Insight for Living

Narrator: In recent days, the nation of Israel has taken center stage in the global political theater. For Bible-believing Christians, a question remains central. Has God permanently rejected the Jewish people for rejecting Jesus as Messiah?

Well, in Romans chapter 11, the apostle Paul, himself a Jew, addresses this mystery with startling clarity. And today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll explains Paul's emphatic answer, revealing God's heart toward His chosen people, and unveiling His magnificent long-term plan, which includes breathtaking hope for their restoration.

Chuck titled today's message, "The Jews: Forgotten or Set Aside?"

Chuck Swindoll: May we turn together to the 11th chapter of the letter to the Romans. Romans 11, verses 1 through 14.

I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be. For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or did you not know what the scripture says in the passage about Elijah? How he pleads with God against Israel.

"Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life." But what is the divine response to him? "I have kept for Myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal." In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God's gracious choice.

But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace. What then? What Israel is seeking it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened. Just as it is written, "God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes to see not, and ears to hear not, down to this very day."

And David says, "Let their table become a snare and a trap and a stumbling block, and a retribution to them. Let their eyes be darkened and to see not and bend their backs forever." 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. Now if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be?

But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. In as much then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them.

Narrator: You're listening to Insight for Living. To dig deeper into the book of Romans on your own, be sure to purchase our Searching the Scriptures Bible study workbook by going to insight.org/offer. Chuck titled today's message, "The Jews: Forgotten or Set Aside?"

Chuck Swindoll: Have you ever spent an evening with truly remarkable people? By that I mean people whose lives are making a significant difference for the cause of Christ and His kingdom. That was Cynthia's and my privilege last Tuesday evening. We were with the Wycliffe Bible Translators at their headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

A room full of people whose lives reflected seasoned years doing tedious and arduous work among the Bible-less people of the world. As I was speaking briefly, and the best part of the evening was being with them, believe me, I shared with them that they could sit for a portrait of Hebrews 11:38, people of whom the world is not worthy.

Let me tell you how it works. Their goal is to put the Bible in the language of Bible-less people, and language-less people. So a family will find their way down a long river in a long boat and step off on the shore of a jungle area, not knowing the people, not knowing the culture, not having experienced the diet or the climate or the sociological Moors or whatever of these people who are not expecting them.

And there they spend their lives. Their hope is to decipher the clicks and the whistles and the sounds and the grunts and the unintelligible type of sounds that form into words that the tribe uses to communicate with each other.

None of this has ever been put into writing. And so through training and prayer and the good work of Wycliffe, they have the ability to put those sounds on paper and to form from all of that an alphabet. And then from the alphabet, the beginning of a sentence structure, vocabulary, syntactical phrases, and all that goes into putting language into a meaningful form. Understanding, of course, that none of these people, not one of them is able to read or write. So the task includes then to communicate to them in their language what has been put on paper so that the people might learn to read.

And then begins the process from Matthew through Revelation of putting the New Testament in the hands of the people. Oh, what stories they tell. For some of them, it's taken 20 or more years to work through that process. Just imagine. We met one couple who had spent 46 years doing that. 46 years.

The good news is they bring back with them these rather primitive photos and video clips of the people who now can read and some of them even write. And they're holding their own book with a big smile. Not always a lot of teeth, but big smiles. And markings on their face and feathers in their hair and all sorts of different looks as they are saying with their gestures, "This is my book." "This is my savior."

It's just overwhelming to think about. How remarkable it is to commit oneself to that as a life task. Now, punch the rewind and go all the way back not only scores of years, but hundreds of years, even even centuries, a millennia to another remarkable people.

These are people also attached to the Bible. Thanks to them we have a Bible. They can trace their roots all the way back to one man, named Abraham. And through Abraham's loins and Sarah came Isaac, and through Isaac the people of the Jews.

The writings become some of the finest writings in all the world in holy literature, the scriptures. The great prophecies of the prophets. The great songs of the psalmists. Magnificent proverbs that to this day have a ring of relevance that are timeless.

And from them came the Galilean Jew, through Mary, and a bewildered husband named Joseph who had nothing to do with the conception, as they deposited onto this planet, God in flesh. The Jews. Messiah.

But that's where the tragedy begins. The real tragedy is that He came unto His own things, but His own ones didn't receive Him. Amazing. Those prophets had spoke of Him and the psalmists had sung of Him. The words had been written and the people could gather those words and understand them. And they passed the traditions from one generation to the next, but when Messiah came, they with the Romans nailed Him to a cross. "He will not rule over us."

And what is interesting from that era to this, and for as long as the Lord may tarry before He establishes His kingdom on this earth, the Jews are missing in the church. Oh, not completely, but that's the exception to find them here. That's the amazing part. The exception is that the the Jews are present. If I were to ask you to lift your hands, I doubt there would be more than two, three dozen of you with hands up saying, "I have Jewish roots." The vast majority of us are Gentiles.

We can't look back to some origination, some spiritual father. We go back far enough, we're in pagan city. We got no spiritual roots. We have nothing to brag about. We have been grafted in this tree. But the Jews, where are they?

Oh, there's a magnificent future awaiting them, but now, right now, has God cast them off forever? These remarkable people that have lived through one holocaust after another, resilient and victorious in battle. But they're not here.

Paul being a Jew is very concerned that the Jews who read his letter to the Romans understand they have not been set aside forever. That the blindness that has come over them is not a permanent blindness. That there is a future.

Chapter 9 he tells them, "You were chosen," as he looks back. Chapter 10 he tells them, "You have rejected the message of the Messiah." He looks at the present. Now chapter 11 he looks yet future saying, "But it's not forever. The future is bright for you. God will keep His promises to you."

That's where we find ourselves. John Stott writes this, "Paul now addresses the implications of Israel's disobedience. In doing so, he asks two questions, to both of which he immediately responds with the same indignant response. Question one, verse one: 'I ask then, did God reject His people?' Answer: 'By no means.' Question two: 'Again I ask,' verse 11, 'Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery?' 'Not at all.'"

The chapter, at least the first 14 verses, revolve around those two questions and the same answer. Ed He has it right when he says the rejection of the Jews was neither total nor final. That is the theme of this chapter.

So if you are Jewish and if you are still saying no to the Messiah, I want you to know there is hope for you. You may not feel a part of the family of God. You are not a part without faith in your Messiah, but now is not forever. And you have not been set aside forever, nor have your relatives.

Now with all of that in mind, let's do a little analysis, okay? Let's understand the issue. First is the issue of identification, verse one. Verse one, "I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He?" Identifying the people, we understand now, to be the Jews, the nation Israel. That is the largest of the group, but within the large group there is a small group of Messianic Jews, believing Jews, converted to Christianity.

Look at verse five. "In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God's gracious choice." Not only are we among the remnant, the Gentiles who have been brought in by God's grace and favor, but the Jews who have believed, those who have followed Christ. To the surprise of a number of people, there are pockets of of converted Jews all over the world, even in Jerusalem. A number of them. But compared to the majority, it is small, in some places tiny.

But the identification issue has to do with Israel. We understand that's what he's talking about. Now the issue of rejection. The question appears, "God has not rejected His people, has He?" Verse 11, "They did not stumble so as to fall," meaning permanently, "did they?" There is a temporary period of rejection. Paraphrased altogether, it might read, "God has not totally and permanently wiped out the nation Israel, has He? He isn't finished with her forever, is He?" Paul's desire is to prove his point.

Now, we see the question, it's in verse one, "He has not rejected His people, has He?" Its answer is no. Now Paul begins in verse, the end of verse one, down through verse 10 to give us four reasons, four pieces of evidence to prove that the Jews are not set aside forever and that there is no issue related to the building of a remnant. There still will be those who believe, but though always will be in the minority.

The first evidence, the first reason, is Paul himself in the verse one. "I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin." If God were finished with all the Jews when they rejected Him at the cross, Paul would not have been born again. But God has not rejected all.

It's an interesting thing to think about Paul's testimony. You might mark your Bible, 1 Timothy 1, verses 12 to 15, 16. The story of Paul's life. It's a remarkable story of a man who was moving in the opposite direction against Christianity, persecuting Jews, and on his way to the ancient city of Damascus, he is struck blind, knocked from the beast on which he was riding, and there on the side of the road he is born again, as he trusts in Jesus Christ, who confronts him with himself, the message. And Paul is wonderfully rescued.

And the man who once worked against the things of Christ is now in a matter of, really years, a few years, moving toward the things of Christ and helping others receive Him. He once rejected Him, but now he's been rescued.

I don't know if you saw the movie Cast Away, but several years ago Tom Hanks played the major role, really the only role that any of us remember in the movie, as he is a FedEx agent who is flying over the Pacific Ocean to make a delivery in this massive 747, and it hits a storm and it crashes. It's a fictional story, but we all are on the edge of our seat wondering who will survive. Only one survives. And he's washed ashore on a little uninhabited island. And there he learns to survive for a number of years. And the only one he talks to is a little soccer ball.

And I'm thinking as I'm watching this. I, a fairly intelligent adult, well, that's sometime questionable. A man is talking to a soccer ball and I am interested in the monologue. Why? What is it about that? Well, we all want to know, what happens to this guy? He's cast away.

Through a series of events, he builds a raft and finally makes his way out. By the way, back at the ranch, they all think he's dead. The woman he was going to marry is already married someone else and she's already started their family and and he's he's not completely out of her mind, but she's they've had a memorial service. He's gone. He's lost. Lost at sea. What they don't know, when he walks back on the scene, he had been rescued.

Paul's story is the same. Lost forever? You would think so if you studied his story up till about oh, 31, 32 AD along in there. And then he's changed. Christ comes into his life, and he returns and of all things, he comes back to the very people who once funded his mission to put down Christians. And he presents to them the gospel. How good is that? Now, that is a story worth your attention. And that's the story of Paul's life. That's why he says if God had rejected all the Jews, then what am I doing? The point is he hasn't.

There's another, by the way, that's a personal reason he mentioned. Here's a theological reason, verse two. "God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew." See the word foreknew? We've seen that before, back in chapter 9, chapter 8. Look, go back to chapter 8. I'm going to show you a verse. I feel sorry for. Romans 8:29.

Everybody knows Romans 8:28, but you got only a handful that can quote verse 29, and it goes right along with verse 28. 28 we could all say from memory. We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose. What's 29? Uh, let's see. And here it goes right along with it, "For those whom He foreknew," there's our word. "He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, verse 30. And those whom He predestined, He called. And those whom He called, He justified. And those whom He justified, He also glorified." These are links in the chain of salvation.

Please notice foreknowledge. Notice then the predestining of those he has called. The calling of them, the justifying, the glorifying. Paul says, "God has chosen people," back in Romans 11, verse 2. "God has not rejected the people whom He foreknew." If He chose them, they're still His chosen. Even though they don't choose to follow Him in return.

God doesn't change because we change toward Him. That's a very common misunderstanding. God's heart is still for the Jew. He still sees them as a chosen people, but they have been temporarily set aside. Now that brings up a biblical reason, which is Elijah. The story of Elijah, one of the great stories in the Old Testament, 1 Kings chapter 18, chapter 19. You'll see what he says here. "Do you not know what the scripture says in the passage about Elijah? How he pleads with God against Israel."

Now, truth be told, some of you don't know the story of Elijah. Elijah was a prophet who stood against Ahab and his wicked wife Jezebel. And he said there'll be no rain for three and a half years, and there wasn't rain for three and a half years. And Jezebel and Ahab hated Elijah for that, as did all the prophets of Baal. Finally there was a showdown. And they built this huge altar and the prophets of Baal said that they would prove that their God was the real God, but he wasn't. They couldn't get him to answer and they couldn't get him to respond. And Elijah goes, "He may be asleep, yell louder."