_ISRAEL'S FALL OVERRULED, FOR THE WORLD'S BLESSING, AND FOR ISRAEL'S
MERCY_
ROMANS xi. 11-24
The Apostle has been led a few steps backwards in the last previous
verses. His face has been turned once more toward the dark region of
the prophetic sky, to see how the sin of Christ-rejecting souls is met
and punished by the dreadful "_gift_" of slumber, and apathy, and the
transmutation of blessings to snares. But now, decisively, he looks
sunward. He points our eyes, with his own, to the morning light of
grace and promise. We are to see what Israel's fall has had to do with
the world's hope and with life in Christ, and then what blessings
await Israel himself, and again the world through him.
[Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =I say, therefore,= (the phrase resumes the point
of view to which the same words above (ver. 1) led us,) =did they
stumble that they might fall?= Did their national rejection of an
unwelcome because unworldly Messiah take place, in the divine
permission, with the positive divine purpose that it should bring on a
final rejection of the nation, its banishment out of its place in the
history of redemption? =Away with the thought! But their partial
fall[189] is the occasion of God's salvation (ἡ σωτηρία) for the
Gentiles, with a view to move them,= the Jews, =to jealousy,= to awake
them to a sight of what Christ is, and of what their privilege in Him
might yet be, by the sight of His work and glory in once pagan lives.
Observe here the divine benignity which lurks even under the edges of
the cloud of judgment. And observe too, thus close to the passage
which has put before us the mysterious side of divine action on human
wills, the daylight simplicity of _this_ side of that action; the
loving skill with which the world's blessing is meant by the God of
grace to act, exactly in the line of human feeling, upon the will of
Israel.
But would that "the Gentiles" had borne more in heart that last short
sentence of St Paul's, through these long centuries since the Apostles
fell asleep! It is one of the most marked, as it is one of the
saddest, phenomena in the history of the Church that for ages, almost
from the days of St John himself, we look in vain either for any
appreciable Jewish element in Christendom, or for any extended effort
on the part of Christendom to win Jewish hearts to Christ by a wise
and loving evangelization. With only relatively insignificant
exceptions this was the abiding state of things till well within the
eighteenth century, when the German Pietists began to call the
attention of believing Christians to the spiritual needs and prophetic
hopes of Israel, and to remind them that the Jews were not only a
beacon of judgment, or only the most impressive and awful illustration
of the fulfilment of prophecy, but the bearers of yet unfulfilled
predictions of mercy for themselves and for the world. Meanwhile, all
through the Middle Age, and through generations of preceding and
following time also, Christendom did little for Israel but retaliate,
reproach, and tyrannize. It was so of old in England; witness the
fires of York. It is so to this day in Russia, and where the
_Judenhetze_ inflames innumerable hearts in Central Europe.
No doubt there is more than one side to the persistent phenomenon.
There is a side of mystery; the permissive sentence of the Eternal has
to do with the long affliction, however caused, of the people which
once uttered the fatal cry, "His blood be on us, and on our children"
(Matt. xxvii. 25). And the wrong-doings of Jews, beyond a doubt, have
often made a dark occasion for a "Jew-hatred," on a larger or narrower
scale. But all this leaves unaltered, from the point of view of the
Gospel, the sin of Christendom in its tremendous failure to seek, in
love, the good of erring Israel. It leaves as black as ever the guilt
of every fierce retaliation upon Jews by so-called Christians, of
every slanderous belief about Jewish creed or life, of every unjust
anti-Jewish law ever passed by Christian king or senate. It leaves an
undiminished responsibility upon the Church of Christ, not only for
the flagrant wrong of having too often animated and directed the civil
power in its oppressions of Israel, and not only for having so awfully
neglected to seek the evangelization of Israel by direct appeals for
the true Messiah, and by an open setting forth of His glory, but for
the deeper and more subtle wrong, persistently inflicted from age to
age, in a most guilty unconsciousness--the wrong of having failed to
manifest Christ to Israel through the living holiness of Christendom.
Here, surely, is the very point of the Apostle's thought in the
sentence before us: "_Salvation to the Gentiles, to move the Jews to
jealousy_." In his inspired idea, Gentile Christendom, in Christ, was
to be so pure, so beneficent, so happy, finding manifestly in its
Messianic Lord such resources for both peace of conscience and a life
of noble love, love above all directed towards opponents and
traducers, that Israel, looking on, with eyes however purblind with
prejudice, should soon see a moral glory in the Church's face
impossible to be hid, and be drawn as by a moral magnet to the
Church's hope. Is it the fault of God (may He pardon the formal
question, if it lacks reverence), or the fault of man, man carrying
the Christian name, that facts have been so wofully otherwise in the
course of history? It is the fault, the grievous fault, of us
Christians. The narrow prejudice, the iniquitous law, the rigid
application of exaggerated ecclesiastical principle, all these things
have been man's perversion of the divine idea, to be confessed and
deplored in a deep and interminable repentance. May the mercy of God
awaken Gentile Christendom, in a manner and degree as yet unknown, to
remember this our indefeasible debt to this people everywhere present
with us, everywhere distinct from us;--the debt of _a life_, personal
and ecclesiastical, so manifestly pure and loving in our Lord the
Christ as to "move them to the jealousy" which shall claim Him again
for their own. Then we shall indeed be hastening the day of full and
final blessing, both for themselves and for the world.
To that bright coming day the Apostle points us now, more directly
than ever: [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =But if their partial fall[190] be the
world's wealth, and their lessening (ἥττημα),= their reduction, (a
reduction in one aspect to a race of scattered exiles, in another to a
mere remnant of "Israelites indeed,") =be the Gentiles' wealth,= the
occasion by which "the unsearchable wealth of Messiah" (Eph. iii. 8)
has been as it were forced into Gentile receptacles, =how much more
their fulness,= the filling of the dry channel with its ample ideal
stream, the change from a believing remnant, fragments of a
fragmentary people, to a believing nation, reanimated and reunited?
What blessings for "the world," for "the Gentiles," may not come
through the vehicle of such an Israel? [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =But[191]
to you I speak, the Gentiles[192]= to you, because if I reach the
Jews, in the way I mean, it must be through you. =So far indeed as I,
distinctively I (ἐγώ), am the Gentiles' Apostle, I glorify my
ministry= as such; I rejoice, Pharisee that I once was, to be devoted
as no other Apostle is to a ministry for those whom I once thought of
as of outcasts in religion. But I speak as your own Apostle, and to
you, [Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =if perchance I may move the jealousy of my
flesh and blood,[193] and may save some from amongst them,= by letting
them as it were overhear what are the blessings of you Gentile
Christians, and how it is the Lord's purpose to use those blessings as
a magnet to wandering Israel.[194] His hope is that, through the Roman
congregation, this glorious open secret will come out, as they meet
their Jewish neighbours and talk with them. So would one here, another
there, "in the streets and lanes of the City," be drawn to the feet of
Jesus, under the constraint of that "jealousy" which means little else
than the human longing to understand what is evidently the great joy
of another's heart; a "jealousy" on which often grace can fall, and
use it as the vehicle of divine light and life.
He says only, "_some of them_"; as he does in the sister Epistle;
1 Cor. ix. 22.[195] He recognizes it as his present task, indicated
alike by circumstance and revelation, to be not the glad ingatherer of
vast multitudes to Christ, but the patient winner of scattered sheep.
Yet let us observe that none the less he spends his whole soul upon
that winning, and takes no excuse from a glorious future to slacken a
single effort in the difficult present.
[Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =For if the throwing away of them,= their
downfall as the Church of God, was =the world's reconciliation,= the
instrumental or occasioning cause of the direct proclamation to the
pagan peoples of the Atonement of the Cross, =what will their
reception be, but life from the dead?= That is to say, the great event
of Israel's return to God in Christ, and His to Israel, will be the
signal and the means of a vast rise of spiritual life in the Universal
Church, and of an unexampled ingathering of regenerate souls from the
world. When Israel, as a Church, fell, the fall worked good for the
world merely by driving, as it were, the apostolic preachers out from
the Synagogue, to which they so much longed to cling. The Jews did
anything but aid the work. Yet even so they were made an occasion for
world-wide good. When they are "received again," as this Scripture so
definitely affirms that they shall be received, the case will be
grandly different. As before, they will be "occasions." A national and
ecclesiastical return of Israel to Christ will of course give occasion
over the whole world for a vastly quickened attention to Christianity,
and for an appeal for the world's faith in the facts and claims of
Christianity, as bold and loud as that of Pentecost. But more than
this; Israel will now be not only occasion but agent. The Jews,
ubiquitous, cosmopolitan, yet invincibly national, coming back in
living loyalty to the Son of David, the Son of God, will be a positive
power in evangelization such as the Church has never yet felt.
Whatever the actual facts shall prove to be in the matter of their
return to the Land of Promise[196] (and who can watch without deep
reflection the nation-less land and the land-less nation?) no
prediction obliges us to think that the Jews will be withdrawn from
the wide world by a national resettlement in their Land. A nation is
not a Dispersion merely because it has individual citizens widely
dispersed; if it has a true national centre, it is a people at home, a
people with a home. Whether as a central mass in Syria, or as also a
presence everywhere in the human world, Israel will thus be ready,
once restored to God in Christ, to be a more than natural evangelizing
power.
Let this be remembered in every enterprise for the spiritual good of
the great Dispersion now. Through such efforts God is already
approaching His hour of blessing, long expected. Let that fact animate
and give a glad patience to His workers, on whose work He surely
begins in our day to cast His smile of growing blessing.
Now the argument takes a new direction. The restoration thus
indicated, thus foretold, is not only sure to be infinitely
beneficial. It is also to be looked for and expected as a thing lying
so to speak in the line of spiritual fitness, true to the order of
God's plan. In His will, when He went about to create and develop His
Church, Israel sprung from the dry ground as the sacred Olive, rich
with the sap of truth and grace, full of branch and leaf. From the
tents of Abraham onward, the world's true spiritual light and life was
there. There, not elsewhere, was revelation, and God-given ordinance,
and "the covenants, and the glory." There, not elsewhere, the Christ
of God, for whom all things waited, towards whom all the lines of
man's life and history converged, was to appear. Thus, in a certain
profound sense, all true salvation must be not only "of" Israel (John
iv. 24) but through him. Union with Christ was union with Abraham. To
become a Christian, that is to say, one of Messiah's men, was to
become, mystically, an Israelite. From this point of view the
Gentile's union with the Saviour, though not in the least less genuine
and divine than the Jew's, was, so to speak, less normal. And thus
nothing could be more spiritually normal than the Jew's recovery to
his old relation to God, from which he had violently dislocated
himself. These thoughts the Apostle now presses on the Romans, as a
new motive and guide to their hopes, prayers, and work. (Do we gather
from the length and fulness of the argument that already it was
difficult to bring Gentiles to think aright of the chosen people in
their fall and rebellion?) He reminds them of the inalienable
consecration of Israel to special divine purposes. He points them to
the ancient Olive, and boldly tells them that they are, themselves,
only a graft of a wild stock, inserted into the noble tree. Not that
he thinks of the Jew as a superior being. But the Church of Israel was
the original of the Church. So the restoration of Israel to Christ,
and to the Church, is a recovery of normal life, not a first and
abnormal grant of life.
[Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But if the first-fruit was holy, holy is the
kneaded lump too.= Abraham was as it were the Lord's First-fruits of
mankind, in the field of His Church. "Abraham's seed" are as it were
the mass kneaded from that first-fruits; made of it. Was the
first-fruits holy, in the sense of consecration to God's redeeming
purpose? Then that which is made of it must somehow still be a
consecrated thing, even though put aside as if "common" for awhile.
=And if the root= was =holy,= holy are =the branches too;= the lineal
heirs of Abraham are still, ideally, potentially, consecrated to Him
who separated Abraham to Himself, and moved him to his great
self-separation. [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =But if some of the branches=
(how tender is the euphemism of the "_some_"!) =were broken off, while
you, wild-olive as you were, were grafted in among them,= in their
place of life and growth, =and became a sharer of the root and of the
Olive's fatness,--= [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =do not boast over the=
torn-off =branches. But if you do boast over them--not you carry the
root, but the root carries you.= [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =You will say
then, The branches were broken off--that I might be grafted in. Good:=
true--and untrue: =because of their unbelief they were broken off,
while you because of your faith stand.= They were no better beings
than you, in themselves. But neither are you better than they, in
yourself. They and you alike are, personally, mere subjects of
redeeming mercy; owing all to Christ; possessing all only as accepting
Christ. "Where is your boasting, then?" =Do not be high-minded, but
fear,= fear yourself, your sin, your enemy. [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =For
if God did not spare the natural branches, take care lest He spare not
you either.= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =See therefore God's goodness and
sternness. On those who fell,= came His =sternness= (ἀποτομία, not
ἀποτομίαν); =but on you,= His =goodness, if you abide by that (τῇ)
goodness,= with the adherence and response of faith; =since you too
will be cut out= otherwise. [Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =And they too, if
they do not abide by their (τῇ) unbelief, shall be grafted in; for
God is able to graft them in again.= [Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =For if you
from the naturally wild olive were cut out, and non-naturally (παρὰ
φύσιν) were grafted into the Garden-Olive, how much more shall
those, the= branches =naturally, be grafted into their own Olive!=
Here are more topics than one which call for reverent notice and
study.
1. The imagery of the Olive, with its root, stem, and branches. The
Olive, rich and useful, long-lived, and evergreen, stands, as a
"nature-parable" of spiritual life, beside the Vine, the Palm, and the
Cedar, in the Garden of God. Sometimes it pictures the individual
saint, living and fruitful in union with his Lord (Psal. lii. 8).
Sometimes it sets before us the fertile organism of the Church, as
here, where the Olive is the great Church Universal in its long life
before and after the historical coming of Christ; the life which in a
certain sense began with the Call of Abraham, and was only
magnificently developed by the Incarnation and Passion. Its Root, in
this respect, is the great Father of Faith. Its Stem is the Church of
the Old Testament, which coincided, in the matter of external
privilege, with the nation of Israel, and to which at least the
immense majority of true believers in the elder time belonged. Its
Branches (by a slight and easy modification of the image) are its
individual members, whether Jewish or Gentile. The Master of the Tree,
arriving on the scene in the Gospel age, comes as it were to prune His
Olive, and to graft. The Jewish "branch," if he is what he seems, if
he believes indeed and not only by hypothesis, abides in the Tree.
Otherwise, he is--from the divine point of view--broken off. The
Gentile, believing, is grafted in, and becomes a true part of the
living organism; as genuinely and vitally one with Abraham in life and
blessing as his Hebrew brother. But the fact of the Hebrew "race" in
root and stem rules still so far as to make the re-ingrafting of a
Hebrew branch, repenting, more "natural" (not more possible, or more
beneficial, but more "natural") than the first ingrafting of a Gentile
branch. The whole Tree is for ever Abrahamic, Israelite, in stock and
growth; though all mankind has place now in its forest of branches.
2. The imagery of Grafting. Here is an instance of partial, while
truthful, use of a natural process in Scripture parable. In our
gardens and orchards it is the wild stock which receives, in grafting,
the "good" branch; a fact which lends itself to many fertile
illustrations. Here, on the contrary, the "wild" branch is inserted
into the "good" stock. But the olive-yard yields to the Apostle all
the imagery he really needs. He has before him, ready to hand, the
Tree of the Church; all that he wants is an illustration of
communication and union of life by artificial insertion. And this he
finds in the olive-dresser's art, which shews him how a vegetable
fragment, apart and alien, can by human design be made to grow into
the life of the tree, as if a native of the root.
3. The teaching of the passage as to the Place of Israel in the divine
Plan of life for the world. We have remarked on this already, but it
calls for reiterated notice and recollection. "At sundry times, and in
divers manners," and through many and divers races and civilizations,
God has dealt with man, and is dealing with him, in the training and
development of his life and nature. But in the matter of man's
spiritual salvation, in the gift to him, in his Fall, of the life
eternal, God has dealt with man, practically, through _one_ race,
Israel. Let it never be forgotten that the "sundry times and divers
manners" of the apostolic Epistle (Heb. i. 1) are all referred to "the
prophets"; they are the "times" and "manners" of the Old Testament
revelation. And when at length the same Eternal Voice spoke to man
"_in the Son_" (ἐν Ὑιῷ), that Son came of Israel, "took hold of
Abraham's seed" (Heb. ii. 16), and Himself bore definite witness that
"salvation is from the Jews" (John iv. 24). Amidst the unknown
manifoldness of the work of God for man, and in man, this is single
and simple--that in one racial line only runs the stream of authentic
and supernatural revelation; in the line of this mysteriously chosen
Israel. From this point of view, the great Husbandman has planted not
a forest but a Tree; and the innumerable trees of the forest can get
the sap of Eden only as their branches are grafted by His hand into
His one Tree, by the faith which unites them to Him who is the Root
below the root, "the Root of David," and of Abraham.
4. The appeal to the new-grafted "branch" to "abide by the goodness of
God." We have listened, as St Paul has dictated to his scribe, to many
a deep word about a divine and sovereign power on man; about man's
absolute debt to God for the fact that he believes and lives. Yet
here, with equal decision, we have man thrown back on the thought of
his responsibility, of the contingency in a certain sense of his
safety on his fidelity.[197] "If you are true to mercy, mercy will be
true to you; otherwise you too will be broken off." Here, as in our
study of earlier passages, let us be willing to go all along with
Scripture in the seeming inconsistency of its absolute promises and
its contingent cautions. Let us, like it, "go to both extremes"; then
we shall be as near, probably, as our finite thought can be at present
to the whole truth as it moves, a perfect sphere, in God. Is the
Christian worn and wearied with his experience of his own pollution,
instability, and helplessness? Let him embrace, without a misgiving,
the whole of that promise, "My sheep shall never perish." Has he
drifted into a vain confidence, not in Christ, but in privilege, in
experience, in apparent religious prosperity? Has he caught himself in
the act of saying, even in a whisper, "God, I thank Thee that I am not
as other men are"? Then let him listen in time to the warning voice,
"Be not high-minded, but fear"; "Take heed lest He spare not thee."
And let him put no pillow of theory between the sharpness of that
warning and his soul. Penitent, self-despairing, resting in Christ
alone, let him "_abide by the goodness of God_."
[189] Παράπτωμα: so we venture to render the word here, where its
compound form gets a special point from its neighbourhood to the
simple verb πίπτειν (πέσωσι).
[190] Παράπτωμα: see above p. 294.
[191] Read δὲ not γάρ. It is the "_but_" of a slight pause and
resumption.
[192] The converts of the Roman Mission were surely Gentiles for the
most part. See further below, ver. 25.
[193] Τὴν σάρκα μου: we venture to write "_flesh and blood_" as the
nearest equivalent in our parlance to the vigorous Greek, "_my
flesh_."
[194] It will be seen that we punctuate the Greek here as follows:
Ὑμῖν δὲ λέγω τοῖς ἔθνεσιν (ἐφ' ὅσον μὲν οὖν εἰμὶ ἐγὼ ἐθνῶν ἀπόστολος,
τὴν διακονίαν μου δοξάζω) εἴ πῶς κτλ. The thought of his "_glory_"
in his "_ministry_" is surely _parenthetical_; thrown in to remind
them that his plea for Israel means no change of heart towards his
Gentile converts, or any wavering in the certainty that in Christ they
are as completely "the people of God" as Israel is. The "main line" of
the sentence runs past this parenthesis: "To you Gentiles I speak, in
the hope of moving the jealousy of the Jews."
[195] Cp. too 2 Cor. iii. 14-16 with this whole passage.
[196] This chapter is silent on that great matter.
[197] "To our safety our sedulity is required." Hooker, _Sermon on the
Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect_ (at the close of the sermon). See
the whole sermon, with its temperate and well-balanced assertion of
the power of grace.