Note: This sermon was introduced by the drama "The Perfect Bonds of Love").
God has a plan. It’s a plan that started at creation, and it has continued even when human sin corrupted God’s wonderful creation. It’s a plan that’s taken lots of twists and turns along the ways, a plan full of surprising heroes and unexpected villains. God’s plan is a grand story, what postmodern people today call a metanarrative, a story that makes sense of the world and all of our stories.
But there’s a problem with this grand story of God’s unfolding plan. And it’s this problem we’re going to start to tackle this morning. It’s the problem we saw raised in the drama, the problem of why Jesus’ own people rejected him.
Today we begin looking at one of the most difficult controversial parts of the Bible, the ninth chapter of Romans. Friendships have ended because of disagreements over how to understand Romans 9. Churches have split, pastors have been fired, and people have been excommunicated based on how they understand the ninth chapter of Romans.
We’ve been in a series through the New Testament book of Romans called "Good News for Our Times." In chapters 1 to 4 of Romans we looked at "the Good News about God’s Integrity." In chapters 5 to 8 of Romans we looked at "the Good News about God’s Love." Today we start our third major section of Romans, chapters 9 to 11 of Romans. The key theme of these three chapters of Romans is "the Good News about God’s Faithfulness." As much as we might struggle to understand specific details of this part of Romans 9, the key theme of these chapters is that God is faithful to keep his promises. We can trust God to do what he promises to do. If we don’t lose sight of the fact that God’s faithfulness is the major theme of this section, then no matter how we understand the particulars, we’ll keep the main thing the main thing.
Today we’re going to first look at a dilemma in God’s grand story, and then we’re going to look at three facts that can help us solve this dilemma.
1. The Dilemma (Romans 9:1-4a).
Let me start by just stating the dilemma we find in this section of Romans: IF JESUS FULFILLS GOD’S PROMISES TO ISRAEL, WHY DO THE JEWISH PEOPLE REJECT JESUS AS THEIR MESSIAH?
This is the dilemma Paul’s agonizes over in vv. 1-4a. We tend to think of Judaism and Christianity as two separate religions, but that’s not entirely accurate. Jesus himself was Jewish, from the tribe of Judah, circumcised in the Jewish temple, and he grew up in a Jewish home going to synagogue every Sabbath. Although Jesus was critical of many things about the way the Jewish religion was taught in his generation, he lived his entire life by the Jewish torah. He celebrated the Jewish festivals like Passover and the Day of Atonement.
Jesus didn’t set out to start a new religion. You might think of the difference between a reformer and a revolutionary. A reformer tries to bring about change within a system, while a revolutionary tries to overthrow the system and start something new. Jesus was more like a reformer than a revolutionary. He wanted to help the Jewish nation be what God had truly called them to be.
And all of Jesus’ 12 apostles were also Jewish, again more like reformers than revolutionaries. Twenty-five of the 27 books we have in the New Testament were written by Jewish people. When the Christian Church was born on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, all of the Christians were Jewish, and the church was entirely Jewish for about the first ten years of its existence. In those early days, the Christian Church was more like a subgroup within Judaism rather than a distinct religion in its own right.
But by the time Paul is writing Romans, all that had changed. Now the non-Jewish Christians outnumber the Jewish Christians, and the Christian faith is starting to look like a distinct and different religion from Judaism. This is because the vast majority of the Jewish people didn’t accept the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promises. They also didn’t accept the idea that God welcomed non-Jewish people into God’s family without them first converting to Judaism, and this was a huge debate between Christian and non-Christian Jews.
So Paul agonizes over his own people’s rejection of Jesus. He wishes he himself could be cut off from God and accursed if only his fellow Jewish people could come to know Jesus as their Messiah.
Now this issue had special significance to the Roman Christians. We know from Roman history that the church in Rome started out exclusively Jewish, and only gradually did a few non-Jewish become Christians and join the church in Rome. The debate over whether Jesus was really the Messiah or not led to trouble between the Jewish who were Christians and the Jewish people who weren’t Christians. Finally the Roman Emperor Claudius got fed up and he kicked all the Jewish people out of Rome, whether they were Christians or not (Wuefel 85-101). Suddenly the few non-Jewish Christians in Rome were left in charge of the Church in Rome. Soon the Church in Rome started exploding in its growth, as hundreds of non-Jewish people were coming to faith in Jesus and joining the church in Rome. After the Emperor Claudius died, his successor Nero repealed the expulsion of Jews from Rome, and gradually the Jewish Christians started coming back to the city. They had left a relatively small Jewish Christian church, and they returned to find a non-Jewish church that was exploding with growth. They felt out of place, because their church had changed so much.
Let me give you analogy you might be able to relate to. Imagine if all Christians over 30 years old were kicked out of California, leaving LBF Church in the hands of all our members 29 years old and younger. Some of you think that sounds pretty good! So all us over 30 folks are locked out of California for five or six years years, and during that time LBF grows ten times larger, so to about 10,000 people. Do you think LBF would be any different? You bet it would be! The music would be different, the style would be different, the facilities would be different, virtually everything would be different. We’d come back five or six years later and feel like we were foreigners in our own church. That’s what happened to the Jewish Christians when they returned to Rome five years later.
And the non-Jewish Christians were making things worse by being prideful and arrogant toward the Jewish Christians. They started saying things like, "I can’t believe you guys crucified your own Messiah." They started making fun of the Jewish Christians because they still kept the Jewish Sabbath, worshiped God in Aramaic, and obeyed the Jewish food laws. So this tension between the Jewish Christians who had a long religious heritage and the non-Jewish Christians who came from entirely unchurched, irreligious backgrounds was growing. Paul is writing these chapters to ease the tension.
Paul’s going to give us three facts to remember as we struggle to resolve this dilemma. These three facts all draw from the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible. In fact, out of Paul’s many quotations of the Jewish Bible in his 13 letters, 20% of these quotes occur in Romans 9 (Moo). This week, we’re going to find most of these quotations come out of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish Bible. Next week we’ll find some quotes out of the book of Exodus, the second book of the Jewish Bible.
1. The First Fact (Romans 9:4b-5a)
Let me give you the first fact: WE KNOW GOD HAS GIVEN HIS PROMISES TO ISRAEL.
That’s what we find in vv. 4b-5a. Here Paul lists seven special privileges God has given to the Jewish people. God adopted the nation of Israel as his son. God gave Israel his glory, which is a reference to God’s visible presence in Israel. The "covenants" refers to the various commitments God made to Israel in the Old Testament. The receiving of the law refers to God giving Israel the ten commandments. The temple worship refers to the sacrificial system God instituted to deal with sin. The promises refer to all the predictions and prophecies about Israel’s future. The patriarchs refer to the forefathers of Israel in Jewish Bible’s book of Genesis: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jacob’s twelve sons.
Notice Paul uses the present tense in these verses. These seven privileges still belong to the nation of Israel. Theirs is still the sonship, theirs is still the divine glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple worship, the promises and the patriarchs. According to Paul, these privileges have not been taken away from the Jewish people, even though as a nation they have rejected Jesus as their Messiah (Schreiner 485). Although God has created the Christian Church and is currently using the Christian Church to fulfill his plan, the Church has not replaced Israel in God’s plan.
Whenever Christians forget this, it’s caused problems. Many times in the last 2000 years of church history, Christians have been guilty of anti-Semitism, of hatred and discrimination against the Jewish people. In every single case of Christian anti-Semitism, the Christians involved had forgotten this first fact. This first fact should forever stop Christians from being anti-Semitic. God has given his promises to Israel, and he’s still bound to keep these promises.
2. The Second Fact (Romans 9:5b)
Let me give you the second fact: WE KNOW THAT JESUS FULFILLS THESE PROMISES.
That’s what we find in the second half of v. 5. Here Jesus’ human ancestry is traced through Israel’s patriarchs--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus is a direct descendant of these forefathers of the Jewish nation, and thus he stands in continuity with God’s promises to Israel. The word "Christ" means Messiah, the promised one predicted in the Jewish Scriptures.
Yet here Paul also calls Jesus God himself. Not only is Jesus fully human--fully Jewish in fact--but he’s also fully God. This is the claim of the New Testament, that in the person of Jesus Christ we encounter a fusion between Godhood and humanity.
Now obviously Jewish people would contest this second claim. Yet a close study of the Old Testament and Jesus’ life reveals that Jesus amazingly fulfills the predictions and prophecies about the Messiah. Jesus is the seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3:15, he is the "prophet like Moses" promised in Deuteronomy 18:15, he is the Passover lamb foreshadowed in the Jewish Passover festival, he is the heir to David’s throne promised in 2 Samuel 7. Jesus was born of a virgin as promised in Isaiah 7:14, he was born in Bethlehem as promised in Micah 5:2, he was crucified as predicted in Psalm 22, he was despised and considered a criminal as predicted in Isaiah 53, and he was raised from the grave as promised in Psalm 16. Jesus himself said, "I have not come to abolish the [Old Testament] Law and the prophets, but I have come to fulfill them" (Matt 5:17). Again, Jesus doesn’t speak as a revolutionary who wants to overturn Judaism, but as a reformer who wants to renew it.
This means there’s a continuity between God’s plan in the Old Testament and God’s plan in the New Testament. Jesus Christ and the Christian Church doesn’t start a new story, but it starts a new chapter in the same story we find in the Jewish Scriptures. This is why Christians accept the 39 books of the Jewish Bible as their own Scriptures, because through our faith in Jesus Christ, we become included in Israel’s story. Because of who Jesus is and what he did, there’s a continuity in God’s plan.
But of course this second fact still doesn’t solve our dilemma about why Israel as a nation has rejected Jesus.
3. The Third Fact (Romans 9:6-13)
Let me give you the third fact: WE KNOW GOD KEEPS HIS PROMISES IN UNEXPECTED WAYS.
Let’s look at what Paul says in v. 6. Paul’s concern here is a person might conclude that because Israel has rejected Jesus as the Messiah, somehow God’s promises to Israel in the Jewish Scriptures have failed. The Greek word "failed" here was a sailing term that meant drifting off course and running aground (Louw and Nida 54.19). Have God’s promises drifted off course from God’s masterplan run aground because of Israel’s unbelief? The fact that Israel as a nation has rejected Jesus could give a person that impression.
To counter this conclusion, Paul reminds us that not everyone who’s called "Israel" is truly a part of God’s "Israel." There’s ethnic Israel, which is composed of all the people who are of Jewish descent. In Paul’s generation (and in our own as well) the vast majority of these people don’t accept Jesus is their Messiah. Yet within ethnic Israel there is a remnant, a smaller group of Jewish people who do embrace Jesus as their Messiah. Paul is NOT suggesting here that the Church is now Israel, but he’s saying that Jewish Christians today are a remnant within ethnic Israel. There are hundreds of synagogues across our world that are filled with Jewish people who do believe Jesus as their Messiah. A few of our members here at LBF Church are Jewish in descent as well. Jewish Christians are a tiny minority of the worldwide Jewish community, but they are a remnant within ethnic Israel.
Now In Paul’s generation, his Jewish countrymen believed that being born Jewish automatically made you part of God’s people and a recipient in God’s promises. So long as you had a Jewish mother, you were in, according to the Jewish thinkers of Paul’s day. So it was automatic because of your based on race.
So Paul gives us two examples from the book of Genesis that call this assumption into question.
The first example in vv. 7-9 comes from Abraham’s son Isaac. When Adam disobeyed God, the entire human race became captive to the power of sin. We talked about this back in Romans 5. Because of Adam’s sin and because of our own sins, all human beings are under the power of sin and in need of reconciliation with God. Now according to the Bible’s book of Genesis, God selected one person out of the human race to set into motion his plan for setting people free from the power of sin. That person’s name was Abram, later changed by God to Abraham.
Among other things, God promised Abraham, "All peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (Gen 12:3). This blessing for all peoples would be the reversal of the curse brought into the world by human sin, it would be an opportunity for all people to find reconciliation with God and freedom from the power of sin. So somehow through Abraham and his descendants, God promised to reverse Adam’s failure.
Now the next stage of God’s plan was supposed to come through Abraham’s son. The only problem was that Abraham didn’t have a son, and he and his wife Sarah were getting pretty old. We looked at this back in Romans chapter 4. So at his wife Sarah’s urging, Abraham had a child with his wife’s servant, Hagar. That child’s name was Ishmael, and Ishmael is the father of the Arab people. But God’s plan was for Abraham to have a son with Sarah, and eventually Sarah did get pregnant and she bore a son named Isaac. That’s recorded in Genesis 21. But there’s a problem now because now Abraham has two sons. Which one will be stage two in God’s plan? Paul quotes Genesis 21:12, that God’s choice for stage two is Isaac, not Ishmael.
This example from Genesis proves that not every person genetically related to Abraham is a child of promise. But notice that Paul doesn’t say anything about whether Ishmael was saved or not, but the focus here is on which son God chose for the next stage of his plan to reverse the effects of Adam’s sin. Paul’s point here is NOT that only one of Abraham’s sons had a relationship with God, but it’s that only one was chosen to be God’s instrument to fulfill his promise to Abraham to bless all the people’s of the earth. Clearly from Genesis, Ishmael does have a relationship with God, and God promises to bless Ishmael.
The second example Paul appeals to in vv. 10-13 is the birth of Jacob and Esau. Once Abraham’s son Isaac grew up and married Rebekah, they had twin sons: Jacob and Esau. Esau was the firstborn, but Jacob was the one God chose for the next stage of his plan that started with Abraham.
We learn here that God made this decision before either son was born, before either had done anything good or bad. In other words, God didn’t choose the good son over the bad son, or the bad son over the good son. If you read Genesis, you’ll find that both Jacob and Esau were scoundrels. God chose Jacob out of his grace, and God renamed Jacob Israel, which is where the nation of Israel gets its name.
Now again I don’t think Paul is talking about God choosing Jacob for heaven and choosing Esau for hell. Paul’s point here is that God chose Jacob for a special role in the next stage of God’s plan to reverse the effects of Adam’s sin (Cranfield). In fact, when you think about God’s promise to Abraham, this choice of Jacob over Esau was ultimately to bring God’s blessings to all peoples, including the descendants of Esau. We know this is what Paul is talking about because if you look at the verse Paul quotes from in v. 12 (Genesis 25:23) the emphasis is on Jacob and Esau representing two different nations, each with a different destiny in God’s plan.
We find verse 13 to be harsh, as God says he loved Jacob but hated Esau. But these Hebrew words for "love" and "hate" aren’t emotional words about affection, but they’re covenant words for either choosing a person for a special covenant relationship or passing over a person for a special covenant relationship. For instance, if I were to think about the women I dated before getting married, I might say, "Chris I have loved, but the other girls I dated I have hated." This would be an Old Testament way of saying that I entered into a special covenant relationship with Chris when I got married, but I rejected the other women for this kind of relationship. So what God is saying here is, "Jacob I have chosen for a special covenant relationship, but Esau I have rejected for this special covenant." This is actually a quotation from Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, the Jewish BibleWhen God said these words through the prophet Malachi, Isaac’s twin sons Jacob and Esau had been dead for over 1,500 years. So again, Jacob stands for the nation of Israel and Esau stands for Esau’s descendants, the nation of Edom.
God is saying he chose the nation of Israel for bringing about his strategy to bless all the peoples of the world through Abraham’s offspring, but he rejected the nation of Edom for this task. There’s nothing in any of the Genesis verses Paul quotes that would indicate God is choosing Jacob for heaven and Esau for hell.
Now the text stops with Jacob and Esau, but we know from the rest of the Old Testament that Jacob went on to have twelve sons. These twelve sons formed twelve tribes within the nation of Israel, and out of these twelve tribes God chose the tribe of Judah over the other eleven tribes for the next stage in God’s plan. But again that doesn’t imply that the other 11 tribes were rejected by God for salvation; only that they weren’t the ones God would use for the next stage. And out of the tribe of Judah, God chose one family--the family of David--for the next stage. And of course Jesus Christ is a descendant of the Jewish king David, who is a son of Judah, who is a son of Jacob, who is a son of Isaac, who in turn is a son of Abraham.
Now by looking at the big picture in this way, we’re better able to understand what Paul means by the phrase "God’s purpose in election." God’s purpose in election was to use a descendant of Abraham each generation keep his plan going to reverse the effects of Adam’s sin. God chose Abraham for this purpose, then he chose Isaac, then he chose Jacob, and he ultimately chose his own Son Jesus Christ to bring about fulfillment of this promise. The Greek word "stand" in v. 11 means "to remain" or "to continue" (Louw and Nida 85.55; 13.89). So the idea is that God’s purpose in choosing Abraham was continued in his choice of Isaac, which was continued in his choice of Jacob, and so forth.
You see God never chooses people to play favorites. He always chooses a person in order to bring his blessings to others. He chose Abraham to bring his blessings to the entire human race, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the fulfillment of that promise is in Jesus Christ. For now God has chosen the Church to share God’s love with the rest of the world.
So to prove his claim that physical descent doesn’t guarantee a role in God’s plan, Paul points to the examples of God choosing Isaac over Ishmael and the example of Jacob over Esau.
The fact that the nation of Israel doesn’t currently believe in Jesus as the Messiah shouldn’t surprise us, says Paul, because we find similar things happening with Ishmael and Esau.
Just as God chose Isaac over Ishmael to continue his strategy, just as God chose Jacob over Esau to continue his strategy, for now God has chosen the Church over Israel for the next stage in his strategy to bring the blessing promised to Abraham to all peoples of the world.
That doesn’t mean God has rejected Israel, it doesn’t mean that the Church has replaced Israel, and it doesn’t mean that God’s promises have failed. It simply means that God keeps his promises in unexpected ways.
Conclusion
There is continuity between God’s work in the Old Testament and his work through Jesus in the New Testament and today. Israel’s rejection of Jesus as her Messiah shouldn’t cause us to conclude that God’s promises to the Jewish people have failed. God isn’t done with the nation of Israel: he’s bound himself to promises to Israel, Jesus fulfills these promises, and God is keeping his promises in unexpected ways. The Church doesn’t replace Israel, but for now God is using the Church to further his strategy to bring God’s love and grace to every nation in the world.
It reminds me of a story I read about a few years ago (Yancey 48-49). It seems an engaged couple in Boston went to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston to plan their wedding reception. The yuppie couple selected expensive entrees from the menu, they chose special china and silver for the meal, and selected the flower arrangements they wanted to make their dream reception come true. The bill came to $13,000 and they paid half as a deposit. They day their wedding announcements were supposed to go out in the mail, the groom got cold feet and decided he didn’t want to get married. When the woman tried to cancel their reservation at the Hyatt, she found that the contract was binding, so she’d only get 10% of her deposit back. So the jilted bride decided that instead of loosing all that money, she’d go ahead and empty her savings account to have the party, not a wedding reception but a big blow out. You see, ten years earlier this yuppie bride had been living in a homeless shelter. So in June of 1990 the exclusive Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston hosted a party for homeless people in Boston. They served boneless chicken in honor of the groom. Bag ladies, vagrants, alcoholics and drug addicts took a night out from rummaging through trash cans to sip champagne, eat wedding cake, and dance to big band music late into the night.
In a sense that’s what’s happened with Israel and the Church. The Messiah came to Israel, but they rejected him. So God started His Church, composed of both Jewish and non-Jewish people who believe in Jesus Christ.But God’s not done with Israel yet, as well see later in these chapters. But for now, we’re invited to the banquet, to rejoice in God’s love and grace, to share that love and grace with our community around us, and to help fulfill God’s promise to Abraham so many years ago.
God is faithful to keep his promises, even if he keeps them in some pretty unexpected ways.
Sources
Cranfield, C. E. B. 1979. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (T. & T. Clark).
Louw, J. P. and E. Nida. 1989. Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. New York: United Bible Societies.
Schreiner, Thomas. 1998. Romans. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Books).
Wuefel, Wolfgang. 1991 "The Jewish Community in Ancient Rome and the Origins of Roman Christianity" in The Romans Debate ed. K. P. Donfried (Hendrickson Publishers).
Yancey, Philip. 1997. What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan Publishing).
