Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay. So we’ll get started here in just a minute. When we get started, we’re going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter eleven. But since we have had a little bit of a break, first I will get us sort of caught up, by running real quickly through— This section of Romans really begins in chapter eight, and so we’ll go from— real quickly through eight, nine, and ten before we start in eleven, so we’re not sort of starting in the middle.

So in chapter eight, St. Paul talked about the theme of us becoming sons of God. We talked about how “sons of God” was actually a reference to a particular rank or type of angels in the Old Testament. So this is talking about— This isn’t just talking about a nice “God’s our dad” kind of thing, but that God’s family is a royal family, and so becoming sons of God means we become heirs—in the language he uses, “heirs along with Christ to the kingdom.” Because as you’d imagine, the children of the king: you have one heir on earth. And St. Paul has set up Christ: Christ is the heir; he’s the firstborn of all things. But we, by becoming sons of God, become heirs along with Christ of the kingdom. And not only does that mean that we inherit the kingdom, but that God shares with us in ruling over it. We talked about some of the other passages in the gospels that also talk about that.

And that’s the reason— He uses the language “sons” instead of “children” for a couple of reasons. It’s not just that he’s sexist, because in other places he uses the language “children of God,” and St. John uses the language “children of God” more often than “sons of God.” But he uses “sons” for two reasons, one being again to refer to that class of angels—and angels aren’t men and women, so “sons of God” was just a title in the Old Testament—and also because in the culture in which St. Paul is writing, it was the son who was the heir who inherited. So it’s not that St. Paul is only talking to men; it’s that Christians, both men and women, become sons in the sense that they become heirs. So there’s not sort of this division— Even though on earth, especially in St. Paul’s time, there’s this division, where it’s the son who inherits everything and the daughters… Well, hopefully they get married to somebody, the son… [Laughter] But in the kingdom of God, that we all become co-heirs with Christ.

So then in chapter nine, he gave the example, remember, of Jacob and Esau, where he gave— He put right next to each other two quotes about Esau. The first one was from before Jacob and Esau— Remember, they were twins, and Esau came out first, which meant he was the firstborn, which meant he was the heir; Jacob came out second. But the prophecy at the time they were born was that the older would serve the younger. Then he gives the quote from much later in the prophets, from centuries and centuries later: “Jacob I have loved; Esau I have hated,” which in context we saw was talking about the nation of Edom that was descended from Esau, as opposed to the nation of Israel, because, remember, “Israel” was Jacob’s other name.

So we talked about how St. Paul is appealing to the whole history of those nations. What you see is, for example, when you go to Deuteronomy 2 and God has brought the people of Israel out of Egypt and he’s bringing them to the land, they come through Edom, and he says, “You’re not to attack the people of Edom. You’re not to take even a foot of their land, because they’re your brothers, and God has given them this land,” which was part of the land that he promised to Abraham, because Esau was Abraham’s descendant, too. And so it talks about how they dealt peacefully with each other and how they were brothers, and then later on in the history of Israel, Edom became basically a vassal state of Israel: that prophecy, the older will serve the younger. But as long as that faithfulness, that faith and loyalty and fellowship was maintained between the descendants of Esau and the descendants of Israel, the descendants of Esau received part of the inheritance along with Israel.

Then a time came later, reflected in that second prophecy that St. Paul quoted where, when the time came that the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and then the Babylonians came and destroyed the kingdom of Judah, rather than helping their brothers, the people of Israel, the Edomites chose to attack them, use that as an opportunity to take more land. They turned on them, and so because they had now turned on the people of Israel, they lost their inheritance, too, and that’s what God prophesied against them, was that now, because of the way that they had treated Israel, they were going to lose the land that he had given them as well.

Q1: In terms of today’s geography, would Edom be in southern Jordan?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, Petra was an Edomite capital.

Q1: Ah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: So the analogy that St. Paul is making here— Because remember the question St. Paul was addressing when he brought up that example is: Well, how come, if Jesus is the Messiah, if Jesus is the King of the Jews, if Jesus is the One who’s promised all through the Hebrew Scriptures, why did so many of St. Paul’s fellow Jews reject him? How does that work? What does that mean? And so he’s using this example to say: Look. Yeah, they’re descendants of Abraham, but because they’ve cut themselves off from the Heir, who is Jesus Christ— Because they’ve cut themselves off from him, they lose that inheritance.

Q1: Just like the Edomites.

Fr. Stephen: Just like the Edomites lost their part of the inheritance by cutting themselves off from Israel. So in the same way that receiving part of that inheritance from Abraham depended on keeping faith with God’s firstborn, Israel, now receiving that inheritance depends on keeping faith with Christ, who is God’s firstborn and is the heir. So again, he’s going back to what he said in chapter eight: we become co-heirs with Christ by keeping faith with Christ. We don’t receive anything for ourselves because we’re descended from Abraham or not.

And so then he moved on at the end of chapter nine to address the question that he’s going to come back to here in chapter eleven, which is: Why did God do what he did? This is still an open question. He’s still talking about it when we come to chapter eleven. Why did God do what he did in terms of Israel, then? For example, God brings all twelve tribes out of Egypt; he brings them to the land. A couple hundred years later, the northern kingdom of Israel no longer exists. That’s ten tribes, gone. So why did God bring them out of Egypt in the first place? Because he knew— He knew that was going to happen, so why’d he bother bringing them out of Egypt? Why did he bother giving them a government? When the northern kingdom separated, he went to Jeroboam, their first king, Jeroboam son of Nebat; he said, “Oh, if you keep all my laws and all my ways, I’ll establish your dynasty forever like I did with David.” Well, God knew when he said that that Jeroboam wasn’t going to do it; he knew Jeroboam was going to be wicked. So St. Paul is saying: Why? Why all this? Why all this history? And he knew it was going to happen to Judah and Benjamin. He knew all this. Why bother?

And in that context, so far what he’s talked about is he’s talked about the fact that God has preserved sort of this remnant. There is this part of the descendants of Abraham, of Israel, that has stayed— has embraced Christ, embraced Christ when he came.

Q1: So it’s been sort of a—

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s not everyone. So there is this core, this remnant, but that doesn’t really answer the question of: Okay, there’s this remnant, but why the other 99% or whatever the other percentage would be—90%, 80%, whatever it is—why the rest of that? Why bother giving them all these blessings in the first place when you knew they were going to…? And so the only way he’s addressed that so far is to kind of point out that the question you’re asking is: Why did God give blessings to these people he knew would be ungrateful? Why did he ever do anything good for them? [Laughter] Which is kind of a weird question, when you think about it. Why would God be good to them ever? Why didn’t he just never create them or wipe them out earlier? Well, you know. But that’s not to say that St. Paul doesn’t think there isn’t a purpose, and we’re going to get to that in chapter eleven [which] is where he’s going to finish his answer to that question.

So then in chapter ten, he talks about the fact that through all of these people being cut off— Even though all these people from Israel that have been cut off, there have been all these Gentiles, people from the other nations, who have now come to faith in Christ, and who now have this relationship of faithfulness with Christ.

And we talked about how important it is that we translate— We’re used to hearing “faith,” and we’re used to thinking of “faith” as just like: “Oh, yeah, I believe that Jesus is the Messiah: true.” That’s not what faith is biblically. It’s faithfulness; it’s loyalty. It’s ongoing; it’s the way we live our life. And so the people who have been cut off are cut off because they’ve broken faith with Christ; they’ve cut themselves off. And so these other people who have now become faithful and loyal to Christ are now a part, and so are becoming co-heirs.

Right at the end of chapter ten, he gave— St. Paul quoted a whole series of prophecies that prophesied that this would happen—“this” being that the Gentiles would come in—where he says—and we can look at a few of these at the end of chapter ten, where he quotes from Deuteronomy: “I will provoke you to jealousy by those who are not a nation; I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.” And then in Isaiah: “I was found by those who did not seek me; I was made manifest to those who did not ask for me.” And then finally he quotes Joel, which says, “All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people,” talking about Israel.

He is also making the point that God didn’t turn his back on Israel. God didn’t turn his back on them; they turned their back on him. He’s still there. If they’re willing to come to Christ, then they’ll be a part of what he’s doing as well.

And so one last note before we start chapter eleven here, because I made this point before, but it’s been a while. St. Paul— There are many things where we’ve gone through and we’ve said he uses, like “body” and “flesh.” We think of those as the same thing, but he uses them differently. Well, another one of those is “Israel” and “the Jews.” Especially in our modern world, we think those are the same thing, especially in our modern political discourse. If you say anything negative about the country of Israel, you’re anti-Semitic and attacking the Jewish people. These are two different terms, especially then, because at the time St. Paul’s writing, there was no Israel. There was no nation called Israel. There hadn’t been for 750 years. It had been 750 years since there was a nation called Israel in the world, so that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s not talking about a country.

There’s “Israel” and then “the Jews.” He uses both terms. When he’s talking about the Jews, literally the word that we translate as “the Jews” means the Judeans, the people who live in Judea, the Roman province. And usually when St. Paul uses it, he’s also including Galileans. This is one of those trivia trick questions. Jesus technically was not a Jew, because he was not a Judean; he was a Galilean. [Laughter] Different province in Rome! So he usually— When St. Paul’s using that, he’s referring to Judean and Galilean people, and people of that ethnicity who live other places. That’s what he means when he says “Jews.”

When he’s talking about Israel, he’s speaking theologically. He’s talking about all twelve tribes, and he’s talking about Israel the way it’s talked about in the Old Testament. “The Israel of God” he’s going to say. And that’s important because, again, this is not a thing that exists when St. Paul is writing. When he’s talking about all twelve tribes, ten of those tribes do not exist.

Q1: I think he’s not speaking historically only.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Q1: He’s not talking about the past; he’s talking about—

Fr. Stephen: But the reason I’m hammering on this is, as we’ve been reading about him talking about Israel—we’re going to hear him talking about Israel in chapter eleven—this has nothing to do with any nation that has ever or will ever exist; this has nothing to do with ethnicity. He’s specifically addressing— There’s a whole group of prophecies, and we won’t go through them all now, in Isaiah, Amos, in some of the other prophets, that when they talk about God coming to his people and restoring them, it talks about all twelve tribes. It talks about tribes that, at the time the prophecy was written, didn’t exist any more. It talks about Eprahim being restored, which was the central tribe, the biggest tribe of the northern tribes; it’s where the capital was. They promised these things.

So part of what St. Paul is doing here when he’s talking about Israel is: How are those prophecies going to be fulfilled? How can that possibly happen, since those tribes no longer exist? There is no Manasseh, there is no Ephraim, there is no Dan, there is no— And he’s going to give an answer here in chapter eleven as to how that happens. But those are not prophecies that any of the New Testament writers— When you get to the book of Revelation, St. John is going to talk about— He’s going to list all the tribes, and you’re like: “Well, those tribes don’t exist.” [Laughter] So all the New Testament writers see those prophecies as being fulfilled; none of them see them being fulfilled as being some kind of Jewish nation-state. Not one of them.

Q1: Are they— This is jumping ahead a bit, but are they fulfilled in the replacement of these tribes with the Gentiles?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get there.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We’ll get there. So unless there are any questions or comments or allegations or outbursts, we’ll go ahead and get started in Romans 11:1.

“I say then, has God cast away his people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” So that “certainly not” is this Greek phrase, mi genoito, which St. Paul— It’s a weird phrase, because it’s an outdated form of the language. It’s what’s called an optative verb. And there’s, like, 60 times that they’re used in the whole New Testament, and 40-some of them are St. Paul saying, “mi genoito.” [Laughter] It’s just sort of this expression he uses, which literally means something like: “May it never be. May it not be.”

Q1: “God forbid.”

Fr. Stephen: “God forbid.” In the King James they translated it that way. “Certainly not” here. [Laughter] “No way” I’m sure in some modern translation somewhere. But it’s the idea that this is something we don’t want to ever happen.

So he’s making the same point he made at the end of chapter ten: did God cast away his people? Because that would be one way to interpret what had happened. One way to interpret what had happened would be: “Well, God’s just done with Israel. That’s over. Phfft. They’re gone. Now it’s the Gentiles. That whole Old Testament thing is over. He’s starting over.” St. Paul’s saying that’s not what’s happening, and he’s saying that he himself is proof of that because he’s a descendant of Abraham. He’s from the tribe of Benjamin, he says. And he, obviously, has accepted Christ and is a faithful follower of Christ. That means God hasn’t jettisoned the whole people. He says:

God has not cast away his people whom he foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel, saying, “Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”? But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

St. Paul goes back to this story about Elijah, about St. Elias. This is right after the big showdown at Mount Carmel, where he and the prophets of Baal had this big showdown where they both built altars, and God sent down fire from heaven, which— I hate to ruin your Sunday school, but “fire from heaven” is how they referred to lightning.

Q1: Aww.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So that’s what happened. And the reason that was important was— If you remember, leading up to that, it hadn’t rained for several years. That’s because Baal was a storm-god. So they had all stopped worshiping their God and gone to worshiping Baal, this storm-god. And so the real God said, “Okay, well, it’s not going to rain any more.” So who’s in control of that. So if you’re a storm-god, what do they always depict Baal, Zeus, everybody’s holding a lightning-bolt. And so the idea of the showdown on Mount Carmel was: “We’ll both build altars, we’ll both put animals on them, and we’ll see which God sends fire from heaven, sends lightning to light it, to set it on fire.” And so, yeah, that’s what— It was lightning. [Laughter]

So right after that happened, and then after he won, Elijah slew a bunch of the prophets of Baal. [Laughter] After that, he goes off by himself, and he sort of has this depressed come-down moment, where he prays and he says, “Look. Yeah, we just won that one on Mount Carmel, but the truth is they’ve gone and killed all the other prophets except me. They’ve torn down all the altars. They’re all worshiping Baal. I’m the last person left who cares.” And basically he prays and says, “God, why don’t you go ahead and kill me, because—”

Q1: “Finish the job.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, “because I can’t do this any more.” And God’s response— He sort of rebukes him and says, “I have reserved for myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal,” meaning: “You’re not the only one. There are thousands of people who are still faithful.”

And what St. Paul is saying is that that’s probably the first place in the Hebrew Scriptures where we see this idea of there being a remnant. So, first of all, it’s not a new thing that the majority of the Israelites would be apostates. Look, in Elijah’s day, the majority of Isreal were apostates. [Laughter] That’s been true all along, that the majority has been disobedient. But God has also, all along, just like them, preserved this remnant. So St. Paul’s saying, “The same is true now. I know you look out there and it looks like the Jewish people have all turned their back on Christ, their Messiah, but the truth is it’s not all of them. It’s not all of them, and in fact it’s about the same proportion as you see all through Israel’s history, that the faithful few are a faithful few.”

“Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace, and if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work.” So there’s a nice little—

Q1: Yeah, you’ve got a bit of work to do there.

Fr. Stephen: Here’s a nice tongue-twister for you. [Laughter] But what he’s saying is— Remember, we’ve talked already in Romans about what the definition of grace is. Grace is God working.

Q1: God’s actions.

Fr. Stephen: So this is what he’s addressing. He’s saying, “Is this by God’s action or by human action?” And he’s been saying all along this is by God’s action. Remember we talked about how the word that we translate “predestined,” which has caused so many problems, actually means put in order before time. Sometimes that’s translated “foreordained” to give that idea, but the idea is: Christ died for me before I existed—before I existed, before I did anything. God prepared salvation for us before we existed, because he knew we would because he created us. So he knew, and because he knew that his people would exist, he set things in order, he did these things, he accomplished these things in Christ, beforehand—beforehand, so that we would have the way of salvation available to us.

And so the same thing here. This isn’t that “Oh, there’s this remnant, and they’re just better than the other ones.” It’s that there’s this remnant, and the reason this remnant is preserved, as he’s just quoted, “I’ve preserved for myself,” this is the grace of God. He had prepared the means. He obviously is the Messiah and came as the Messiah, came to them. That was grace. They didn’t earn it; they didn’t do anything to make him come.

And that’s running counter to, remember, what the Pharisees believed. The Pharisees believed when Israel becomes righteous again— Remember, their math was: The reason we got sent into exile is that we were sinful and didn’t keep the law, so once we’re all keeping the law perfectly and we’re all righteous, then the Messiah will come and God will save us. That’s what they believed; they believed it worked that way. And St. Paul’s been saying over and over again, “No, it’s the exact opposite way.” God doesn’t come to Israel in Egypt and say, “Okay, here’s the law. When you keep it, I’ll deliver you from slavery.” [Laughter] He takes them out of slavery, he brings them to the land and just gives it to them, and then he says, “Okay. Now here’s the law. This is what I expect from you,” which is faithfulness.

Q1: I have a question that’s sort of— I guess it has to do with Protestantism. The formerly Baptist, now independent church in Breaux Bridge has a sign thing up, of course, and lately it’s been saying, “Very few go to heaven. Are you going to be one of them?” The beginning is the “very few” going to heaven. And that sounds like this remnant talk, but I don’t think it really is. So could you explain?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, we don’t know how many people are or aren’t going to go to heaven. [Laughter] We don’t have the exact numbers. So they may be trying to get across the idea, like in Christ’s parable, where he says, “Broad is the way and easy is the path that leads to destruction, but narrow is the way and difficult is the path that leads to life, and few find it.” They may be trying to get across that idea, the idea that— which is— The core idea of that parable is the idea that we don’t get to the kingdom of God by living in easy, lazy life and just sort of doing what we want; that it takes work. It takes effort on our part to seek it out and find it, so it’s a more difficult road. That may be the idea they’re getting from and that they’re trying to convey: so you should come to church because otherwise you’re going to wander off to destruction kind of idea.

But, yeah, that’s not the same idea. The remnant is a very particular thing in Old Testament prophecy in terms of Israel. I don’t know that I would try to apply that now. I wouldn’t; they might. [Laughter] They might have the idea that… I mean, there are some Protestant groups that sort of have the idea that they’re the only ones who have got it right, and so they’re sort of the faithful remnant. In fact, I think I’ve even seen a “Faithful Remnant” Baptist church once! [Laughter] But that’s not what St. Paul is dealing with, that this remnant is a remnant of Old Testament Israel, which is purified and becomes then the basis and the root for the Church. So it’s a particular moment here.

Q1: So the Gentiles that come in and join…

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get there. We’re getting there!

Q1: Oh, okay, we’re not there yet.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We’re getting there. But so this whole thing about grace and works, the reason he brings it up again is to prevent a possible misinterpretation of what he’s saying, because one of his fellow Pharisees could come along and say, “Oh, okay, I see what you’re saying. There were a group of us who were righteous and who were keeping the law perfectly, and so God sent the Messiah for us, and he just doesn’t care about the rest of these people.” [Laughter] Like, that’s a possible interpretation of what St. Paul is saying, that God only cares about the elect; God only cares about this small group—notice that’s a misinterpretation of what St. Paul is saying, as though he just sent the Messiah for that group. So he’s making the point: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. [Laughter] That’s not the basis here for who accepted Christ and who didn’t. In fact, he’s already made the argument that the whole approach of the Pharisees to righteousness, to their own self-righteousness, is a big part of what ended up causing them to reject Christ, because of their own self-righteous attitude. So then verse seven:

What then? Israel has not obtained what it seeks; but the elect have obtained it, and the rest were blinded. Just as it is written: “God has given them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear, to this very day.” And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling-block and a recompense to them. Let their eyes be darkened, so that they do not see, and bow down their back always.”

So we’re going get— Here we get to an idea that we talked about back in St. John’s gospel. Some folks have interpreted this to mean: “Oh, well, God chose to give salvation to these people, and then God deliberately chose to make these other people blind so they wouldn’t accept Christ.” So they want to interpret this as the people didn’t make any choices; God just chose to chuck the lion’s share of Israel, and he chose just these few whom he wanted. Now, first of all, that contradicts what he was just saying, that God has not turned his back on his people but all day long he stretched out his hands to them.

So it contradicts what he just said, but in terms of understanding what he’s actually saying, we could go back to Romans 1, where in Romans 1 he was talking about the Gentiles. You remember what he said there. He talked about how the Gentiles, the nations, had turned to idolatry and worshiping other gods, and because they had rejected God and worshiped these other gods and because they were wicked and sinful, St. Paul said God gave them over. So then there’s this long list of sins—sexual immorality, theft, everything else—every other kind of sin that he lists that God just gave them over to.

But he didn’t just decide: “I don’t care about the Greeks. I don’t care about the Romans. I don’t care about the Chinese. I’m going to give them over to sin and wickedness and send them all to hell.” That’s not what St. Paul is saying. St. Paul is saying because they rejected God, because they turned away from God, because they said they did not want him, he basically gave them what they wanted. He said, “Okay, you don’t want me? Okay. Here’s what you want.” And what they wanted turned out to be destruction; it turned out to be havoc, sin, destruction, that destroyed their lives. And even the Gentiles to whom he’s writing knew that the things he was listing were morally wrong. They had a concept of morality. So they had to look around at their fellow people and say, “Well, yeah, all those things are sort of running rampant.” [Laughter]

Q1: I guess we would, too.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul said, “That’s a result of your rejection of the only true God.” So this is what St. Paul is saying here. It’s the same thing St. John made clear in his gospel. We saw that over and over again, that the way people reacted when they encountered Jesus was based on who they already were, who they had already become. The ones who were living lives seeking to follow God and who were faithful to him, when they encountered Jesus they recognized him instantly who he was, and they became his followers and his disciples. The ones who were wicked in their hearts and their souls, when they encountered Christ, they rejected him. But the reason they accepted or rejected him was based on the person they already were. And that’s what St. Paul is saying here, that because these people had already rejected God, God gave them over to what they wanted. Even when the Messiah was standing right in front of them, they couldn’t see him or understand him or know who he was, because they’d already rejected God and his ways and those things.

So their blindness is the result of their own choices that they’ve already made, their own faithlessness, and that’s what happened here. It’s the same dynamic you see in Exodus with Pharaoh as the plagues start coming. At first, he’s hardening his own heart, and then it says God hardens his heart, because there comes a certain point where God— “Okay. If this is what you want, you’re going to get all of it. You’re going to get all of it.” So, yeah, this is— From St. Paul’s perspective, this is the great threat. The thing we should pray that never happens is that God gives us what we think want. What we think we want will probably destroy us, rather than trusting him to give us what we need.

Q1: So I should stop buying lottery tickets.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s gambling. That’s bad. Just enter the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes: you don’t have to buy anything, and you have about the same chance of winning something! [Laughter] Yeah. See, we tend to say, “Well, here’s what I want,” and if God doesn’t give it to me, then we get mad and we complain. We say, “Why doesn’t God listen to my prayers? Because I really want this.” Actually, we say, “I really need this,” when we don’t. Rather than trusting God to give us what we need and thanking him for it. And sometimes thanking him— Sometimes we look back in our life— At least, I’ll speak for myself, I look back at my life and some of the things I prayed and asked him for, it would have been a disaster if he’d given it to me. [Laughter] So I’m actually thankful he didn’t answer some of those prayers and didn’t give me some of those things I thought I wanted at the time, because he spared me a lot.

But, yeah, so this is— On the negative side, this is what has happened to the people who have now separated from Christ, is that God has given them what they thought they wanted, and it’s a terrible thing for them.

Verse eleven: “I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall? Certainly not!” Again. [Laughter] “But through their fall, to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles.” So what does he mean there, that they stumbled so as to fall? Meaning: does this mean it’s over for them? God’s just given them over, there’s no hope for them, they’re hopelessly lost? And St. Paul’s like: Of course not. Of course not! In fact, hopefully, now that they see the Gentiles coming to faith and following Christ, they’ll be moved to jealousy and maybe that will draw them back, when they see what God is doing among the Gentiles, that he’s fulfilling these promises among them.

“Now if their fall is riches for the world, and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness!” So he’s saying, “If them having fallen away, now the Gentiles have come in and we rejoice about how the Gentiles have come in, how much more wonderful will it be if they now, also, come to faith in Christ?” So this is another possible— Again, St. Paul is here still attacking this idea that he started out chapter eleven attacking, which is the idea that God just said, “Okay, this whole Israel thing is over with. The whole Old Testament thing is over with. I’m starting over.”

Q1: Is he saying basically, “We don’t know how he might bring these people back. Here’s some possibilities, but it’s…”?

Fr. Stephen: I mean, he was at first—St. Paul himself was persecuting the Church. He was cut off and ended up coming to faithfulness in Christ. So he’s going to say elsewhere, if he can, anybody can come to follow Christ. But so the argument here in chapter eleven so far is he says: Well, okay, is he just done with Israel, then? Well, no. First of all, here’s this remnant. He says, “There’s me, but it’s not just me. There are a lot of people who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah.” And now he’s saying, “And God’s not even done with those who haven’t accepted him yet.” The fact that there are still to this day Jewish people who have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah doesn’t mean that any one of them or any number of them couldn’t come and accept—and there have been all through history Jewish people who have become Christian.

He says, “For I speak to you Gentiles; inasmuch as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if by any means I may provoke to jealousy those who are my flesh and save some of them.” He says, “Right now I’m writing to you…” A lot of the Church in Rome— Remember what occasioned this letter is that Claudius had cast all the Jews out of Rome, out of the city of Rome. So the Christians who were Gentiles had stayed in the city, but the Jews were gone for over a year, and now they’ve come back. And now that they’re coming back, St. Paul wants to make sure that we don’t end up with a Jewish church and a Gentile church, but that we have all one Church.

So he says, “I’m speaking to you Gentiles,” because the establishment of the Church there now, for over a year, has been just Gentiles. So he says, “I’m talking to you who are in authority in the Church now, who are Gentiles, inasmuch as (he says) he’s the apostle to the Gentiles.” Remember, “apostle” means one sent. And the way St. Paul uses it is very close to the idea of a prophet. A prophet is sent. And most of the prophets in the Old Testament were sent to the people of Israel. He’s saying, “Well, I got this commission from Christ. I was sent out to all the nations.” So he says, “I’m talking to you as the person whom Christ sent to you, to speak to you.”

And he’s saying, “But my ministry is magnified. He didn’t send me just to you, where I’m not allowed to talk to my own people.” He said, “My ministry is even greater, is magnified, is even greater if, through jealousy of what’s happening with you, I can get some of my own people to come and become Christian and join you.”

Q1: Of course, some have come, or he wouldn’t be having the problem.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but, remember, he’s concerned about there being some separation between the two. So he says, “Even though I am the apostle to the Gentiles, that doesn’t mean I have some kind of separate church or I only talk to— We’re all together. We’re all together.”