A. The problem of Israel’s unbelief (9:1–5)
5. Human Unbelief And Divine Grace (9:1–11:36)
A. The problem of Israel’s unbelief (9:1–5)
To many modern readers chapters 9–11 form a parenthesis in the course of Paul’s argument. Had he proceeded straight from 8:39 to 12:1, we should have been conscious of no hiatus in his reasoning. He has just pointed forward to the culmination of God’s purpose of grace, the glory that is to be revealed in the children of God. What more can he say than press home on his readers their responsibility to live in this world as befits heirs of the glory to come? If ‘I appeal to you therefore’ (12:1) came in at this point, we should be quite ready for it.
Not so Paul. The problem with which he proceeds to grapple was one of intense personal concern to him. He gloried in his ministry as apostle to the Gentiles, and rejoiced in their salvation. But his own kith and kin, the Jewish nation, had for the most part failed to accept the salvation proclaimed in the gospel, even though it was presented to them first. What then? Should they simply be written off as ‘unworthy of eternal life’ (Acts 13:46)? No indeed: they were his own people, and he neither would nor could dissociate himself from them. He too, like so many of them, had once opposed the gospel, but he had been arrested by the risen Jesus and set on the Christian way. How he longed that they too might have the scales removed from their eyes! Indeed, if their salvation could be purchased by his own damnation, right readily would he consent, if such a thing were possible, to be ‘anathema from Christ’ for their sakes. The ingathering of the Gentiles, no matter on how extensive a scale, could never compensate for the defection of his nation, which caused him such unceasing mental anguish.
He takes up the subject too, we may infer, because the situation in the Roman church required it. The original believers in Rome appear to have been Jews, but by this time they were becoming outnumbered by Gentiles. There was perhaps a tendency on the part of some of the Gentile Christians to think of their Jewish brethren as poor relations, mercifully rescued from an apostate nation but inhibited by a respect for outmoded customs. The tendency on the part of some at least of the Jewish Christians might be to resent Gentile aspersions on their fellow-Jews and to stress their continued solidarity with them, to a point where they were in danger of underestimating those distinctive features of Christian faith and life which forged a bond between them and their Gentile brethren in the Lord stronger than the bond which bound them to their Jewish brethren in the flesh. (It may well be that we meet a later stage of this tendency in the letter to the Hebrews.) Paul appreciated the wisdom of showing both sides something of the part played by both Jews and Gentiles in the saving purpose of God.
But, above all else, a real problem in theodicy was involved. The present situation called in question the whole exposition of the gospel set out in the foregoing chapters. It was of the essence of Paul’s argument that the gospel which he (and his fellow-apostles) preached was no innovation. It was attested in the Hebrew Scriptures; it was the fulfilment of God’s promise to the patriarchs; it proclaimed that God’s way of righteousness through faith, by which Abraham had been blessed, was still open to all who believed in God as Abraham did. How came it, then, that it was pre-eminently Abraham’s descendants who declined to believe the gospel? Surely, had Paul’s claims been valid, the Jewish people would have been the first to acknowledge them? Such objections were no doubt voiced, and Paul could appreciate their force, although he was well aware of the fallacy which they involved. Yet it was a paradox, not to say a scandal, that the very nation which had been specially prepared by God for this time of fulfilment, the nation which could glory in so many unique privileges of divine grace (including above all the Messianic hope), the nation into which in due course the Messiah had been born, should have failed to recognize him when he came, while men and women of other nations which had never enjoyed such privileges embraced the gospel eagerly the first time they heard it. How could this be harmonized with God’s choice of Israel and his declared purpose of blessing the world through Israel?
In the next three chapters (9–11), then, Paul wrestles with this problem. This was not the first time that he had done so; the contents of these chapters are the fruit of many years of thought and prayer on his part, no doubt. It has indeed been suggested that the three chapters existed already as a separate treatise, but this is doubtful. It seems plain that, as Paul dictates to Tertius, he wrestles with the problem afresh, pressing towards a solution now along this road and now along that, until at last he emerges into the full light of the wisdom of God’s overruling grace. He begins with one statement of God’s ways in election and ends with another, but at the end he sees farther into the character and aim of the divine election than he did at the outset. He begins with the particular problem of Jewish resistance to the gospel, and ends with an unfolding of ‘the divine purpose in history’1 which in some ways goes beyond any comparable passage in the whole Bible.
The first two answers that he gives to the problem are:
i. This is how it has come about in the unchallengeable ordering of God’s sovereign choice (9:6–29).
ii. Human responsibility also comes into the picture: Israel’s resistance to the gospel follows the precedent repeatedly set throughout her history; ‘disobedient and contrary’ she had always been in face of God’s overtures (9:30–10:21).
These are followed by two more, which are fraught with greater promise:
iii. The fact that a ‘remnant’ of Israel has already believed the gospel is the token that, in God’s purpose, Israel as a whole will yet do so (11:1–16).
iv. If Israel’s present rejection of the gospel has been the occasion of so much blessing for the Gentiles, Israel’s future acceptance of the gospel will usher in the day of world-wide regeneration (11:17–32).
1. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit. A further example of the Spirit’s consentient witness with the believer’s spirit (cf. 8:15–16). For ‘conscience’ see note on 2:15 (p. 97).
3. I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ. ‘Accursed and cut off’ renders the single Greek word anathema. Paul’s wish recalls Moses’ prayer after the incident of the golden calf: ‘But now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written’ (Exod. 32:32). But whereas Moses refuses to survive if his people perish, Paul could almost welcome perdition for himself if it meant salvation for Israel. ‘I could wish’ (better, ‘I could pray’, imperfect of euchomai) implies the unexpressed protasis, ‘if such a thing were possible’.
4. To them belong the sonship. The people of Israel are called collectively the ‘son’ of God (Exod. 4:22–23; Hos. 11:1) or individually his ‘sons’ (Hos. 1:10).
The glory. The Shekinah of God, the token of his dwelling among them, e.g. in the Mosaic tabernacle (Exod. 40:34) and in Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11).
The covenants. There is weighty evidence (P46, B, D, etc.) for the singular reading ‘the covenant’, in which case the covenant at Sinai (Exod. 24:8) would be meant. But the plural is probably to be preferred (cf. Eph. 2:12); ‘the covenants’ will then include those made by God with Abraham (Gen. 15:18; 17:4–21), with Israel in the days of Moses (Exod. 24:8; 34:10; Deut. 29:1ff.) and Joshua (Deut. 27:2ff.; Josh. 8:30ff.; 24:25), and with David (2 Sam. 23:5; Ps. 89:28); not to mention the new covenant, promised in the first instance to ‘the house of Israel and the house of Judah’ (Jer. 31:31).
The giving of the law. The Mosaic legislation (Exod. 20:1ff.).
The worship. The prescriptions for the cultus (latreia), especially those in the book of Leviticus, on which the temple ceremonial at Jerusalem was still based when Paul was dictating these words.
And the promises. Including the Messianic promises, God’s ‘steadfast, sure love for David’ (Isa. 55:3; cf. Acts 13:23, 32–34); but a special place must be given to the promise to Abraham and his offspring, which is basic to the receiving of God’s righteousness through faith (4:13–21).
5. To them belong the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons, the primary recipients of the promises just mentioned.
Of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. Compare the affirmation of Christ’s Davidic descent in 1:3, and the later statement that ‘Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs’ (15:8). In him all God’s promises to Israel reach their consummation.
God who is over all be blessed for ever. The relation of these words to those which precede is disputed, RSV takes them as an independent ascription of praise to God, prompted by the mention of God’s crowning his many blessings on Israel by sending them the Messiah (similarly NEB, GNB). They may be taken, on the other hand, as in apposition to ‘the Christ’; so RSV margin: ‘who is God over all, blessed for ever’ (similarly AV, RV, NIV).
The latter construction is more in keeping with the general structure of the sentence (cf. 1:25, where the words ‘who is blessed for ever! Amen’ are not an independent ascription of praise but the integral peroration of the sentence, standing in apposition to ‘the Creator’). It is further supported by the consideration that something is required to balance the phrase ‘according to the flesh’ (as in 1:3–4, where the same phrase is balanced by ‘according to the Spirit of holiness’). Here the Messiah is said, with regard to his human descent, to have come of a long line of Israelite ancestors; but as regards his eternal being, he is ‘God over all, blessed for ever’.
It is true that Paul is not in the habit of calling Christ ‘God’; he reserves for him the title ‘Lord’: ‘for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1 Cor. 8:6). Yet for Paul Christ is the one in whom, through whom and for whom all things were created (Col. 1:16), in whom ‘the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily’ (Col. 2:9). ‘The judgment seat of God’ (14:10) is called in 2 Corinthians 5:10 ‘the judgment seat of Christ’. Moreover, when Paul gives Jesus the title ‘Lord’, he does so because God the Father has bestowed this title on him as ‘the name which is above every name’ (Phil. 2:9). This title ‘Lord’ is given to Jesus by Paul as the equivalent of Yahweh; his application of Isaiah 45:23 (cf. Rom. 14:11) to Jesus in Philippians 2:10–11 indicates that to him the confession ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ is equivalent to ‘Jesus Christ is Yahweh’.
It is, on the other hand, impermissible to charge those who prefer to treat the words as an independent doxology with Christological unorthodoxy. The words can indeed be so treated, and the decision about their construction involves a delicate assessment of the balance of probability this way and that.2
Amen. A proper conclusion to doxological language (cf. 1:25; 11:36; Gal. 1:5; Eph. 3:21; Phil. 4:20; 1 Tim. 1:17; 6:16; 2 Tim. 4:18). In addition, it forms a fitting conclusion here to the very positive catalogue of Israel’s ancestral blessings (including, be it noted, ‘the giving of the law’)—a fuller answer to the question ‘what advantage has the Jew?’ (Rom. 3:1) than it received in its immediate context. Such a positive catalogue (which may also have been called for by the Jewish-Gentile situation in the Roman church) emphasizes the seriousness of the problem which Paul is about to propound.