Has God rejected Israel.
1 I ask therefore: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. 2 God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew.
Yesterday we began to look at the olive tree. Something is being cut off and replaced. Now I want us to go back and look at the beginning of this chapter, Romans 11. Those who know me, know that I am not really happy to quote a verse or even a chapter without its full context. In fact Paul’s letter to the Romans is pivotal to much of our understanding about covenant, encapsulating a broad view of both old and new Testament scriptures related to the subject.
“I ask therefore, did God reject His people.”
Two words to look at closely, “Therefore”, and, “reject” . We must ask, what is therefore, there for? It is there because it refers us in looking for an answer to the question, “Did God reject His people back to the huge store of information which Paul has opened up to us in the previous chapter. It could easily read, “In view of all that I have written, did God reject His people. We will of course look in a moment at just a little of what Paul says, but the other word to look at is a sort of compund Greek word, (απωσατο), aposato. We understand apo, as in apostle, sent. Sato, is measure. So we get something like, “distanced”. “Sent a distance away”.
Paul now continues, “No, let that never be mentioned”. He is strongly asserting all of those preceding scriptures where God is saying that, “nothing can separate us from the love of God”, qualified by, “that is in Christ Jesus”, thus combining the fact of God’s closeness with the reality of God with us in Christ Jesus, Messiah. Jesus is here not to condmen the world, but, in the words spoken to Nicodemus, that leader in Israel in John 3 verses 16-17, “but that through Him, (Jesus), the world, (first the Jew and then the Gentile), might be saved.” Paul is an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. Yet as he speaks of salvation, he now places its possibility, nowhere else than in the grace of God through Jesus. God, faithful to His promise and seeing where Israel was fruitless and failing, comes, just at the right time to their rescue in the form of Messiah, Saviour.
God did not reject those he foreknew. This word, “foreknew”, is used earlier and I, “therefore”, regard it as a technical word which Paul is rehearsing to draw us into his previous teaching. Romans 8 verse 29 where the word, “foreknew”, passes on a specific meaning,, “The elect”. “Those predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son”. Here again we see the separation, of one group from another on the basis of the call of God, a prequel to what Paul speaks in the illustration of the olive tree.
I want to conclude this short section today with Paul’s devastaing statement in Romans 9 verses 1 – 6 as the next, “Therefore”, which we must visit before we can move on in Romans 11
Romans 9 :
1 I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit— 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5 Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen. God’s Sovereign Choice 6 It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.
This passage of scripture distinctly says that not all Israel are Israel..
more to follow