Will God Forsake His People?

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. God's promises were unconditional and God's gracious gifts and his calling are irrevocable. Has God failed to keep his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations?

Paul's answer, absolutely not. And here's how I know that he says, because a lot of Jewish people have been saved like me and even their rejection of the gospel has led to Gentile salvation, but the best is yet to come. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Think with me for just a moment about a tough topic, okay? Does your obedience to God reveal a faith that will endure to the end? How do you think God feels about people who claim him as Lord, but don't walk with him or really want to submit to him? Today, Pastor J.D. Greer is going to show us how, while God kept his promise to Israel, he will also remove anyone who does not demonstrate a staying faith, just like he had to do with Israel. We're back in the book of Romans, friends, and it's time to finish our journey through this essential book of the Bible.

So stick with us for the next couple of weeks as we head toward that finish line. Pastor J.D. called today's message, Will God Forsake His People?

Let's jump in. Romans chapter 11, if you got your Bible, hope that you have it this weekend, Romans chapter 11. I feel like I've said this a lot in this series, but this chapter is really, really difficult and maybe the most difficult of the ones we've looked at thus far. I told you at the beginning of the series that for years I have been nervous about preaching through the book of Romans and, quite frankly, have avoided it for 16 years. This chapter, in large part, is one of the reasons why I have been nervous about preaching through Romans.

It's got all this confusing stuff in it about who the true Israel is and how God is going to graft into the vine Gentiles in their place. I'm not even sure what Paul means here, and I'm definitely not sure how any of it actually applies to me or changes my life. I found that the pastors who do preach through the book of Romans, which, unfortunately, is not very many, but the ones that actually do preach through the book of Romans, that a lot of them skip 9 through 11, chapters 9 through 11, and then the ones that preach 9 through 11 will a lot of times skip chapter 11.

Just one example here, I heard a guy talking about his church. He said that their pastor was working his way through the book of Romans, just like I'm doing. He said when we got to chapter 11, he said the pastor stood up and said, listen, I'm just not sure what's going on in Romans 11, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it would be relevant for us or edifying. He said, and next week we've got Vacation Bible School and the week after that student camp, so we're just going to take the morning to pray about those things, and I'll see you back next week, and we'll pick up with Romans 12.

So that's one way to deal with it. I remember in the church I grew up in, every once in a while, the pastor would stand up and say, this morning we're going to have a testimony service, and people would just come up from the audience and share a word of testimony. As I got older, I learned, you know, I figured out that this was just his way of saying, I didn't have time to prepare a message this week, and so we're going to let you do the talking. All right, listen, I can sympathize with those pastors who skip these chapters. Some scholars even say that chapters 9 through 11 function like a historical footnote that Paul inserts only for the Jews, but it's mostly irrelevant for us. They say the gospel logic of the book of Romans, you remember Paul's been building this gospel case. They say the gospel logic stops at the end of Romans 8 and then just picks back up in Romans 12, and they say you can actually skip 9 through 11 without losing any of the progression.

But I disagree. It's like I said when we started chapter 9, you remember this, I said Paul, in the gospel logic, seems to recognize that when he gets to all these glorious promises in Romans 8, remember those? You know, all those that God foreknew, he predestined, those he predestined, those he called, those he called, those he justified, those he justified, those he glorified. You know, nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. When he gets to all these glorious promises, he knows that the thinking person is saying, what about the Jews?

I mean, weren't the Jews also God's chosen people? And clearly they've fallen away. Clearly they've been separated from the love of God. They crucified Christ. And so how is this not a failure on God's part? And this is where it gets really relevant for us. If God failed with them, how can we be sure he's not going to fail with us also?

Right? I mean, if you read the promises in the Old Testament, they read like unconditional promises. Unconditional meaning I'm going to do it regardless of what you do. You read Genesis 12, God says to Abraham, I'm going to bless you, and I'm going to make you a great nation, and I'm going to bless your nation with salvation.

And not only are you going to know me, you're going to become a blessing to all the other nations, and you're going to teach them about God also. There's no if, or maybe, or might, or if you do this, I'll do that. It's just a promise.

It's unconditional. By the way, to drive that point home, just a couple chapters after Genesis 12, God has Abraham do this ceremony that demonstrates that. They do this back in those days.

It seems strange to us, but it was common in those days. If you were doing something really, really important, a really important covenant, you would take animals. And so God has Abraham take three animals and cut them in two and put them on either side of a little ditch so that their blood runs down into the ditch. And the way that you do the covenant is both parties of the covenant would walk through the blood, so the blood would splash up on their robes. And if we were demonstrating that if I fail to keep up my end of the bargain, may my blood flow like this blood. When it comes time for Abraham and God to pass through this river of blood, God puts Abraham, Genesis 15 says, into a deep sleep, and God goes through it by himself. And the meaning is God saying, Abraham, I'm not only going to make myself responsible for my side of the covenant, I'm going to be responsible for your side of the covenant as well.

That's unconditional. And now you get to Romans 9, and here you've got Israel falling away. And so Paul knows you're asking, well, if God reneged on these unconditional promises to Israel, how do we know he's not going to do the same thing with us? Chapter 11 is Paul still wrestling with this question. In the first 16 verses, he's going to give you his answer to that question. And then in the next six verses, he's going to give you a very important warning that comes out of reflection on that answer. And then the final nine verses of the chapter is where Paul just kind of burst into an explosion of praise as he meditates and reflects on that answer. So here we go, the question, verse 16 verses.

Here's how I would summarize the question. Has God failed in keeping his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations, or you could say the Gentiles? By the way, if you hear the word Gentiles, anytime it's in the Bible, anytime I'm using it, it just means anybody who's not an ethnic Jew.

That's everybody who's not an ethnic Jew is classified as Gentile. Has God failed in keeping his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations? Chapter 11, verse 1. Here's how Paul says, I ask then, has God rejected his people?

Absolutely not. Paul then offers four, let's call them arguments, to prove that God has not reneged on these Genesis 12 promises. The first we'll call the, let's call the Paul argument, verse 1. Paul says, I'm a Jew. In fact, all the apostles are Jews and God has not only saved us, he's using us mightily to establish his church.

So God hasn't totally forsaken his people because look at us, right? The second, we will call the election argument, verse 2. Paul says, it's like I explained to you in chapter 9, since the very beginning of the Israelite nation, we see that not every son or daughter of Abraham truly belonged to God.

You remember this from chapter 9? Paul uses two examples. He said, Abraham had two sons. One was named Isaac, one was Ishmael. Isaac was the son of promise, Ishmael was not. Isaac has two sons.

One is named Jacob, one is named Esau. Jacob embraces the promises personally for himself, Esau rejects them. These represent Paul's says two kinds of Israelites who have always existed in Israel. There are those who know God personally and embrace the promises for themselves and those who don't. The true Israelites, Paul says, the ones that God foreknew are not those who inherited the biological DNA of Abraham. The true Israelites are those who embrace his faith.

So Paul concludes there in verse 2, no, God has not rejected the people that he actually foreknew. All the Jacobs and all the Isaacs whom he had an actual relationship with, he has not forsaken. Third, he's going to give what we'll call the Elijah argument. Again, verse 2, don't you know what the scripture says in the passage about Elijah? What was God's answer to him? In the Old Testament, there was a prophet named Elijah who prophesied at a very dark time in Israel. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel were on the throne and Israel was very far away from God. And so in a moment of just total like despair, Elijah finds himself on top of Mount Horeb and he is saying, lamenting to God, God, I'm literally the only one left. Nobody else in all of Israel follows you.

It's just me. What is God's answer to him? You see it there in verse 4. Paul quotes it. I have left for myself 7,000 people you don't even know about who have not bowed down to Baal.

There's 7,000 people out there, Paul, you're unaware of. And I have preserved a remnant that's going to follow me. And the same way Paul says, even today, God has preserved a remnant of his people. Sure, you might look at the Israelite nation as a whole and say they've rejected God, but look closer, look closer, and you'll see that God's been doing something you didn't even know about. And he preserved a remnant that still belonged to him. And I'll tell you, if you look at Christian history, that has always been true. Not only was the early church birthed by Jews, throughout Christian history, there has always been a small but thriving Jewish Christian community.

If you're into philosophy or literature, people like Mortimer Adler or Simone Weil, if you're into more popular culture, people like Jay Sekulow or Bob Dylan, Josh Groban, Kathie Lee Gifford. These, he says, these has always existed, always existed throughout history. If I could just throw this in real quick right here. What Paul is indicating to you, and this is something you can take away from this, just when you think it's over, just when you think like the chapter is closed, just when you find yourself in a situation where you're on Mount Horeb saying, God, it's over.

Like the family's lost and the friends are gone and nobody's left but me. You should open your eyes, Paul says, because God's been doing some surprising things probably that you're not even going to know about it. I mean, think about it for a minute. If you had been around in the first century and somebody had told you that pretty soon the seat of Christianity was going to be the Roman Empire, what would you have said? You said, yeah, right. And then it happened, right? And then in the fourth century, you know, after Rome has basically converted to Christ, if somebody had told you the new center of the Christian world is going to be the English speaking world, which by the way, at that point was a bunch of savage tribesmen who were barbarians, right?

If you heard that, you'd be like, no way, there's people who can do anything. And then if you'd have been around in Europe, English speaking Europe in the middle ages and somebody had told you one day the center of Christianity, when Europe began to go secular and liberal, the center of Christianity was going to be this little upstart country that nobody had heard about, didn't exist at the time of Paul on a continent nobody had even discovered yet, that the United States was going to become the largest mission sending country that had ever existed, you would have said, that's crazy. Even today, you look around and you see that the church they say is growing fastest in China, Latin America, and Africa in places that we thought were closed countries and places that are very dangerous. What is God just saying? Look, just when you think it's done, just you open your eyes because I'm doing something you don't even know about. It's like a friend of mine says, if you're not dead, God's not done. And God is working and he's doing something. He's going to keep this promise. So you've got this Elijah argument that God's probably doing a lot more than you, than you realize. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We'll get back to today's teaching on the book of Romans in a second, but I've got a very exciting announcement. We've got a brand new featured resource for you starting today. It's part two of Pastor Tim Keller's Roman study called In View of God's Mercy. This study will take you through chapters eight through 16 of Romans as we finish this very important teaching series here on Summit Life. And if you've been with us for a while, you hopefully already got part one of this study. So you'll definitely want to complete the set with part two. If you happen to miss it, however, let us know and we can make sure that you get both parts. These resources come with our thanks for your gift of $35 or more to this ministry.

To give, just call us at 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now let's return to today's teaching here on Summit Life. Paul uses these two reasons. He says, see, God has not forsaken his people. He saved me, I'm a Jew, apostles are Jews. Number two, the ones that God has elected and foreknown, he's always been.

And then number three, he's got a remnant that's going. But then verse 11, Paul hears you again, because he knows you and he knows your cynical. He hears you say, well, wait a minute, Paul.

Paul, really, that's it? That's the fulfillment of all those promises is you get this little tiny Jewish community, the occasional Bob Dylan or Josh Groban and the occasional song about you lift me up. And that's basically the Jewish contribution to Christianity. Because when I read the Old Testament, it sure sounds to me like Israel as a whole is going to respond to God. Sure sounds like the Jewish people are going to be known as God's people. And I guess it just looks like God was not able to pull that off. And I guess that makes us Gentiles like God's consolation prize or we Gentiles were his safety school.

You know, safety school, like the school that you know you can get into if you don't get into the school you want to get into. Is that what happened? All right. So Paul, verse 11, gives his fourth and final answer. He will call it the future argument. Paul explains that Israel's response to the gospel is going to unfold in three major stages. This is pretty awesome, by the way, because it gives you a vision of the future. Stage one, verse 11, would you describe it this way?

All right. These are Israel's response to the gospel. Israel's mostly negative response to the gospel opens a door for Gentiles to hear and to believe. See, verse 11, by their transgression, by their rejection of Christ, salvation has come to the Gentiles. The fact that Israel missed the gospel opened up a unique opportunity for Gentiles to believe.

I mean, think about it. If you go through Acts, you'll see that the gospel goes into a new city on basically a standard progression. The apostles arrive in a new city and the first place they go is where? Always go to the Jewish synagogue and that's the first place they preach the gospel.

The reaction is always mixed. There's always a handful of Jews that believe, but for the most part the Jews reject the gospel. And so the apostles are driven out of the synagogue into the streets and the marketplaces where they encounter a lot of Gentiles who are willing to believe. And within a hundred years Christianity has become a multi-ethnic, mostly Gentile movement where the Gentiles are now the core of the church. Just imagine, Paul says, if in every town at the synagogue that the apostles preached at, imagine the synagogues had all responded enthusiastically. Well, the apostles might have grown complacent, right? And they might have not ever gotten out into the street, not ever gotten the gospel to the Gentiles. So God has arranged it so that even the Jewish hardness to the gospel has turned out to a unique opportunity for the Gentiles. Well, that's going to bring us to stage two, right? Stage two, Gentile believers make Israelites jealous.

Look back in verse 11, right? Because of this transgression, salvation came to the Gentiles and that made Israel jealous. This is not bad jealousy, like she's prettier than me or he's smarter than I am.

This is a good kind of jealousy where somebody has something, you know, that you really ought to have yourself. For example, if my teenage kids, if they rejected my wife and I and ran away from home. And so my wife and I brought in some homeless kids into our family. And after several months, my kids make their way back and they're cold and lonely and hungry. And they come to our window on Christmas morning and they look through the window and there they see around the Christmas tree, they see these kids, they don't even know who are opening these beautiful gifts and just experiencing the love and warmth of being a part of our family. And in their hearts, there's cold and lonely and hungry. They're like, that's supposed to be me.

That's supposed to be me. And I miss that kind of family. God says, that's what is happening to the Jews right now. There is a sense in which Jewish people resent. They resent the closeness that Christians feel toward their God, the God of the Old Testament, the way we talk about the God of David and the way we use the Psalms and the way we love Moses.

And there's a sense in which there's a jealousy that's being provoked that says, hey, this God has brought me into his table and I'm sitting here and I'm feasting and you could be here also. And that eventually is going to lead, Paul says, to stage three. At some point in the future, Israel as a nation is going to come back to God. And that's going to, that's going to spawn a worldwide gospel movement like nothing we've ever seen. This Gentile love of the gospel is eventually going to cause Israel as a nation to turn back to God. See verse 25, a partial hardening has come upon Israel. They rejected the gospel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

That's us right here. And in this way, all Israel is going to be saved. This is going to cause the whole nation at some point to, the whole, the whole community of ethnic Jews to turn back to Christ. Now, one clarification, when he says all Israel, he doesn't necessarily mean every single Jewish person alive.

And he's not talking about the nation state that's, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu and all that kind of stuff. What he is just saying is that there's going to be such a movement among Jewish people toward the gospel that you could think of it as a national conversion. And this national conversion, Paul says, is going to in turn spawn a worldwide movement of the gospel.

See verse 12, this is such an awesome verse. If the Jewish people's transgression, if their rejection of Christ brought riches for the world, and if their failure brought riches for the Gentiles, us, then imagine what their embrace, imagine what the fullness is going to bring. Paul is like, look, God promised to make Israel a blessing to the nations.

And they have been. Even ironically, their rejection of the gospel blessed the Gentiles because it allowed us a chance to hear the gospel be saved. And Paul's like, if their rejection of the gospel brought us blessing, imagine what their embrace of the gospel is going to do.

If their disobedience brought blessing, imagine what their obedience is going to bring. Now, unfortunately, Paul didn't go into a lot of detail here about how this massive Jewish conversion to Christ is going to, how it's going to lead to a worldwide movement. The book of Revelation, last book in your Bible, says that in the latter days, what some Christians call the tribulation, God is going to save 144,000 Jewish people.

And he's going to appoint them as his worldwide witnesses who are in turn going to lead the largest gospel movement that has ever been known in the world. Many scholars say that what Paul is saying here in Romans 11 points to that and what John says in Revelation points to this national return of Israel. Whatever it looks like, this is going to happen, Paul says, because God will indeed fulfill his promises to the Jews just like he gave them. So even though, he concludes, even though Israel on the whole has rejected God, they are still loved because of the promises of the patriarchs. Because God's promises were unconditional and God's gracious gifts and his calling are irrevocable. So to sum all this up, has God failed to keep his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations?

Paul's answer, absolutely not. And here's how I know that, he says, because a lot of Jewish people have been saved like me. And even their rejection, even Jewish rejection of the gospel has led to Gentile salvation, but the best is yet to come. Now, before I move on from this to the warning, I just want to point out one incidental thing that you can learn from Paul and all this.

Here it is, okay, here's your takeaway. Never, ever, ever give up on the people that God has placed in your life to reach for the gospel and the ones that he's put on your heart. Ever. Even after facing rejection after rejection from the Jewish people, Paul never gives up hope. Even after being driven out, even after being persecuted at the point of death, Paul never gives up hope that his Israelite friends can be saved. There was a passage we skipped over in Romans 9 and I promised you that we were going to come back to it.

Boom. Here we go. Romans 9. Paul first of all opens this section. I'm speaking the truth in Christ. I'm not lying. My conscience bears witness in the Holy Spirit.

Hang on. That's very unusual for Paul what he just did right there. He is qualifying his statement in three ways to tell you that he's telling the truth. Paul's normal kind of mode of writing, his motif is I'm an apostle, I speak for God, of course I tell the truth, you shut up. That's Paul's general attitude when he writes.

Here he does something totally unusual and he kind of takes the glasses off, puts the pens down, puts the nobody down and says, listen, what I'm about to tell you, I'm not exaggerating. I'm not posturing. This is what is going on in my heart. Verse two. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ.

You know what that means? I'd turn in my salvation if I could. I would go to hell forever if it meant that my brothers, my family, my friends, and Israel come back to faith in Christ. This was not some academic thing for Paul.

Paul said, if I could, I would go to hell itself if that meant they would come back. And he never gave up hope and he never stopped working. My question for you is who is like that for you? Who is that person? Who is that group of people that God has put on your heart that you would say I sense that kind of anguish?

I know that my kids are certainly like that for me. And if one day one of my kids walks away from God, then yeah, I'll be the one that's up early and up late praying for them. John Knox, the famous reformer in Scotland, 16th century, one of the largest European awakenings of the gospel of anybody. 16th century, John Knox was known by his friends to pray with loud laments and tears.

God, give me Scotland or I'll die. And his friends who knew him well said he meant every single word of that. I know missionaries today from our church who right now are facing unbelievable obstacles in the places where they are, but they won't leave no matter how hard it gets. They just won't leave because they have this kind of anguish in their heart.

And they say, I don't care how hard it is. I've got to see these people come to faith in Christ. Friend, I just want to ask you, who is that one for you?

Don't give up on anyone because God put them on your heart for a reason. You were listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer as we've picked up the third and final part of our year-long teaching series through the book of Romans. Pastor J.D., we finally made it. We are in the home stretch of the Roman series.

Yeah, that's right. I know this has been a pretty long series. There was a lot that we tried to soak out of this book, but there's a lot more that's still there. And we want to help you continue to soak yourself in the book of Romans.

Like we've talked about, every spiritual awakening in our country has come from a generation reawakened, these incredible gospel truths. And as far as printed resources go, you've got one more opportunity to really soak in the content of Romans. Right now, you can get the second installment of Tim Keller's Romans Bible study. This is a way that you can take a spiritual mentor and hero of mine and actually let him walk you through some of these verses and these chapters that we've been soaking in. I think you'll get a lot out of it.

If you'll just go to JDGrier.com, you will see exactly what I mean. We would love to hear from you. If you give today, we'll send you a copy of the second volume of the late Pastor Tim Keller's Romans study book titled In View of God's Mercy.

It'll take you through the second half of the book of Romans, just in time for you to study as we finish up the book of Romans here on Summit Life. To give, call 866-335-5220 or you can donate and request the study online at JDGrier.com. I'm Molly Benovitch.

Hope you have a great weekend of worship, and we'll see you next week when we conclude this message called Will God Forsake His People? Listen Monday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer.