Enriched Gentiles

Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Eleven
HOW ISRAEL’S FAILURE HAS
ENRICHED THE GENTILES

Scripture Reading: verses 8-15

(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. AND DAVID SAITH, LET THEIR TABLE BE MADE A SNARE, AND A TRAP, AND A STUMBLINGBLOCK, AND A RECOMPENCE UNTO THEM: LET THEIR EYES BE DARKENED, THAT THEY MAY NOT SEE, AND BOW DOWN THEIR BACK ALWAY. I SAY THEN, HAVE THEY STUMBLED THAT THEY SHOULD FALL? GOD FORBID: BUT RATHER THROUGH THEIR FALL SALVATION IS COME UNTO THE GENTILES, FOR TO PROVOKE THEM TO JEALOUSY. NOW IF THE FALL OF THEM BE THE RICHES OF THE WORLD, AND THE DIMINISHING OF THEM THE RICHES OF THE GENTILES; HOW MUCH MORE THEIR FULNESS? FOR I SPEAK TO YOU GENTILES, INASMUCH AS I AM THE APOSTLE OF THE GENTILES, I MAGNIFY MINE OFFICE: IF BY ANY MEANS I MAY PROVOKE TO EMULATION THEM WHICH ARE MY FLESH, AND MIGHT SAVE SOME OF THEM. FOR IF THE CASTING AWAY OF THEM BE THE RECONCILING OF THE WORLD, WHAT SHALL THE RECEIVING OF THEM BE, BUT LIFE FROM THE DEAD?

As attorney for the defense in this great courtroom drama, Paul is still endeavoring to find a legal basis on which the Jew, his fleshly kinsman, may find a righteous place under God’s favor. He now calls into evidence the apparent facts of the case – Israel as a whole hath not obtained the promises of God. His great question: Has God cast them off? He is the first witness that this is not so, for he, Paul, an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham and the tribe of Benjamin, has been brought into the blessing of God in and through Christ. Thus, repre-sentatively he is a witness that God has not cast His people away.

Then he puts Elijah on the witness stand, as it were, and indicates that Elijah maintained he was the only one left in his day who stood faithful to God when in reality there were seven thousand others who had not bowed the knee to Baal. So it is in the day the apostle lives. Although outward evidences indicate Israel has departed from God, yet there is an election according to grace. That is, there are those who are “called-out ones” on the principle of grace, not on the principle of works. However, all the others are in a kind of slumber. Their eyes are dimmed, their ears are dull of hearing. Paul now puts David back on the witness stand. Surely his testimony will be of value, and notice that however virulent, it is put on the basis of righteousness. As a result of the fact that God’s ancient people were rebellious against Him, David pronounced on them,

Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway.¹

Any Israelite of any age would lift up his head at the testimony of David the king. He is perhaps the most illustrious and certainly the most glamorous figure of the Hebrew Bible. He was anointed king of Israel and Israelites everywhere have thrilled to the music of the Psalms of David. Will the Sweet Singer of Israel speak smooth words in their favor? But when it comes to unbelief they find no en-couragement from his lips. David is just as pronounced as Paul. If they continue to be rebels against God, then their table – that is, the bounty which God has set before them – shall be turned into a trap and a stumbling block, and they shall well deserve the captivity into which they are brought. That is David’s pronouncement on his own people.

Then the magnificent grace of God comes in to show that although David spoke righteously and cried for retribution, God speaks in grace:

Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.²

Remember the purpose of God is not always single; not always on one line. God will not be frustrated in His purposes. They must go forward no matter what men may say or do. God then takes a hand and, even through the defection found in the ranks of Israel, He makes this an occasion of bringing blessing to the Gentiles. However, it is not for the purpose of casting off Israel. But rather to provoke them to jealousy that they might abandon their rebellion and turn to the Lord.

Then, in verse 12, Paul says a wonderful thing, “If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?” and in verse 15, “For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?”³ God came to Israel with every offer of mercy and loving-kindness. Even in the Gospel the glad tidings went out “to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” “That repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations beginning at Jerusalem.” However, in this passage we are reminded that Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. Humanly speaking we may say he carried the blessing of the glad tidings to the Gentiles because he was refused by Israel. He tried every possible way to bring the Lord Jesus to the attention of his fleshly brethren but they rejected his testimony, so he turned to the Gentiles.

One need only scan the pages of history to see how much the Gentile nations have been enriched by the wealth incidental to the spread of the Gospel among them. There was a day when the darkness of unbelief spread around the world like an impenetrable fog and only the land of Israel was free from it. They had light in their dwelling when all of Egypt, which encompassed the entire Gentile world, was in the darkness of midnight. Then the Gospel came, beginning at Jerusalem, and in living power the divine message radiated in ever-widening circles until today almost the entire earth is enriched by the illuminating beams of God's love. Think only of one incidental item wherein the riches of divine grace has made a tremendous difference among Gentile nations. In those years and centuries before the light of the Gospel penetrated the gloom of idolatry, a woman was as much a piece of merchandise as a dog or sheep, regarded as being a soulless being, born to drudgery and suffering. The light of the Gospel of Christ came and elevated womankind to a place of dignity and honor previously unknown. That is but one of many ways in which the Gospel of Christ has enriched the Gentile world, and these are just transient riches – they are nothing to the eternal riches of His grace.

Footnotes:
¹ Paul brought this forward from Psalm 69:19 for the purpose of further proving from the Scriptures that the hardening of Israel had long been foretold by the Word of God. “Let their eyes be darkened” ... is a clear reference to hardening. “Snare ... trap ... stumblingblock” ... As John Murray said (The Epistle to the Romans, Vol. II, p. 74), “these words are closely related, and precise distinctions of meaning are not to be pressed.” That “their table” is to be made such, is a reference to the fact that the very devices which God had provided, by which Israel should have been restrained and purified, such as the law of Moses and all of the religious institution, (those very things) became the occasion of their fall, not through God’s fault, but through their abuse of sacred privilege. This also may have reference to such things as the monarchy, which, though contrary to God’s will, was permitted as something they ardently wanted, being in that sense “their table,” but being at the same time the very thing that blinded them to the Lord when He came. “Their table” ... is also suggestive of what Jesus said regarding the temple, “Behold your house is left unto you desolate” (Matt. 23:38), indicating that even divine things, set up by God Himself, if perverted and debased to serve human ends, lose all their sanctity, thus being no longer God’s but “theirs.” “Bow down thou their back always” ... refers to the perpetual nature of the sentence imposed upon Israel, not referring exclusively to their being perpetually subjected, but to the endurance of the hardened condition finally imposed. Certainly, in this place, there is no suggestion that after certain centuries have passed, or after the Gentiles are saved, God will commute the sentence and restore them.
² This verse is admittedly difficult because of the uncertainty of just what is meant by the pronoun “they.” As a result of two Israels being in view throughout this portion of Romans, it may not be amiss to refer the first “they” to fleshly Israel and the second “they” to the true Israel. Although this usage of pronouns may be a little unusual, it is by no means ungrammatical, and would seem to be required by the difficulty of understanding the passage without this device. As Moses E. Lard (Commentary on Paul’s Letter to Romans, p. 354) said, “Did Israel stumble that they might fall? The answer is, ‘Not at all.’ But what is the precise point denied? Not certainly Israel’s stumbling, for this the question concedes. It must be the fall; and yet unqualifiedly a fall cannot be denied, for the next clause concedes one.” Lard resolved the difficulty by amending “fall” to mean “fall without remedy;” but there is far less authority for that than there is for understanding different antecedents for the two pronouns “they.” It is plain that a fall is admitted and denied in this verse, and no logic occurs to us by which that can be understood otherwise than affirming a fall for fleshly Israel and denying it for spiritual Israel. A paraphrase of what Paul’s thought may have been is thus: “Did fleshly Israel then stumble so completely as to involve even the spiritual Israel also in their fall? God forbid. Just the opposite happened, because their fall has greatly advanced the conversion of Gentiles, thus provoking the old Israel to increased acts of violence against the faith, through their jealousy.” Such appears to be the thought of this verse. The other device of understanding this place through imposing a different meaning upon “fall” so as to make it mean “fall without remedy as far as individuals are concerned,” does no violence to the truth, if properly understood, but seems to us to be more cumbersome and unnatural than supposing the two Israels to be in Paul’s purview. However, Lard’s method of understanding this is subject to the gravest abuse. Allow God’s word, “fall,” to mean anything else, or anything different from total and final apostasy and hardening of fleshly Israel; and the result will be all kinds of wild speculation about fleshly, or national, Israel and God’s supposed ultimate plans for them. Nothing that Paul wrote in Romans, or elsewhere, may rightly be construed as a plain promise that the hardening of Israel will ever cease; and although such a promise might be intended in Romans 11:25, through Paul’s use of the word “until,” there is no authority in the Word of God for so reading that word there. Against the possibility of so reading “until” in that place, is the prophetic statement of Psalm 69:19, just cited by Paul (Rom. 11:10), to the effect that Israel’s condition is for “always.” “Provoke them to jealousy” ... is read as emulation by some commentators; but the word “provoked” does not go with that thought at all. What is intended is the explanation of why fleshly Israel should have been so murderously vindictive against the Christians of the Pauline age, not even the savage persecutions of Roman emperors exceeding it in fierceness. “By their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles” ... In his book, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, p. 361, Charles Hodge commented that “The rejection of the gospel on the part of the Jews was the means of its wider and more rapid spread among the Gentiles, as clearly intimated in several passages of the New Testament.” This came about through persecutions which multiplied the centers of propagation of the new faith, like that which resulted from the martyrdom of Stephen, and also from the result of freeing the church of encumbering Jewish practices. Thus, as Hodge said (Ibid., p. 362): “If Jews, for example, had made up the principal body of the primitive church, they would have proved a hindrance by their efforts to clog up the gospel with the ceremonial observances of the law, and such things as circumcision, abstaining from certain meats, and many others.”
³ This verse is another conspicuous example of translators? of various translations adding words to the text in order to clarify what they thought to be the meaning. It is our contention that this is clearly an example of butchering a text in the Bible. They put no less than five shafts into this one. They supplied two verbs, one in the present tense and another in the future tense, and also threw in a prepositional phrase to boot. Given this kind of liberty, there is hardly any meaning that might not be imported into any text. The verse (Rom. 11:15) without its human additives: ?For if the casting away of them the reconciling of the world, what the receiving but life from the dead?? What was Paul saying? He had just mentioned the possibility of saving a few Jews; and it was of them that he said, ?What the receiving but life from the dead.? Every Jew Paul converted was viewed by him as one baptized out of a cemetery. The hardened, judicially condemned and sentenced nation (fleshly Israel) was morally and judicially dead. Yet even from that nation some were being saved, and the converts were indeed as life from deadness. ?Casting away of them the reconciling of the world? ... is a reference to the preceding verse, making Paul?s meaning respective of that and not directed to some future event. The future tense is not in this verse except by the gratuitous indulgence of translators. ?Shall be? is their word, not Paul?s. The millennial, or future wholesale Jewish conversion theories which are imported into this verse through the human additions to the text, encounter an impossible antithesis. Since the reconciling of the world (a universal concept) is said already to have been accomplished by the fall of Israel, their ?fullness? if viewed as some future wholesale acceptance of Christianity would have to be viewed as accomplishing something even more wonderful than the "reconciling of the world," and, pray tell, what could that be? The Scriptures do not teach any such thing, but quite the contrary, Jesus Himself asking plaintively, ?Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?? (Luke 18:8) It?s too bad that Jesus didn?t know about all that wholesale conversion of Jews out of fleshly Israel that our translators boldly said, ?shall be.? How could translators have done such a thing as importing such fantastic speculations into Paul?s word here? Perhaps no better example may be found of ?how? such a thing happened than that which appears in the works of Moses E. Lard himself. In his book, Commentary on Paul?s Letter to Romans, p. 361, he wrote: ?Here again we supply ?will be? or ?shall be,? and so make the apostle assert the future conversion of the Jews. This course seems necessitated by the nature of the case!? Ones does not question the sincerity of such a man as Lard or so many others for that matter; but the judgment of any person who will ?supply? words to make an ?apostle? of Jesus Christ ?assert the future conversion of the Jews? can simply not be relied upon in that instance. It is precisely in what people have made Paul say here that the trouble lies. It is held as axiomatic by the StudyJesus.com team that if Paul had believed in a future conversion of fleshly Israel, he would have trumpeted the fact to the skies in words that no one could avoid understanding. The above words of Moses Lard are an admission that the future conversion theory regarding Israel is what people have made Paul say, and not what Paul wrote.