Romans Chapters 9-11, A Few Thoughts Before We Get Back to the Text Next Week!

Tom Wright notices that Romans 9-11 “highlights the peculiar tragedy of the gospel’s revelation of God’s righteousness—namely the ironic failure of Israel to believe in the Messiah. This, too, however, turns out to be held within the strange purposes of God, whereby Israel’s fall, acting out on a grand scale the death of Jesus, is the means by which salvation can extend to the whole world. This cannot mean that Jews themselves are thereby forever debarred from participating in the covenant blessing. Paul himself is a counterexample, and God desires that even now, by recognizing that it is indeed their promised blessings that the Gentiles are enjoying, more of Paul’s fellow Jews will come to share in new covenant membership. Gentile Christians, therefore, are warned severely against anti-Jewish arrogance.” He also writes, “Everything about Romans 9-11 is controversial.”

Chapters 9-11 seem to us modern day Christians to be a parenthesis within Romans, but not for Paul. He is dealing with a real issue in his life and in the life of the Roman church. It is the Jewish conundrum. For the most part, the Jews had failed to accept the salvation proclaimed in the gospel, even though it was presented to them first. What does this mean? Should they be written off as, unworthy of eternal life?  No. They were Paul’s own people. He had been just like them before his encounter on the Damascus Road with Jesus in regard to his rejection of the gospel. He takes up this subject most likely knowing that the situation in Rome required addressing this issue.

The original Roman believers appear to have been Jews, but now the Gentiles are outnumbering them. Paul wants to show them the parts that both Jews and Gentiles play in the saving purposes of God. Paul has argued that the gospel is no invention but is attested to in the Hebrew scriptures. It is the fulfillment of God’s promises to the patriarchs. It proclaimed that God’s way of righteousness through faith, by which Abraham was blessed, was still open to all who believe in God as Abraham did. Yet, why is it the descendants of Abraham decline to believe? That the nation into which the Messiah was born failed to recognize him while men and women of other nations embraced the Jewish Messiah? How could this be harmonious with God’s choice of Israel and his declared purposes?

In 9-11 Paul wrestles with this problem, which is probably the fruit of years of contemplation. He will begin with the problem of Jewish resistance to the gospel and end with an unfolding of the divine purpose of history. The first two answers he gives are: 1) This is how it has come about in the unchallengeable ordering of God’s sovereign choice (9:6-29), and 2) Israel’s resistance follows the precedent repeatedly set in her history of disobedience (9:30-10:21). Two more arguments follow: 3) The fact that a remnant of Jews has already believed the gospel is the token that in God’s purposes Israel as a whole will do so (11:1-16), and 4) If Israel’s  rejection of the gospel has been the occasion of much blessing, Israel’s future acceptance will usher in the day of world-wide-regeneration (11:17-32).

Paul begins this section with grief and sorrow because he sees his fellow Jews rejecting the gospel of their own Messiah. Paul is not writing a post-Enlightenment treatise about how all religions are basically the same; nor is he writing an essay on the modified version of the same project—namely, how the one God has made two equally valid covenants, one with Jews and the other with Christians. Nor is he writing a postmodern tract about how everybody must tell their own story and find their own way. He writes God’s story of working with his chosen people.