Rom 11 - Has God Rejected His People

By Paul Ice

Adapted from John Piper

Romans 11

Romans 11:1, "I ask, then, has God rejected his people?" That question is utterly pressing because of the preceding chapters and the preceding verse (Romans 10:21), "But of Israel he says, 'All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.'" In other words, it looks like Israel is resistant to God and therefore rejected.

So Paul asks in verse 1: "Has God rejected his people?" And he answers: "By no means!" Then he gives his argument, his reason: "For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin." Do you see how different this argument is from anything else he has said so far in Romans 9-11? Here he is arguing that God's faithfulness to his people is found precisely in the fact that Paul is Jewish. God has not rejected his people! Look! I am a Jew. I am an Israelite, a "member of the tribe of Benjamin." The fact that he mentions what tribe he is from shows that he is not merely thinking of himself as a spiritual descendant of Abraham, but also as a physical descendant. God has not rejected his people, because I am not rejected and I am part of physical Israel. That is his argument so far and it is new in these three chapters. This is a new level in the argument.

From here he will argue that there is a remnant including himself-including Jews for Jesus-and a remnant points to a fullness the way first fruits point to harvest. We will need to follow this argument carefully. But I save that for next week. I want to ask the "so what" question as we tackle Romans 11. Why should anyone care about this ancient letter? Why should anyone who is here for the first time today bother to come back?

Really it's a question of whether we need to be assured that the word of God to Israel has not fallen. Paul must think this issue is enormously important to spend three chapters defending God's faithfulness to his word to Israel. Why? And why should we care?

Consider these two reasons.

1. If God's Word Fails to Israel, God Is Not Glorious, and God Is Not God

If God's word fails to Israel, God is not glorious. And if God is not glorious, God is not God. And if God is not God, our greatest treasure is taken from us, and we are turned into beasts with the monkeys and the porpoises, and all our love and all our affections are nothing more than chemicals, and we must play "make believe" all our life that anything is significant.

But Paul is passionate for the glory of God and the God-ness of God and the unspeakable significance of your life. And so he writes these chapters and ends them like this:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! 34 "For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?" 35 "Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?" 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33-36)

That is what hangs on God's faithfulness to his word to Israel. His glory. His being God. And your life mattering at all.

2. If God's Word Fails to Israel, We Cannot Believe That the Promises of Romans 8 Will Be True for Us

The second reason you should care about God's faithfulness to his word to Israel is that if God does not keep his promises to Israel, all our hope that he will keep his promises to us in Romans 8 falls to the ground.

What about the promise of Romans 8:38, "I am sure that neither death nor life . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Will death separate you from the love of God? Not if you trust Jesus Christ as your only Savior and Lord and not if God is trustworthy. But if he does not keep his promises to Israel, he is not trustworthy, and the promise of Romans 8:38 is unreliable, and the experience of Frances Ridley Havergal is a sham and you will never know it. She wrote "Like A River Glorious." She died when she was 42. She wrote:

I do not fear death. Often I wake in the night and think of it, look forward to it, with a thrill of joyful expectation and anticipation, which would become impatience, were it not that Jesus is my Master, as well as my Saviour, and I feel I have work to do for Him that I would not shirk, and also that His time to call me home will be the best and right time; therefore I am content to wait. (Like A River Glorious: Prose, Poetry, and Music by Fances Ridley Havergal, Rio, Wisconsin: The Havergal Trust, 2003, p. 710)