If I was to ask anyone today what he or she thinks of first when asked to list the characteristics or attributes of God, I’m sure that nearly every case the person would say “love.” Yet that would not have been true for the Old Testament saints. They would have said “holiness.” Surprisingly, that is a concept almost never thought about by most people today. Not only did the Old Testament figures think of holiness when they thought of God. They also thought of holiness in reference to anything or anybody who had contact with God, for they knew that only what is holy can have contact with Him. Holiness dominated their religious ideas.

We need to remember this when we come to Romans 11:16, for Paul is certainly writing within an Old Testament framework when he says, almost casually, “If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches.” What Paul is doing here is drawing upon an Old Testament understanding of holiness to carry forward the important point he is making in Romans 11, namely, that God has not given up on Israel.

It’s true that the mass of Israel has been laid aside temporarily in order that by their rejection, salvation might come to the Gentiles. But even in this period of rejection, Israel has not been rejected utterly; a remnant is still being saved. Nor will Israel be rejected finally; for at the last the masses of Israel will be brought to faith in Jesus Christ, who died for them that they might have forgiveness for their sins.

In Romans 11, Paul is writing about the future of the Jews as a people. So it’s surprising how much of what he says in this chapter is to the Gentiles. He began by addressing them directly in verse 13, and he continues speaking to them exclusively until verse 25, where he begins to address a broader group of people again. In verses 17-22, he warns the Gentiles not to boast over Judaism because of the Gentiles’ current favored status, saying that if the Jews, who were God’s especially chosen people once, have been rejected at least temporarily because of unbelief, the Gentiles also will be rejected if they follow their bad example.

This is a serious warning, one that we must take to heart. As Paul writes to those of us who are Gentiles, he is aware that our present position might cause us to boast over the Jews who held a privileged position before us. But he warns us not to boast. Rather fear God, he says. We may be standing now, but we stand only by grace. If we cease to stand in grace by believing God, we too, will fail. Does that mean that salvation can be lost? No. Paul has been teaching the doctrine of perseverance. But what he says here is nevertheless a strong warning against spiritual presumption. What Paul tells us in these verses is that if the Gentiles fail to stand by faith, they will be cut off, just as the Jews were.

This warning extends to individuals today who suppose they are Christians because they are part of a Christian church and affirms the right things, but who are not actually anchored in the grace of God and are not exercising that true faith in God that comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit within them. Let me warn you that it is fatally easy to assume that all is well with your soul when actually you are perishing. In fact, in your unbelieving state it is the most natural thing in the world, because you do not perceive what is really spiritual and suppose that the externals of Christianity are what matters.

If you have any sensitivity to spiritual things, you must ask yourself, “Has my commitment to Christ made any discernible difference in my life?” In other words, is there anything you are doing now that you would not be doing if you were not a Christian? Is there anything you are not doing because you know it would displease Jesus Christ? Are you obeying His commandments? Do you love to be with other Christians? Are you studying the Bible? And when you study it can you really say that you hear God speaking to you in its pages? Do you recognize what you read there to be the truth? Do you change what you are doing as a result?  Are you trying to order your life according to the Bible’s teaching and redirect it according to right Christian priorities?

This is what it means to “make your calling and election sure” (2 Pet. 1”10), in sharp contrast to what Jesus was warning of when He described sowing seed on ground where it seemed to grow well but soon dried up for lack of depth, was chocked by weeds, or was snatched away by Satan (Matt. 13:1-9). Churches and individuals who foolishly boast of their own attainments or coast along in their present favored standing without pausing to remember the grace of God that brought them to that place and the obligation they have to stand together as Christians in grace by faith alone. So do not forget! Stand in your high calling! Stand by faith! Greater individuals than you and I have perished. Nations as powerful as ours have been overthrown. And stronger churches than ours have fallen to the severity of God’s just judgments in history.

Romans 11:16-24 Reflection Questions:

Beginning in verse 13 and continuing through verse 32 Paul is speaking directly to the Gentile Christians in the Romans church. What seems to be in danger in the Gentile believers that Paul is addressing? What is his warning to them?

He uses two illustrations in verses 16-24 to highlight the point he wants to make to the Gentile believers. What is Paul saying here?

One thing that many people may not know about olive trees in ancient Israel is that, from time to time, gardeners performed grafting operations on them. Some olives grew wild, and would often be quite strong in themselves though not producing good fruit. The gardener might decide to take that energy and harness it by grafting shoots from a proper, cultivated olive into the trunk of a wild olive, thus combining the energy of the wild tree and the fruitfulness of the cultivated one. Why does Paul reverse the illustration?

What was Paul implying through the use of the grafting image? What possible wrong impressions, particularly among Gentile believers, was he attempting to correct?

To many people the doctrines of election and reprobation seem wrong because they appear to be arbitrary. “Arbitrary” means that there are no reasons for them. It means that God chooses one and not another as if He were plucking petals from a daisy, saying: “I love you…I love you not.” That is not an accurate picture, of course. True, we dare not think that God owes us an explanation for what He is doing or that we could fully understand it if He should give us a complete one. But even if we do not have an explanation, that does not mean that God does not have His reasons. God is a purposeful God, and we should rightly suppose that everything He does has a purpose, and an infinitely wise one at that.

However, God has given us some explanation of why He chooses some people and passes by others. We saw it when we were studying Romans 9. It is that God might be glorified, that is, that He might be known as He truly is. In Romans 9, Paul taught that God makes His patience, wrath, and power known in the case of the reprobate, whom He passes by and judges for their sin, and that He reveals His mercy in the case of the elect, whom He saves apart from any supposed worthiness in them. We remember that Paul is dealing with the meaning of history in these chapters, and this means that he is writing on what we might call a down-to-earth level as well as on a theological one. He has been talking about the passing by of the great mass of Israel, which has rejected Jesus as the Messiah. We might ask: “Does God have a purpose in that?” The verses we come to now teach that God does have a purpose. God is using the passing by of Israel to bring salvation riches to the Gentiles.

In Romans 11:11-12, Paul makes four points that govern his thoughts throughout the remainder of the chapter. (1) Israel has “stumbled,” but their stumble is not final. In this section he teaches that the unbelief of Israel will not be forever. They stumbled as a nation by their rejection of Jesus as their Savior and Messiah, but they will rise again. (2) Their “stumble” had a purpose: it would be used by God to bring salvation to the Gentiles. It’s an example of the “riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God” about which Paul will write later (Rom. 11:33). (3) The salvation of the Gentiles will lead in time to the “fullness” of Israel that is to the salvation of the Jews as a nation and this in turn will lead to even greater Gentile blessing. It means that the Jews have not been cast off so that salvation might come to the Gentiles instead, but that through Gentile salvation the Jews themselves might find Jesus as their Savior. (4) The way this will happen is by the spiritual riches of the Gentiles making Israel envious. They will see what the Gentiles have, recognize that these spiritual blessings were intended for them, and long to possess them too.

When God sent Jesus to be the Savior, He sent Him not only to be the Savior of the Jews but as the world’s Savior, too. When Jesus died, God showed this by tearing the veil of the temple in two from top to bottom. That act signified that the way to God was now open to anyone who would come through faith in His sacrifice. In one sense that meant the end of Judaism, at least in its ancient form. No Jew today worships at a temple in Jerusalem. No Jew brings the required sacrifices for sin. The end of that system was the opening of salvation to the Gentiles.

The title of this study, “Life from the Dead,” is taken from the phrase Paul uses for the anticipated salvation of Israel as a nation in the final days of world history (v. 15). In verses 13-15 Paul speaks of Israel having been rejected, in verses 11-12 Paul made the same point by speaking of the people’s “fall” and “loss.” This is an all-too-sad reality, of course. As Paul saw it, the tragedy lay in Israel’s rejection as the Messiah, with all that entailed. For centuries the Jews had been waiting anxiously for the Messiah’s coming, asking themselves whether any leader who emerged above the average might be him. Israel’s rejection of Jesus was a rejection of the very future for which they had been hoping. It was a repudiation of their spiritual destiny. Paul was acutely aware of this and grieved for what his people had lost.

So why did the Jews reject Jesus, after all? The reason people (Jews and Gentiles alike) reject Jesus Christ is because they are dead in their sins, and being spiritually dead, they are unable to understand the extent of their need, comprehend the grace of God in the gospel, or yield their hearts to the Savior. This is what Paul was teaching in the earlier chapters of this letter (Rom. 3:10-11). Paul means that apart from a spiritual resurrection, which Jesus called being “born again,” no one is able to be good, understand spiritual things, or seek God. On the contrary, we run away from Him and make substitute gods to take the true God’s place.

So what is the solution? The solution is obvious. We need to be born again. We need a spiritual resurrection. We need God, because only God is able to give life and provide resurrections. But praise be to God, this is exactly what God does. God is in the resurrection business. I remind you of the death and resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:1-44). If the story was only about a physical resurrection, it would be spectacular enough. We have bodies, and our bodies die. We need physical resurrections if we are to stand before God, see His face, and worship Him forever – as we sense we have been designed by God to do. But the deaths of our bodies are not our greatest problem, nor is physical resurrection our greatest need. We also have dead souls, and we need the resurrection of our souls and spirits if we are to turn to Jesus Christ in living faith and find salvation in Him.

Fortunately, the story of Lazarus is also about spiritual resurrections and the promise that spiritual life is to be found in Jesus. He alone can do what needs to be done. He alone can call us from the dark, loathsome charnel house of sin. And He does. Everyone who has ever come to Christ in saving faith has experienced just such a spiritual resurrection. We were dead in our sins, but we heard Jesus calling, “come out.” And we responded. All who have ever heard that call have responded and have thereby passed out of spiritual death into spiritual life.

Have you? If you have not, I urge you to pay attention to the Bible, the Word of God, because it is through the Bible and its teaching that Jesus calls men and women today. Read it. Allow yourself to be exposed to sound teaching. Meditate on Bible truths. I believe that if you do that, you will hear Jesus calling and will find that His call is bringing you to new spiritual life.

This brings us back to Israel as a nation, for it is Israel we are talking about primarily, and it is the resurrection of that nation that is our chief concern in this passage. We are studying the teaching that the Jews will have a spiritual rebirth in the final days. I know there are people who consider that impossible for a number of reasons. But we are not talking on the human level here. We are speaking about God and resurrections, which only He is capable. “With God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). Why should the future gathering in of Israel be thought impossible when it is God who is doing the gathering?

Romans 11:11-15 Reflection Questions:

Verses 7-15 (and all of Romans 9-11) echo the stories of tensions between younger and older brothers from Genesis (Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers) as well as Jesus’ own parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. In all these cases God establishes and vindicates the younger over the older. How is Israel now in the position of being the older brother in the prodigal son story?

How might jealousy, as described in verses 11-15, actually draw Jews to Christ?

How is it that Paul nonetheless has hope for Israel’s future and envisions its resurrection (vv. 11-15)?

Two things must characterize any Christian. One is a profound sense of personal sin and unworthiness. The other is an overwhelming awareness of the grace of God. The two go together, of course, for without a proper sense of sin, we will never appreciate grace. We will think that the good we experience from God’s hand is merited. On the other hand, the more we appreciate the grace of God, the more aware we will be of our sin and want to be free of it.

The apostle Paul was a trophy of God’s grace, and he never forgot it, which is probably why he has included the words about grace that we find in Romans 11:6. Paul loved the doctrine of grace, saw it everywhere, and wanted his readers to see it and love it, too. Paul also knew how difficult it is for most people to accept grace and how inclined we are to add works to it. I imagine that as he wrote the preceding verses, referring to the seven thousand faithful Jews from the days of Elijah’s ministry, he would have thought that some readers would instinctively give those faithful Jews some credit and by extension give themselves a bit of credit, too.

Because that kind of thinking comes naturally to all of us, and Paul knew it, he interrupts the natural flow of thought that would have led him to the distinctions between the majority of Jews and the remnant, which he develops in verses 7-10, to make sure we all understand that even the remnant exists by God’s grace only. It is not that some had it in them to be faithful while others did not. It is rather that God chose the remnant to believe. Verse 6 makes only one point: that grace and works are incompatible opposites. So if a person is to be saved by grace, it cannot be by works, otherwise, grace is not grace. Conversely, if a person is to be saved by works, it cannot be by grace; otherwise, work would not be work.

A good teacher knows when enough information has been given out and it’s time for a summary. Paul seems to have been aware that a summary was needed at precisely this point in his letter. It is what Romans 11:7-10 is about. These verses are a summing up of what Paul has written thus far in Romans 9-11. What has he written? First, there is his teaching about election. He introduced the subject in Romans 9, showing that God’s purposes in salvation have not failed because even though the great majority of Jews had rejected the gospel, those whom God has elected to salvation beforehand nevertheless were being saved.

Second, there is his teaching about reprobation, the doctrine that God passes by the many who are not saved, sovereignly declining to elect them to salvation. Third, there is the reason for man’s rejection of the gospel. The Jews are Paul’s prime example, because he is discussing the fate of unbelieving Israel in these chapters. But it’s the same for all persons apart from Christ. People reject the gospel because they want to establish their own righteousness and do not want to submit to the righteousness that comes from God. Paul discusses these in chapter 10.

Fourth, there is the teaching that what has happened historically in the overall rejection of Christ by Israel had been foretold by God and was therefore no surprise to God, nor did it cause a departure from His plan. In Romans 9, Paul gave four separate Old Testament quotations to make this point (Hos. 2:23; 1:10; Isa. 10:22-23; 1:9). In Romans 11:8-10 he provides two more: verse 8, which combines words from Deuteronomy 29:4 and Isaiah 29:10; and verses 9 and 10, which quote Psalm 69:22-23.Yet Paul’s summaries are never mere summaries. They always seem to carry his argument just a bit further, even in summing up. In this case, Paul’s summary has the effect of highlighting the doctrine of election and thus brings him back to the point from which he started out.

In another way in which these verses carry the argument further comes by comparing Paul’s teaching about reprobation in Romans 9 with what we have here. In chapter 9 Paul uses Esau, the father of the Edomites, and Pharaoh, the nation’s great enemy. Paul wrote that God “hated” Esau and that He “hardened” Pharaoh’s heart. Neither Esau nor Pharaoh was among the elect people of God. But here is the striking thing. In Romans 11 Paul is not writing about non-Jews, Edomites, and Egyptians. He is writing about Israel, which means that he is applying the doctrine of reprobation to the allegedly “chosen” people. What’s more, he is saying that even those things that should have been a blessing to them – presumably the very things he lists at the start of Romans 9 – have become a “snare,” “trap,” “stumbling block,” and “retribution” for them in their unregenerate state (11:9).

Here is where this summary of Paul’s teaching comes home forcefully to us. If individual Jews, who were a chosen nation, missed salvation because of their rejection of Christ and if, as a result, the blessings of God that had been given to them became a curse for these people (see Mal. 2:2), it is entirely possible (indeed probable) that many sitting in the evangelical churches of America today are also missing salvation because of their failure to trust Jesus in a personal way and that their blessings have become curses, too.

Do you understand that? It means that if you will not allow the good things we enjoy as allegedly Christian people to lead you to Christ, which is what God has given them to us for, they will be worse than worthless to you. They will actually be harmful and propel you inevitably into an even greater spiritual stupor, hardness of heart, and sin.

Here are four examples: (1) Baptism. Baptism is an outward sign of an inward, spiritual union with Jesus Christ. It is meant to strengthen our faith by making the inward reality more palpable to us. But countless allegedly Christian people have trusted the outward sign without the inward commitment. They have judged themselves to be saved persons without any true following after Jesus Christ. (2) Communion. The same thing is true of communion. Entire branches of the church teach that grace is somehow imparted in the physical partaking of the elements, so that the physical act by itself conveys salvation. But the reality in not physical. The Lord’s Supper is meant to show us the broken body and atoning blood of Jesus Christ and lead us to trust Him and place our faith in Him, not the ceremony. If we don’t trust Christ, the sacrament, which is intended to do us good, actually becomes a curse for us, and we become superstitious and even pagan in our practice.

(3) Material possessions. Money and other material goods are from God. But they are dangerous, particularly when we possess them in abundance. They should lead us to God in gratitude. More often they lead us from Him. (4) The Lord’s Day. In earlier years, Sundays were sacred days of rest and worship for the majority of Americans, and even those who were not Christians respected them. Look how this has changed today, look how many events today are scheduled on Sundays, and do any of them give rest and the worship of Jesus Christ?

Romans 11:6-10 Reflection Questions:

What is the situation of the Jews to whom Paul is referring in Verses 7-12?

Paul sees Israel’s blindness and stumbling (vv. 8-10) as means by which the wider world can be brought into God’s family (vv. 11-12). How is it that Paul nonetheless has hope for Israel’s future and envisions its resurrection (vv. 11-15)?

How do you deal with Paul’s statements concerning God’s decision to save some and not others, to harden the hearts and to shut the eyes and the ears of some?