Welcome to Series 3 as we continue our story of Paul explaining the Christian message to the Roman church.

Background and Recap

Series 1 gave a summary of the gospel, the importance of the gospel, the need for the gospel and the depth of sin into which mankind had fallen. Series 2, which we have just finished, described the various resources that God has given Christians to live a successful and victorious Christian life in all sorts of different circumstances. Paul has described the amazing power of the Holy Spirit who comes to live within us. He ended chapter 8 with a wonderful passage from which I want to read a couple of verses by way of introduction to where we are going next. Paul says in Romans 8: 28,

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him who have been called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:28, NIV

In this amazing statement, Paul describes God’s sovereignty over our lives as believers. He goes on to say God ‘foreknew’ us - he knew us even before we were born. God ‘predestined’ us to be saved and God called us, justified us, and glorified us. This is a description of the process of salvation in our lives from the very beginning to the very end of our lives. That is where Paul left the story as a wonderful climax in Romans 8, as Paul confirms the power of the gospel and the security of our salvation in Christ.

What is the Significance of the Jews?

In this series, Paul changes the topic quite dramatically. He focuses his attention on a particular question that arose in the church in Rome and in other churches that Paul preached in and looked after. This question was about the significance and the place of the Jewish people in God’s purposes now that Jesus Christ had come. This was a very important question for the Early Church. Paul said in Romans 1: 16, that the gospel “was first for the Jew and then for the Gentile”. The Jewish people were the people God had used in his purposes for thousands of years before Jesus came and now it appeared that most of the Jewish people rejected the gospel. This presented the Early Church with a real question: what is the significance of the Jews? Do they still have a place in God’s purposes? What should our attitude be to them?

This is a very important question for us today because in our world hostile racial attitudes towards Jewish people are very common - anti-Semitism. But also very significantly the Jewish nation has come together again, has been reformed during the middle of the 20th century in the nation of Israel, and also very significantly more and more Jewish people at this time in history are turning to faith in Jesus Christ as their Messiah. So the Jewish question is a question for the modern world, as well as a question for the New Testament Church in the time of Paul.

Our first consideration is Paul’s situation and in the verses that we are going to study in this episode, Paul introduces this topic. We will be looking at the Jewish question throughout Romans 9, 10 and 11. In chapter 11, Paul suddenly gives us an amazing insight into God’s purposes for the Jews in the future, beyond his lifetime. That is what we are looking forward to, but meanwhile he is going to explain his perspective on the Jewish people. He himself is Jewish, profoundly Jewish - brought up with all the Jewish traditions and so this is an important question for him.

“I speak the truth in Christ - I’m not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit - I have great sorrow, an unceasing anguish in my heart. 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, 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. These are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.”

Romans 9:1-5, NIV

The Place of the Jews in the Church in Rome

What provoked Paul to enter into this deep and significant discussion? One of the things that influenced him was the situation in the church in Rome itself that he was writing to. Rome was the capital city of the Roman Empire - a long way away from Israel and Jerusalem, Jesus’ ministry and the place where the Church started in Jerusalem, which is described in the book of Acts. But Rome had had a Jewish community living in the centre of the city for many years before the church came into existence. At the Day of Pentecost, as described in Acts chapter 2, when the Church started in Israel, as Jesus had predicted, the Spirit came down in power on the apostles and their friends, and Peter - the leading Apostle - stood up and preached to a vast crowd of people and many were converted. Three thousand people were baptized as a result of his preaching on that first day. The Church was born.

The Day of Pentecost was part of a Jewish annual feast, celebration, or religious festival. The Jews had three main religious festivals during the year: Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. All of them are mentioned in the Gospels. At each of these religious festivals it was the custom for Jewish people to gather in Jerusalem from all over the country and to travel from other countries where they lived, to come to the homeland for a week or two for a major religious festival, to stay in and around Jerusalem and to participate in religious ceremonies in the Jewish Temple in the city. At the Feast of Pentecost, when Peter stood up to speak, there were huge numbers of visitors in the city. Probably most of the congregation and crowd that heard Peter speak were actually visitors to the city and in Acts 2, Luke describes many of the places that they came from which included different parts of the Roman Empire, different places to the east of Israel and North Africa - all sorts of different places and they included in Acts 2: 10, ‘visitors from Rome’. So we know that there were Jewish people in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost who were converted by Peter and others during those first few weeks of the Church’s life. Because they didn’t live in Jerusalem, they inevitably went back to Rome as Christian believers - Jews who had become Christians. They would have come back to their small community in the centre of Rome and would have explained to their friends how they had become believers and that they now believe that Jesus was the Messiah. The church in Rome would have been born out of these people who travelled back to their homes with a newfound faith.

Over time that church grew a little and some non-Jews, Gentiles, were attracted to the gospel, and they joined the church. But we also know that about 15 years later after the Day of Pentecost, the Roman Emperor Claudius, after some rioting in the city of Rome, decided to send all the Jews into exile and to remove them from the city of Rome. We know this from Roman historical records, and it is also referred to in Acts 18: 2. In Rome the church changed. Before, they had some Jewish church members and some Gentile church members, now the Jewish church members have left because they had all been forced to go. Then about five years later, when a new emperor came to the throne, by the name of Nero, re-admitted the Jews and so they came back again into the city.

These events reinforce the sense that there were two ethnic groups in the church that were rather separate from each other – the Jewish members and the Gentile members – and Paul had heard that there were tensions between these groups. He deals with some of these tensions in this letter from chapter 9 onwards, at various points right the way through until the end of the letter. One of the points of tension and difficulty was that it appears that many Gentile Christians had come to the conclusion that God had finished with the Jews; they were no longer his chosen people, they no longer had a special purpose. Very few Jews had believed. Most of them, even in Rome, were hostile to the church and had heard reports that wherever Paul went to preach he was opposed by the Jewish people who sometimes attacked him and tried to kill him, or get him out of the city. So how could God still be the God of the Jews? Surely the time has come to leave the Jewish people behind and to build the church with all the other nations of the world. God has come for the nations of the world. This was what they were thinking, and if they had this attitude as they met together with Jewish believers there would be tension. Probably by the time that Paul was writing, the church was meeting in different groups according to their race; they weren’t even meeting together. One of the things that Paul needs to address is the question: has God finished with the Jews?

Paul, the Jew

Paul’s own experience when preaching the gospel to the Jews was a difficult experience. He loved the Jewish people and he says here, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart”. He even wished that he could be outside of salvation if they could all come in and be saved, which is a strange thing to for him to say. He had a deep compassion and love for the Jewish people but he had experienced tremendous opposition from them; they had tried to kill him on many occasions. Paul always asked for an invitation to go to the Jewish community first, to their religious assembly - their synagogue - wherever he went in different cities He would ask permission to read the scriptures and explain the scriptures to them and then he would preach about Christ the Messiah. Everywhere he went there would always be an argument; some people would believe and others would not, and then there would be great tension and difficulties which usually meant he had to leave the synagogue and go elsewhere. Sometimes he even had to leave the city as a result of the threats on his life. So why did Paul feel so deeply about the Jewish people when he had had such a difficult experience and so many Jewish people had rejected the gospel? For Paul, it was the tragedy of missed opportunity and God’s unfulfilled purposes for the Jews.

The Jewish Heritage

He goes on to describe the extraordinary privileges of the Jews; the things that God had given them which he remembered and he knew about as listed here in this passage. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; in the Old Testament, God describes Israel as ‘my first born son’ Exodus 4: 22 - 23. “The first nation that I’ve loved is the Jewish people.” They were corporately his son.

Paul mentions “the divine glory”; God had revealed himself to the Jews throughout the Old Testament period in some remarkable ways and his presence amongst the people could be seen and felt at different times. At the time of the Ten Commandments, the glory of God came over Mount Sinai where Moses was; there were dark clouds and a sense of power and authority that felt like a manifestation of God. When the Jewish tabernacle was set up (the place of worship which was a very large tent that moved through the wilderness with various altars and other religious symbols within it), whenever it moved and settled, there appeared to be like a cloud above it during the day but it wasn’t a normal cloud. It was like a cloud but it was an illuminated area which was actually the glory of God, and that turned into a pillar of fire during the night time. Later on when Solomon built his temple and the priests went into the temple for the first time to start worshipping and praising God, the glory and the presence of God was so great that they couldn’t do anything: they couldn’t move; they couldn’t conduct their ceremonies. This is what Paul means by the divine glory.

Then he speaks of the “covenants”. God made an agreement, or a covenant, with Abraham which was the foundation of the Jewish people. He chose Abraham and Sarah to be the first people of the Jewish nation. He made a covenant with Moses by which he established a law for them to live by in the Promised Land. Then God made a covenant with David the king and he promised him that his monarchy, his kingship, would go on forever and that there would be in the long-term future, a successor to King David - a king who would be a deliverer. That that person was Jesus.

They received the “law”, they had the “temple worship”; they had the patriarchs - the father figures of the nation: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Finally Paul says, they had the human ancestry of the Messiah. Jesus was Jewish. His stepfather Joseph was Jewish; his mother Mary was Jewish. He was born in a Jewish family, in a Jewish community and his ancestry went back to King David both through his mother’s line and his stepfather’s line. He was connected biologically as an ancestor to King David, the king to whom God had promised that there will be a greater king that comes after him who would be the deliverer of his people – the Messiah. Jesus was utterly Jewish: born under the Jewish law, living in the Jewish nation.

Paul saw all these incredible privileges of history and covenant and spiritual opportunity that God had given to the Jews and essentially what he is saying to his audience, these things are not cancelled because the gospel has come. These things are still in place and are still important. He will explain subsequently - in this chapter and the next two chapters - how these things are important. He was standing against the argument of some of the Gentiles in the Roman church who said, ‘Forget about the Old Testament, forget about the past, forget about the Jewish people. That is history. Now we are on to something new. Let us just go with Jesus and the gospel. Let us go to the nations and leave the Jews behind’. Paul knew in his heart that there was more to this story than they understood. In fact, he knew that God had a future plan for the Jews. Paul deeply desires the salvation of the Jewish people and he wants the church in Rome to be loving and caring of its Jewish neighbours, to welcome Jewish Christian believers into the midst, to have a harmonious relationship with them and to build a church with both Jews and Gentiles worshiping together - that was Paul’s goal.

Reflections

As we think about this passage, and as we come to the end of this episode, what things can we learn from it?

First of all a general point about ethnic tensions in the Church. This conflict that Paul is talking about is not the only ethnic conflict that Christians experience. There are many ethnic conflicts that follow on, that are like this conflict. We need to learn from the way Paul deals with this. One of the scriptures that can really help us is Ephesians 2:14 - 16, where Paul is talking about the reconciliation of the Jewish and the Gentile peoples in Christ,

“For he, Christ himself, is our peace, who has made the two groups into one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”

Ephesians 2:14-16, NIV

What Paul saw here is that every ethnic group is going to be incorporated in the Church of Jesus Christ and find a place of relationship and harmony together at the foot of the cross, acknowledging Jesus as Lord. In the first instance this must apply to the Jews and the Gentiles in his generation. In our world today, most of the ethnic conflicts in the Church do not directly involve the Jewish people but they involve tensions between different races and ethnic groups that we have in our church communities. We need to take an approach like Paul, to find a place for every ethnic group that comes to our church, or is in our local community, to understand them and to acknowledge them as equal to us in their relationship with God because everybody comes to Christ on the same basis. This will be a challenge in your context, and in my context. It depends which part of the world you are in how big a challenge this can be. It can be a huge challenge where there have been tribal conflicts and wars between nations, where there is long-standing prejudice or historical events that have caused great pain between different ethnic groups. We need to remember that Paul’s goal was to overcome all these things through Jesus Christ.

Another reflection that we can gain from this is to learn from Paul’s experience of being cut off from most of his fellow Jews because of his faith. Most of his fellow Jews rejected him, and if they had the chance they wanted to get rid of him, even to assassinate, murder, or imprison him so that he would stop spreading the gospel. He was cut off from his own people. Sometimes we as Christians experience that same feeling of being cut off from our own family, or our own tribe, or our own local community because we have become Christians and they are not and they are hostile to us. We can learn from Paul and can gain comfort from the fact that he had a similar experience and he had permanent hostility from many Jewish people throughout his ministry.

There is much more that Paul wants to say about Jewish history and how God shaped the nation of Israel and what that means for us today and we will look at that in the next few episodes.