Chapter # 11 Paragraph # 1 Study # 1
October 21, 2018
Humble, Texas
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Thesis: God's "Larger Plan" does not annul His "Lesser Plan".
Introduction: Perhaps one of the greatest "issues" in evangelical theology is the meaning of the text to which we are turning our attention as we move into Romans 11. There has been a large breech in the community of the saints over the question Paul raised in Romans 11:1, with some insisting against his words that God has indeed "cast away His people" if by "His people" is meant "Israel" as a national group and others insisting for his words that "God has not cast away His people" with the understanding that "His people" are "national Israel" (with the critical distinctions involved that are addressed in Romans 9:6-13). At the roots of this breech stands one critical issue: how are the words of God to be understood? This is what is called a "hermeneutical" issue and at the roots of this issue is the question of whether the prophecies God made regarding "national" Israel are to be fulfilled in their "normal" sense as rooted in His words. Will Messiah rule over a real nation of Israelites on this earth according to the normal sense of God's promises in this regard, or will He not because those words are to be "spiritualized" and, thus, "understood" as having their "reality" realized in the "Church"? For our studies, we are going to take the "normal sense" and deny that Paul's distinctions in 9:6-13 constitute "spiritual" interpretation. In that text he does not "spiritualize", he simply insists that God's words are given to be believed and those who do not "believe" them are never accepted into the community of the saints toward which the words are addressed. Unbelieving Israel was never Israel in terms of God's promises because disbelief in the promises disqualifies people from participation in those promises.
- I. The Question: Has God Cast Off His People?
- A. The roots of the question are in a complete misunderstanding of Paul's prior words in 10:19-21.
- 1. In those verses Paul's teaching was that, in order for God to not "cast off" His people, He was going to take a rather extraordinary action for the purpose of getting them to come back to Him so that He would not be forced to "cast them away".
- 2. But Paul clearly thought that his explanation would be treated as so many of the words of God are treated: throw off the essence in favor of the typically human.
- a. Because people typically have no sense of integrity and a heightened sense of hypocritical justice, the last statement Paul made in chapter 10 was taken to mean that He had had enough of Israel.
- 1) No sense of integrity means promises are considered "legitimately broken".
- 2) A heightened sense of hypocritical justice means God should cast off those "rejects" of which I am not one.
- b. It is typically human to make "justice" the default position rather than "grace" [Note where God's "default" is in 11:5].
- B. The essence of the question is whether, or not, God's response to an extraordinarily long history of "disbelief" and an "argumentative spirit" was to be "Enough already!"
- 1. This "enough already!" means "I am not going to fulfill my national promises".
- 2. That "enough already!" is what the "spiritualizers" of the words of God would have us to believe He really meant.
- 3. And, if we were to add the phrase "to these stiff-necked, argumentative, unbelievers" to this "Enough already!" conclusion, they would be correct (not in their "spiritualizing", but in their actual conclusion).
- 4. The problem with that conclusion is that it ignores the reality that there were genuine believers in the larger, antagonistic, group and they, according to the promises, were legitimately expecting God to fulfill His promises as He gave them.
- II. The Answer to the Question: Absolutely not.
- A. Grammatically, Paul prejudiced this answer by the way he formed his question.
- 1. In English we would typically read something like, "Therefore, am I saying, 'God has cast off His people'?"
- 2. In Greek, however, there is a "not" in the sentence that the translators have tried to include by adding words to Paul's: they translate, "God has not rejected His people, has He?".
- 3. Robertson explains what is going on here in his A Grammar of the Greek New Testament on page 917 where he discusses the use of the two most common negative particles and makes the claim that when writers are setting forth a question, they often use those particles to indicate the answer they are expecting (an anticipated positive answer is indicated by the placement of ou before the verb in the question and an anticipated negative answer is indicated by the placement of mh before the verb).
- 4. Because this is a well-recognized linguistic tactic, there is no need to actually translate the negative particle as long as the question gets the anticipated response.
- 5. Paul's adamant mh genoito is that anticipated answer from Paul himself, not leaving it up to his readers to answer: "I am absolutely not saying that God has cast off His people".
- B. This answer, apparently, needs some validation.
- 1. Paul's validation begins with his own identity.
- a. He is "an Israelite" -- one to whom the "national" promises were given.
- b. He is "out of the seed of Abraham" -- one of those to whom the "national" promises were given (compare the specific promise of Romans 4:13 to the specific identity given in Romans 4:17).
- c. He is "of the tribe of Benjamin" -- one of those from whom the first king of Israel was taken to continue the "national" identity of Israel.
- 2. But his argument rests upon the fact that his own identity begins with being "a believer in the promises of God".
- a. The specifics are not conclusive as already established in 9:6-13.
- b. But the reality is conclusive for those who, being those things, also believe (Romans 4:16).
- 3. And his argument is capped with his parting shot: God has not cast off those whom He foreknew.