking to the Gentiles who have become saved and he's reminding them that the reason why they have become saved in one sense, at the human level, is because of the disobedience of the Jews. The gospel went first to the Jews and largely, though not entirely, they rejected it.

That's what he means when he talks about their transgression, verse 12. The Jewish transgression, unbelief, meaning riches for the world. Their loss means riches for the Gentiles.

The Jews pass by the privileges that were theirs. Paul knows this because oftentimes he's been in the synagogues, has he not, in Turkey and he's ministered and he's had rough treatment and so he's more or less shaken the dust from off his feet and said, okay, if you won't accept it, then I'll take it to the Gentiles. And they did accept, large numbers of them.

And the possibility was that the Gentiles might become proud because of, well, they've responded and the Jews haven't responded and the apostle Paul has already started to indicate, ah, but God still has in mind a great turning of his ancient people, the Jewish nation, to the Lord. And so the latter part of the 12th verse, he says, how much greater riches will their fullness bring? The Jews come back, how wonderful it will be, how lavish will be the blessings of God upon them if they return to the God who's ministered to the world in the sending of our Lord Jesus. Well, let's drop down to the 17th verse and we're out in the garden for a parable and you have got to imagine two trees.

They're both the same type but there is a difference. They're both olives. One is a cultivated olive and the other is a wild olive.

The olive tree itself, well, it stands for the people of God, it stands for the people of God. The wild olive shoot, verse 17, is typifying the Gentiles. They were wild, they had no part in the purposes of God, at least amongst the people of God, until something quite remarkable happened.

What was that? Well, the gospel was directed to them and these wild people, so to speak, these people typified by this wild olive shoot, they responded and it's just as though, says the apostle, using this agricultural metaphor, it's just as though the branch was taken from the wild olive shoot and it was grafted in, it was grafted into the parent cultivated olive tree. If some of the branches have been broken off and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches. What's Paul telling us? Let's try and repeat it for these good folks who've just arrived.

He's telling us that Gentile people who have responded in faith to the gospel have actually, so to speak, being grafted into the olive tree that stands for the people of God. Now, this blessing that the Gentiles have entered into should in no way make them proud. Don't boast about it, says the apostle.

Don't boast as though you had achieved yourself this blessing of salvation. Appreciate this, that the salvation that belongs to you, verse 18, and the latter part, the salvation that belongs to you is something that's being given to you by God. You are supported by the root, the root of the olive.

The root supports you. Everything that you are, everything that you ever will be is as a result of God taking you from the wild condition in which you were in and grafting you into the true olive tree. Now, when you have a look at this olive tree very carefully, you discover that not only have branches been grafted onto the tree, but some time ago, branches were broken off.

Branches were broken off, verse 20. What did these broken off branches stand for? Well, they typified the ancient people of Israel by and large. They were broken off for what reason? Why were they separated from the true people of God? Well, because of their unbelief.

And we've example that, haven't we, in Paul's ministry in Turkey. You see it often, don't you, in the Old Testament, the unbelief that the Jews offered to the word of God when the prophets came along and spoke it. And so you see the picture.

Here's this olive tree. Branches broken off that used to belong the Jewish people. Branches that were part of a wild olive taken off deliberately and crafted into the olive tree.

So that these branches, as they develop, as fruit comes on them, will recognize that all that they are, the life that is in them, the support that they get, is a result of the sustenance that comes through them having been grafted onto the true olive tree. Now, you can work that out very clearly, very carefully yourself, can't you? When you became a Christian, you became a partaker in the very life of God. The Holy Spirit indwells you.

The Holy Spirit floods through your personality in varying measures in a congregation like this. All that we ever hope to be is as a result of us being grafted in as members of other people of God. If we were to get proud or arrogant as the apostle, then the possibility is that we would finish up in the same way that the Old Testament Jewish people largely did.

In pride, they responded to what God had done for them. And as a result of the pride, they were broken off. So we're not to be arrogant, says the apostle.

You Gentile people who are part of this olive, you're not to be arrogant at all. Because if God cut off the natural branches, the possibility is that if you respond ultimately with pride and arrogance, then you too will be broken off. It's he who endures to the end who's saved.

You've always got to be testing yourself, haven't you? In terms of your personal salvation, you've always got to be examining yourself, 2 Corinthians 12 five, to ensure that you are in the faith. Now, says the apostle Paul, the incredible thing that strikes me is this. That there is the possibility that God who has grafted you, Gentiles, into the olive tree, if you like, could do exactly the same thing for those broken off branches and have them placed back into the parent tree.

Look at verse 23 and 24, or verse 24 especially. If you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? You see what he has in mind? He's really taking you back to what we looked at in verse 12. He talks about the Jewish unbelief, meaning riches for the Gentiles, and then he suggests the possibility that the Jews might ultimately come to believe and how much greater will be the riches that they receive as they trade their unbelief for faith and enter into the blessings of God.

So in these verses from the 17th through to the 24th, all he's done is changed the metaphor and he still has at the back of his mind this great optimistic hope that there could come a time when his ancient people, his own people, will respond in large numbers to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, what he's telling us about, and he brings it all to some point that's much sharper in the 25th verse and onwards, he's talking about the restoration of Israel, the restoration of Israel. This is really what keeps him going.

I don't want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers. Paul is an apostle and Paul has been receiving additional revelation from the Lord Jesus. I don't believe anyone receives additional revelation today.

But in terms of understanding the character of God, I believe that God gives the revelation to people to be able to apply what's already within the word of God and to direct it into individual circumstances. God has got nothing else to reveal about himself and his purposes but that which is within the word. But when our Lord Jesus was on earth, he didn't teach the disciples everything that there was to know because he said they couldn't contain it.

But he would teach them, and he did by the power of the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit has come, he will lead you into all truth. Well, here is the apostle Paul, and he is picking up on the promises of the Lord Jesus.

Something has been revealed to me. I don't want you to be ignorant of this mystery. What will happen to the ancient people? This has been revealed to me.

Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. Now, he knows that himself, doesn't he, through his own ministry. Not every Jew has believed by a long chalk.

And as we've said a couple of times already, he has much greater success amongst the Gentiles. That's always been the case, historically, incidentally. I don't know a time when there has been revival amongst the Jews.

There's always been a trickle of Jews who've been saved. And I pick up information in America that there are quite a number of Jews today being one for the Lord Jesus. But if you go out to Israel, you'll find that by and large there's intransigence, there's hardness, there's blindness amongst Jewish people in the land of Palestine.

So this partial hardening, this partial blindness, is something that Paul knew in his day of ministry on the earth. It's something that we can illustrate down the years as far as the Jews are concerned, and it's with us to this very day. Now this is my argument, you see.

There has never been a time in history when Jews in large numbers have come to a realization that Jesus is Lord. And yet scripture indicates through Paul, and there are other supportive scriptures that we could bring to bear, that that blindness, that hardness, is gonna be lifted. In other words, we have got an element of prophecy which has yet to be fulfilled.

That's why I say we always ought to be in prayer in regard to the salvation of Jewish people, because the gospel was directed to the Jew first and also to the Gentile. The Apostle Paul is expecting a great ingathering of people in the Jewish nation, from the Jewish nation to the ranks of Jesus Christ. And so he says in the 26th verse, in what has become a verse of much contention amongst evangelicals, though I don't really understand why, he says in the 26th verse, and so all Israel will be saved.

Let's read the whole of that passage from the 25th through to the 26th verse again. I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved, as it is written.

And he quotes Old Testament prophecies to buttress this idea of a mass regathering of Jewish people into the family of God. What, it seems to me, he is arguing for is this, that the time will come when the full quota, the full complement, if you like, of Gentile people for whom Jesus died have responded to his gospel. And at that particular point, there will come this mass turning of Jews around the world to the Lord Jesus.

I take it that this will occur preceding, immediately preceding his great and glorious second coming. What does Paul mean by all Israel being saved? Well, he can't mean that every Jew that was ever born, every descendant of Abraham that has ever been will enter into salvation. If he meant that, then you may as well tear up the first three or four chapters, because he has rejected that idea in his opening observations.

So what does he mean? Well, it seems to me that you've got to do a little bit of reasoning from what he has already told us in regard to the Gentiles. He tells us in the 12th verse, doesn't he, that the day will come when the Gentile people who have responded to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in great numbers will trigger off, if you like, the mass conversion of Jewish people. He's arguing, let me read it from my notes here.

I'm going from the second paragraph or the third paragraph on the third page. He cannot mean that every descendant of Abraham will enter into salvation. That would rule out a lot of what he so carefully taught in the opening chapters.

In the 11th verse, in the 11th verse, he has told us that salvation has come to the Gentiles. Now, obviously, he's not said in that 11th verse that all the Gentiles have been saved. Rather, he's arguing that a representative in increasing number, including many through his ministry, have been.

Now, if you drop down to verse 25, you will see that he talks about the fullness of the Gentiles, the total of all Gentiles who will believe in Jesus until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. Now, it's interesting, it seems to me, that he uses exactly the same terminology when he's referring to his own people. Again, look at verse 12.

He's spoken about Gentiles being enriched by the unbelief of the Jews. The gospel, as a consequence, was preached to them. But then he speaks about a later response of his people to the gospel they once rejected.

How much greater, verse 12, the last part, how much greater riches will their fullness bring? Will their fullness bring? Now, drop down to the 26th verse, and we're well-equipped to understand what he means by all Israel. All Israel will be saved as it is written, and he quotes those supporting scriptures. So when he refers to all Gentiles, he was referring, I say this in summary, he was referring to all the Gentiles for whom the Lord Jesus has died.

When he refers to all Israel being saved, he has exactly the same idea in mind, all those for whom our Lord Jesus Christ has died. So you see Paul's reasoning, and you can see his optimism, the reason for his optimism. Did God reject his ancient people? By no means, he hasn't rejected them.

But he will bring them in to the true olive tree, if you like, he will have them numbered amongst the people of God on the same basis as Gentiles have responded to the gospel through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So he quotes from Isaiah's prophecy and also from Jeremiah in underlining his great belief that there is going to be a mass return of the people of the Hebrews to the God and father of Abraham. Well, look at verse 28, because here he's dealing with the present situation, he's come away from this optimistic picture that he sees in the future of this great movement of the Holy Spirit amongst the Jews.

But at the present time, the time of Paul writing, the time of his own ministry, as far as the gospel is concerned, these Jews at the moment, they're enemies on your account. I mean, he can prove that, can't he? Look at the way that they've dealt with him, look at the way that they've treated him as he's gone from place to place, he's been hunted and hounded from pillar to post. The Jews, they seem to be his enemy, enemies of all those who preach the gospel.

Because, well, they've rejected the Lord Jesus, they don't understand this great mystery of election how God will bring to himself an innumerable number of people from the Gentile ranks. Nonetheless, says the apostle, these people who are so blinded, these people who are so stubborn, they still have this historical pedigree that trace back to the patriarchs. God still loves these people because, well, they have this pedigree and he made these promises to Abraham and the promises he made to Abraham was when Abraham was in a condition of faith and if these people will put faith in God as Abraham put faith in God, as the Gentiles are increasingly putting faith in God, then it's still possible for them to be saved because the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable.

And he repeats what he's told us on many occasions in this chapter, in the 30th verse. There was a time when you were once disobedient, there was a time when you rejected the things of God, you Gentile people, and then God nonetheless moved in your heart by his grace and you responded to his gospel. Now, as you have received faith and salvation as a consequence, it's possible that God in his mercy will nonetheless still respond to them even despite their disobedience.

They will move into that position of becoming God's children, verse 30, as a result of God's mercy to you, the Gentiles, and also to them. You see, Paul has wanted, as he concludes this comment, this particular piece of reasoning of verse 32, he's wanted to show that all Jews and all Gentiles are in a hopeless condition before God. He's bound all men over to disobedience.

There's non-righteous, no, not one. But the possibility is that God can have mercy, have mercy on all the categories of mankind, Jew and Gentile, through the Lord Jesus. So you remember, those of you who've been on this course of studies for such a long time now, how at the beginning of the letter, the apostle spends time showing that the Gentiles are in a hopeless condition.

Before the Lord, there's no hope. They've exchanged so many things that God has given in terms of natural revelation of himself. They've exchanged it for a lie, and God has brought in the verdict on the Gentiles that they're guilty before him, and there's no hope.

Then he turns to the Jews. They had additional revelation. The oracles of God belong to them, the patriarchs, the prophets, God sent them, and yet with all this super potential for blessing that God had directed to the Jews, they rejected it, and so God brings in that final verdict.

All men are guilty before me. There is non-righteous, no, not one. He binds them all over in disobedience, and then instead of saying, all right, you lot, that's it, I turn my back on you.

He starts to have mercy, and he shows his mercy through the Lord Jesus, and it's the Gentiles who first largely respond to that mercy, but the mercy that's shown to the Gentiles through our Lord Jesus has also been shown to the Jews, so God has revealed his mercy in both camps, and both camps will have to respond to the only way of salvation that there is, and that is through faith in the Lord Jesus. The time will come when all the Gentiles for whom Jesus has died will have made response. The time will come when all the Jews for whom Jesus has died will make response.

At that moment, it would be true to say, both spiritually and also on a nationalistic basis, that all Israel will have been saved. It's interesting that in this chapter, there's no reference to the land of Israel. There's no reference to the Davidic kingdom.

There's no reference to some great political era in which the Jews shall have had restored to them the prestige and the wealth that they had in the days of David and Solomon. Paul is beyond all that. The Jews are to be taken beyond all that.

He has, Paul has a greater hope for the Gentile and for the Jew. Paul is really back, if you like, in the mindset of Jacob and the ancient patriarchs who never actually owned, apart from the cave in which Abraham and Sarah and the others were buried, never actually owned any part of the promised land. They looked for a city whose maker and whose builder was God.

They weren't just the materialists that some people who preach the prosperity gospel tell us they were. These were men whose visions were raised from the material to the heavenly, from the now to the ultimate. And so, Paul, you see, when he's dealing with these great things that God still has in store, he's not concerned with the territorial rights of the Jews.

He's not concerned with political power. What he is concerned about is that old rugged cross and the power of forgiveness that God has released into the camps of both Jew and Gentile. God has bound all men over to disobedience.

He has shown that both groups are faulty before him, and yet blessed be his name. He's done it so that he can placard his mercy before them all in the face of the Lord Jesus. And Paul warms so much to what he's now saying that he moves into a pyramid of praise, into this glorious doxology, the language of which is hardly excelled anywhere else in scripture.

Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments. Bring your philosophers, bring your great men, get all the intellect of humanity, concentrate it if you can into one mind.

And even that mind could not fathom the depths of the wisdom and the knowledge and the riches of God. How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out. Who in their wildest dreams could ever have believed that this creator of the heavens and the earth, this God who has caused planets to come into existence, this God who makes the earth just as a grain of sand compared with all the universes that there are, that he should single out planet earth and become as a man in the person of his son, born into humankind, taking upon himself the consequences of our sinfulness.

How unsearchable his judgments, his ways past finding out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor? In one sense, the Christian gospel must be true because it is so far-fetched, it is so fanciful that no one in their right mind could ever have contrived it. It's the absolute wonder of the gospel that in effect becomes its own proof, its own self-authentication.

This is beyond the bounds of human reason for anyone to have contrived in terms of a plot or an attempt to produce a religion. How unsearchable his judgments, his ways past tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be the glory forever, amen. Can you imagine the emotion that there must have been in the mind of the Apostle Paul as he pens this glorious doxology? There were those Gentiles, do you see them? Do you perceive yourself like this? A wild olive, lawless, no shape, no symmetry, a life out of skew, a life with no rhyme, no reason to it. And then God in his grace takes his secateurs and he snips you off and he brings you to this olive, this parent plant and he puts you in and he grafts you.

And the grafting process is the gift of the spirit that produces faith in your life and you draw sustenance, sap from him. You're there, you're there because there was something about you that caused God to choose you. No, there was nothing in you.

Let not one vestige of arrogance remain in your personality. It's all of grace. He brought you in.

If he brought you in and others who were naturally his people have been broken off, if he has done the lesser, could he not even do the greater? Could he not bring those people back and put them again into the olive branch where naturally, logically, historically they belong? I, says the Apostle Paul, he can do that and that's what he's going to do and that's what keeps me going as an apostle to the Gentiles with an eye on the Jews. I'm being blessed here and maybe my blessings here as Gentiles come and worship Yahweh and discover who he is, maybe that will provoke the Jews so that they too will come in. Indeed, says the Apostle, this is bound to happen ultimately because God has spoken by his word that he's not given up on his ancient people.

All Israel will be saved. All Gentiles will be saved. All Israel for whom Jesus died, all the Gentiles for whom Jesus died, all that great elect company, so numerous that the final total cannot be computed, they will be saved.

All the depth of the riches, of the wisdom and the knowledge. Let's bow in prayer for a moment. ♪ Of his precious beyond all us ♪ ♪ Father, your love overwhelms me ♪ ♪ Father, your love is precious beyond all us ♪ ♪ Father, your love overwhelms me ♪ ♪ So I lift up my hands as an expression of my love ♪ ♪ And I give you my heart in joyful obedience ♪ ♪ Father, your love is precious beyond all us ♪ ♪ Father, your love overwhelms me ♪ ♪ So I lift up my hands as an expression of my love ♪