Romans 9-11 The Hinge Chapters

[HKHaugan]

Romans 9-11 The Hinge Chapters

Another way to get an overview of Romans is to divide it into three parts: chs.1-8 the past, chs.9-11 the present and chs.12-16 the future. In this session we deal with chs.9-11, God’s answer for the present. Here is presented the cross-generational issue of the place of the Jews in God’s plan and our attitude toward them. Should they be evangelized? Are they lost? Just what is their place in the larger spiritual picture? What about the nation Israel today?

Remember, Paul’s lens is Jesus and therefore ours. So let’s take ch.9 first then see its principles extended into chs.10-11.

Vs.1-5 God’s choice is to give everyone the freedom to accept or reject Him. But Paul agonizes over his own people, his brothers in the flesh; his bloodline and his blood family. They were the ones given the opportunity to carry the Word of God, be set aside as a visible community of people who witness to the One and only God and prepare the way for His Presence in the Messiah. Note Paul's given list of qualifications: “Theirs is:
1. Adoption as sons---Ex.4:22
2. Divine glory---Shekinah--throughout the Old Testament in the physical actions of lightning, thunder, fire on Sinai, parting of the Red Sea, defeat of enemies, burning bush, the Son of Man in Daniel 7, the 4th man in the  fire with Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego, etc. In the New Testament Jesus calming the sea, walking on water, miracles, the Transfiguration, the Cross, the Resurrection and the changing transformed hearts. Both the Shekinah glory and the Jesus glory are one and the same, the work of the Holy Spirit.
3. Covenants---Noahic (Gen.9:12-17), Abrahamic (Gen.15:5), Mosaic (Ex.3), Davidic (Ps.89:3-4), In Christ (Lk.22:20)
4. Receiving the Law (summed up in Ps.147:19)
5. Temple Worship (Ex.25:8-9, Heb.9:1)
6. Promises (summed up in Ps.89:26-29)
7. The Patriarchal Lineage –- basically Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joseph, David

Vs.6-16 Israel is defined spiritually. The lens for that definition is Jesus. We see that the issue is not the flesh but the spirit. Israel is more than a bloodline. Israel is really faith made visible. It is a personal faith relationship with God as established in Abraham who was counted righteous because of his faith. Isaac is the key. He was the child of a spiritual promise of God. We are his spiritual descendants by faith. Paul uses Jacob and Esau as further examples. “The older will serve the younger’ and that by God’s choice. It is God who sets the agenda, not man or his rules. (see Ephesians 2:14-21)

Vs.17-33 The bottom line is that God chooses the way He wants to run His universe and no amount of intention, effort or work on man’s part can alter the nature, mind and heart of God. We are made to reflect, practice and demonstrate God’s glory. God is not a prideful arrogant dictator but a God whose glory is His love, compassion and mercy. He enjoys relationship and is a God of relationship. He is the structure, the essence and the heart of what it means to give of self, to share one’s nature in complete and open honesty, integrity and desire. He seeks only to give of Himself and have those who receive what He gives be totally fulfilled as He is already by nature. To let Him be God in our mind and heart is the way He shows Himself as a fully relational, loving, caring and sharing God.

The implications of this part of ch.9 are several.

First, sin will always work a way in us to justify ourselves before God and everyone else. Using bloodline, family, institution, obedience to the Law or laws, good intentions, ‘I’m not as bad as others’, ‘I try hard’, are attitudes of self-justification. Self-justification points to our deepest need, the need to be right, that when I look in the mirror or am in the presence of others I can believe and feel that I am OK, I am satisfied, I am right. That is what sin is all about. The fear of not being right, not feeling right, not sensing I am OK, that fear is the essence of sin. The issue of sin is so deeply ingrained in humanity that its results have blinded us spiritually. As Jesus put it, “Even if someone should rise from the dead they wouldn’t believe…” What Jesus saw and expressed in His teaching was the absolute lostness of mankind, individual hearts adrift on a sea of self-isolating sin, and how all this could be overcome only through Him and Him alone.

Second, sin is spiritual, personal, heart resident and mind deceiving. The very fact that He chooses a people to be His people who turn away from Him time and again and time and again be forgiven, has to say something. This very process indicates that even those whom He chooses fail and fall because of the tenaciousness of sin. But it is this same process that takes place on a daily level with each of us. Sin is a pervasive spiritual infection from which only God can deliver us. It is fatal, as we all know, since everyone dies. The fact that it spans history and dominates the world in all its activities means that the Cross of Jesus covers every human being who was and will be. It is always the present living heart that God maintains this process for. If He loves each of us this much that He would go to this personal extreme who are we to judge God when He says, ‘I will choose the way I want to do it.’? Who are we to tell Him how to run His universe or ask Him why He made us this way? Our minds choose sin, replacing God with self, at every level.

Third, sin will ultimately keep us from acknowledging God’s purpose for us---to give Him the glory. Sin fights anyone seeing the glory of God. Sin will always exploit and get us to justify our pride, ego and greed in order to get all the glory. Giving God the glory removes us from giving in to the need for receiving glory from others. Thus it is God who gives the glory as He wants. That is always the bottom line. Sin will always move us to grasp glory for self and glory from others.

For these three reasons we can begin to see how people are first just people, limited, creatures of God made in His image and likeness but fallen and in need of a spiritual cure. This is why He chose a people to be His, to show mankind the spiritual problem that distances it from Him and bear the Messiah so that those who were not His people might be saved and that salvation could be opened to all who would receive Him as He presents Himself in Jesus. He wanted to let all know that all are personally included in all that He has to offer. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, no human being outside of the opportunity for oneness with God (Gal.3:28).

It is the finality of sin, the total obscurity it develops in us, the completeness of its devastation in our separation from God that Jesus died on the Cross to overcome. He truly substituted Himself for us, took our place on the Cross that awful day when our fearful human nature manipulated by the devil used the state, religion, conspiracy and human power to isolate Him by death.

The question Paul tenders at the end of ch.9 is logical. Why is it that the Gentiles who did not pursue God’s righteousness, being right by faith, obtained it and Israel who pursued it by Law didn’t? Precisely because it was by faith not religion, by heart not institution, by individual not a group, by citizen not a nation and by personal love not fear. People are so sinful, lost and self-possessed that the only hope is faith in the risen Jesus and the process of recovery He brings, that is repentance; heart changing, heart transforming submission to Jesus as a daily Savior and Lord.

What we have in chs.9-11 is a transition from the past to the future with the Jews being the hinge theme that connects the past with the future. The failure to be faithful in the past is now the opportunity for the present and the future to be realized in and by faith in Jesus Christ. The key verses are in ch.10, “8But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: 9That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”

So what of the Jews? God has promised that they will come into the fullness of the Gospel but in His time. Right now their disobedience is the foundation for the acceptance of the Gentiles (11:11-16). When God has determined that the time for both is right He will deliver the Jews because, as has been explained by Paul, theirs are the patriarchs, the prophets and the heritage, the ones through whom the Messiah came.

The dynamic here can also be applied to understand that each individual is involved. For instance, when you have shared the Gospel with someone and they seem to reject it, the seed has been planted and you sense that ‘it’s not their time yet, but that time will come.’ We say this of children who leave their parent’s teachings and go on their own way. We pray for them and communicate with them trusting that Scripture is true that when you train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he won’t turn from it.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is an illustration. Israel is the historic prodigal. Israel’s history of disobedience crosses centuries so that individuals in each generation have the opportunity to receive God’s mercy. Israel represents a heart going its own way rejecting Jesus as Messiah or at least an attempt to earn God’s favor by obedience to the Law and maintaining their bloodline at all costs. Israel is symbolic, its history an analogy, of the human heart locked in pride wanting God but still remaining in control of their personal and national destiny.

It is inevitable that people will sin, be disobedient and leave both parents and God. But in the same dynamic a whole nation can be disobedient, drift and become self-absorbed thinking that by works or membership they can earn their salvation or, at the least, be good people without the good God. But “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. Blessed are the people He chose to be his own. Ps.33:12.”

Israel’s history is our personal history. So the nation of Israel, its people and its heritage stand out as illustrative of individual human nature and group behavior. Israel, its faith and people, is the only nation that has been universally castigated for the length of its history. It is a burden they have carried and God will bless them in the context of His plan for eternity.

Scripture gives us the picture, the promise and the hope for both individuals and the nations in which they reside. It was by faith that Abraham was counted righteous before God and the same is true for every person of faith today. It is also true that whole groups of people will return to God but in God’s economy one group is made hardhearted so that another group may find Him. Scripture points out the Egyptians and Hebrews, Jews and Gentiles, the non-believer and believer.

So when God decides to honor the original people He chose He will turn their hearts as He has turned ours (11:25-32). But it took their rejection to give us Gentiles the basis for acceptance. In a sense the fact that we know they are rejected for their lack of faith in the Messiah gives us the reason to see faith as the point of our acceptance of Him.

The dynamic seems to be this, that if the Jews reject Him it gives Gentiles a consistent visual cross-generational reason to accept Him. The hardness in the Jewish heart, that is, the refusal to believe Jesus is the Messiah, is rampant among the Gentiles. It is the Jews God chose to be the messengers of faith to whom we turn to see the Messiah coming from them for our sake. God loves both Jew and Gentile equally but it is apparent this is His process that dealing with sin requires. He alone knows what it takes to solve all issues of spirituality.

In God’s sight it is the heart that He cherishes and it is the heart that transcends all other issues in His mind. This is a spiritual issue for every human being born and therefore a spiritual process from first to last. God is all about spiritual relationship because that is who and what He is, spiritual Father, spiritual Son and Holy Spirit in a perfect totally shared relationship in mind, heart and Spirit. We are created in that three fold image but we are out of balance due to sin. Why else would He have sent His Son to suffer and die in our place if it were not to bring us into what He intended? Jesus is the perfect balance of mind, heart and spirit to make it clear that each of us is designed to be like Him. But even more important is the worth He places in us to consider. We are worth so much to Him personally that He was willing to die for us, take the punishment for sin we deserved. He showed that by faith we are risen with Him just as He was risen by faith. Jesus' Cross for us is every next moment lived by faith in Him, dying to sin and rising above the worldly demands every next moment brings.