Israel Is Israel

“I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:1-2).

For years I went into prisons and into schools to teach, and I would occasionally ask, is there anything God cannot do? Everyone had been taught, of course, to answer that God can do anything. Then I would read them a verse: “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began” (Titus 1:2). There is one thing God cannot do. He cannot lie. Hebrews says the same: “it was impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18). Balaam, a man who was no friend to Israel, was made to say it over Israel’s camp: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19).

God made promises to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and to the nation that came from them. Many of those promises have not yet been kept. Either God will keep them to the people He made them to, or He has taken them back and given them to somebody else. Paul put that question in writing in Romans 11, and he provides the definitive answer.

On Sunday afternoons at Victory Baptist Church in Coden, Alabama, we have been laying the foundation for the study of Bible prophecy, and this part of the foundation has to be set straight before anything else is built on it. If a man does not know that Israel is still Israel, the prophetic passages will not fit together for him. He will read promises God made to a nation and try to apply them to the church, and the further he goes into prophecy, the more confused he will become.

Hath God Cast Away His People?

Paul asks, “Hath God cast away his people?” and answers, “God forbid.” God forbid occurs twenty-four times in the Bible, and ten of them are in Romans. In every one of the ten, Paul has just asked a question that a reader might wrongly answer from his teaching, and he refuses the wrong answer outright. In Romans 3 he asked whether man’s unbelief could make God’s faithfulness of no effect, and he gave the same answer: “For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:3-4). Romans 11 asks that question about the whole nation.

The words cast away occur sixteen times in the Bible. Samson, when he had finished speaking, “cast away the jawbone out of his hand” (Judges 15:17). David mourned on Gilboa that “the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul” (2 Samuel 1:21). The Syrians fled from Samaria and left the road strewn with “garments and vessels, which the Syrians had cast away in their haste” (2 Kings 7:15). Samson was finished with the jawbone, Saul’s shield lay where it fell, and the Syrians never came back for their garments. In each of those verses, to cast a thing away is to be finished with it and to walk off. Solomon sets its opposite beside it, providing us the needed contrast: “a time to keep, and a time to cast away” (Ecclesiastes 3:6). Solomon also shows that a thing cast away is not always cast away for good: “A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together” (Ecclesiastes 3:5). Whether a casting away is final depends on whether a gathering follows it, and Romans 11 answers that question about Israel.

So the question is whether God has finished with Israel as Samson was finished with the jawbone. Paul says He has not, and in the next sentence he says it again: “God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew.” The question is asked in Romans 11:1 and answered with God forbid, and Romans 11:2 states the answer as a plain fact. If a man can read those two sentences and then teach that God has cast away His people, his teaching contradicts the plain words of the Bible, and the fault lies in his teaching, not in the Bible. He ought to repent of such teaching and stop telling people that the Bible allows for such an idea.

Many men who hold that teaching love the Bible and came to their view honestly, usually from a few verses read apart from their setting. But a man’s sincerity does not change what the verse says. Paul does not leave the matter to sincerity. He offers proof, and the first proof he offers is himself: “For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” He names his nation, his father, and his tribe. He told the Philippians the same thing in more detail: “Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee” (Philippians 3:5). The man writing Romans 11 was a saved Israelite. Salvation had not made him a Gentile, and it had not removed him from the nation or the tribe he was born into. If God had cast away His people, He would not have saved an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin and made him an apostle.

Wot Ye Not What the Scripture Saith of Elias?

Paul then rebukes his reader with a question: “Wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elias?” The word wot means know. Abimelech said to Abraham, “I wot not who hath done this thing” (Genesis 21:26), and Israel said of Moses on the mountain, “we wot not what is become of him” (Exodus 32:1). Paul is asking, do you not know what the Bible says? The Lord asked the Pharisees the same kind of question: “Have ye not read so much as this, what David did” (Luke 6:3). Asked of a man who claims to teach the Bible, it means he does not know the passage he claims to explain.

What the Bible says of Elijah is that he stood on Mount Carmel against the prophets of Baal, and he said to the people, “How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word” (1 Kings 18:21). God answered by fire, and the prophets of Baal were slain. Elijah had been proved right before the whole nation. Then Jezebel threatened his life, and he ran. He “went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die” (1 Kings 19:4). When the LORD asked him at the cave, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” he answered, “I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away” (1 Kings 19:9-10).

Elijah believed that Israel was finished and that he was the last faithful man in it. God told him he was wrong: “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him” (1 Kings 19:18). Paul quotes the exchange in Romans 11:3-4: “Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.”

Then he applies it to his own day: “Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace” (Romans 11:5). In Elijah’s day, under Ahab and Jezebel, the prophet thought he alone was left, and God had seven thousand in Israel who had not bowed to Baal. In Paul’s day, after the nation had rejected its Messiah, there was again a remnant, and Paul was one of them. That remnant was made up of Israelites who had believed and been saved by grace, and as saved men they were members of the church, the body of Christ. Their salvation does not settle the future of the nation, and Paul does not offer it for that purpose. It answers the question of Romans 11:1 in one sense: God had not refused the people of Israel, because some of them were being saved in Paul’s own day, and the nation’s unbelief, though real, was not total. What God will yet do with the nation itself, Paul takes up in Romans 11:11-12 and 11:25-29, and it rests on the covenant God made with the fathers.

The Election of Grace

Paul says the remnant stands “according to the election of grace,” and he explains at once what grace excludes: “And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work” (Romans 11:6). He had already set this out in Romans 4: “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (Romans 4:4-5). What God gives by grace He does not owe. No Israelite was ever right with God because he had earned it, and no one in Israel is right with God simply because he was born a Jew.

That has been true from the beginning. God did not find something in Abraham that put Him in Abraham’s debt. The Levites prayed, “Thou art the LORD the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees” (Nehemiah 9:7). God called him out of his country and promised, “I will make of thee a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). The promises passed to Isaac and to Jacob, and from them to the nation, and every one of them was a gift. God is not obligated to keep them because Israel deserved them. He will keep them because He promised them.

Inside the nation there have always been two kinds of people. Paul says, “Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded” (Romans 11:7). The election in Romans 11:7 is the remnant of Romans 11:5, the part of Israel that has believed God, as the seven thousand did in Elijah’s day. The rest did not believe. Who the elect are is settled each time by the context they are named in, and in this verse they are the believing remnant within the nation, set beside the rest of the same nation. These three chapters name their own subject. Paul begins with his “kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites” (Romans 9:3-4), prays “for Israel” (Romans 10:1), and asks whether God has cast away “his people” (Romans 11:1). He is writing about a nation and its standing before God. To read these chapters as God choosing individual men for heaven or for hell is to read into them something they obviously do not say.

Of the rest Paul writes, “(According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day” (Romans 11:8). He is drawing on Isaiah, who told the Jerusalem of his own day, “For the LORD hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes” (Isaiah 29:10). Paul gives the cause for this a few verses later, speaking of the branches of Israel: “Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith” (Romans 11:20). They were blinded and broken off because they did not believe. Paul describes Gentiles in the same condition: “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not” (2 Corinthians 4:4). A man who refuses God’s word may find he can no longer see it, and he may stumble in that darkness for a long time.

John wrote of the nation and its Messiah, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:11-12). The nation as a whole did not receive Him. Individual Jews did, and do. A Jew today may come out of that blindness and be saved the same way any Gentile is saved, and when he is, he becomes a member of the church, the body of Christ. Paul himself is the proof.

Paul Speaks of Israel in the Present Tense

When Paul speaks of unbelieving Israel, he speaks of it in the present tense. “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came” (Romans 9:3-5). They are Israelites. To them pertaineth the covenants and the promises. Paul wrote this years after the cross, as an apostle of the church, about the people who had crucified the Lord. If the promises had been taken from Israel and given to the church, Paul did not know it. The teaching that the church replaced Israel finds no support in the apostle who wrote the very chapters it relies on.

In the next chapter he is on his knees for them: “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved” (Romans 10:1). No man prays for the saved to be saved. Paul prayed for Israel because his kinsmen according to the flesh were not saved, and they needed the same Saviour every Gentile needs. He did not pray for them as the church, and he did not pray as though their promises had passed to the church. He prayed for them as lost Israelites.

Have They Stumbled That They Should Fall?

Paul raises the question a second time in Romans 11:11, and answers it with the same words: “I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy” (Romans 11:11). Israel has stumbled. The question is whether the stumble is final, whether they have fallen so far that God is done with them, and the answer is God forbid. Their fall has served a purpose: salvation has come to the Gentiles. And that purpose includes Israel, “for to provoke them to jealousy.” A nation that can be provoked to jealousy is still a nation, still distinct from the Gentiles who provoke it.

Then Paul asks, “Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?” (Romans 11:12). Their fall has a fulness beyond it. A few verses later he uses a related expression, and a careful reader will want to know how it fits with Romans 11:2: “For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15). Paul himself sets the casting away of Romans 11:15 beside a receiving. What he denies in Romans 11:2 is that God has thrown away His people as a man throws away a thing he is finished with. What he describes in Romans 11:15 is a setting aside that has a receiving at the end of it. Paul says later in Romans 11 how far the blindness goes and what ends it: “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Romans 11:25). The blindness is in part, because Paul and the remnant are not blind. It lasts until, and until means it has an end. The Bible does not give the date of that end.

What has God done in the meantime? He has built His church, and the church is not Israel under a new name. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13). Both Jews and Gentiles enter the one body, and both come in on the same footing: “for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin” (Romans 3:9). A saved Jew does not carry Israel’s promises into the church with him, because he comes in the way the Gentile beside him comes in, as a sinner under sin, saved by grace. Nothing was handed over from one people to another. Paul says of the church, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). What a man was in the flesh is not what brings him into the body of Christ, and what his nation was promised is not what he receives there.

The Covenant God Will Not Break

Why can Israel’s promises not be cancelled? Because of the kind of covenant God made. “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). God says have I given, as of a thing already done. In Genesis 17 He says it again: “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:7-8). He calls it an everlasting covenant and an everlasting possession in two verses.

A careful reader will point to the next verse: “Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations” (Genesis 17:9). If God tells Abraham to keep the covenant, how can it be unconditional? The paragraph answers that question itself. Circumcision is “a token of the covenant betwixt me and you” (Genesis 17:11), the sign of a covenant already made, not the price of it. And when a man refuses the sign, the Bible says exactly what is lost: “And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:14). That soul is cut off from his people. The man is cut off, but the people are not cut off with him. A man may break the covenant in his own flesh, and the promise remains over the nation he walked away from.

But Israel broke the law of Moses, and broke it many times. That is true, and God dealt with them for it. Paul answers this objection in one verse: “And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect” (Galatians 3:17). The law came four hundred and thirty years after the promise, and it cannot cancel what God had already promised. In the very chapter where God lists the curses for breaking the law, He says what He will not do: “And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the LORD their God” (Leviticus 26:44). Those are the words of Romans 11, cast them away, with not in front of them, spoken of a people already scattered into enemy country for their sins.

A man who believes the church has replaced Israel will usually turn next to Galatians 3, and the chapter should be read through. Paul says, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16), and he ends, “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). Paul names the promise the believer inherits in this chapter: “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed” (Galatians 3:8), and “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:14). The promise is the blessing of the nations in Abraham’s seed, justification by faith and the Spirit received by faith, and it comes to the Gentile in Christ, who is the seed. Galatians 3 does not say that the land promised to Abraham’s seed “for an everlasting possession,” or the nation that was to come from him, has been taken from Israel. The same chapter says the promise cannot be disannulled.

God fixed the terms through Jeremiah, and He tied them to the sky. “Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever” (Jeremiah 31:35-36). If the sun rose this morning, God still has a nation called Israel. It has risen over every year of their disobedience and every year of their scattering. The next verse names their sin and sets the terms of their rejection: “Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:37). God wrote for all that they have done into the promise Himself. He knew what they would do when He made it.

Two chapters later He used the very words of our text: “Thus saith the LORD; If my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob, and David my servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them” (Jeremiah 33:25-26). Day and night still follow one another, so God has not cast away the seed of Jacob.

A doctrine has to be followed all the way to its end. The men who teach that the church has replaced Israel do not mean to say anything against God. But if God made everlasting promises to a nation and then took them back and gave them to another people, God did not keep His word, and the Bible says He cannot lie. The teaching, followed to its end, accuses God of the one thing He cannot do. Paul’s answer in Romans 3:4 governs here: “let God be true, but every man a liar.”

Seventy Weeks upon Thy People

Daniel 9 shows where Israel’s future lies. Daniel was praying, he says, “confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the LORD my God for the holy mountain of my God” (Daniel 9:20), when Gabriel came to give him “skill and understanding” (Daniel 9:22). The answer begins, “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city” (Daniel 9:24). Daniel’s people are the people he had just named in his prayer, Israel. His holy city is Jerusalem, the city of “the holy mountain of my God.” The prophecy is addressed to a particular nation and a particular city.

Gabriel gives six purposes for the seventy weeks: “to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.” Set the first four beside what the Bible says of a believer in the church. He has “redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Ephesians 1:7). He was “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), and God has quickened him. God “hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Christ was made sin for us, “that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The believer’s transgression is not waiting to be finished, and his sins are not waiting for an end to be made of them. He has been reconciled, and he has been made righteous in Christ. The seventy weeks are not determined upon the church. They are determined upon Daniel’s people, and their transgression is not yet finished.

The prophecy counts the weeks in order. Sixty-nine of them, “seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks,” run “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince” (Daniel 9:25). Then, after those weeks, “shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself” (Daniel 9:26), which is the cross. Seventy were determined and sixty-nine are counted, so one week remains, and Daniel 9:27 describes it: “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.” Daniel 9:26 names two persons, Messiah, who is cut off, and “the prince that shall come,” whose people destroy the city and the sanctuary. The he of Daniel 9:27 confirms a covenant “with many” and then causes the sacrifice to cease, and Messiah, already cut off, is not the one who does that. The nearest person named is the prince that shall come. The sacrifice and the oblation he stops are Israel’s worship, offered in Daniel’s holy city. That last week is still to come, and like the other sixty-nine it is determined upon Daniel’s people and Daniel’s city. Jeremiah gave it its name: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it” (Jeremiah 30:7). It is Jacob’s trouble, and Jacob shall be saved out of it.

Hosea described the long wait between: “For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim: Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king; and shall fear the LORD and his goodness in the latter days” (Hosea 3:4-5). Israel has no king and no sacrifice today, exactly as Hosea said. The same verse that describes the wait says afterward.

John saw the tribes still counted in that day: “And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel” (Revelation 7:4). He names them one at a time, twelve thousand of each, and the last one he names is this: “Of the tribe of Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand” (Revelation 7:8). Benjamin is the tribe Paul named in Romans 11:1 as proof that God had not cast away His people. The last book of the Bible names that same tribe and counts out twelve thousand of it. No one in the church is assigned a tribe when he is saved. God still knows Israel by its tribes.

It Is Not for You to Know

After His resurrection, the disciples asked the Lord a direct question: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). He did not tell them there would be no kingdom for Israel. He did not tell them that the kingdom had been given to someone else. He told them the time was not theirs to know: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:7-8). The restoring of the kingdom to Israel is still future, and its time belongs to the Father. If the kingdom had passed from Israel to the church, this was the moment to say so, because the apostles had asked the question in plain words. The Lord did not correct the question. He left the promise to Israel standing and withheld only the time. What He gave the apostles was a different work, to be His witnesses, and in the book of Acts that is what they did. Paul later wrote of the church’s part in that witness, “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us” (2 Corinthians 5:20).

That is also why a Christian should not read Israel’s future off the evening news. When the disciples asked on the mount of Olives, “what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” the Lord began by telling them what was not the sign: “Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (Matthew 24:3-6). There has hardly been a generation without wars and rumours of wars, and the Lord said of them, the end is not yet. Every new war is not the end of the world, and every earthquake is not a fulfilled prophecy. Take heed that no man deceive you was spoken to His disciples, and it makes the hearer responsible not to be deceived. A man who is taught that the church replaced Israel is responsible to open Romans 11 and read what it says.

The church’s hope is not Daniel’s seventieth week. Paul told the Thessalonians that they had turned to God “to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10). The church waits for the Lord from heaven. Israel waits for the fulfilment of everything God promised the fathers.

Jews, Gentiles, and the Church of God

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32). He names three companies of people in one verse, all of them existing at the same time, after the church had begun. People often say that the church replaced Israel. No one ever says that the church replaced the Gentiles. The church was built from both, by one Spirit, on the same terms, and if it took the place of either one, it took the place of the Gentiles as surely as the place of Israel. It took the place of neither. The Gentiles still exist, Israel still exists, and the church of God exists beside them. Every person alive is in one of the three. A man who is in the church of God is not there because of what he was in the flesh, and he does not stand there as a Jew or as a Gentile: “Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh… Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17). Paul was still of the tribe of Benjamin by birth, and he said so in Romans 11:1. But his tribe was not what brought him into Christ, and it gave him no standing there that a Gentile believer lacked.

Paul leaves us holding both truths about Israel at once: “As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:28-29). As concerning the gospel, Israel stands as an enemy for the sake of the Gentiles, who have received mercy through their unbelief. As touching the election, which in this verse is the nation God chose in the fathers, they are beloved. The reason they are beloved still, after all they have done, is the last clause. God does not repent of His gifts and His calling. He does not take them back.

That clause matters to every believer. If God could grow weary of a people, take back what He had promised them, and give it to somebody else, then He could do the same to you. A man who is trusting God for eternal life needs to know whether God keeps His word. Israel’s history answers that question. God has not broken covenant with a nation that killed His prophets and crucified His Son. He has chastened them, scattered them, and waited, and He will keep every word He spoke to Abraham. That is the same God who said of His own, “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28).

If you have never trusted Christ, the gospel Paul preached is for you as it is for every Jew he prayed for. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). Whether you were born a Jew or a Gentile, you come to God the same way, as a sinner under sin, trusting the Christ who died for your sins and rose again. Believe Him, and God will keep His word to you as surely as He will keep it to Israel.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com