Lesson 47a

So we are 47. So we're working our way through Romans chapter 11, verses 11 through 18. And basically what we've been talking about through 9, 10, and 11 was simply put, what's the deal with Israel? God made a lot of promises to them. Did He decide that He'd had enough of their nonsense? And He just flushed them and went with any with Christianity?

The answer is no. And this theme continues on here especially. Question 1, in verse 11, who is Paul talking about with the word they? Verse 11 says, I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be. But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles. to make them jealous. So who are they?

The 12 Tribes. I'm sorry? The 12 Tribes. The 12 Tribes. It's the whole nation, right? It isn't individual Jews. It's the entire nation. So it's the mass of the Jewish nation. All but one group of people. What's the one group of people? We talked about them last week. the remnant they're not part of they but all the rest of the Jewish nation is they okay so the question too is did the stumbling of Israel in its rejection of the Messiah result in its final downfall Paul says may it never be may it never be you have to contrast between stumbling and falling.

We wouldn't make that contrast but the Word of God does. Falling shows that by falling is meant the irredeemable fall from which there is no recovery. So there are people that have that view that they screwed up so bad that there isn't any going back and God has rejected them because they fell. The idea is not so much of the purpose, but as a result of what their stumbling was. Paul rejects the idea of stumbling of Israel and the rejection of the Messiah, and that was the issue. The issue was the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's still the issue. Maybe put it simply, what do you think of this man? Who do you think the Lord Jesus is? Who is he? What do you think about him? He's the idea.

So the falling of Israel is temporary, not permanent. They've been set aside. So, question three. Through Israel's sin, God brings great blessings. What are they? Look at verse 12. Read verse 12. It says, now if their fall is the riches of the world and their loss is the riches of the Gentiles. So what's happening here?

I think we have to realize that God dealt only, up until this time, only with the nation of Israel in terms of mankind. You understand? I mean, that sometimes is a little hard to believe because you think, well, gee, how about the guy that lives in Vietnam in 300 A.D. or B.C.? Did God care about that guy? Yeah.

But when you go through the Old Testament, like especially Genesis, and you find out that God was going to destroy the world, but he held back eight people because he found one righteous guy out of two billion? Noah? And because of Noah, he didn't destroy everybody. He saved Noah and the seven others in his family. It shows you where the sin nature and the Adamic life in the default position rejects God.

It isn't that they all go to Sunday school and then they get to decide. They just come into the equation like that. And so you have a whole planet of people. There's no Jews yet. God's dealing with the whole planet of people. And they all, you know, which Genesis 6 says that God saw that man did evil continually. Not once in a while, continually.

And they all did it. So then fast forward through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He thought, his plan was, is that, well, I'm going to demonstrate who I am to the world through a nation that will obey me and that will learn about me and through their, they being the nation and the focus and everyone will know that they're my people, the whole world can get saved through them.

How'd that work out? Not so good, right? exactly the way God planned. Well, He didn't plan for the fall. What you just said means that He planned for the evil and the sin. Well, He knew they were going to do it. Yeah. So, we've talked about this before. When we study Old Testament and Israel, what do you pick up about God? What characteristic of God did you find? especially here with Israel.

He's a lover, and he's always looking for a way to bless. The people are always going the other way, but he's always looking for a place to bless. And so, here it is again. The nation that he chose rejects his Messiah, so what does he do? He sets them aside, and then through that process, he begins to bless Gentiles. all of the other people on the earth because of them. Because they rejected. Now, if it had been me, I would have said, let's flush them all. Let's get rid of all of them. So, he takes an occasion where the people he chose rejects his Savior.

He takes that occasion to bring salvation to the rest of the world. It's really cool. But that's his character. That's what he does. When you study Genesis in the Old Testament, that's what you see. God is always looking for a way to bless people no matter how bad they reject Him. He's always doing that. He still does it today.

So if you, which we studied, you look at Ephesus or Corinthians or back in Rome, the whole world gets enriched by Israel's fall. That's kind of cool. That means that everybody in this room probably wouldn't have been given the grace that you've been given if Israel didn't fall. Or you'd have been down at the temple today, yesterday. If that were the case, where would we have gone yesterday? Up to the temple. We'd all live in the Middle East, because we'd want to be near the location of the temple, because that was the center of who they were.

We wouldn't be able to follow, when Paul says, all your requests known to the Lord. If you were a Gentile in 200 BC, Could you make a request to the Lord? You didn't even know who He was, nor did you believe. You knew that those Jews had something going for them, but all of your friends in your neighborhood in Mesopotamia or wherever you lived, you didn't know about who God was, you didn't know about Christ, you didn't know about any of that. Right? So if you were going to pray, who would you pray to? whoever the God of the neighborhood was, or the tree in the village, I don't know.

But you couldn't make, like now we're in every Gentile, every human being on the earth can believe in the person and work of Christ, every one of us. So all of the ethnic distinctions went away. So we have incredible riches because Israel turned their back on the Messiah. You know, it's interesting in Acts 10, talking about Cornelius, the Roman centurion, he says he was a godly man.

Yes, he was. He was not a Jew. No, he wasn't. He was not even a convert or anything. But he says he was a godly man. A God-fearing man. Not a godly man, but a God-fearing man. So I'm thinking there were probably other God-fearing people outside the Jewish nation who prayed to the true God.

Think about that. Cornelius had an advantage, and the advantage was that he was stationed in Israel. See? And he could see, and he was learning about Jehovah. And obviously the Lord called him to be there. But he's observing this whole Jewish system and it says somewhere else that he's studying and he's praying and he's learning. But in order to save him, interesting, what did God do? He had Peter go over to his house and the Spirit came down upon him and his fellow Gentiles that believed and they were baptized into Christ. And for Peter to accept what he just saw, he had to see it. Because he went running back to Jerusalem and looked up James and the boys and said, guess what? God is going to save the Gentiles. And they said, nah. He said, yeah, no kidding. He said, I just saw it. They received the Spirit just like we did. That's right.

It was a big surprise to him because at that point, if you read Acts 2 and the first few chapters of Acts, it's all about the Jews and it's all about the kingdom. It isn't about the Gentiles until that event. And that's the first time. And before that, you had to be inducted into the Jewish nation to receive the blessing, because they all received the blessing.

That's right. No other Gentiles received blessing. You always got it through the nation. That's right. That's the only way you could get blessing from God is through the nation of Israel. So, I mean, if you were an American Indian in Montana, you were in trouble. Unless some Jew shows up, you don't know anything. It wasn't then like it is now. You see that? Now the Spirit of God has gone out into the world to save individuals. And he's doing his job. Everything was through Israel. Everything was through Israel.

So there wasn't a little group of sort of godly, righteous people stuck in Montana someplace. That didn't happen. And it wasn't because God wasn't fair. You realize, of course, all of our salvations is because of God's grace, not His fairness. If He's fair, we all are scheduled for a hot afternoon. Let's see. We as believers should see the blessing that has resulted out of God's heart of mercy. In fact, because of what the Jews did, He could show kindness and He did show kindness to the Gentiles. He invited us. which we weren't invited before. You had to become a proselyte in Judaism to avail yourself of the blessings. So, okay, question four. What effect did these blessings have on Israel? Made them jealous. Supposedly it did, but I don't know. You know, the Hasidic Jews that live in my neighborhood aren't jealous of me.

They're thinking I'm an idiot and that they got it all right. Verse 13 says, But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles, inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify... I'm ahead of myself. Talking back to verse 11. But by their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make them jealous.

How is that going to possibly happen? I mean, my rabbi friend across the street, Zev Pomerantz, he was never jealous of my Christianity. And I think he looked at me and thought, you need to get yourself a yarmulke and get up to the synagogue. That's what he thinks. And you need to do all this really cool stuff that we're doing. You're not doing anything. It brings up a really interesting point.

You know that letter I read a couple of weeks ago from the missionary that was sent to the church that was supporting the missionary in this area? And somebody from that area, a native, wrote a letter back to the church. It wasn't a missionary, it was one of the villagers. And the content of the letter was, please send us a Christian family.

It would be okay if they knew how to do something, woodworking, and help us out. But that isn't why we want them. We want them here, family, so we can observe how a Christian family functions. Because we don't know how they do. We don't know how they function. What do they do? We read this stuff about husbands love your wives, and wives submit yourself to your husband, children obey your parents, and on and on it goes. But we don't have any examples of that in our village. So please send a family. You know what's interesting about that? That's our job, right here in Denver.

People should be able to see by the way we live, not by what we say, but just the way we live, what it means, the difference in being a believer. Should be able to see it. My Zev Pomerantz should be able to see that across the street from him is a Christian family, and there's something different about them. Not to put it on you, but that's really, I think, how the witness of Christianity is to be portrayed. How you live your life. And every day, walking around, whatever you're doing, you manifest the life of the Lord Jesus. And trust me, it's different. It's very different than what you see in the world.

You know, Michael, in Epiphyte, it says that he's magnifying his ministry in his office, in the hope of making my fellow Jews jealous, in order to stir them up to imitate, copy, and appropriate, and thus managing to save some of them. Like you're saying, he's hoping for them to see by his example, a better way.

I used to think about that. Did you ever think about that when the Pomerantzes were across the street and all those Jews that hopefully they saw something just in the way we lived? I used to think about that. We became good friends with them. We loved their kids. You know, when you say that we should get up to the temple, I always had the feeling that it was more like Nicodemus. Well, I'm in.

Too bad for you. That's true. Yeah, I think I got it all because I was born a Jew. And then Jesus says to them, well, unless you're born again, you're not even going to see, let alone enter the kingdom. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe they were just inherently nice folks. Well, I think they were very gracious, as much as they could be.

What I learned out of that is how blinding a strict legal environment is. And I'll get to a question here in a minute about what we have done in Christianity by bringing in legalism, denominationalism, and we've got all these rules and systems and stuff that we're supposed to knuckle under and we're all supposed to look like Baptists or whatever. And how that is not what God has in mind. that isn't what he has in mind for the body of Christ in terms of how they function, how they live. People should know there's something different. Like Malloy used to say, people should come up to you and ask you, what's that hope that's in you?

I don't see it anywhere else. And people see that. They do see that. I saw it in Christian guys before I became a believer, but immediately before, I didn't see it before that, but I was amazed. The very first Bible study I ever went to at Cherry Hills, I walked out of there thinking, gee, there's all these business guys here. I know who most of them are. They're serious about what they're doing. They're serious about the Bible. And they're serious about being Christians. The denomination I came up with, it was all religion. We did the rules and then we got out of there as fast as we could. Got back to the system. And that was a real surprise to me, but that's what I think the Spirit of God does.

It will eventually, and already has, it makes individual Jews jealous. Why do you have this grace and we have sought it and we didn't get it? And as the book of Galatians says, it's because you sought it legally out of your own your own strength rather than dependence on the Spirit of God. That's why. You know the Abrahamic Covenant where it said they'd give the land a seed and a worldwide blessing. I wonder if that worldwide blessing was kind of a prophecy of Gentiles like us. Well the worldwide blessing was directed towards the Messiah.

And without his death on the cross there is no Because he's got nothing to offer. Without the cross, there's no offer. You realize that. The Jews look forward to it, promises. From the cross on, now we deal with facts. If that event didn't happen, none of us get saved. Because the atonement, there's no atonement for our behavior. See that? Oh, the question's next.

Have we Christians missed the message by not being involved in the messianic Jewish congregation? No. When you say no, that means you've got to explain. I wrote down, when the Jews accept Jesus as Messiah and place their faith in Jesus, they become new creatures. and are no longer spiritual Jews. Okay, that's pretty good. Should believers in the Lord Jesus Christ be involved in what God has temporarily set aside? That's exactly the question.

Because we don't realize it, but there are a lot of what I would call messianic Jewish congregations today, where people where people think, oh boy, you know, I've got to get involved in some sort of a Jewish environment because they're really the ones. They're really God's chosen people. Yeah, we're Christians, but we're Messianic Jews, too. Arnold Vorkenbaum, which is a guy that lots and lots of people really admire, a Jewish believer, he's a believer, and a writer and a philosopher or a theologian, he contends that there are, I talked about this last week in The Remnant, there are Jews who are Christians, but the Jewish distinction doesn't go away, and that they really do have the purer form of Christianity by these messianic environments.

And it's an easy sell because it's like being a Catholic and getting saved and you don't leave the Catholic Church. You're like a Jew in Palestine in 50 A.D. Well, if this Christian thing doesn't work out, I'm still a Jew. If this Christian thing doesn't work out, I'm still a Catholic. I want to get involved in as many clubs as I can because one of them is going to be right.

Yes, it does. It certainly does. And that's why, well, that isn't why, but that's a reason that dispensationalism has been pushed aside now. The prevailing method of theology in Christianity today is reform. Reform theology says, among other things, that the Church is just an extension of Israel. that it just sort of stopped being all Jewish and now became Christian, but it's the same group.

It's the same law. It's the same principles. Well, that's all well and good, except we don't have a temple. The Jews can't do anything without a temple. I asked my buddy Zev one day, I said, how do you guys get your sins forgiven if you don't have a temple to sacrifice? He said, oh, we're past that. We go up to them and pray, and we get it done. We confess. I said, oh, okay.

I almost said, yeah, but your Bible tells you that without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness. Where's the blood, buddy? And it only can be spilled in that little building in Jerusalem. So anyway, why wouldn't we come to church wearing yarmulkes and be a little more Jewish than we are. Why wouldn't we be? You think we should?

The old has passed away, the new has come. Well, we understand that, but have a conversation with someone who's involved in Reformed theology and they'll think, they'll say that, well, they kind of kowtow to this messianic idea. I had a good friend from college that became a Christian and he bought into this and he spent all of his efforts in trying to convert Jewish people to Christianity and he was involved in one of these messianic environments but he's also a charismatic so the way he thought that through miracles the Jews would all become Christians but They only got 50% Christianity and had to hang on to the other 50% of Judaism.

There's no grace there. No, there isn't. I've also heard that since we've become Christians, we're also part of the 12 tribes of Israel. Yeah, I've heard that too. One of the lost ones. Yeah. No, but when we go into the Millennium, we'll be in one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Sure. That's kind of weird. Yeah. Where do they get that? Yeah.

So, the distinction that we make between Judaism and Christianity is a line of demarcation as wide as it could possibly be. We are not in any sense You hear the saying, well, we're a Judeo-Christian country. No, we're not. Because a Judeo-Christian is an oxymoron. You're either one or the other. In Christ Jesus, there's neither Jew nor Gentile. So what are you? If you're not a Jew and you're not a Gentile, what are you? Tell me. You're what? You're believers. More than that. What are you? We're in Christ. We're in Christ which makes us what? A son of God. We're an organic offspring of the God of the universe. His family. His sons. Sons. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Okay.

I wrote down, it's awful to make present day Jewish claims when God says Jews are for the present no different than Gentiles before God. They're just ordinary plain sinners like the rest of us. That's what they are. And they need Christ as their Savior.

I can see though how a Jew, well a Jew that's serious about Judaism, not one of these ones that just show up on Saturday, it would be really tough for them to accept the premises and the grace of Christianity, just like it's really tough for someone who's in a staunch legal-based Christian denomination. I'll pick Catholicism because that's what I came out. I feel like I can pick on them because I was one. You know what the hardest thing for a Catholic to settle down with in terms of Christianity, what do you think it is? What is the hardest tenet? the one thing that they just struggle with.

What do you think it is? Eternal security? That's exactly it. Eternal security. That if I believe in the person and work of Christ, that God will save me for all eternity. I don't have to do anything else. And I can't screw it up. They can't buy that. Why?

Because they've been told from this high that you better be watching out because if you screw up, you're in trouble. It's the same dance that the reformed people tell you, only they do it a little different. They say to you, well, you know, one of their tenets, the tulip principle, the last letter P is the perseverance of the saints. How do you know you're saved? If you persevered all the way to the end, it's the same trick.

You never know. You never know. I might screw up on Tuesday and get hit by a truck on Tuesday afternoon. Oh, all this has been for nothing. You know? And if you're charismatic, you wake up and you say, well, I decide to become a Christian so I can decide not to be one.

Lots of security in that. Go ahead. As I say, I think the doctrine of justification is what brings that rock solid security forever in Christ. I think so. I think you're right. The other element in this whole equation for a person who believes in Christ and His work, the Spirit of God will persuade him that he's saved. Do you think that's true? I think it's absolutely true. He may have, or maybe we've all had doubts at one time or another, but the Spirit of God were persuaded.

Now, He's not going to persuade us about some really solid spiritual growth thing, but salvation, and oh, by the way, He's not going to persuade me that Bob is saved. I don't know if He is or not. It's between Him and the Lord. I would assume He is, based on the way, but I haven't been persuaded about it by the Spirit, but I am persuaded about me.

We all should be persuaded like that, where there isn't any doubt. And it seems like God makes facts in the Bible believable to us by the Holy Spirit. Yes, He does. Sure. I mean, it's just when I read about that doctrine of justification, in other words, if I had never heard that doctrine, it would be harder for me to realize that Jesus really did it.

The work of the cross is done. It's completed and He didn't leave anything for you to clean up. That's right. That's exactly right. So, okay. Question 6. Verse 13. I'll read it for us. Verse 13 says, But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles inasmuch then as I am an apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry."

So when Paul uses the term Gentiles, who's he speaking to? He's not talking about believers in Christ, is he? Is he? No. He's not talking about Jews, but Gentiles as over against Jews. Gentiles. Everybody who's not a Jew. So non-Jewish unbelievers. That's exactly right. That's who he's talking to. What did he say? Non-Jewish unbelievers. Gentiles. Gentiledom. Gentiledom. Yeah. And that's what he called it. And that's really a pretty cool term because it's a term that can lop them all together. Gentiledom. If Israel was cut off because of unbelief, who's left? Gentiledom.

Now, I wrote down some of Newell's stuff. He said, Gentiledom must be where less not abiding in the goodness of which God has set the Gentiles, that is, in the direct divine favor without law or religion in which God has put Gentiledom and also shall be cut off. For God did not give Gentiledom a law with its ten thousand things as He did to Israel. He gave Gentiledom the gospel only and He gave them Paul and the message of grace. So when you think about it, the Apostle Paul's message is the most important message ever. That's why in Galatians he could say, if anyone, including an angel from heaven and myself, preach any other gospel than what I preached, let him be accursed.

That's a pretty bold statement, isn't it? It's like me standing up here and saying, look, I'm absolutely right and don't listen to anybody else. And whatever I say is it. Mike. I thought since the cross there was neither Jew nor Gentile. That's true. So you can't ride the fence. Well, that's true. That's true for those who are in Christ.

But he's not talking here to those who are in Christ. He's talking to the Gentile world because he's the apostle to that world. He's an apostle to everybody who isn't Jewish. And actually he's got two ministries, the Gentile world, but also the body of Christ, which in the body of Christ there's neither Jew nor Gentile. But his message and his evangelistic efforts went to the Gentiles. That's why he didn't spend a whole lot of time in Jerusalem, and every time he went there he got in trouble.

So then that would draw the Jews. What's that? The gospel would draw the Jews. That's right. That's right. Gentildom has continued in God's uncaused grace and goodness. And that's the thing that the Jews are going to learn, that the church is the recipient of God's uncaused grace. We are blessed.

And we had nothing to do with it. We didn't obey one single law to get it. Not one. They've got 614 and they can't keep up. And we have no law. Not a single one. We are all saved under this principle called grace. And our believing in the person and work of Christ is not a legal act. It's a gracious act. It's a response to the grace. There's the law of the spirit of life in Christ. Change the word law to principle. That's right. That's how it works.

What it means then is the bleeding in our ears of liturgies, masses, holy days, even prayers for the dead. What means all this buzz of administering sacraments, investments, and holy orders, and priesthood? Why the big cathedrals? Why all of that stuff? Why is all that stuff around? I can't find it in Paul's epistles, but why do we do it? You know, look at when that that the Basilica of Notre Dame burned in Paris, you would think it was Armageddon. Why?

None of that stuff is Christianity. None of it. How much money did they raise to rebuild that thing? A billion dollars or several billion dollars all over the world? to people to rebuild an artifact that has absolutely no spiritual meaning whatsoever.

Interesting. Is it all about human good? That's right. It's legalism. If I contribute 20 bucks to the building of that temple, God's going to notice. And I'm going to be favored. That's the mentality. Well, where did that mentality come from? came from the natural man in Judaism. I do this and God rewards me. That isn't the way Christianity works. Christianity works and God blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.

That's what we start with. So what can you add to that? Nothing. Nothing. So we're to live in the grace, learning to be receptive. That's really what it's all about. Isn't it really rejection of the Holy Spirit? To accept, to get into legalism? Yeah, because his whole message is grace. I wrote down a couple more things.

The apostle had none of these. God commanded none of it. He forbade it. The most high dwells not in temples made with hands. Really? Where does he dwell? inside every believer. And why did they stone Stephen? Because that's what he told them. That's what he really told them.

Maybe ask this question, has Gentile dumb deserted the goodness of God? Has Gentile-dom deserted the goodness of God? Yes. What do you think? Yes. Everybody agree that, yeah, they have? Sure they have. And they've gone after a Judeo-pagan system and they've poured holy water on it and called it Christian. Now, will Gentile-dom get cut off because of that? Yeah, they will. Yes, they will. So I'm going to stop there and we'll expand on that next week. So you get set aside. Okay, let's close.

Dear Father, how we thank you for the grace that we live under. It's good for us to understand that your grace is overriding every other thought that we have. Your Spirit is teaching us just to receive the grace that's been provided for us already. And we thank you and pray in your son's precious name. Amen.