Has God Abandoned His people?
The readings for today share a common theme. These texts speak of God coming to the gentiles and expanding His work beyond the nation of Israel. It’s that very nation of Israel that is referred to in Romans 11 as “His people.” At the end of Romans 10 in the last 3 verses immediately preceeding the 11th chapter Paul is talking about this same very question. They did not believe, but didn’t they know? Didn’t God give them the law and the gospel? The prophecies of Christ? According to Paul, the evidence was there. God really spelled it out in the Scriptures. Paul says that God spoke to Israel saying, all day I stretched out my hand to you and you continue to disobey my law and throw away my promises. So instead He sought to make them jealous by extending that same hand to the gentiles. God said; “I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest to them that asked not after me.”
I know it can be tempting to look at this text and say, well there you have it; the Jews are God’s special people and we’re just some dogs that get to sit under the dinner table and eat their left-over crumbs. Maybe we think that Christ came only for the Jews and that we should be happy just knowing that He won’t throw us in hell for being gentiles. Or perhaps its that God loves us intensely, but were not really His true people, He loves the Jews more. Is that it? No. Friends… Why did God love the Jews? For no reason in themselves. Which just so happens to be the very same reason that He loves us. As Paul says in Romans 5:8; God shows His love for us in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners! Nothing within you or about you moved Christ to come in the flesh to bear your sins. It was something in Him. It’s something innate to God, it’s His love. From before the foundations of the earth, His love sought you out. It sought to create you, knowing you would fall. It sought to save you, knowing you would disbelieve. It sought to know you and make you into a child of God in Christ Jesus. A child. Not a stranger, collegaue, friend or a dog under the table, but a Child. He has chosen you before the earth was formed that in Christ you might stand before Him as His child in whom He is well pleased, holy, and blameless. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation; “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.”
That is what made the Jews special. Is wasn’t them. It wasn’t their heritage. John the Baptist dispelled that idea quite thoroughly when he condemned them for thinking that in Matthew 3, saying don’t take comfort in your genetics, God can create children of Abraham from the very stones on the ground. It was God’s promise to them and that alone which set them apart. And you brothers and sisters have that same very promise upon your souls. Yes. God is faithful to the Jews even still. And yes, the Jews are still special to God. As Paul says in Romans 9:4 these Jews are Israelites, “to whom belongs the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises.” 2 Timothy 2:13, “if we are faithless He remains faithful for He is not able to deny Himself.”
What makes the Jews His people? His love. What makes them special? His promises. The message of Romans 11 is that God is for you, even when you are against Him. Romans 11 is not about Jews. It’s about how God is for the Jews. How He loves them, has chosen them, and has promised them all that He has, even unto Himself, even unto the eating of His very flesh. Neither is it about Gentiles. It’s about how God is for the Gentiles. How He loves them and has chosen them, even to the drinking of His very blood. In the realest and truest sense, Romans 11 is about God in Christ on the cross for you.
Okay, that’s all great, God is for us and God is for the Jews that’s awesome, BUT. Has God forsaken His people? Well… It sure looks like it, let’s be honest. Not only has history been chalk full of examples of anti-semintism but most of ethnic Israel since Christ’s first Advent has persisted in unbelief. What must the people of the time have thought? He must have cast them off and forsaken them! He must have gotten tired of their unbelief and finally abandoned them! The temptation to think these things is present and active. To asnwer this Paul goes back to the prophet Elijah who also found himself in a time when nearly all of Israel persisted in unbelief. They had almost all-together as a nation abandoned the Lord and bowed their knee to false gods. The situation now is nothing new, it’s nothing unique to the Israelites of the 21st century. It was a common theme throughout the entirety of the OT. This isn’t restricted to Israelites either. Look at the world. What do you see? There is a lot of unbelief. Yet God is not unfaithful. God is not without His promises to the world, not to the Jews and not to Gentiles. There have even been times in the church where this is the case to greater or lesser degrees. There was once a time in the 4th century that almost the entirety of the church condemned the doctrine that Christ was fully God and fully man. And in the 16th century the majority of the church condemned justificaiton by faith alone in Christ alone as a damnable heresy. It is good news that Romans 11 is not just about the Jews. Because this issue of widespread unbelief is not a Jewish problem. It’s a human problem and it exists among all the gentile nations and even the institution of the Christian church. Wherever God is making promises of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, there can man be found persisting in unbelief. Yet although we are faithless, God remains faithful. Has God cast away His people? No. But His people have tried to cast away their God.
So, what are we to do in such a world, where Jews, Gentiles, and professed Christians all alike persist a large part in unbelief? Two things; firstly, we must warn the lost. And secondly, we must hope in the coming redemption of God’s people. Elijah prayed to God and said, your people have rejected your covenant and they’ve torn down your altars. They put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me! God answered Elijah that day and said to him two things. One is Law and the other is Gospel. The gospel we find within the text of Romans 11, but the first half is only in the text that Paul is citing in 1 Kings 19. God’s answer reads like this; “anoint Hazael king over Aram. 16 Also, anoint Jehu king over Israel, and anoint Elisha to succeed you as prophet. 17 Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael, and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu. 18 Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.” We have here two responses of God to unbelief. The first, a sword. There is one way, one truth, and one life. Although God holds out His hand to Jews, Gentiles, and Christians all day long Hebrews 9:27 states in the utmost clarity that it is appointed once for man to die and then he will be judged and receive his eternal fate. He will either be found in Christ, or he will be found condemned. But the hand that God is holding out with all of its promises; adoption into sonship, the righteousness of God, union with Him, His time, His love, His creation, His very body and blood is real and its promises true. Through the Word God speaks and it is so. He proclaims to you that you are forgiven. Is it not so? Did Christ miss one of your sins when He was dying for you on the cross? Is your adoption in Christ void? Did the Father not predestine you from before the foundations of the earth for the very purpose of having you as His holy and blameless child in and through Christ? These are all yours in and through Christ Jesus. Has God abandoned His people? God forbid it be so (literally)! No, God’s response to Israel’s unbelief in His promise was to extend it to the whole world. Though we be faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
I will close with this illustration: Imagine with me for a second the parable of the prodigal son. That story where the Father has two sons and one is faithful while the other whishes his father dead and abandons the family to go and spend all the money given to him from his inheritance in a prodigal, meaning extravegant way, until he runs out and crawls back to his father full of shame and guilt only to be received back with open arms by his loving father. But this time I want you to imagine it this way. The Father has only one unfaithful and disgraceful son whom he loves and cares for, but this son does not reciprocate his love. Rather, his son takes all of his fathers gifts without thanks and abandons his family to go and waste the gifts of his father in the most disgraceuful of ways possible. Now, as i said, this father has only one son. In the wake of his son abandoning him what does he do? Does he revoke his gifts to his son? No, he gives to his son all that he has to give. But more than this, after his son abandons him he adopts 10 sons and gives all he has likeiwse to them too, and then sends out his newly adopted sons to go look for bring back their older brother who left the home. Brothers and sisters this is our God. He is a prodigal father. He is an adoptive Father. Has God abandoned His people? No, He has expanded His people. Though we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
