Romans Chapter 9 cont'd
God spoke through Hosea the prophet, "I will transform rejected and unlovely people and make them my accepted and loved ones, so that where I used to say to them, 'You are not my people', now I will say to those very same ones, 'You are the children of the living God'." Isaiah also prophesied about Israel, "Although the numbers of Jews are as many as the grains of sand in the sea, only a remnant of them will truly be saved. For the Lord will fulfill his prophetic declarations concerning both his righteous judgments and his salvation in the earth, and he will do it swiftly at the appointed time." Isaiah prophetically said of this remnant: "Unless the Lord who rules creation preserves a faithful remnant of Jews, our whole nation will be swept away in judgment like Sodom and Gomorrah were."
So here's the great ironic mystery of history. The Gentiles, who were not seeking salvation from the God of Israel, stumbled upon it by simply believing in the Messiah Jesus. But the Jews, who have worked so hard to earn salvation have stumbled over God's salvation plan, and have therefore failed to find it. Why is this so? Because the Jews have gotten caught in the trap of self-righteousness and their pride has blinded them from simple faith in God which is the basis of salvation. As God prophesied through scripture, "Behold, I have strategically placed my Messiah as a rock in the path of the Jewish people which scandalizes and offends all who are religiously or ethnically proud. But whoever believes in him will not be disappointed."
Comments:
Paul uses three examples to OT prophecy (and there are others like them) to reinforce one of his main points in Romans...the Jewish scriptures themselves point to the fact that God would one day fling open the doors of his salvation far and wide to call all the nations to receive the Messiah and enter in to the covenant relationship that he has always had with his people through Abraham. Jesus and his apostles made it clear time and again the this decisive hour in the Big God-Story of human history had now arrived and all people, Jews and gentiles, were equally invited to turn around spiritually put their personal faith in Jesus the Christ. God had personally come to earth, in Jesus, to put things right...to show forth his mercy and display his justice.
All the first Jesus followers were Jews and they clearly viewed themselves as the firstfruits of the believing "remnant" prophesied about by the ancient Jewish prophets. The fact that the majority of the first century Jews did not embrace Jesus as the promised Messiah did not dissuade them in the least from this conviction. Rather, they humbly viewed the tragic unbelief of their fellow Jews (and the subsequent joyful reception of Jesus by many gentiles and their inclusion in the now fulfilled Abrahamic covenant) as a further confirmation of the prophetic warnings issued by their own prophets..."the rock that the 'builders' rejected, had indeed become the chief cornerstone" as Isaiah had foretold. Thousands of first century Jews did follow Jesus (and thousands more have come to faith in our generation alone), and so instead of thinking that God was untrue to his promises to save "Israel", there is a way of looking at and reframing this history to realize that God was, in fact, more than faithful and true to his promises.
A further irony has been created so many hundreds of years later. The people involved in "Christendom", have been and are now, perched on a similar spiritual precipice as were the Jews of the first century. The church world has been populated by many people who have experienced certain rituals and rites of initiation and embraced certain social conventions by being born into a "christian" culture. But these things alone have never been the essential basis of entering and enjoying covenant with the living God. There must also be, beneath all this, a genuine personal and heart-felt conversion to Christ that provides an individual person with a miraculous spiritual birth and a new heart for the Spirit's home, that longs and chooses to follow Jesus Christ as Lord and Master of one's whole life.
Religious self-righteousness and spiritual pride can creep and settle in over generations (or even within a few years!) to effectively cut people off from an interactive relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit...people who are placing their spiritual security in the outward forms of faith, rather than in the heart of the matter. This kind of religious-ness is undoubtedly the kind of thing that Jesus, if nothing else, came to overturn.
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