“I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience testifies to me through the Holy Spirit—that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, and the promises. The ancestors are theirs, and from them, by physical descent,  came the Christ, who is God over all, praised forever. Amen.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever known someone who had every opportunity in the world, and yet couldn’t manage to accomplish any of the best things they had the potential to do? That’s an experience that ranges from frustrating to maddening. In some particularly egregious circumstances it can be downright depressing. As we begin our look at Romans 9 today, we find Paul starting a new section. The next three chapters of Paul’s letter answer a question that has been nagging at us over the last few verses. What about Israel? Let’s dive in here and see what Paul has to say about God’s plans for Israel in light of the Gospel.

One of the really important things to understand about the New Testament is that it is firmly rooted in the Old. No, I don’t think you understand. There are at least 283 direct, word-for-word quotes. Some suggest that number is 302. When you factor in the indirect references and allusions, the number of contact point surges to more than 1000. Some more generous estimates puts the number up in the range of 4000.

The New Testament contains just under 8000 total verses. In case that math isn’t obvious enough, that means the New Testament authors reference the Old Testament in some form or fashion about every other verse.

So what? The point is that these guys obviously understood there was a very deep connection between what God had done for, in, and through Israel that was consistent with or at least directly informative in terms of giving understanding of what He was doing now in Christ.

I think it’s honestly more than that. When they looked at what we call the Old Testament—they referred to it as merely “the Scriptures”—they saw a clear line connecting what God did then to what God was doing now.

When Jesus was walking on the road to Emmaus with a couple of his disciples after His resurrection, Luke tells us that He showed them from the Scriptures why it was necessary for Him to die and be raised from the dead. The necessity was found in that God had planned it, but also in that the Scriptures proclaimed it and the Scriptures were true and accurate in everything they affirmed, understood properly.

In other words, all these guys need to prove to someone that Jesus was the Messiah and that they should be following Him as Lord was the Old Testament. As long as someone had that, the conclusion was obvious.

But…

The Scriptures were for the Jews. They were given to Israel. Abraham’s children knew them better and in more detail than anyone else in the world. If anyone was in a prime position to be able to understand and accept who Jesus was (and is), it was the Jews. They are the ones God had told about what He was planning to do before anyone else. It was to them that God had first revealed His plans to bless the world through the revelation of Himself. In fact, they were the ones through who He was going to do that revealing. They had received the Law, the means by which someone could attain a right relationship with God before Jesus. They knew where the boundaries of a relationship with God were before anyone else did.

It was to them that God had made incredible promises of blessing and restoration that He intended to keep even after they failed to uphold their side of the covenant He made with them. God had given them the temple, the place where anyone could come and experience His presence in worship. And, above and beyond all of that, they were the people from whom came the Messiah. To put all of that in Paul’s own words: “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, and the promises. The ancestors are theirs, and from them, by physical descent, came the Christ, who is God over all, praised forever. Amen.”

In other words, Israel had literally every opportunity in the world to know God and follow God and be in a right relationship with God through Jesus. When the Gospel had come and was proclaimed, it went to them first. Whenever Paul went into a new city to proclaim the Gospel and plant a church, the first place he went was to the synagogue, where the Jews gathered regularly for worship and to study the law together, and told them first.

And they nonetheless rejected it. Over and over and over again they said, “No thanks.” Actually, they weren’t typically quite so polite as that. The Areopagus pagans were fairly polite in their rejection. The Jewish people Paul encountered tended to be pretty violent about it. They persecuted Paul and his companions. They ran them out of town. They incited the local Gentiles against them. They tried to kill them. A lot.

Far from all of this making Paul angry, though, it simply broke his heart. “I speak the truth in Christ – I am not lying; my conscience testifies to me through the Holy Spirit – that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood.” He was willing, if he could, to give up his own place in God’s kingdom through his relationship with Jesus if it would result in the Jews’ coming to accept Him as Lord en masse.

How could this be? How could it be that the very people to whom God had revealed all these things long before they actually happened reject them when the time finally came for them to come to pass? The tempting answer for the secularist is that none of it was true. I’d rather give time to serious answers than silly ones. If none of it was true, Christianity would have never gotten off the ground in the first place. That kind of a response is the currency of someone grasping at straws to justify a rejection rooted in soil that is emotional or relational, not intellectual. That is, they don’t want it to be true for some reason, and are making up reasons to make their rejection sound like more than that. A few secularists are willing to be honest enough to acknowledge that, but not many.

A fuller answer to that question is what Paul is going to spend the next three chapters exploring. From reading the Gospels, though, we can observe several reasons fairly easily. The Jewish people by the time Jesus arrived had built a whole culture around an understanding of the Law and the covenant that wasn’t consistent with what God had originally intended for them. They had spent centuries picking and choosing which parts of the Scriptures to heed, and which parts to ignore. They cherry picked the parts they liked and used those as the lens through which the parts they didn’t like so much were filtered. This resulted in the parts they didn’t like and didn’t understand so well becoming locked into that misunderstanding rather than following God’s Spirit to greater illumination and a proper understanding. In Christ, God was giving the people a fresh – not to mention correct – lens to better understand and live in light of what He had first revealed to them.

When a whole cultural and religious system is built around a set of ideas, and when that system has several hundreds of years’ worth of history behind it, pivoting to something new isn’t so easy. It’s not so easy even and especially when that new thing is explained well and is clearly the more correct understanding of the mysteries inherent in the old. In our pride and stubbornness, rather than admitting we are wrong, we often double and triple down on our misunderstanding, close our eyes and ears, and pretend we were right all along. Often we’ll add persecuting the person telling us we were wrong to the package as a bonus.

As Paul has long since made clear in this letter, though, the first step toward embracing the Gospel is accepting that we don’t know how to get and stay in a right relationship with God on our own. Someone might argue that the first step is acknowledging there’s a God in the first place, but the existence of God wasn’t something Paul thought could be rationally rejected, so He fairly well skipped over that step. He noted it briefly when he declared God’s existence and nature so obvious from a simple observation of the natural world that no one has any excuse for denying it, but that’s all the time he gave to it.

But, acknowledging we are wrong isn’t something we take to easily. We’re much more comfortable explaining why we’re right. Even if we aren’t. This is the case even when there is a mountain of evidence pointing us in the right direction. Intellectual, cultural, and religious habits (even if those habits happen to be not adopting any religion) are hard to break once they are well ingrained. It usually takes something dramatic happening to us to finally shake us from our hold. Sometimes, though, the fear of being wrong and having to step into the unknown is too great for someone to overcome, and they remain stubbornly stuck in their rejection. Eventually God will deliver to us what we want most even if that’s not Him. That will either be a really good day, or it won’t. The choice is ours.