Recap and Background

Welcome to Series 3 Episode 5 as we continue our incredible journey through the book of Romans. In the first series, Paul told us about the power of the gospel and the need for the gospel. The second series summarised the way that Paul described the resources we have to live the Christian life effectively. But now in Series 3, as you will be aware if you have been following these episodes, we are focusing in on that incredibly important and yet challenging question ‘Where do Israel and the Jewish people fit into the purposes of God now that the gospel has come?’ Paul has outlined long discussions about these issues with the church in Rome. They were confused and uncertain; there were prejudices and division in the church between the Jewish element and the non-Jewish, or Gentile, element. There was the risk of a split in the church over this issue and so Paul took plenty of time to explain God’s purposes for the Jewish people. That question matters for us two thousand years later as much as it mattered for them.

Now we come to chapter 11, which is the climax of Paul’s explanation and it involves a remarkable surprise, which is hinted at in this episode and will be explained fully in the last episode of this series at the end of Romans chapter 11. This is exciting territory in terms of the writings of Paul. We need to remind ourselves of some of the things that Paul has told us about the Jewish people. First of all in Episode 1 of this series, he told us of his incredible love for the Jewish people. He was a Jew himself and he was hugely troubled by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish people had rejected Jesus Christ, rejected the gospel, rejected the apostles and had rejected Paul himself. He was so sad about that. In Romans 9: 2 he says, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” and this was concerning their lack of salvation. But what he has explained in chapter 9 he comes back to again in chapter 11 as of great importance. Romans 9: 6 is a vital verse to understand Paul’s thinking: “For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel”. He made a distinction between the ethnic Jews and the believing Jews. Not all ethnic Jews were true believers in God, the God of Israel, and then in Jesus the Messiah when the gospel came. So with all that in mind, we now come to Paul’s conclusions and his final statements about this issue at the beginning of Romans 11.

A Faithful Remnant

Romans11: 1 - 6

“I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I’m an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah - how he appealed to God against Israel: ‘Lord they’ve killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I’m the only one left, and they’re trying to kill me.’? Now what was God’s answer to him? ‘I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.”

Romans 11:1-6, NIV

Paul refutes the idea that the Jews have been rejected because of their failure to believe in the Messiah. He gives three different explanations of why that is a mistake. His first answer concerns himself. If God had rejected the Jewish people why had Paul become a believer? If his race had been rejected, why did he become a believer? He is an example of that remnant and all the early Apostles were Jewish. Almost all the members of the first church in Jerusalem were Jewish. Almost all the writers of the New Testament were Jewish. The only exception is Luke. The Jewishness of what God did in giving birth to the Early Church tells us that he has not rejected the Jews.

Secondly, Paul says God foreknew Israel. He had a plan for them. This is all about timing and God’s purposes through history, where there are different phases of God working. Paul has in mind here that God can’t reject the Jews because he has made covenants, binding agreements, with the Jewish people in the Old Testament and he can’t now suddenly change his mind. We have discussed these covenants in some of the other teaching on the book of Romans and they are important to remember all the way through the New Testament. When God called Abraham at the very beginning he made a covenant agreement with Abraham that he would be the father of a whole nation, they would have a land and they would be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. God tells Abraham that the covenant is everlasting, permanent. (Genesis 17:7 and 8). He made a permanent commitment to the Jewish people to be in relationship with them. God made a covenant with King David to say that his kingship would continue, that there would be kings after him and ultimately a great and final king who would bring in God’s Kingdom. When God made that promise to David in 2 Samuel 7: 16, he said that his house, or his monarchy, his kingship would last forever - permanent. The covenants of the Old Testament mean that God will always be committed to working out his purposes with the Jewish people. He will never get rid of them, forget them, or reject them entirely. God foreknew Israel.

Paul’s third answer to this challenge is to remind his readers that there has always been a division in the people of Israel between true believers and nominal believers, or people who have turned away from the living God amongst the Jewish people. There has always been a remnant. God always gathered people together within Israel in every period of history. Paul gives a very vivid example in this passage when he refers to the story of Elijah.

Elijah and the Seven Thousand

When Paul mentions Elijah he has in mind when Elijah appealed to God against Israel and said he was the only person left who was still faithful and probably he was going to die soon and that would be the end. Elijah, the prophet, came to the northern kingdom of Israel at a time when an incredibly evil ruler had just taken power. His name was Ahab. The Bible says in 1 Kings that he did more evil than the kings before him. He was a particularly evil man and he married a foreign wife called Jezebel, who came from a different nation and brought with her into Israel a whole new religion and a whole new god, the god named Baal. They set up a temple to Baal in the capital city of the northern kingdom, called Samaria. They brought in prophets and religious ideas and practices that were completely against the ways of the living God of Israel. Idolatry landed in the country and took control of the whole country at that time. It was a very dark period in the national history. Elijah spoke to the king as a prophet and said that there would be no rainfall in the country until he came to speak to the king a second time. Three years passed before he saw King Ahab again and during that time there was a total drought, indeed a famine. People were dying, people were desperate. The country was sinking into chaos and violence, and anger and frustration; families were suffering. Elijah said to Ahab ‘Right, there is going to be rain coming soon but first of all I am going to confront this religion of yours on Mount Carmel. We are going to have your prophets of Baal and me, and we are going to pray and set up a sacrifice. You can set up a sacrifice to Baal. I will set up a sacrifice to the God of Israel and we will see in which sacrifice God acts miraculously by coming with supernatural fire and burning up the sacrifice.’ Amazingly, even though water was poured over Elijah’s sacrifice deliberately, fire came from heaven. Then he attacked and killed the prophets of Baal and the people turned against them.

Shortly after this, Ahab and Jezebel took their revenge on Elijah and tried to assassinate him; he had to flee the country. It was at that point that he appealed to God and said, ‘I’m the only true believer in Israel, the country has given up on God in total. I’m the last one left and I’m probably not going to survive much longer because they are trying to assassinate me’. In that context, God spoke to Elijah and said ‘You’re not the only one. I have reserved seven thousand true worshippers who have not given any worship to Baal at any shrine anywhere in the country in these last few years, seven thousand.’ That seven thousand is, in Paul’s thinking, a remnant and what he is saying is that at every stage in the history of Israel there has always been some true believers, even in the darkest moment, and that was one of the darkest moments ever. There were still true believers because God is still working in Israel, and there was still a remnant in Paul’s day.

The Spiritually Hardened

“What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened, as it is written: ‘God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear, to this very day’ And David says ‘May their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them. May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever.’”

Romans 11:7-10, NIV

God revealed himself to those that Paul calls ‘the elect’, the ones who God gave special revelation to. But the rest he allowed to be spiritually hardened amongst the Jewish people.

This was illustrated in the time of Jesus. Let me give you a very powerful illustration of this incredible division in Israel that came. When Jesus was ministering, as we saw in the ‘Life of Jesus’, when we studied the Gospels, his main opponent was the religious authorities. They had a Council that ruled over all the religious affairs of Israel known as the Sanhedrin, or the Jewish Ruling Council and there were Pharisees and Sadducees involved. It was chaired by the High Priest and there were other priests in that group of seventy. They voted on all decisions to do with running the religion of Israel and it is the Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus as a false messiah and handed him over to the Romans to be executed on Good Friday. But the interesting thing is, out of that seventy there were some who didn’t agree and had actually become believers in Jesus. We know the names of two of them. Their story is told in the Gospels.

One of them was called Nicodemus. He was a much respected leader but very early in Jesus’ ministry he privately came to Jesus at night, according to John 3, and asked Jesus a lot of questions and was clearly searching for salvation. Jesus explained to him how he could be born again and how he could find a new life and Nicodemus came into the life of faith. The other man whose name we know, who did not agree with what the religious leaders were doing was Joseph of Arimathea. We know from the Gospels that when Jesus died, he went to Pontius Pilate and asked him for the body because he wanted to bury Jesus in a tomb that he had prepared for his own family use. The Gospels tell us that he also was a disciple. So here we have, even in the Jewish Ruling Council, a remnant, the elect, those who believe.

Everywhere in Judaism, even in the dark moments there have been those who truly believed in Jesus as the Messiah. We might think these are very few in number. How significant are they, what does it mean? In our next episode, we are going to realise that Paul has a surprise about what is going to happen in the future concerning this remnant. Is it just going to be a handful of people all the way through the era of the Church until Jesus comes again, or not? We will find out in the next episode. Paul is building up to a surprise and a climax of his explanation. As we prepare to leave this passage and move on to the next episode, we can see Paul has unambiguously defended the fact that God is still working amongst the Jewish people. We should not dismiss them because of all their failures and rebellion.

Reflections

As we come to some reflections at the end of this episode, we find that yet again Paul shows us as he has done in Romans 10, and several times in Romans 9, that nobody can believe unless in the first instance God opens up the way by giving revelation. We have to respond – that is our responsibility – and God holds us responsible but he has to reveal the gospel to us. Paul says here that the remnant of Israel are those whom God softened in their hearts, or showed by revelation of the message. Paul really felt this very deeply because that was his experience; that was his story, he was totally against the gospel but God broke through. God had chosen to reveal himself to Paul and Paul desperately desired this for other people. But we can only believe in the gospel if God reveals Christ to us as part of that journey. I wonder where you are with the Christian message. I wonder if you are a true believer or whether you are listening to this episode and wondering and thinking. Maybe you have a Jewish background and you are trying to work out how that Jewish background connects to the Christian gospel. This chapter is incredibly important for you.

Another reflection we can make is to remind ourselves that God is always faithful to his covenants. He doesn’t change his mind. Once he has committed himself to people, he doesn’t decide later on that he is going to cancel that commitment. It is not a business contract, nor a marriage where he can opt out by divorce. God has committed totally to his people and if that is true for the ancient people of Israel who made such a terrible mess of things on so many occasions, then we as Christians ought to take comfort from the fact that we are in a covenant relationship with God and he is not going to withdraw that relationship, or that covenant. He is not going to cancel it when we let him down. He will still be there. His word is still secure. Hebrews 6: 19 says, concerning the new covenant, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” We live in the new covenant that Jesus won for us and made for us. If you are doubting today, if you have fallen into sin, if you have started to neglect being part of a church, if you have been opposed in your faith and feel like giving up, can I encourage you: God is faithful to his covenant; he will lift you up, he will show the way forward for you, if you come to him today.

This episode, the beginning of Romans 11, is going to open up the way for some amazing predictions that Paul makes for the future - predictions that are very relevant for us in the 21st century. I look forward to welcoming you back to the next episode as we follow through the story in the next section of Romans 11.