By: Curtis Baker
This week we reach a major turning point in our study of Romans. Through the first eight chapters of this letter, Paul has carried us through the story of what God is up to in the world. That story began with a recognition of mankind’s sinfulness; it continued with God’s attempt to deal with that sinfulness through the nation of Israel; it lamented how Israel became a part of the problem, rather than the solution; it climaxed in the sacrificial death of Jesus on behalf of the sins of all mankind; and ultimately it has pointed forward to the future that awaits us whenever God’s people become fully what they were intended to be. This is the grand story of God’s righteous purposes that each one of our lives are caught up in, and Paul has gone to great lengths to spell it out for us.
But now that this basic presentation of the gospel has been laid out, for the next three chapters (9-11), Paul is going to come back to one specific element within the greater story — the place and role of the people of Israel. In many ways, this might seem like a discussion that is hardly relevant to us in Slaton, Texas. But with the nation of Israel once again in the news on a daily basis, there are some things in Paul’s teaching in these next three chapters that need to be considered very carefully.
Paul opens chapter nine by lamenting the fact that the people of Israel have not accepted Jesus as the true Messiah, sent by God. This was not true of every single person of Israelite descent, just as it would not be true today either. But when looking at things in the broader sense, it certainly would have been true in Paul’s day (and also in ours) that a good many people of Israelite heritage had not put their trust in Jesus.
So in a passage that is reminiscent of Moses’ appeal for God to take his life, rather than to punish the people of Israel for their disobedience, Paul here states that he wishes he might be cut off from a covenant with Christ, if only the people of his own heritage, the people of Israel, might themselves receive the blessings that were always intended for them. Paul feels the absurd irony that the very people through whom God had brought the Messiah, and thus salvation to the whole world, had themselves rejected him, and therefore rejected the salvation that comes through him.
After all, the people of Israel were the first to be adopted as sons and daughters of God. They were the first people with whom God had made covenant. They were the people to whom God had entrusted the law and the revelation of his own self. To them belonged the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc), the temple, and all the promises that came with them. It was through them that the divine glory was first revealed. And yet….despite all that God had done for them and through them, when it came to understanding how God’s purposes through them was to achieve its climax in Jesus, they failed to understand what God was doing. Why? Because their ambitions were nationalistic ambitions, not the ambitions of the God who wanted to bring his saving work to every person among every tribe and people.
There is more to Paul’s words, however, than just an infernal irony. His words have relevance to our own complicated history. Due to the horrors of the Holocaust and the complexities of the contemporary secular Israeli state, one is right to question what is modern Israel’s relationship with God? Certainly anti-Semitism is a horror beyond words, but what of land-claims that many people make on Israel’s behalf? In the beginning of Romans 9, Paul seems clear enough in his anguish. Anyone who has not put their trust in Christ, no matter what their ethnic heritage, is not in covenant with God. Paul desperately wishes it wasn’t so, even to the point of offering his own life for his native people. But it is a sacrifice he knows he can’t make. Each person, no matter what their ethnic heritage, is accountable to God as an individual. What will matter in the fullness of time is not whose blood runs through your veins, but whose blood was shed to cover your sin.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message From the Heart radio program Sunday evening at 8:00pm on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com)
(curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
