As we continue the discussion of millennialism, I want to begin commenting on Romans 9-11. To do this, I want to get a running start from the context of the end of Romans 8 and it will likely take several posts to conclude. So here is Roman 8:31-39.
31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In the midst of writing his discourse on the faithfulness of God to maintain our adoption as sons, it is as if Paul steps back and says, “wait a minute, what about those who are my brothers in the flesh who have not gained the promise because they lack faith? Someone is sure to raise an objection to what I’m saying because so many Jews have not believed and yet so many gentiles, Greeks no less, have believed our report! How shall I respond to that; why is it that they are separated from the love of Christ?”
It is as though the “us” Paul is considering in the passage suddenly strikes him as being a group that probably should be a majority of ethnic Jews since the focus of the Object of faith is a Jew who fulfilled Jewish promises that were made in the midst of a Jewish religious system and in that day, were proclaimed primarily by Jewish Apostles and first to the Jewish people group, but he realizes that many of his own Jewish brothers and sisters do not believe in the Messiah prophesied in their own scriptures, so perhaps thoughts such as these, and the Holy Spirit lead Paul to write the words in Romans 9 and following.
Romans 9
1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. 5 To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
I think he preempts the objector who question would question whether Paul had forsaken his brothers in the flesh, he has “gone outside the camp” and become the apostle to the gentile nations, and rightly so given the structure of the great commission of our Lord. Surely Christ had not meant that it was only to the Jews in all the nations to which the gospel was to be preached. Paul had understood by now that Christ’s descent, life, death, resurrection, and ascension were not simply to fulfill all righteousness and showing Himself the end of all the object lessons of the Old Covenant cultic practices, no, He also came to bring in the gentile nations, as promised in Hosea, making them part of His body as well.
But, how is it that Paul can go so quickly from the victorious proclamations of verses 37-39 in chapter 8 to, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.”? No doubt, it is his meditations on the absence of belief in some of the synagogues, and the paradox created by the fact that God chose a nation in Abraham to bless the world finally in Christ, only to have many of those in the nation remain in unbelief after the appearing of the person for whom they were supposed to be looking. In the back of his mind, Paul must also have considered how he too was once an unbelieving Jew, and had even persecuted the Christ who eventually knocked him off his horse on the road to Damascus. So, even he at one time, as studious and academic a Jew as one could be, had denied the fulfillment of rightly practiced Old Testament Judaism in the coming of Christ Jesus; even he, missed the significance of Jesus being the Archetype and the Substance of the Old Testament types and shadows. With as full an understanding of justification and substitutionary atonement that anyone had at the time, Paul speaks in the most dramatic language possible by wishing himself cursed for the sake of all the Jews and for their belief, just to give weight to the sincerity of his love for his fleshly brothers and sisters. Paul continues by making the point that God had already blessed the people by using them as the nation which He had adopted for the purpose of distributing the illustration of His character through the Law, making the covenantal promises, and sending the Christ. All other things aside, they were a people used of God. His method of argumentation he is not dissimilar to the one who, before he critics, mentions the common ground he has with his opponent.
6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, 7 and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but "Through Isaac shall your offspring be named." 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. 9 For this is what the promise said: "About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son." 10 And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, 11 though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls— 12 she was told, "The older will serve the younger." 13 As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
And with verse 6 Paul begins to answer the assumed objection by assuring his readers that the Word of God has not failed. One would expect him to answer quite differently if Paul had had the modern day pre-millennial doctrine in the back of his mind. Perhaps he would have answered like this instead, “But it is not as though the word of God has failed. After the glorious appearing of our Lord, Jesus Christ, He will establish His Kingdom in Jerusalem, and sitting on David’s throne, He will give the land to His chosen people, Israel, for Abraham’s sake.” But this is not what Paul said. Instead, as an answer to these questions, “what about the Jews, the land was promised to them and why do they not all believe and why do they seem cut off from the love of Christ?”, Paul provides several examples of how Israel’s consideration has always been one of promise. The promise God made to Abraham, that he would have offspring numbered as the stars in heaven and the grains of sand by the sea, was a statement of the future. Just as we think of God having chosen us from the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:4) He proclaims the future to Abraham as though it had, in His mind, already occurred, so Abraham was to know that, when this did happen it was certainly not of his doing, and history has quite plainly proven that his attempt to procure God’s promise by his own hands has manifested social disaster. Thus the examples Paul chose to use, Sarah, Rebekah and that of Jacob and Esau…by them it is sufficiently shown that God is a God of promises, and those promises are conditioned only upon His good and holy desire to have them fulfilled. At this point, someone may be inclined to say that this passage refers only to God’s sovereign dealing over nations, and the mention of the two different children of Abraham and the mention of Jacob and Esau is Paul’s way of illustrating the tragedies that are consequences of God’s people not pursuing Him in His way. No one thinks that God’s promises have failed because Ishmael and his sons and Esau and his sons have not inherited God’s promise, and that would have to be the expectation if this passage were exclusively about nations. Thus, I think that is a peculiar conclusion at which to arrive, especially considering verses 11 and 12, “in order that God’s purpose of election might continue”. And when you see that the opposite book end of this set of verses is in verse 33 where Paul’s use of the term, “elect” is not just that of the physical nation chosen by God, but it is the children of His spiritual election. It is not the return to the physical land and temple and to the cultic Old Covenant rituals that distresses Paul so, no, it is that they are “separated from the love of Christ” because they do not believe, thus this passage (and as it will also be proven in the context that follows) is not referring exclusively to the physical nation. So when Paul say, “6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” he is in effect, saying, “not all who are part of physical Israel are a part of spiritual Israel”, therefore he cannot be saying, “it is not the sons of Esau who are part of the nation of Israel, but only the sons of Jacob are a part of the nation of Israel”. Likewise, the “children of the flesh” do not only refer to the children of Ishmael and Esau, and the children of promise are not the physical children of Isaac and Jacob only.
I will break here and continue the discussion of Romans 9 in later posts.
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