TRUE ISRAEL
TRUE ISRAEL
ROMANS 9:6-9
If we are Christ’s, we are also Abraham’s descendants.
Is then God’s plan defeated, if those who, as a people, gave Christ to the world, have rejected him? Not at all. Paul appeals to all the range of history. Embedded in the events of the earliest covenant is a principle of choice. “Abraham’s children,” the race of the promise, were those of one line, that of Isaac. Ishmael was equally a son of Abraham, but had no part in the lineage of the covenant (Genesis 21:12). The real descent was not as man, but as God ordained it (Genesis l8:10-14), with the accompaniment of special overruling, and in a context of miracle.
It was therefore established, even in the time of the patriarch, that a selected line was that which should carry Abraham’s name. It was not merely physical descent that should be the determining factor. The word (9:6) in virtue of which Isaac was born was a word of “promise” (9:8f.). He was “born from above,” and there is no other way of becoming “a child of God” (9:8) except by such a process. Galatians 4:28 calls Christians “children of promise,” like Isaac. It therefore follows that the privilege of such sonship is open to Gentiles as well as to Jews. Notice the bold reasoning by which Paul attaches the right of the Gentile to salvation to the most ancient covenant of the Jew. If we are Christ’s, we are also Abraham’s descendants.
It had, in fact, been implicit in the whole situation. Abraham, on the great historic occasion, had been instructed to observe the sands of the surrounding desert as a picture of his descendants. He had been told to consider the stars of heaven, although it is only comparatively recently that mankind has known that their multitude is comparable with the desert’s sand. Here, in poetic imagery, is the suggestion of a twin posterity: earthly and heavenly.
The climate of thought has changed. We see no difficulty in the theme of Abraham’s descendants. A “chosen people,” in the narrow Jewish sense, would be our stumbling block. Paul’s careful argument demonstrates the different historical situation in which his evangelism was set. Those scholars who maintain that the Roman church to which Paul wrote was synagogue-based, and partially Jewish are probably correct. Paul’s argument would seem logical to them. At least it fell within the pattern of their common inquiry.
And from that thought emerges another. God is ready to meet us on the level of our preoccupations, to move within the framework of our thoughts. And that should be the endeavor of our own evangelism—to meet men and women where they think or understand, however perverse sometimes such habits of thinking may appear to us.