God Is Not Finished With Me Yet Series

But, as we’ve seen this morning, that wasn’t true for Israel and it’s not true for us either. So let’s go back to the two questions we posed at the beginning of the message and answer them based on what we have learned this morning from the Bible:

Question #1: Can I trust God to keep His promises?

Answer: God always keeps His promises

While there are some conditional promises in the Bible, I’m talking here primarily about the promises in Romans 8 – the promise that God will cause all things to work together for our good and that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

If God did not break His promises to Israel because of their rebellion and disobedience, then we can know that He can and will keep those promises to us.

Question #2: Will God forsake me when I fail Him?

Answer: If I could “undo” God’s grace, then it wouldn’t be grace

If you have put your faith in Jesus, then, by definition, you are God’s “chosen” and God has extended His grace to you because in His complete sovereignty, He predetermined to love you. You did nothing to earn or deserve that and therefore there is nothing you can do to cause God to forsake you and take away or undo His grace. If that were the case, then it really wouldn’t be grace, would it?

2. Be a channel not a bucket

One of the main reasons that most Israelites had rejected Jesus is because they misunderstood what it meant to be God’s chosen people.

Every good Jew was familiar with the promise that God had made to Abraham back in Genesis 12:

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

(Genesis 12:2–3 ESV)

The problem is that they only focused on the part where God promised to make them into a great nation and to bless them. And so they viewed themselves as a bucket that was to be filled up with God’s blessings that were merely for their own benefit.

But they had forgotten about or ignored the rest of what God said to Abraham. They had lost sight of the fact that God wanted to bless them so that they could be a conduit, or a channel, through which God would pass on His blessings to all the nations of the earth.

As a result, they became a very proud people who considered themselves to be superior to all the other nations of the earth. And that is largely why they were not willing to humble themselves and submit their lives to a Jewish Savior who was largely being embraced by the Gentiles.

I think that is largely the point Paul is making in verse 9 when he quotes from Palm 69 about how the table of the Jews has become a trap and a snare. As we talked about last week when we observed the Lord’s table, the table represents a place of fellowship and a place to experience God’s blessings. And for the Jews that fellowship that excluded the Gentiles just reinforced their thinking that God’s blessings were just for them and not to be passed on to the Gentiles, too.