Romans 11:1-10; Has God Given Up?

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Turn with me this morning.

Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

If you need a Bible, you'll see a black pew Bible in the pew in front of you.

And you can turn to page 963 in the Pew Bible.

If you're visiting with us this morning, uh we are a church that just goes through books of the Bible, and we uh believe the Bible is what we most need.

And we uh look at it every single week and we just work our way through the books.

And this morning we find ourselves in Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

We ended last week at chapter 10 when on a really hard verse: Israel's disobedience, but we learned that God is still holding out his hands, and he's still holding and reaching for his people and waiting for them to turn to him.

This morning we're gonna look at chapter 11 and start chapter 11 and see where Paul takes us next.

So with that in mind, follow along with me as I read the Word of God, Romans 11, 1 through 10.

I ask then, has God rejected his people?

By no means, for I am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.

Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah?

How he appeals to God against Israel?

Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.

But what is God's reply to him?

I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.

So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace, but if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise, grace would no longer be grace.

What then?

Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking.

The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened.

As it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see, and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.

And David says, Let their tables become a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a retribution for them.

Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see and bend their backs forever.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray.

It's a very difficult passage this morning, as well as all of Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

So let's pray and let's ask for the Spirit to help us this morning.

Please bow with me.

Father, please come and help me.

Help this to be clear.

And I pray there's lots here that we don't understand, that it's mysterious, but I pray that you would open our eyes and our ears this morning to what you have made crystal clear in this passage.

I pray that you'd put us on the edge of our seats to hear your word.

We need to hear from you, even this passage that's difficult.

We need it.

And so bring it into every heart you've brought us here.

We need your presence and we need your spirit.

We need your conviction and we need to be led to repentance.

And the only thing that's going to lead us to repentance is the beauty and the grace and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So may we see Him and may we see how amazing your love is for your people.

We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We've covered a lot of ground over the past couple of weeks.

We've been in some pretty difficult passages in Romans 9, 10, and this morning we start 11.

And at the end of 9 and 10, they ended on a pretty painful note, if you've been tuning in.

A people who, God's people who, by every measure, look on the outside when you're reading this, look finished.

It looks over.

And that's why Paul begins exactly where he does in verse one.

Has God rejected his people?

Are they finished?

And if you were sitting in a house church and you were hearing this for the first time, read, Jews and Gentiles alike, sitting in Rome, hearing this, letter that's being read aloud, you would be leaning forward because the answer seems so obvious.

But notice how Paul answers.

He doesn't answer, it's not a shrug.

He doesn't say, Well, it's really complicated, or he doesn't say, Well, we're just gonna have to see how this all turns out.

No.

He gives a flat, immediate, emphatic, by no means.

And he spends the rest of these ten verses proving it.

Mark Twain is famous for saying it ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me.

It's the parts of the Bible that I do understand that bother me.

And that's what I want us to face today, but also in the next few weeks as we deal in Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

The parts that we do understand, I want us to face those head on.

And I want us to be humbled by the mystery, but moved by the clarity.

The question this morning is Paul's question.

Has God rejected his people?

And to answer that question, he points us to three things in this passage.

First, the evidence.

Secondly, grace.

Thirdly, repentance.

Evidence, grace, repentance.

That's where we're headed.

Let's look at those in turn this morning.

First, the evidence.

If you're a serious gardener or know a serious gardener, perhaps you've heard of the scratch test.

A hard freeze comes through the winter and wreaks havoc on your crepe myrtle.

And by February, you genuinely can't tell.

Did this thing make it?

Is this dead or is it just lying dormant?

And so there's a test you can do.

It's the scratch test.

You take your thumbnail and you scratch a little bit of the bark away.

And if it's green underneath, you're good.

It's alive.

You're just waiting.

But if it's brown and dry all the way through, it's gone.

And no amount of spring is going to bring that branch back.

And so from the outside in January, a dead branch and a dormant branch, well, they look exactly the same.

You can't tell which is which by just looking at it.

And I tell you that because that's actually the precise question sitting underneath Romans chapter 11, verse 1.

Romans 11:1

Are God's people dead?

Or are they just lying dormant?

And Paul does not leave us guessing.

He gives the scratch test, so to speak.

And he gives us three reasons, three examples of why Israel, why God's people, why they're not dead, and why they have not been completely and totally rejected.

And the first thing he says, or the first test, he says, look at me.

I'm an Israelite.

I'm descended from Abraham.

I'm a member of the tribe of Benjamin.

And elsewhere in when he gives his resume in Philippians, he says, goes further.

I was circumcised on the eighth day, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless when it comes to the law.

And then he says, by his own admission, and I think this is significant, a persecutor of the church.

Remember his story?

He was there cheering on as Stephen was getting stoned to death.

Paul hated Christians.

He hated the church.

And that last detail matters in Philippians in his resume, because essentially what Paul is doing is saying, look at me.

If God were finished with Israel, then I wouldn't be standing in front of you preaching the gospel.

And then he says, not only look at me, but look at Elijah.

Look at verses 2 and 4, 2 through 4.

God's not rejected his people to whom he foreknew.

Word foreknew there means more than foresight.

In the scriptures, it means for loved.

And so to know someone in the Bible is to love them covenantally, not just be aware of them.

And so what he's saying here, before Israel even existed, God said his love on them.

And it'd be unthinkable for God to finally reject them as a people.

And that's the ground that we on everything that Paul says next.

Elijah, fresh off of this greatest victory over Baal, is now hiding in a cave.

This is these verses here, verses two through four.

And he's telling God, I'm alone.

There's no one else that believes what I believe and loves and serves you.

And these people are seeking my life.

And God corrects him and says, I've kept for myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.

And so he's saying there, Elijah, your math is off.

You're not the only one.

You just don't know what I know, and you can't see what I can see.

And so Paul scratches back the bark.

He does it one more time.

So we've seen himself, Elijah, and now he says, look around.

Look now in the present day, verse 5.

There's a remnant chosen by grace.

What is a remnant?

It's simply the surviving few God preserves out of a larger hole.

And he's not being hypothetical here.

Later in Acts chapter 21, James would tell Paul that there are thousands of Jews who have come to believe.

Acts 21 · chapter mention

So has God rejected his people?

Paul says, by no means.

Look at Elijah, look at me, look at what's happening now.

Remember, we're going after what is clear.

And what is clear in this passage, three witnesses spanning centuries, one verdict, God's covenant promises are still standing.

No matter how things might look from the outside, and no matter how things might look from where we sit.

So what?

We like to ask, so what does this mean for me on a Tuesday at 2 p.m.?

Well, if you're anything like me, I tend to think about God's faithfulness in terms of only what meets the eye.

Only what I can see on the surface, the size of the room, the coldness of a particular heart, or how long someone has been walking away from God.

And from the outside, remember, dead and dormant look exactly the same, and that's the problem.

We don't know.

We're not God.

We can't see what God sees.

We don't know what God is doing and how He's at work, and we don't know what God knows.

What looks finished to us may just be waiting on a spring that we can't see coming at this time.

And so this morning, who's the person, or maybe the whole category of people that you've quit on or given up on, or just written off as dead wood?

Who's the prodigal around you that you stopped praying for by name?

Before you write a branch off for good, remember Paul looked dead by every outside measure, too.

And he wasn't.

God was at work.

And so whether it's a branch that you've given up on or you feel stuck in a cave like you're the only Christian in the world, in your workplace, in your family, in your school, in your dorm room, remember the story's not over.

God's at work, and there is more happening than meets the eye.

Secondly, grace.

Paul points us to grace, the remnant, not only does he say it exists, but now he tells us why the remnant exists, which gives us a second answer to our question this morning.

God hasn't rejected his people.

Why?

Well, because the choice, his choice was never based on them in the first place.

And that's what he's getting at here.

Look at verse 5.

Ends with the phrase, chosen by grace.

And this isn't something new.

It's interesting.

Paul keeps coming back to these same themes.

He's talked about this a lot in Romans, and this isn't something new, but remember, this is exactly how God chose Israel in the first place.

By grace.

Moses, centuries earlier in Deuteronomy chapter 7, says it, I chose Israel not because they were the biggest and the strongest and the most impressive and the most deserving.

Deuteronomy 7 · chapter mention

He actually says the opposite in Deuteronomy chapter 7.

Deuteronomy 7 · chapter mention

It's because they were the weakest.

God said his love on them simply because he loved them, and he was keeping a promise that he had made to their forefathers.

A choice in love made before the foundations of the world.

Grace was never, we often think of grace this way, a New Testament correction to the Old Testament's work system.

Now, it's always been grace.

From beginning to end, that's how God has worked in his people.

That's the way he's always chosen his people.

And then it gets more explicit.

Look at verse 6, he works this out even more.

But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works.

Otherwise, grace would no longer be grace.

Grace has nothing to do with our effort, our record, or our goodness.

But I think it's easy with this verse kind of stuck in the middle, it's easy to miss the context here.

So let me remind you of the context because I think it helps us remember.

He's not, this is not just a side theological point back on grace that he's trying to make.

He's answering the question that his own argument just raised.

Remember point one the remnant exists.

Paul says, look at me, look at Elijah, look around.

And so then the next obvious question, and this is what he's answering, is okay, so if that's true, then what makes someone a part of the remnant?

What separates the 7,000 from everyone else?

And then verses 5 and 6, you see what Paul's doing?

He refuses to let the answer be anything.

Anything about the remnant.

Anything about the 7,000 themselves, their zeal, their discernment, their refusal to bow the knee.

No, Paul is saying the only answer is God's gracious choice alone.

And as I was thinking about this this week, you know, it's remarkable that a remnant, a small remnant, exists at all.

That's the most remarkable thing.

Not that it exists, but that it's even there's anything at all.

Because we have a whole nation that's turned their back on the Messiah, and in the middle of that, God's saying, I still got my people.

I'm still at work.

Robert Cunningham, he's done a few conferences for us.

He leads a ministry in Kentucky called Christ for Kentucky, and part of their work is buying up.

You might know about this, but they buy up medical debt in the same way collectors buy up medical debt, pennies on the dollar, sometimes a hundred dollars of debt for just a dollar.

Except they're not buying it to collect it.

They're actually buying up the debt to cancel it.

And churches give to it and donors give to it, and they fund this effort, and they do a lot of work in eastern Kentucky because the medical debt and the collections run high.

It's one in every three people is dealing with some sort of medical collection or medical debt.

And here's the detail that matters for us this morning.

The donors do not get to pick who's worth forgiving.

Okay, so they're not sorting by who's tried the hardest to pay or who's really trying to work out of it, or I'm really sympathetic to their situation, or this person, I think they really deserve a break.

No, the debt gets paid and bought in bulk before anyone downstream even knows the name.

And then these families get a letter, and the letter goes out from a local church, so they've tied in the local church, and it goes to someone whom they've never met, and someone who these people have never met is paying the bill and saying, in effect, your debt has been paid, your debt has been forgiven, you're no longer under it.

There's no paperwork, there's no loophole, there's no payment plan.

We're gonna lower the payment plan.

No proof that you actually deserve it.

Just one day, this enormous debt existed, and the next day it doesn't.

Gospel.

That is the gospel.

And that is the whole point Paul is trying to make in verse 6.

He does not just tell us that the debt got canceled, he's telling us that we were never chosen because of anything in the file to begin with.

He's saying the remnant doesn't exist because they were better, and because they were more devoted and more careful and somehow were just holding on better than everyone else.

They were chosen by grace.

And if you're in Christ this morning, you've been handed the same letter.

The debt has been paid, not reduced, paid in full.

And it wasn't paid by a donor that you will never meet.

It was paid by the Lord Jesus Christ on a cross, your Savior, who chose before the foundation of the world to set his love on you.

You see, that's what's clear.

That's what's clear in this passage this morning.

Not that your effort doesn't matter at all, but that your effort is not what holds you.

Grace is what holds you.

And if the remnant, if that's true of the remnant in Paul's day, you know what that means?

It's true in this room too this morning.

Faith Presbyterian Church is still here because of God's grace.

Faith Presbyterian Church does not exist because we somehow are the generation that finally got it right and we were finally faithful enough.

No, we exist, the church, because grace is holding us.

Grace is keeping us.

Lastly, repentance.

Paul doesn't stop at grace.

Look at verse 7.

This is when it starts to shift, so hang with me here.

What then?

Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking.

The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened.

And so to answer that question, our question this morning, we have to ask a harder question.

And so let me help us here.

Here's the question.

If the remnant proves that God didn't reject his people, well then what do we do with the rest?

Isn't the hardening just rejection with a different name?

And the answer is not as long as repentance is still on the table.

Not as long as repentance is still an option.

And you see, this is the sobering turn of this passage.

The very remnant we just celebrated turns out to be the minority.

And these are some very difficult verses.

God is described here as actively hardening people.

And so hang with me and let me try to explain it.

I think the order is very, very important for us to be careful about because it changes how we hear this.

And then they were hardened as a consequence.

And this is what theologians call judicial hardening.

A hardening that is itself an act of judgment.

It's not the cause of the unbelief, but it is God's confirmation of a choice already made.

Look at verse 8, confirms it.

God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see.

Then verses 9 and 10, it's actually a quote from Psalm 69.

And here that verse calls it retribution.

It's the legal word, a punishment that fits a specific crime, which means that, again, the order, the crime comes first.

And there's a reason why Paul reaches for Psalm 69 here specifically.

And it's because it was originally about hostility towards God's anointed king, which the early church read as pointing to Christ himself.

And so the resistance hasn't changed, only the target.

Do you see it?

From God's anointed king then to who now?

To King Jesus, the Son of God in the present.

And here's what's easy to miss, and where I want, I think it's worth sitting with as we close this morning.

We need to sit here the longest.

It doesn't take open rebellion in order for the hardening to happen.

That's often the way we think about it.

Just this real defiant open rebellion against God.

My daughter Eva, she is in the last couple of years, she's gone to camp and she's taken pottery.

So she's been into pottery and done it a few times here in Birmingham.

And she's new to the pottery wheel and world.

And she was telling me about it, and she says, you know, in order to, I was asking her about it, and some of you probably know this.

If you've worked with pottery and clay, to keep it workable on the wheel, what needs to happen?

Well, the clay needs to stay wet.

And if you take away the water and do nothing, then the clay completely hardens on its own.

Nobody has to do anything to it.

Be similar, think about drifting in a boat.

If you were in the middle of the water, you didn't anchor, what do you have to do for a boat to drift?

Nothing.

Just sit there.

And I think that's what makes these verses to me very unsettling.

Because the hardening isn't a dramatic act or defiance always.

It's what happens by default when nothing keeps our heart soft.

It's the default, in some ways, of the human heart.

And so, what does it take for you to harden your heart this morning?

Well, just this.

Walk away from the sermon, walk away from the worship, and do nothing.

You see, I don't there's things here we don't know.

Again, we're doing what's clear, what's not clear.

I I don't know, and it's unclear.

I don't know when the hardening happens, I don't know how long it takes, whether you could drift for five years or so, or uh uh a day or a year.

I don't know, you don't know, we don't know.

But here's what's crystal clear, and that's the warning.

What's clear is that if you want your heart to harden towards God, do nothing at all.

Let me be clear here.

This isn't works.

You're saved by grace and kept by grace.

Grace is never just let go and let God.

No, grace moves you to engage in the means of grace that God has given his church and his people in word, prayer, worship, sacrament.

We ignore those and walk away from those and do nothing with those long enough.

That wreaks havoc on your soul, spiritually speaking.

But the welcome is just as clear here as the warning.

And so let's hear the welcome.

And listen, Paul does not use the word repent in these ten verses.

He doesn't have to.

Remember, in the original scriptures, there was no verse divisions.

This was like one long letter.

And so he doesn't have to, because he just ended chapter 10 by saying, God all day long has held out his hands to disobedient and contrary people as if to say, Come to me, repent.

And then in Romans chapter 13, verse 11, I love this.

Romans 13:11

The hour has come for you to wake up from your sleep.

Again, the call.

I don't know where you are this morning, but don't wait.

And friends, this is not just for the people who have never believed.

This is for every single one of us.

Because repentance is not just a door we walk through once and say, repent, believe, I'm good.

No, repentance is the path that a Christian walks every single day.

It's the posture of a soft heart kept soft over and over and over again.

And so my question this morning, and this is one I've started adding into my devotional life, just asking frequently, and I'll ask you this morning, what do you need to repent of?

Where are we repenting?

Is there a relationship that's ruptured, that needs repair, that needs repentance?

Where do we need to repent?

Because it's the repentance in that posture that keeps us in a posture of dependence and softness towards God.

And this word repent, it isn't demand, demand shouted from a distance.

God's always called his people all throughout the Bible to repent, not as a hurdle to clear before he loves them, but as what?

A response.

A response to his grace, the grace that was already reaching from them.

What's different now is that the grace we're responding to isn't a promise like in the Old Testament, it's a person, the person of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.

And Jesus bore the retribution of verse 9 that it was named in verse 9.

The people who had done nothing to deserve the rescue.

And so when Paul says to repent, he's not asking you to prove yourself worthy first.

No, no.

He's saying respond.

Respond in love and grace and mercy that God has shown you.

Call on the name of the Lord, and you will be saved.

See, there's a lot here.

There's going to be a lot here in the weeks to come in Romans chapter 11 that we don't fully understand, but please do not let the mystery keep you from what is clear.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

And what is clear is that if you are in rebellion against God, if your heart is dry, hear the warning.

Yes, but please hear the welcome.

All day long, I hold out my hands.

And so come to Jesus in repentance and faith and be made alive.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your grace that has kept us.

Forgive us for how we've quietly keep trying to pay the debt that you've already paid.

Forgive us for the times that we've let our hearts uh hardened and grow cold because we have neglected you.

Holy Spirit, bring renewal to our souls.

Keep us soft, keep us responsible, uh responsive to your word.

We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.