THE BOOK OF ROMANS CHAPTER 11
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS – DEATH UNTO LIFE

DEATH unto Life is the revelation of the principle of God’s maturing method for His eternal purposes for mankind. The Life of the Messiah Jesus Christ and His soulical death requirement sets forth this principle. It is seen historically that Israel, after having covenanted with God to be His priests in the earth to all Nations, continually resisted that certain selfless death after their justification. They have skirted His soulical requirements by insisting on a useless type of righteousness of their own. That righteousness attained by checking off a performance list of do’s and don’t’s, without allowing God’s heart to touch the core of their being. Walking in their observance of the Law of Moses without the heart of God behind it.  Judgments from God have followed due to their continued stubborn hardness to His methods and plans. This will ultimately be severe enough to cause Israel to come to a reconciliation with their need for a selflessness, realized in soulical death (dying to the desires of the carnal soul). That is to say, a final surrender to their own perpetuating of a religious carnal life, separate and apart from the directives of God, and finally realize the fullness of their Covenant calling. This calling being to be a people of God out from all other peoples as His priests to all the other nations. 

And further, it is to be realized by the Gentiles that if the Messiah and Israel would need to suffer unto this kind of selfless death, so would they have to manifest the same death to self in their lives. Suffering serves the furthering of His purposes for the bringing forth of a new creature from mankind, who have the Glory of God as the purpose of their existence. Not to serve themselves, but to love God with all their hearts, minds and souls, in the willingness and practical application of giving themselves up even unto physical death for others. (That death unto selfishness being what the Book of Romans ultimately has in view; that being displayed in Gentile appreciation and love of their brethren and wayward Israel.) This is the true reflection of God’s manifest manifold wisdom and glory. Those undefeatable traits of acquired character through Gospel Covenant with Christ, being now manifest unto the unseen spirit powers now ruling in this world. It is a true and frightening testimony to their sure demise and future replacement, seen in His purposes that declare the character warrant and necessary to rule in His Kingdom. The mandate has gone forth, and the Severity of God was realized in Israel’s negative response to God’s proclaimed purposes. The question was; will the Church rise up in this selfless, loving faith and yield to suffering in the power of the Spirit in answer to God’s Glory? Or like Israel before them, do they expect on the basis of some pretentious religious skirting, that God will wink at their half-heartedness and declare their works better than stubborn Israel’s before them? Would He establish them without merit to replace those that were to manifest His great Glory and Power as examples of selflessness that deserve to govern over this World in their stead? NO! The New Man can be cut off as well for rejecting the death message, and not qualify to rule and reign as priests either.

Paul was designated the Apostle unto the Gentiles. His purpose being to reveal the mystery of the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom understanding. It was in this revealed understanding that he was first appointed as one to initiate the challenge of God to Israel. Israel being His estranged wife/those now stubborn Jews, to whom He, by first directive, proffered this great inheritance to, yet they persisted in rejecting it. And although the Nation slipped into stone cold hard-heartedness, Paul yet tried to snatch out a few through jealousy. Those who understood his expounding of Scripture to mean that God now was turning to the Gentile, willingly accepted justification in Jesus Christ and the Covenant of the heavenly kingdom inheritance, from which they found themselves cut off. 

We (Gentiles/New Man) are not an end in God’s salvation plan in and of ourselves but a part. And we can also be the means by which He will restore Israel (on the one hand by a few who selflessly give their lives in loving care, and on the other hand by the final judgment of God in the cutting off of His Gentiles’ calling in answer to their Christian pretense and persistence in religious Babylonianism). If we don’t have the correct perspective of the revealed Word, we stand aloof from God’s purposes for our very out-calling. And we will live our lives willy nilly in justification only in the pretentiousness of modern-day, religious, perfunctory service, disguised as God’s Gospel and Covenant following of Jesus Christ. Having a sketchy sentiment for Israel at the very best; as it serves our religious or selfish purposes. But as we approach the Tribulation, God will turn from the Gentiles to bring in the Jews. 

The Mystery of Israel’s blindness comes to light in these three chapters of Romans 9-11, culminating in the 11^th Chapter. The Mystery includes the following: 1) God’s gifts and callings on Israel are to Him irrevocable, 2) the ministry and testimony of the New Man and the fullness of the Gentiles come in, 3) the purposes of God realized through the Body of Christ 4) Israel’s subsequent repentance and great Millennial Passover to the Promised Land. (This Exodus will be so much greater than the first exodus from Egypt that they will no longer even talk about the first. Likely because the persecution and affliction will be exponentially so much worse on the Jews from this end-time Pharaoh/anti-Christ. See Jeremiah 16:14-15… “Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.”)

The proper perception of Israel in the end times is maybe the greatest provision of revelation of God’s Word to the Church of the New Man (yet few comprehend it). It is now the fuse that lights God’s desired state of heart with anticipation; that anticipation which the first century Church had. It is very likely the essence of motivational purpose we find ourselves in need of in this moment of time. Christians have in general long abandoned their first century love and instituted a kind of religious perception of Israel that answers to the lack of anticipation in the spirit of what the last Apostles foresaw and spoke so passionately about. Namely the restitution of all things and Messiah’s refreshing restoration of Israel. (Acts 3) 

For the revelation, zeal, and passion of the first-century church, modern-day Christianity has substituted a niceness, an acceptable churchy attitude that is the evidence of a failed reliance upon the Holy Spirit seen over these centuries since the Apostolic age. They have replaced true discernment for the need for righteousness in the Earth; as seen in the severity of God in His righteous judgments towards Israel. Falsely interpreting then themselves as taking the role of “Israel” in the earth, being the so-called answer to the Gospel call and the world’s needs. Having then a false sense of entitlement, a false view of its own worth, believing the Church has become then the apple of God’s eye, as they promote the ideals of a self-righteous Christianity as the answer to the World’s wickedness. Thinking that they are the ‘kingdom’ of Christ manifesting itself in the betterment of the World. It is nothing but ever-tracing strides of pompous presumption. It is preoccupied with itself reflected in mere benevolent concerns of men, having done nothing to move the world to God at all. Without the tether and central understanding of God’s gifts and calling unto a certain selfless death, the future culminates in the theater of Christian apostasy and the last great apocalypse of Jews (the time of Jacob’s Trouble).

Contract versus Covenant

It should be presented in such a way that it is understood that it is not because of loving tenaciousness that keeps God hanging on to an unfaithful Israel. It is not because He is obligated by His Love for them, and in futile hope that He maintains His Covenant, but that His Covenant with them is on the basis of their forefathers’ merit, and His promises to them (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). He says plain enough in Scripture that this is the case. We should not think that God is otherwise obligated to Israel. That is to say, there is no clause in Covenant that He might not justly abandon them forever. It is mistaken to say that He is obligated to them no matter what they do. As if a ‘Covenant’ has no stipulation for its breaking. For He fulfills His part of the Covenant.

God’s Covenant with Israel is solely in effect because of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Israel’s Covenant with God has been whittled down to any warrant on God’s part to the very minimum of His faithfulness in order that He might yet fulfill His irrevocable promises to Abraham and his seed. He has fairly warned Israel from that very first assembly of theirs after deliverance from Egypt, that the consequences for their failure to keep the Covenant are terrible to say the least. But yet throughout their Covenant-breaking existence, He declared He would not utterly destroy them. And it was not because He had no right under their Covenant with Him, but again because of His unbroken Covenant with Abraham to his flesh or seed which was to be fully fulfilled. 

The realities of that Abrahamic Covenant, that extended to the earthly seed and the earthly promises of the future, based upon God’s and Abraham’s fulfillment, can be extrapolated to that Seed wherein God made another Covenant with His Son and thereby with His seed. And although the calling on the two seeds is different, the principle of the Covenant is the same. In that God is only obligated to the Covenant to extend only as far as the faithfulness of the other party or parties. In the case of Abraham personally and God’s promises to him, it is eternal and irrevocable. And in the Covenant with His faithful Son and the greater and more encompassing promises to Him; it is eternal and irrevocable. But as it relates to their seed’s inheritance promises, it is weighed out according to their faithfulness. In other words, God is not obligated without discrimination to their seeds to grant to them the same privileges that they for faithfulness are warrant to. 

End time Israel’s future is secure for a limited remnant only because of God’s Covenant with Abraham, which laid the foundation for their Covenant. Otherwise God says that He would have already turned them over to destruction as He did Sodom and Gomorrah. Let us not think their present or future mercies are based on sympathy (although certainly God’s sympathies are with them as many Scriptures point out, but the thrust of these few words is to not allow God’s love for Israel to obscure His severe judgment upon them as an unfaithful people. Our celebrations of their current culture, much of which might have been developed after their dispersion and being estranged from God, can diminish the Scriptural understanding of theirs and our warnings of state) or because He is obligated by Covenant with them personally, for that is not the Scriptural reality that is being set forth for us in Romans 9-11. 

Jealousy versus envy…

God is jealous, not envious. He’s jealous for His Wife. The difference will be explained. The idea according to most Christians is that this jealousy which Paul speaks of, as it relates to Israel’s attitude, amounts to our having the blessings along with such a display of God’s love and fullness within the Christian community as expressed towards ourselves as well as the Jewish community that this would make the Jew realize what a wonderful Truth of their Scriptures could have been fulfilled in them. That is to say, our faith in Jesus on display will cause them to realize what we have instead of them; which would make them jealous supposedly. It most certainly will/does have an impact, but to express what we have that they don’t have leads to envy, not jealousy. To make a Jew jealous is to show them that you have something that is rightfully theirs. God’s intent is not to make a Jew envy us (because we have something they don’t), but to make them jealous for what God has discovered unto us Gentiles that was/is rightfully theirs. What is this? It is the heavenly kingdom inheritance associated with their Messiah! If the modern-day Jew could see what the ‘kingdom’ message of Christ was when He presented it to them when He manifest 2000 years ago, immediately a jealous zeal would form within them. What a great shock to see the heavenly calling as opposed to the earthly calling and to realize that they had settled for second best! 

The Jew is the hardest of converts on the earth, but of course it is due to God’s hardening of their hearts and dulling of their hearing to their Scriptures. Their seeing and experiencing our love is of little effect as it does not replace their theological perspective. Would receiving compassion and love from other peoples of other religions make them ‘jealous’ unto other religions, such as those of Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists? No! It’s a revelation from their Scriptures that someone else has what is rightly theirs that would make them jealous. Yes of course it is their Messiah, but nothing would promote jealousy of the New Man in Christ better than a true understanding of what the benefits are which were offered to the Gentiles because Israel had refused them. This being not merely an earthly promise of an inheritance in the restored Land of Israel, but a regality and royal place of co-ruling from the heavenly realm with the Messiah. Along with the spiritual glorification of spirit, soul and body which equates to being “like the Angels”. That is to say, a life of an eternal spiritual kind, free from any kind of need for sustaining it. This being an Authority in the heavenly places that was only experienced before by the Angels of God, as well as a Ministry that transcends the earthly realm into the heavenly realm. 

To see these things in their true light as things first offered to Jews, which only a few privileged Jews had thus far availed themselves of, is to ignite the fire of jealousy that will make them burn in sober contriteness and a passion for inclusion within the Body of the New Man in Christ Jesus. It is the message of the kingdom of heavens that Jesus gave to His disciples which they were to perpetuate among the Jews. It was Christ that called Paul to give the deeper significance of the heavenly kingdom and present it first to the Jews and then later, as they became further hardened, to take it to the Gentiles.

We cannot look at current Israel through the eyes of Sentiment, but through the eyes of rightly divided Scripture. God’s loving chastening of a hardened people is yet to be realized in the land of Israel, that which is fore-proclaimed throughout Scripture. This we say to those who are celebrating the last 70 years of Jews to Israel, thinking it to be in answer to the final day restoration of Israel by God. We, as others before us, are to be accused of anti-Semitism as we point out the error of such thinking. All of that said, the New Man’s destiny and that of Israel are inextricably woven together. One cannot be fulfilled without the other. In fact, it is the basis of the warning in verse 25 where Paul warns the Gentiles of the New Man concerning any sort of replacement theology, such as saying, ‘we are Israel’, or ‘we are the “kingdom” of Christ in the earth’. (“For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.”) The mystery of which he speaks is only gleaned by revelation and that only to those humble and contrite enough to hear and receive it. It is in this proper disposition that the veil is to be taken from our own eyes to see the centrality of the nation and people of restored Israel in the true light of understanding of the mystery which is otherwise lost in our religious deceits.