Israel Divided

Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Eleven
ISRAEL DIVIDED IN TWO

Scripture Reading: verses 1-8

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. OR KNOW YE NOT WHAT THE SCRIPTURE SAITH OF ELIAS? HOW HE MAKETH INTERCESSION TO GOD AGAINST ISRAEL, SAYING, LORD, THEY HAVE KILLED THY PROPHETS, AND DIGGED DOWN THINE ALTERS; 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. EVEN SO THEN AT THIS PRESENT TIME ALSO THERE IS A REMNANT ACCORDING TO THE ELECTION OF GRACE. 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. WHAT THEN? ISRAEL HATH NOT OBTAINED THAT WHICH HE SEEKETH FOR; BUT THE ELECTION HATH OBTAINED IT, AND THE REST WERE BLINDED. (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.

There is obviously no difficulty keeping in mind that this passage is a legal document. It is a lawyer’s brief with abstruse reasoning. Keep in mind that Paul, as attorney for the defense on behalf of his people the Jews, is now exploring every avenue of approach for a righteous basis whereon his fleshly kinsmen may have a proper standing before Jehovah.

In view of what is presently taking place in Palestine, the strident question presented in this passage is arresting – “Hath God cast away His people?”

Certainly, from many outward evidences, one might come to the conclusion that Israel has been set aside forever. But here Paul’s contention is that Israel has not been set aside at all, and the first point of evidence he presents is that he himself is an Israelite and a Christian. If God had turned His back on Israel then He would have turned His back on Paul, and Paul could not possibly have come into the riches of divine grace under the Lordship of Jesus the Messiah and Savior. The fact that one man of no mean stature in the traditional faith of Israel, has come into the blessing of God is witness enough that God has not turned His back on Israel.

But Paul, the brilliant attorney, looks farther afield for the evidence. In this passage, he is intimating that we must not always judge God’s dealings with men from an outward trend that we see in the world. It may seem evident to some that God has cast away His people because they are downtrodden by Gentiles. In order to show this is a mistake, Paul brings to the witness stand none other than the illustrious Elijah¹ of the Hebrew Bible, and clearly indicates that he made the same mistake in his time: Elijah made intercession to God against Israel declaring, “They have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life.”

Never was there a darker day in Israel’s history than when the idolatrous prophets of Baal were in the ascendancy, and it seemed as if the entire nation of Israel had followed after Baal. It seemed as if Elijah stood alone in the testimony for God against rebellious and idolatrous people. But even a man of God like Elijah can be mistaken. At best, we are all shortsighted. So, still keeping Elijah on the witness stand, Paul asks “What is God’s answer to him?” And here it is: “I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.”

When apparently standing alone in the citadel of faith, little did Elijah think there were actually seven thousand in the ranks of Israel around him whose hearts beat true to the God of their fathers. There is no effort to excuse the seven thousand for being silent and refusing to take an adamant stand with God’s servant Elijah; the point before the court is this: in God’s dealings, one must never judge things by outward evidences. It is as God says in Hebrews 11, “Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” Elijah’s day was perhaps the darkest day for the children of Israel until Malachi, but there were still seven thousand loyal to the Lord. So Paul says, “Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.”

God is never defeated in His purpose. In determinate counsel, He has set out to call men out of sin and rebellion, enriching their lives with a sense of His unbounded goodness, and He will not be frustrated. Sometimes it seems as though the divine cause is lost entirely, as though good is always on the scaffold and evil always on the throne. But behind the scenes, God is still carrying on His purpose and there is ever an election according to grace, those whose hearts are touched by the loving-kindness of the Lord and who are true to Him.

Now Paul takes up the great question that again and again has been before the court, namely, that those who are true to God, whether in Israel or among the Gentiles, are accepted by Him, not according to their works, but solely under the sovereignty of divine grace. Nor is there any admixture of the two – “if by grace, then is it no more of works.”² God is calling men by divine grace today, offering them full salvation in Christ, on a golden platter of unmerited favor. This call of God goes out not only to Gentile nations, but also to Israel. Jews and Gentiles together are finding their way into this new kingdom which has been inaugurated under the administration of a risen and glorified Christ.

“What then?” says Paul, “Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.”³ Here the nation of Israel is divided into two. They are those who have accepted God’s unbounded blessing in Jesus the Messiah, the crucified and risen Savior, and those who have rejected Him and gone their own way of national and individual rebellion against Him. And what has happened to this latter section? Unbelief has obscured the vision and dulled the hearing⁴ so the glorious Gospel of the Lord Jesus finds it hard to penetrate, for “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them.” This is true of all in unbelief today, but doubly true of Israel after the flesh. Through Jesus Christ, the Jews may be admitted into the wealth of eternal riches in the Church which is composed of Jew and Gentile – all distinctions obliterated in the power of new creation.

Footnotes:
¹ The case of Elijah (1 Kings 19:10) was here brought forward by Paul to demonstrate that God’s “people” during the period of the monarchy were not the state, or nation, in any sense, but were the faithful spiritual seed, whom God had not cast off, and never will cast off. The apostasy of Israel was so complete under Ahab, during the days of Elijah, that Elijah was convinced that God had no people at all except himself. Ahab, the head of the Jewish state, had murdered the prophets of God, overthrown the worship of God, and led the nation into total rebellion, as a nation, against God, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Samuel that Israel, through their demand of a king, had indeed rejected God from reigning over them (1 Sam. 8:7). The existence, along with Elijah, of 7,000 faithful persons as the true Israel during those terrible days when Jezebel sat on the throne in Jerusalem was revealed to Elijah by the Lord for his encouragement; but the existence of the true Israel even at that time was totally separate and apart from the nation, as such, for the nation was God’s unqualified enemy. Still, the true Israel was throughout that period concealed in and mingled with the other Israel.
² “No more of works” ... i.e., “not of fleshly descent,” as expressed in Romans 9:11. The great objection on the part of the old Israel to Paul’s preaching the Gospel of Christ had to do with his categorical rejection of all the elaborate ceremonial of Moses’ law, to which the fleshly Israel tenaciously clung, not in the sense of keeping it, as did Zacharias and Elizabeth, but in the sense of making it a device of their own glorification; and, upon such a basis, they denied that salvation could be extended to Gentiles. Further, the glaring fact that Paul had just shown that the righteous remnant, both in Elijah’s day and presently, had obeyed God, the former by not bowing to Baal, the latter by obeying the Gospel, and the equally glaring fact and even notorious fact of the fleshly Israel’s thinking that salvation could be “earned” through the devices they followed, coupled with Paul’s passion to show that salvation was never, either then, nor previously, nor now, nor ever, something people could earn or merit – all this prompted Paul to pause here and stress again the great doctrine of grace. R.L. Whiteside (A New Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to Saints in Rome, p. 226) has a perceptive paragraph on this as follows: “There is no grace when a man merits salvation. Works by which a man merits justification and commands which one must obey to be saved are distinct matters. It is unfortunate that many cannot, or will not, see this distinction. Because of this, they conclude that a sinner must do nothing in order to be saved; but a man has no real understanding of either works or grace if he thinks that a sinner’s complying with the terms of salvation causes him to merit it. Many things are of grace, and are yet conditional. Is anyone so simple as to think that Naaman’s healing from leprosy was any less a matter of grace because he had to dip seven times in the Jordan river? Is any so blind that he cannot see that Jesus’ giving sight to the man born blind was any less of grace because he was required to wash in the pool of Siloam?”
³ ?That which Israel [he]seeketh for? ... refers to fleshly Israel?s ?seeking? God and His approval, a thing which they did not truly seek at all, for if they had truly sought the Lord, they would have found Him, as one of their great prophets said: ?And ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.? (Jer. 29:13) Israel did not seek God in the sense of truly believing in Him and walking as He commanded, but by the pursuit of their own righteousness (see Rom. 10:3). Thus, the ?seeking? in this verse, as it pertained to the old Israel, is mentioned in the sense of what they really should have done, and not in the sense of what they actually did. Christ made the same distinction in Luke 13:24 and Matthew 7:8. ?The election obtained it? ... refers to the true Israel who feared God and honored Him in their lives. Specifically, these were the righteous remnant, as distinguished from the nation. ?And the rest were hardened? ... this is past tense and refers to the nation in its entirely after the separation of the true Israel which was accomplished by the preaching of the Gospel. It is understood as the rest of the commingled Israel, as distinguished after the commingling ceased. The commingling of the two Israels had continued right up until the ministry of Jesus Christ, as witnesses by the fact that Zacharias and Elizabeth (part of the true Israel) were truly serving God within the institution of the law of Moses, and that Jesus Christ Himself was born under the law and submitted to it in perfect obedience. But with Pentecost came the preaching of the Gospel to all nations; and thereafter the separation of the two Israels was complete. What appears to be the total Israel, called here ?the rest,? were hardened. The true Israel had accepted Christ, and the total fleshly Israel were hardened. The totality here should be distinguished. It would have been incorrect to say that all Israel was hardened, for the spiritual Israel, until then commingled with the fleshly Israel, was not hardened; but the ?rest? of that commingled Israel, meaning all of the fleshly Israel, were the ones hardened. The two Israels in this verse emerge clearly under two designations, ?the election? being the true Israel, ?the rest? being the fleshly Israel. The election received God?s blessing through the obedience of faith. The rest received it not through unbelief, rebellion, and self-hardening, terminating finally in God?s judicial hardening. The fact of fleshly Israel?s culpability in their terminal condition was stated by Christ thus: ?And unto them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which saith: By hearing ye shall hear, and shall in no wise understand; And seeing ye shall see, and shall in no wise perceive: For this people?s heart is waxed gross, And their ears are dull of hearing, And their eyes they have closed; Lest haply they should perceive with their eyes, And hear with their ears, And understand with their heart, And should turn again, And I should heal them.? (Matt. 13:14, 15) It was Israel?s closing of their eyes against the light that made them guilty; and, given that conduct on their part, God did indeed harden them. The same condition is appropriately called ?blindness? by the sacred writers. Paul also called it a ?strong delusion? and a ?working of error? (2 Thess. 2:11). To Corinth he wrote that: ?The God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving.? (2 Cor. 4:4) Thus, there are three centers of participation in the hardening, or blinding (spiritually) of people who choose to be evil and close their eyes and ears against the truth, these being: 1) the wicked himself; 2) Satan, the god of this world, acting permissively under the will of God, and 3) God Himself who wills that the willfully wicked shall be blinded, or hardened, in their condition. The hardening of Israel (all of the fleshly Israel) is of such tremendous importance to the remainder of this chapter, that a further study of it is appended here. THE HARDENING OF ISRAEL ? Biblically, God?s judicial hardening of the reprobate is extensively illustrated. The entire antediluvian world, Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, Jericho and the 32 kingdoms displaced by the Jews, Babylon, Nineveh, Chorazin, Capernaum, and Bethsaida are all examples of kingdoms and cities that fell under God?s judicial sentence of hardening, and to these must be added the kingdom of Israel as made up of the ten lost tribes. What happened when God hardened such peoples? They were destroyed with cataclysmic destruction and fell never to rise again, eternal death also apparently being included in their doom. To this list of great cities and kingdoms, the Scriptures add the names of various individuals who were hardened, such as Pharaoh (ominously introduced by Paul himself in this epistle as an example), and Judas Iscariot. They too perished almost simultaneously with their being hardened judicially. Something of the nature of judicial hardening and how it occurs was captured by the discerning words of R.C.H. Lenski (The Interpretation of St. Paul?s Epistle to the Romans, p. 617): ?Ten times Exodus reports that Pharaoh hardened himself; then, only in consequence of this self-hardening, we read ten times that God hardened this self-hardened man. In each instance, ten is the number of completeness. Even the hardening by God?s agency is not complete at once; it follows these stages, permissive, desertive, and judicial, only the last being final and hopeless. The door of mercy is not shut at once upon the self-hardened so that they crash into the locked door with a bang. WE might close it thus. God?s mercy closes it gradually and is ready to open it wide again at the least show of repentance in answer to his mercy; and, not until the warnings of the gradually closing door are utterly in vain does the door sink regretfully into its lock.? Pharaoh is the outstanding Biblical example of hardening, because of the details revealed in the Scriptures, and the fullness of the description of it. The utmost significance of Paul?s pointed reference to Pharaoh (Rom. 9:17) is seen in his application of that example to the hardening of Israel. The citation by the apostle is alone sufficient to justify the assumption of Israel?s judicial hardening in a manner like that of Pharaoh, but there are other considerations that make it absolutely certain, as follows: 1) There is the Savior?s statement that the prophecy of Israel had been fulfilled in Israel (Matt. 13:14, 15). 2) There is the express declaration of Scripture that Israel?s conduct was as bad as that of Sodom and Gomorra (Jer. 23:14), and even worse than that of Samaria (Ezek. 16:47), all of which other people were hardened and destroyed; and there can be no doubt that the thing alone which prevented the same fate for Israel was God?s plan of bringing in the Messiah through their race. 3) Christ formally sentenced Israel to hardening and death in some of the most dramatic words ever written, in Matthew 23:37f. No one who reads Jesus? heart-breaking denunciation there can fail to believe that His words were indeed the formal pronouncement of God?s judicial sentence upon them. The city of Jerusalem itself was consigned to the torch, the pestilence, and the sword, to famine and death, to the heel of the invader and the dashing of her little ones against the stones, a sentence so terrible that Christ wept as he uttered it; and it was all the more tragic and pitiable because it came of their own willful obduracy. The Lord said, ?How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.? 4) Not merely the destruction of the great Jewish capital was announced by Christ. The religious hierarchy that governed the people were called a generation of vipers, the Lord promising that upon them would come the blood even of previous generations which had slain the prophets. He announced the destruction of their temple and the dissolution of their state and flatly declared that they should be trodden under the foot of the Gentiles for a period of time now known to have been at least nineteen centuries. ?The King,? Jesus said, ?would send his armies, destroy those murders, and burn their city.? (Matt. 22:7) There can be no doubt that Jerusalem and the nation of Israel were judicially hardened and condemned to death and subjection by none other than the Savior Himself. After such a sentence as that, who could have imagined that Israel (the old fleshly Israel) would still be around after nearly two thousand years? especially when viewed against what always happened before when God hardened a people? This mystery is that of Romans 11:25. 5) In the analogy with Pharaoh and his changing his mind ten times, hardening himself repeatedly, Israel measured up fully in comparison with it. Their rebellions were so frequent, so willful, so arrogant and extensive that the entire Old Testament is required for the outline of them, thus providing the righteous basis for the declaration of Paul that God, in the case of Israel, ?endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction.? (Rom. 9:22) God endured Israel through necessity, that the promise of the Messiah through them should not fail; but upon their rejection of Christ and murder of the King Himself, the cup of wrath overflowed.
⁴ Verse 8 ends by referring to Deuteronomy 29:4, which reads, ?Yet the Lord hath not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.? This was spoken to a generation that had witnessed the miracles of God through Moses in their fantastic deliverance from Egypt through the Red Sea. The thrust of the words here is that although they had indeed ?seen? such wonders, in the sense of stimuli on the retina of the eye, they had not grasped the true meaning and significance. This was appropriate and applicable to Paul?s generation who had witnessed even the greater wonders of Christ but had somehow failed to get the message. The great realities are morally and spiritually understood. Thus, when Jesus condemned unbelief, He made it the consequence of moral blame rather than of intellectual doubt (John 3:19). There was no doubt another point in Paul?s introduction of this passage from Deuteronomy describing the lost generation of the wilderness. They themselves were another outstanding historical example of God?s judicial hardening and destruction. Due to the promise of the Messiah, God did not destroy them, but delayed their entry into Canaan until the death of the whole generation.