“Now if some of the branches were broken off,  and you, though a wild olive branch, were grafted in among them and have come to share in the rich root of the cultivated olive tree, do not boast that you are better than those branches. But if you do boast—you do not sustain the root, but the root sustains you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The relationship between Christians and Jews over the last 2,000 years has been complicated. While at least a sizable percentage of evangelical Christians today are very supportive of the nation of Israel, professed followers of Jesus have at other times been the chief persecutors of Jewish people. Such behavior and prejudice finds no support in the Scriptures at all, but Paul seemed to anticipate at least a belittling attitude toward his genetic people on behalf of his spiritual people. Let’s take the next few days and walk through his argument against such thinking starting with the illogical nature of spiritual arrogance.

One of the things that makes Christianity so unique is the way it completely undercuts any legitimate argument for pride of any kind. Material pride? God owns everything and only shares it with you as an act of grace. Physical pride? God made your body and owns it. Spiritual pride? Salvation is by grace alone through faith and works play no part in it. Godly humility is the only rational response to the Gospel. Anything else reveals a near total lack of understanding of its basic arguments and premises.

For Gentile believers in the mid-first century, the temptation toward spiritual pride was significant. The Jews were the people of God. They were the people of promise, the bearers of the law of righteousness, and the ones through whom God was revealing Himself to the world. And yet, in the face of their wholesale rejection of Him and His Messiah, God allowed them to walk and send Paul and others to the Gentiles instead. And the Gentiles, rather than mostly rejecting the Gospel message like the Jews did, were receiving it with gusto.

The temptation here was for them to begin to look down on the Jews both who rejected the Gospel, but also—and more importantly for the present context—those who did not as representatives of a people who had rejected the Gospel and the Messiah in favor of their own (false) way. Using an analogy from raising olive trees that would have likely been very familiar to his audience, Paul was warning his Gentile-background readers against doing that.

“Now if some of the branches were broken off, and you, though a wild olive branch, were grafted in among them and have come to share in the rich root of the cultivated olive tree, do not boast that you are better than those branches.”

There are a couple of things going on here. First, is the acknowledgment that Israel (the genetic people, not the spiritual one) is no longer connected to God. That connection has been severed by their refusal to continue to follow Him in the direction He was going. They got as far as Jesus (although an argument can be made that their departure started well before then), but stumbled over that particular stone, and refused to get back up in spite of every offer God had made to the contrary. None of this, however, was a surprise. As Jesus Himself observed, it had been prophesied hundreds of years before: “Haven’t you read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.'”

So, you have one branch of people that has been broken off, and another that has been grafted on. Israel was broken off by their refusal to accept the Gospel, and the Gentiles were grafted on to the root of God’s Gospel when they began to accept it. This is the second thing. The Gentiles, by their willingness to receive the message of Christ, now had access to the rich history of God’s action on behalf of His people. By being grafted in, they were now connected to the same root that Israel once shared. And notice the passive language Paul uses here. That’s on purpose. God pruned Israel’s branch because of its determined refusal to bear fruit. And God is the one who grafted the Gentiles’ branch onto the root. They did not do that on their own. A branch doesn’t have any power with respect to the root. Its power comes from the root. If it is not connected to the root, it is eventually going to die. The only hope it has is to be grafted back on again. More on that later.

The third thing has us landing on Paul’s point. Look at the beginning of v. 18 again: “Do not boast that you are better than those branches.” Yes, the Gentiles were sharing in the work of God now in ways that most of the Israelites were not, but that didn’t reveal anything special about them. That didn’t make them somehow superior to the Israelites. That made them willing recipients of God’s grace. God did the work. He didn’t have to accept them. He didn’t need the Gentiles to be a part of His root any more than He needed Israel (something He reminded them about more than once in the Old Testament narrative).

If the Gentiles started thinking in this direction, they were going to eventually start thinking they were somehow essential to the Gospel, that it somehow depended on them. It didn’t. “But if you do boast – you do not sustain the root, but the root sustains you.” Rather than flirting with or even outright embracing the delusion that God needed them, they needed to remember that they were the recipients of the mercy of God and to throw themselves fully on that mercy. If they tried to stand on their own two feet, they were going to fall. If they pridefully disconnected themselves from the root, thinking they were enough to sustain themselves as Israel had done, they were going to suffer the same fate as Israel. More on that soon too.

Here’s where this lands for us: We need this same reminder. God doesn’t depend on us. We depend on Him. He is the root, we are the branches. Paul here was borrowing directly from what Jesus said to the disciples and which John recorded in His Gospel. No, John’s Gospel hadn’t been written at this point, but the teaching and the stories would have been shared among the believers. Paul spent time with John more than once, and would have had the opportunity to hear it from him directly.

From John 15, then: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that does not produce fruit he removes, and he prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me. If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers. They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.”

Our only hope for salvation is in Christ Jesus. Our only hope to enter into and remain in a right relationship with God is Christ Jesus. Our only hope to be transformed by God’s goodness so that we make the world around us better rather than worse is Christ Jesus. Are you getting the picture? When Jesus said we can do nothing (effective to advance God’s kingdom) without Him, He meant it. We have to remain in Christ. We have to remain connected to the root. We have to remain gratefully aware that God is our source and not ourselves. To forget that is to set ourselves on a path that leads nowhere good. To remember it and actively lean into this truth is to walk a path that will lead to fruitfulness in our own life, and through our life into the lives of the people around us.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather walk the path that leads to spiritual blessing for me and those around me than one that leads to spiritual death. Remember that our boast is in Christ and Christ alone is an important step in that direction.