ISRAEL AND THE CHURCH

God’s Plan for Jew and Gentile
(Romans 11:1-36)

Many Christians hold that the Christian Church has replaced Israel in God’s purpose. This unbiblical view — called ‘Replacement Theology’ — fails to acknowledge the continued existence throughout history of a believing ‘remnant’ of Jewish believers in Jesus, and the future role that God has for the Jewish people in world history when ‘all Israel will be saved.’ In this sermon, given at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 16 September 2007, Rob Yule shows how mysteriously interwoven and interdependent are God’s purposes for Israel and the Church — purposes underlined by startling developments in recent Jewish history.

Many Christians have grown up believing that God has rejected the Jewish people, and that the Christian Church has replaced Israel in God’s purposes.

The view that the Church has replaced Israel is called ‘Replacement Theology’. It has been held by many Christians over the centuries — especially Christians from the established churches. Replacement Theology has nurtured Christian attitudes of superiority and contempt towards Jews. These attitudes, in turn, have led to terrible actions — anti-Semitic episodes and pogroms — culminating ultimately in the Holocaust.

These attitudes and actions are unbiblical. In Romans 11 Paul deals with the place of Jews and Gentiles in God’s plan. ‘Has God rejected the Jews?’ he asks rhetorically (11:1). ‘By no means’, is his emphatic reply.

Israel’s rejection is not total: God has preserved a Jewish remnant (11:1-10)

Paul first shows that the rejection of Israel is not total. Throughout history God has always kept a believing remnant, a faithful minority of Jewish believers. For example:

• There was Paul himself (11:1) — dramatically to converted through a vision of the Messiah when he was actively persecuting the early Christian movement.

• There were the 7,000 God kept for himself when Elijah thought he was the only one left (11:2-4, 1 Kings 19:1-18).

• Down the centuries there have been Hebrew Christians, such as Michael Solomon Alexander, consecrated first Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem in 1841; Franz Delitzsch, the great 19th century German scholar, translator in 1877 of the Hebrew New Testament; or Alfred Edersheim, author of The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883-90).

• Now — since the early 1970s — there is the amazing emergence of Messianic Judaism: Jews who believe in Jesus as their Messiah but wish to retain their Jewishness and links with Judaism. They now exist in greater numbers than at any time since the days of the New Testament.

To this day God has preserved a continuous remnant of believing Jews. But the fact remains that the great majority of Jews don’t believe. Paul says they have been ‘hardened’ (11:7): their spiritual sensitivity has been calloused. If people, presented with the Gospel, will not believe, there comes a time when they cannot believe.

Israel’s rejection is not fatal: God has overruled the Jews’ unbelief (11:11-24)

Secondly, Paul shows that the rejection of the Jews is not fatal. God in his providence has overruled the unbelief — or ‘stumbling’ — of the Jews, to bring salvation to us Gentiles.

There are two kinds of ‘stumbling’. A dying animal, when it stumbles and falls, may never get up again. But a competitive athlete who stumbles, gets up and continues the race.

Many Christians think the Jews have stumbled permanently, and have been replaced by the Church. But Paul says their stumbling is temporary. It has been allowed by God as a means of blessing and salvation to Gentiles. God is in control, and has overruled it for good. He has used Israel’s fall to bring about the Gentiles’ call.

Paul uses a powerful argument: if the rejection of the Jews has brought reconciliation for the world, what greater blessings will their acceptance bring?

‘If their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring!... If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?’ (11:12, 15)

The coming ‘acceptance’ of the Jews by God, Paul says, will be like a resurrection from the dead! It will spark a worldwide awakening or revival.

I’d like to share two illustrations — one personal, one Paul’s — to help you grasp the relationship envisaged here of Jews and Gentiles in God’s purposes:

1. A vision of a cartwheel: Jews and Gentiles in a coming world revival

Once, in the 1980s, I was praying for revival with group of pastors in Christchurch, New Zealand. We got discussing the perennial problem of ‘why revival tarries’. Why don’t we see the revival that so many Christians long for and pray for? As we prayed and anguished about this, I had a vision. I saw a cartwheel, with people grasping the spokes and straining to turn it. Then I saw why it wouldn’t turn: the hub was stuck to the axle.

I realised the Lord was showing me the key factor in worldwide revival. The wheel of revival in the Gentile nations won’t turn until the hub of the Jewish people moves freely about the axle of their Messiah. Revival tarries till God’s ancient people the Jews respond more fully to their Lord. This is why Paul emphasises our responsibility to take the Gospel ‘to the Jew first’ as well as to the Gentiles (1:16).

A picture of an olive tree: Jews and Gentiles in an interdependent historical relationship

Paul uses the picture of an olive tree to describe the fascinating historical interrelationship of Jews and Gentiles. He talks about grafting a wild olive shoot into a cultivated olive tree to rejuvenate and it make it fruit better.

Paul has been criticised as a city-slicker who didn’t know what he was talking about — because this is the opposite of normal horticultural practice today, where cultivated branches are grafted onto a wild or uncultivated root. But scholars have shown that what Paul writes about was a recognized practice in Roman agriculture. To stimulate and rejuvenate an unproductive olive tree, and make it begin to fruit again, a wild olive shoot was grafted onto a cultivated olive root (see C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, Vol. II, pp. 565-6).

Note two things about Paul’s illustration:

(1) We Gentiles are grafted onto a Jewish root

They support us, not we them (11:18). ‘Christianity is Jewish,’ Edith Schaeffer used to say. The historical roots of Christianity are Jewish. The Bible is Jewish. The prophets were Jewish. The apostles were Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. The Saviour of the world is the Jewish Messiah.

(2) The Gentile graft will invigorate the Jewish root

The inclusion of the Gentiles will reinvigorate the Jewish community — leading to the great end-time revival, the ‘renewal’ or ‘restoration’ of all things, foretold by Jesus (Matthew 19:28), the apostles (Acts 3:21), and the prophets. Paul speaks here in Romans 11 of a sequence of events:

The stumbling of Israel has lead to the salvation of Gentiles. ‘Because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles’ (11:11). The salvation of Gentiles will lead, in turn, to the salvation of Israel. Then Israel’s salvation will trigger, ultimately, the worldwide revival prophesied by Isaiah, Micah, Ezekiel and the biblical prophets.

‘If their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring!’ (11:12). ‘If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?’ (11:15)

So, finally, Paul concludes that

Israel’s rejection is not final: God will ultimately save the Jewish nation (11:25-32)

Israel’s rejection is temporary — it is for a specified period. During this period — called ‘the times of the Gentiles’ by Jesus (Luke 21:24) — mainly Gentiles will be saved. This is the Church era, the time of Christendom and of the Gentile mission.

But when the full number of Gentiles has come in, Paul says, ‘all Israel will be saved’ (11:25-26). As Bible scholars explain, this ‘need not mean every Jew without exception’, but rather ‘Israel as a whole’ (F. F. Bruce); not every individual Jew throughout history, but the entire Jewish nation at a particular time in history (David Pawson).

The second half of the twentieth century has seen amazing developments in Jewish history. After twenty centuries of exile, we have seen Jews return to the land of Israel from 180 different nations. In 1948 the state of Israel came into existence — a nation ‘born in a day’ (Isaiah 66:8). Since the early 1970s we have seen the remarkable re-emergence of Jewish believers in Jesus and of Messianic Judaism. The events foretold in the Bible are beginning to happen. The Jews return to the land is the beginning of their return to the Lord (Ezekiel 36).

How will God save the Jews? The same way he saved Paul himself: when they see Jesus (11:26-27). The Deliverer (Messiah) will come out of Zion and turn away godlessness from Israel (Isaiah 59:20-21). ‘They will look on the one they have pierced’ (Zechariah 12:10) — with many moving scenes of repentance as a result (Zechariah 12:11-14).

It’s not a matter of ‘if’ the Jews receive Christ, but ‘when’. The gifts and call of God are irrevocable (11:29). This is not hypothetical, but certain.

So there is an amazing mutual interdependence of Jews and Gentiles in God’s plan. It is also amazing that the history of Jewish-Christian relations down the centuries repeats the history of Jew-Gentile relations in the church in Rome that Paul was writing to.

In the second message in this series I explained that the church in Rome was at first entirely Jewish, then partly Jewish and partly Gentile, then totally Gentile when Jews were expelled from the city by decree of Emperor Claudius, then Jews returned to an essentially Gentile community. In God’s providence, these dramatic twists and turns in the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the church Paul was writing to in first century Rome, became a prophecy of what would happen in Jewish-Gentile relations in later centuries.

So Paul concludes by praising God’s amazing wisdom in the outworking of his sovereign purpose in history. God has made Jews and Gentiles mutually dependent on each other — though they scarcely recognise or acknowledge it. Gentiles can’t be saved without Jews, and Jews can’t be saved without Gentiles. How unsearchable are God’s ways! Who can understand his decisions or adequately explain what he does!

Rob Yule, 16 September 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church