Romans 11:
Mercy and Mystery
Queenstown
Once when I was a
teenager we went on a family holiday to Tasmania, and we drove out to the West
Coast to see Queenstown. If you’ve ever been to Queenstown you’ll know the
experience. You come out along the Mt Lyell Highway and you drive through the
most amazing, beautiful wilderness country, looking out over the Wild Rivers
National Park; you drive through all that, then past a lake and a little old
ghost town called Linda, and then you arrive in the hills around Queenstown and
difference couldn’t be more dramatic. You drive down through the hills into
Queenstown and the entire landscape has been poisoned and stripped bare by
clear-felling and erosion and sulphur from the smelter chimneys. The contrast is
quite overwhelming, really.
So we were standing there by the side of the
road, taking it all in, absorbing what was in front us, when a car pulled up
behind us. It was another bunch of tourists like us. They jumped out of the car,
he took a photo, then he said to her, “Nice, isn’t it,” then they hopped in the
car again and drove away. I remember thinking to myself how bizarre that was a
response to what they had just been standing in front of. ‘Amazing’, maybe, or
‘overwhelming’ or ‘awful’ or ‘ugly’ or ‘terrifying’ or ‘stunning’ - any of those
I would have understood. But ‘nice’ just seemed so inadequate.
It’s a
bit like what we do with the Bible a lot of the time. It presents us with these
vast, frightening, beautiful, amazing vistas of God’s judgement and God’s mercy,
and it connects those stories with us and it says to us, this is where
you are, and this is where you would have been, if you had responded
differently to Jesus - it confronts us with the judgments of God and the mercies
of God and hiw do we respond?
We respond with either boredom or mild
interest; we package it into neat little summaries and sermons and Biblical
theology diagrams, and we become quite proud of our mastery of the whole system,
and somewhere along the line we forget to be confronted by it.
Maybe we
just get used to it, or maybe we never really see it in the first place. Either
way, here in Romans 11 Paul wants us to stop and pull over to the side of the
road and take another look at the whole landscape of God’s dealings with Israel
and the nations. He wants us to stop and remind ourselves again of the big
picture of God’s kindness and God’s severity, God’s mercies and God’s
judgements, and he wants us to be a little bit frightened and a little bit
overwhelmed and a little bit humbled.
Romans 9 - Israel and
God’s election
You’ll remember if you’ve been here over the last couple
of weeks that we’ve been following through a section of this letter of Paul to
the Romans here in chapters 9-11 where Paul wrestles with the tragedy - and for
him it’s a very personal tragedy - the tragedy of the fact that Jesus the
Messiah of Israel has come, and Israel, the chosen nation, the nation that Jesus
was born into - Israel have overwhelmingly rejected him. In chapter 9, Paul
looks at the story from the vantage point of God’s sovereignty, and he asks,
“Has God’s word failed?”, and “Does this mean that God is unjust?”
He
looks at the story from the vantage point of God’s sovereignty and he says in
answer to both of those questions: No, it’s not a matter of God’s powerlessness
and failure, that God was incapable of shaking Israel out of their blindness and
hardness of heart; nor is it a matter of God’s injustice, that God had no right
to harden Israel and soften the hearts of Gentiles instead. No, Paul says, it’s
not either of those things. Rather, from the vantage point of God’s ultimate
sovereignty, it’s simply a matter of the free mercy and election of God, which
he exercises as he chooses and which he owes to no-one: “God has mercy on whom
he wants to have mercy”.
That’s the argument in Romans chapter
9.
Romans 10 - Israel and human responsibility
And then in
Romans chapter 10, starting from Romans 9 verse 30, he switches the focus from
God’s sovereignty to human responsibility. If Romans 9 is about the power and
the right that God has to be the one who ultimately chooses who is going
to be saved and who isn’t, Romans 10 is about the fact that God exercises that
choice through real human decisions and real human messengers and real human
responses. And so at the end of Romans 10, the bottom line of that chapter is
about the decision of Israel to hear God’s word again and again and again
and harden their hearts against it. So he finishes chapter 10 with a quote from
Isaiah 65, where God says: “All day long I have held out my hands to a
disobedient and obstinate people.”
Romans 11 - Mercy and
Mystery
Romans chapter 11 picks up that story of Israel, and does two
things with it. First, Paul says, don’t assume that this is where the story
ends; and second, woven into that first point about the present and the future
of Israel, Paul says: Don’t assume that this story about Israel is just a dead,
irrelevant historical episode that we can move on and forget about. It’s a story
that we need frequently to read and remember and remind ourselves of.
* Remant (1-10)
The chapter begins with a discussion in verses
1-20 of the significance of the fact that Israel hasn’t totally rejected the
Messiah Jesus - that even in the present there is still a remnant, a tiny little
minority of the nation who have believed.
Listen again to what Paul
says.
Verse 1: ‘I ask then: 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. Don’t you know what the
Scripture says in the passage about Elijah — how he appealed to God against
Israel: 3
“Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only
one left, and they are trying to kill me”? 4
And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who
have not bowed the knee to Baal.” 5
So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. 6
And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no
longer be grace. 7
What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did.
The others were hardened, 8
as it is written: “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes so that they could not
see and ears so that they could not hear, to this very day.” 9
And David says: “May their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block
and a retribution for them.
10
May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent
forever.”’
Two things that Paul says about this remnant of believing
Israelites. First, verse 2, he says, it’s an indication of the fact that God
hasn’t utterly abandoned and rejected his people Israel. He hasn’t
just abolished Israel as a horrible failure and started again from scratch with
a new religion called Gentile Christianity. Instead, as Paul says down in verse
17 and 18 he’s taken the stump of Israel and he’s grafted Gentile Christian
branches into that Jewish stump. Within the new community of people in Christ
there is still a very significant remnant of believing Israelites, people like
Paul himself. That’s the first thing that Paul says about the remnant of Israel
- that it’s a sign that God hasn’t utterly wiped out and replaced Israel with
some brand-new Gentile religion.
The second thing he says about the
Jewish remnant within the church, verse 5, is that it’s a remnant chosen by
grace. When Jesus called his disciples, when he gathered around him the
Israel within Israel that was going to be the nucleus of the new community, he
didn’t go out and pick the best of Israel. He didn’t make his selection by works
and religiousness and general human goodness. No, he gathered together a remnant
of Israelites that was unmistakeably a remnant chosen by grace. It wasn’t the
chief priests and the Pharisees and the rabbis. It was the blind and the sick,
the tax collectors and the outcasts, the sinners, the lost. It included
Pharisees like Paul, but when he came to Christ he knew that he came not as the
best of the bunch but as the chief of sinners, as a blasphemer and a persecutor
who had been shown mercy. The remnant of Israel who believed in Jesus was a
remnant that was unmistakeably chosen not by works but by grace.
*
Restoration? (11-16, 23-24, 25-32)
Paul writes in verses 1-10 about the
remnant of Israelites like him who did believe in Jesus. And on the basis of
that, verses 11-16, he begins to suggest that there is in fact a hope for the
wider nation of Israel - not just a remnant but a restoration.
Listen
again to what Paul writes.
Verse 11: Again I ask: Did they stumble so as
to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression,
salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. 12
But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means
riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring! 13
I am talking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I
make much of my ministry 14
in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of
them. 15
For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their
acceptance be but life from the dead? 16
If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is
holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches.”
Do you see what Paul is
saying? He says: this current era, in which the gospel of the Jewish Messiah
Jesus goes out to all the Gentile nations of the world - this current era has
come about in the plan of God through Israel’s transgression. Israel rejected
and crucified the Messiah Jesus, and so now through Israel’s transgression the
message of salvation through Jesus and his death goes out to the gentiles. But
what Paul hopes, verse 13 and 14, is that as that happens, more and more
Gentiles come to faith in Jesus, eventually that will provoke Paul’s own people
Israel to envy and save some of them.
He states it as a wish or a hope
in verse 14; in verses 22-32 it becomes more than that.
Verse 22:
Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who
fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness.
Otherwise, you also will be cut off. 23
And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able
to graft them in again. 24
After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and
contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more
readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!
25
I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not
be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number
of the Gentiles has come in. 26
And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The deliverer will come from
Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. 27
And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” 28
As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far
as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, 29
for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. 30
Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a
result of their disobedience, 31
so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive
mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. 32
For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them
all.’
What is Paul saying? Well, he’s not saying that anyone gets to
heaven simply by being Jewish, independently of having faith in Jesus. As far as
Paul is concerned in these chapters, as long as Israel is hardened, Israel is
not saved. In Paul’s mind you can’t be simultaneously hardened and
saved.
Nor is Paul saying that there will be some sort of return to the
glory days of political, national Israel in the Old testament, with a capital
city in Jerusalem and a strong army and a rebuilt temple and a resumption of all
the sacrifices and rituals of the law of Moses. Paul says again and again in his
letters, those things are over and their time has finished. Those things were
the shadows and the substance is Christ. This is not a Zionist chapter, about
the setting up of the state of Israel in 1948.
Nor is Paul saying that
somehow, in the end, everyone is going to be saved. On the surface of it, that
is what it looks like in verse 32, isn’t it: ‘For God has bound all men over to
disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.’ It looks like that on the
surface, but then Paul in his letters is just as insistent as Jesus is in the
gospels that not everyone will be saved. The road is narrow that leads to life
and the road is broad that leads to destruction. The ‘all’ in the first half of
the verse happens to include every single human being, but that’s not the point
that Paul is making here; the ‘all’ that Paul uses here - as in many other
places in his letters - is an ‘all’ that simply means ‘both jews and Gentiles’.
It’s not an ‘every single individual’ all; it’s a ‘Jews and Gentiles alike’ all.
This is not a universalist chapter.
What is Paul saying, then? What I
think he is saying is an extension of what he says in verse 14. He’s saying that
the ultimate restoration of Israel is not going to be by means of political
activity or military force. It’s going to be by the strange, backwards,
paradoxical means of the messiah being crucified and the gospel going out to all
the rest of the world. And when that process is complete, and the full number of
the Gentiles has finally come in, verse 25, that will be the time when God will
finally soften the hearts of his own people Israel once again. ‘And so’ verse
26; that is to say, ‘and in this way, by this means, all Israel will be saved.’
Now I don’t know exactly how that is going to work. I don’t know how the
timing of that will all take place and how it relates to the fact that the
return of Jesus could be any day; I don’t know how many Gentiles need to be
converted before God will say that the ‘full number of the Gentiles’ will have
come in; and I don’t know how many Jewish people trusting in Jesus will turn ‘a
remnant chosen by grace’ in to ‘all Israel’. In a sense, the fact that I don’t
know is precisely part of the point of this chapter. Because the point of this
chapter is not to give me all the answers and to satisfy my intellectual
curiosity. The point of this chapter is to do something altogether different.
Which brings us to the second last point on the outline there.
Humble
yourself...
According to Paul, the main point of this chapter is not to
give us all the answers but to teach us humility. It’s to humble us, to teach us
not to be arrogant. And it does that in two ways.
* Before God’s mercy
(17-24)
In the first place, verses 17-24, it’s teaches us to humble ourselves
before God’s mercy.
Verse 17: “If some of the branches have been broken
off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others
and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, 18
do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support
the root, but the root supports you. 19
You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” 20
Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith.
Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. 21
For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you
either.”
Do you see the point of the analogy? If you are a non-Jewish
disciple of Jesus, a Gentile Christian, as I am, then you are like a wild branch
grafted into the root of an olive tree. Other branches have been broken off, and
you have been grafted in. The branches that were broken off were the natural
branches that belonged to the tree - they were Israelite branches. So don’t look
down on them as if you were superior and be arrogant; look at them and remember
why they were cut off and be afraid.
Paul continues in verse 22:
“Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who
fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness.
Otherwise, you also will be cut off. 23
And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able
to graft them in again. 24
After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and
contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more
readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive
tree!”
The point is to remember that our relationship with God is all
about his grace and his kindness. Our situation as forgiven sinners is never
something that we should be taken for granted - of course God would forgive me;
I’ve said the right things, I’ve prayed the right prayers, I grew up in a
Christian family. It’s not that, is it. The reality is that the only thing we
have going for us is grace, the kindness of God.
Thankfully, it is grace
that we have going for us. The kind of ‘fear’ Paul is talking about in verse 20
is not some sort of mistrustful insecurity. He doesn’t mean living every day
with the sneaking suspicion that God doesn’t really like me, that he’s just let
me in on a technicality, that he really can’t stand me and has to pretend he’s
looking at Jesus instead of looking at me. No, the relationship we have with God
really is one of grace and love and kindness. He really does love us. But the
fact that he loves us when we are so undeserving ought to fill us with a sort of
trembling, fearful, wonderful amazement, not a smug, arrogant complacency.
In the end, Paul says in verse 32, it’s all about mercy, so humble
yourself before that mercy of God.
* Before God’s mystery
(33-36)
And secondly, Paul says in verses 33-36, humble yourself before
the mystery of God. The point of these verses is not say that God is some sort
of blurry, unknowable force, or that the things God says in his word really
aren’t meant to be understood or believed. That’s not the point of these verses.
The point is not to take away the personhood of God or the clarity of Scripture
or the reality of our relationship with Jesus. The point is simply to challenge
the arrogance of our unbelieving rationalism - to challenge the attitude that
says if God’s word says something that I don’t fully understand - like a lot of
the things in these last three chapters of Romans - if God’s word says something
that I don’t fully understand then God must be the one who has the problem.
That’s the point of these closing verses.
And so Paul writes - verse 33:
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How
unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34
“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35
“Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?” 36
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory
forever! Amen.”
Port Arthur
I began with a little Tasmania
story, and I want to end with another one, this one from the other end of
Tasmania, Port Arthur, and from a couple of centuries earlier.
Apparently, the historians tell us, in the midst of the hell on earth
that was the penal colony in Porth Arthur, there was a bunch of convicts that
had found some sort of personal faith in Jesus. And the thing that they were
known for was their singing. And the song that thet were particularly known for
was a song by Samuel Davies that went like this.
Great God of wonders!
All Thy ways
Are matchless, Godlike and divine;
But the fair glories of
Thy grace
More Godlike and unrivaled shine,
More Godlike and unrivaled
shine.
In wonder lost, with trembling joy,
We take the pardon of our
God:
Pardon for crimes of deepest dye,
A pardon bought with Jesus’
blood,
A pardon bought with Jesus’ blood.
O may this strange, this
matchless grace,
This Godlike miracle of love,
Fill the whole earth with
grateful praise,
And all th’angelic choirs above,
And all th’angelic
choirs above.
Who is a pardoning God like Thee?
Or who has grace so
rich and free?
Or who has grace so rich and free?