Romans 11:11-24; Contrary to Nature

There is an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza has a revelation.

His life is a mess.

He's got no job and no money, and he is back living with his parents.

And he's sitting at the diner with Jerry, and it hits him that every single decision that he has made in his life has been wrong.

His whole life is the sum total of following his own instincts, and look at where it has got him.

And it works.

He gets a date with a woman by telling her, My name is George, I'm unemployed, and I live with my parents.

He orders the opposite of his normal lunch.

He confronts George Steinbrenner.

He confronts the loud talkers at the movie theater.

And by the end of the episode, this man who couldn't get anything right has a new girlfriend and a new job with the Yankees, and his life has turned around completely, all because he figured out that his instincts of how things work were completely wrong.

Our natural instinct for how God works is a bit like George Costanza.

He often does the exact opposite of what we would do in his situation.

God does his work in a way that we simply would not have come up with had we been offered the plan.

Think about it this way: if someone gave you the job of building a new religion, how would you plan for that?

Well, you would probably choose strong, successful people.

You would build on your successes, you would try to hide your failures.

You'd reward the people who work the hardest and behave the best.

And you would cut your losses with people who didn't perform.

But that is not how God works.

Rather than our way of thinking, God works through our weakness rather than our strength.

God works through our surrender rather than the power that we offer.

God does not go looking for promising material, raw materials in which he can build something with.

God is not scouring the transfer portal looking for five-star recruits.

But rather, God takes dead things and makes them alive.

If God worked the way that you and I expect him to work, then we could look at the circumstances in someone's life and we could tell what God thought about them.

We could observe the surface of their life, and from that we could conclude what God was doing underneath.

If you are rich and you're beautiful and you're successful, then God must be pleased with you.

But if your life is full of pain and suffering and loss and failure, it must mean that God wants nothing to do with a life like that that He's moved on.

We look at the thing that is thriving and we call it blessed, and we look at the thing that is broken and we assume that it is finished.

And most of the time the truth is running in the exact opposite direction.

So I want us to look at our passage this morning by thinking about how God works in the exact opposite direction of how we think he should work.

In verse 24, that we will read in a little bit, Paul uses the phrase contrary to nature.

And he's making this point that God works in a way that is contrary to our natural way of thinking.

And so let's see that as we read our passage this morning, Romans 11, verses 11 to 24.

Romans 11:11–24

Hear God's word to us today.

So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall?

By no means.

Rather, through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous.

Now, if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean?

Now I'm speaking to you Gentiles, and as much then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, thus to save some of them.

But if their rejection means reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?

If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches.

But if some of the branches were broken off in you, although a wild olive sheet were grafted in among the others, and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree.

Do not be arrogant towards the branches.

If you are, remember, it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.

Then you will say, Branches were broken off, so that I might be grafted in.

That is true.

They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith.

And so do not become proud, but fear.

For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.

Note then the kindness and severity of God, severity towards those who have fallen, but God's kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness.

Otherwise you too will be cut off.

And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.

For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree?

Let's pray.

Father, as we come to your word this morning, we pray that you would surprise us again with how good and gracious and kind that you are.

Show us that your ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts, that your way and purpose is better than ours.

Show us how you work contrary to our nature, how you bring life from death.

And Lord, where we are unsure that we belong to you at all, we pray that you would turn our eyes from ourselves and that you would fix them on our Savior.

And so, Spirit, come and preach the Son to our deaf ears.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus our Savior.

Amen.

Last week in the beginning of Romans 11, we asked the question, Has God rejected his people Israel?

And the answer was, By no means.

There is a remnant chosen by grace.

And this week the question is, what will the people of God look like moving forward?

What does God do with the people who reject him, who turn their backs on him even after his patience with them?

If we were God, we would be tempted to go back to the drawing board.

We would scrap the plan and we would move to plan B, but not God.

And so, how does Paul answer this question?

He gives us three answers that are contrary to our natural way of thinking.

First, God shows us, uh Paul says that God works salvation through rejection.

Secondly, God grafts in branches that don't belong.

And lastly, we see that God is not finished with anyone.

So our first point is that God works salvation through rejection.

Paul begins the passage with a question: Did they stumble in order that they might fall?

Did the people of God reject Jesus and are they down for good?

Is God finished with them?

Have they fallen and they can't get up?

And Paul answers the way he answers every question like this by exclaiming, By no means.

If you were a part of our church about 15 years ago, you remember our former pastor and pastor emeritus, now Alan Carter, preaching through Romans.

And Alan is from Southwest Mississippi, and he would occasionally provide biblical translations for us in his native tongue.

And so if you are from Brookhaven, Mississippi, by no means is translated as hush your mouth.

You can't say that.

Hush your mouth.

I am not done with Israel.

But it's not just that God is not done.

Paul says that he's actually going to use their rejection to bring about salvation for the world.

He says, through their trespass, through their sin, salvation has come to the Gentiles.

This is a story that Paul has lived over and over.

If you read the book of Acts, you see this pattern.

Paul would go to a new town, he would find the local synagogue, and he would go and he would proclaim to the Jewish people who were gathered there that their Messiah had come.

And a few of them would receive it, but most would reject it, and he would take this same gospel, and he would go then to the Gentiles, and they would receive it with joy.

The gospel was rejected by the Jews, it was received by the Gentiles, and city after city after city.

But think about what if it had gone the other way?

What if the synagogues that Paul went to had received the gospel with joyful hearts?

The gospel may have never made it out the door.

Christianity may have just remained a reform movement within Judaism.

And you and I would still be standing on the outside looking in.

The very rejection that looked like God's plan was coming apart was the means that God used to bring the Gentiles in.

God overruled the sin of Israel to bring about the salvation of the world.

On the surface, it looked like the plan was a failure.

He came to his own people, and his own people rejected him, but we don't see the full story.

We don't have all of the information to make that call.

But yet I know that I still do that exact same thing today.

I look at what is in front of me, and I think that I know from my vantage point exactly what God is doing.

But what we see is God is playing chess, and we are down here playing checkers.

John Piper put it like this: every day, in every circumstance, God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you might be aware of three of them.

We look around and we see rejection.

We only see disaster around us.

And at the moment, in the moment, we are certain that we see the entire picture.

All we can see is loss and feel the pain, and it seems obvious that nothing good could possibly come from what is going on.

We are looking at three threads out of 10,000, and we assume we know the whole story.

One thing you often hear people in addiction recovery say is some version of this story.

This addiction was the worst thing that ever happened in my life.

I made a mess of my life.

I hurt a lot of people that I loved, but I thank God for my addiction.

Because without it, I would have never come to the end of myself.

Now, no one on earth could have told that addict when he was at rock bottom that one day that he would praise God for it.

Because in the middle of it, it was only ruin and loss and pain.

But it's only in looking back that he could see that this is the very thing that God used to save him.

The addict had to go all the way down before God raised him up.

And this is true with Israel too.

In verse 15, Paul says, Israel's acceptance will be nothing less than life from the dead.

Resurrection language.

But as you read the Bible, you see that this is not some new way.

This is not some new way that God is working.

This is the only way that God has ever worked with his people.

God lets them all go all the way down to death, and then he raises them up.

This is the pattern that we see.

It is Isaac from a barren womb.

It is a nation that comes out of slavery.

It is life breathed into dead bones.

And ultimately we see it at an empty tomb.

But this is how God works.

This is how God does his work.

He brings life out of death.

But if you go back to verse 11 for a second, because Paul tells us there's actually another wrinkle that he's doing.

There's something else that he's doing in the situation.

He says that salvation came to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous.

God brought the Gentiles in, and a part of that plan that he was doing was that it would make Israel look at these outsiders.

It would make them look, and they would long to be a part of what really belonged to them.

It would stir something in them.

And so God's strategy is for reaching the ones on the outside is to have people on the inside who were so full of grace that the watching world would long for it.

We see this happening, uh, seems to be what happened it's happening in Acts chapter six.

If you remember back at that part of the book of Acts, the the church had a problem that the widows were going uncared for.

And so what they do is uh they appoint seven deacons to make sure that everyone is getting the care they need.

And so Luke drops this line in at the end of the passage, and he says, a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

The priest, why is it that the priest of all people at this point in history would begin to follow Jesus?

One explanation could be because taking care of the poor and the widow, well, that was their job as priest.

God told the priests that there was to be no one needy among them.

And then they look over at this little ragtag nobody movement that no one really thought anything about, and their widows were being fed.

Every person in their in their group was being looked after.

And they saw it and they wanted in.

But notice what it is that they saw.

They did not see something that was big and powerful and impressive.

What they saw that drew them in was feeding the poor and the widows.

What drew them in was not strength and power, it was grace.

It was grace spilling over into the lives of people that the world overlooked.

So I was thinking about this passage.

I wondered, could the watching world say that about our church?

If a person who doesn't believe any of what we believe walked in here on a Sunday morning and watched us for a few hours, is there anything that they would see in us that would provoke them to a kind of holy jealousy that we see?

Is there anything that they would see that would, they would long to be in this kind of community?

Because the contrary to nature way that God works is not by our strength or how impressive we are, but through a people who are so gripped, so captivated by his grace that it spills out to the least and to the lost and to the lonely, in a way that wakes that makes the watching world homesick for something they've never had.

Now, everything that we said thus far has been God's words, uh God working through Israel's rejection.

But in verse 13, Paul stops talking to them and he begins talking to us, and he says, Now I'm speaking to you, Gentiles.

And that brings us to our second point is that God grafts in branches that didn't belong.

And to explain this, uh, Paul uses the image of an olive tree.

And this olive tree in this passage is a picture, you think of it as a picture of the history of uh the people of God throughout all of history.

So the root of this olive tree that Paul is picturing is uh the roots are the covenant promise of God.

This is the promise that God made long ago to Abraham when he said, You I will be your God and you will be my people.

The trunk of this olive tree, Paul pictures as that same promise growing up through the generations to Isaac and to Jacob and throughout the nation's history.

And the branches of this olive tree, these are the people of God joined to the branch, uh joined to the tree by the promise of faith.

And so some of these branches, Paul says as he's looking at this olive tree, some of these branches were broken off.

And so he he, and that's the Jews that rejected Jesus.

And then he turns to us, he turns to Gentiles, he turns to the outsiders, and he says to us, You were the branch that was broken, you were the branch off of a wild tree, and God grafted you in.

It's important that we know a little bit about grafting in order to understand Paul's point.

Grafting is when a farmer takes a branch off of one tree and he puts it onto another tree, and it grows there, and uh, they're able to grow things they wouldn't be able to grow separately, and so it fuses on and the sap begins to run into it.

Now, normally what you would say, according to nature, what a farmer would do was you would graft a strong branch onto a strong tree, and you would get the best of both.

But notice what God does.

God does the opposite of that.

God takes a wild branch, a junk scrub branch, a branch from a tree that grows nothing worth eating, a scrub branch that you would see growing on the side of the interstate.

If the 90s have taught us anything, it's that we don't want no scrubs, right?

But that is exactly what God does.

He grafts the scrub branches onto the good tree.

And Paul knows how backwards this sounds.

And so he says plainly, you were grafted in, you Gentiles were grafted in, contrary to nature.

There's our phrase.

It is a branch that was born on one tree, and then it is grafted onto another.

It has no history or claim to be there.

It ended up someplace that has no business being, drinking sap that it never earned.

And that is a picture of you and me.

We are growing on a tree that we were never born on.

And so, if that is true, how should that change us?

Paul says in verse 18, do not be arrogant towards the branches.

You do not support the root, the root supports you.

The fact underlying everything that Paul is saying here is that we didn't grab on to the branch because we were good enough, because we suddenly decided this was going to be a good idea.

We were grafted in.

The branch doesn't reach out and take hold of the tree.

The branch gets cut, the branch is carried, the branch is placed on the tree.

Everything the branch does is passive.

Everything is done to it.

It's passive the whole way through.

And Paul says, You showed up with nothing, and this tree has been holding you up ever since.

And depending on where you are this morning, you might hear this truth differently.

To the arrogant, this sounds like a rebuke, and frankly, it is.

But to the anxious, I hope this might sound like rescue to you because Paul addresses the anxious, I mean, the arrogant in verse 19.

He says, Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.

That's what he's quoting the Gentiles, thinking they could be saying.

But do you hear the arrogance in that?

Those branches were cut off so that they could so that room could be made for me.

Their loss is proof of my worth.

That I must have been grafted in because there was something really special about me.

You and I were not grafted in because God went searching up and down the interstate, and he picked the most promising dead branches he could find.

And it only takes a moment for God's chosen to begin to act like the choice.

Israel did it.

They started to believe that God picked them because of something in them, something inherent in them.

And Paul looks at a church full of grafted and Gentiles, and he said, Watch out.

Watch out.

That is where you're headed.

It's happening to you as well.

And it's absurd for us to do this to take credit for a decision that was made that we had nothing to do with.

A decision that was made while we were still hanging dead on a scrub tree on the side of the road.

Paul's conclusion is that there is no room for arrogance in the kingdom of God.

The only fitting posture for a grafted end branch is one of humility and thankfulness.

So Paul is speaking here to the proud, but that same truth can also be comforting to those who are doubting.

Think about it this way: if you didn't grab onto the branch, if it was all done to you, then your place on the tree does not depend upon your grip.

And if you're the kind of Christian who lies awake at night wondering if I've held on tightly enough, if my faith has been strong enough, have I done enough?

Hear this.

You were never holding on to the tree.

The tree is holding on to you.

It held you on the days when your faith was strong.

It held you on the days when your faith was nowhere to be seen.

You were not drinking from your own roots this morning.

You are drinking from the well of the promise.

Of God's grace that He made long ago, and that will extend into eternity.

But Paul is not finished with the grafting imagery.

He knows that this same truth can be twisted, and so he says, what he says next is the hardest thing he says in our passage.

Verse 20.

They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith, so do not become proud, but fear.

Verse 22, provided you continue in his kindness, otherwise you too will be cut off.

And that should get our attention.

Because the logic goes, if a branch can be grafted in, certainly a branch can be broken off.

So we want to be careful here because this verse has frightened people that it was never meant to frighten, and it has been shrugged off by people that it was meant to wake up.

Similarly try to say plainly what Paul is not saying here.

He is not saying that you can be truly joined to Christ and then lose him.

This is the same Paul who told us at the end of Romans 8 that there's nothing in the entire creation, the entire universe that can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

But what he is saying in this passage is that we should not be presumptuous just because of our nearness to the tree.

Look who it is that got cut off.

It was the family.

It was those who were on the tree.

And the branch can look for all the world like it belongs and have nothing of life flowing into it.

And the warning is this: don't mistake being near the tree for being alive in the tree.

And so if you're anxious this morning about which kind of branch you are, don't go looking for the answer by staring down at yourself.

A branch doesn't prove it is alive by inspecting itself.

It just keeps drawing from the root.

And so do not look at your grip.

Look at Christ.

Look at the one who is holding you.

Look outside of yourself unto Christ.

Keep coming back to him with empty hands.

A branch that keeps coming back to the root is a branch that is alive.

Which brings us to our third point, and the best news in the entire passage.

And that is that God is not finished with anyone.

Verse 23, and even if they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.

Even them, even the ones who were cut off, even the ones who rejected Jesus to his face, God can put them back on the tree.

And that's Paul's argument in verse 24.

He says, Look, you are a wild branch.

You Gentiles were scrub trees on the side of the road with no claim to any of this, and God grafted you in, contrary to nature.

And if God would do that thing, if God would do the unnatural, the hard thing, the thing that no farmer would ever bother to do, then how much more easily would he be able to graft a natural branch back into its own tree?

So think about this in your life.

The logic goes like this if he's already done the improbable thing by grafting you in, then the hardest case, the hardest person in your life is not too difficult for him.

Who is it in your life that you have written off?

Who is it that you look at their life and their situation and you think there is no way that they could ever change?

You prayed for them for years, and at some point you just stopped praying.

You've made peace with what you think is final, you've done the math and you've closed the file, and what you have concluded is that this is just the way it's going to be.

That I guess this is just who they are now.

If Paul were up here and he were preaching this morning, he would turn to us and he would say, Hush your mouth.

Don't say that.

By no means.

You don't have the information to make that call.

You were looking at three threads out of 10,000.

God knows who his people are.

And you and I simply do not.

And the same God who reached down and grafted you in, you and I, wild branches who never belonged, is more than able to bring them home.

And maybe this morning you were the person that someone has been praying for.

Maybe someone dragged you here this morning against your will, and you've assumed that the last hour was for them and not for you.

You are the branch on the ground.

But the whole point of what we're saying is that the ground is not the end of the story.

That God has the power to graft you back in.

So this is the God that we are dealing with.

Not a God who works in the ways that we would expect, but a God who works through rejection.

A God who grafts branches in, they've never belonged, and a God who refuses to be finished with everyone.

But what does God working contrary to nature mean for us today?

If God works salvation through rejection, then that means that there is no room for us to presume what God is doing.

We have to conclude that we don't know the full story, that we only see a sliver of what God is doing.

And secondly, if God grafts in branches that never belonged, then there is no room for pride in you or me.

And lastly, if God is able to put back the ones who are cut off, then there is no room for despair in us.

Branches came off, branches went on, and not one of us is here because we earned it.

Which means you and I are not the ones who decide who get to be on the tree.

You and I are not the judge of who is too far gone.

We are just branches who are grafted in out of sheer grace, who long to tell branches on the ground that there is still a way back home.

But the way back home is not without a cost.

Because for you and I to be grafted in, there was a branch that had to be cut off.

Because there was one truly righteous branch, the true Israel, the only son who ever really belonged on the tree, and he was cut off for our sake, cut off from the land of the living.

At the cross, the Son of God was broken off so that wild branches with no claim on him could be grafted into the tree of life.

And that is the most contrary to nature thing we could have imagined.

Because that's the thing that none of us would have ever designed.

If we were in charge, we would have saved the beloved sun, and we would have cut off the scrub branches.

But God did the opposite.

You and I were once far off, but we have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

And so let us not dare write anyone off.

Not the person you think is too far gone, not the person you are certain is finished, and certainly not the person in the mirror.

Because God does not work in the ways that we expect.

His ways are not our ways.

God takes dead things, takes dead branches and dead people, and a body dead in a tomb, and he makes them alive.

And so remember, you and I are growing on a tree that we were never born on, put there by grace, by God who works contrary to our nature.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you that you do not work in the ways that we would have left to us.

We would have saved the strong and cut off the weak.

We would write off people that you are not done with.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.