The Judgment Of Hardness
THE JUDGMENT OF HARDNESS
ROMANS 11:7-12
The stumbling of the Jews is part of God’s plan to allow salvation to come to the Gentiles.
Paul cannot quench the question which breaks through again. Why, with their many advantages, did Israel react like this? He searches the prophets, and disturbing but illuminating messages come to his mind. Look at Isaiah 6:9f.; 29:10: These were words which haunted the first Jewish Christians, faced with the enormity of their compatriots’ apostasy. All four evangelists quote the words (Matthew 13:14f.; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:40; Acts 28:26f.). Some special coming of God must have caused it. A numbness or a torpor has fallen upon them, not in arbitrary fashion, but as a divine judgment on their rebellion. God has said to them: “Your will be done,” and as Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, so it has tragically come to those blessed and gloriously endowed, but who still persisted in denying the purpose of their calling and willfully continued in their sin.
Psalm 69:22f. is quoted to similar effect. It was another Old Testament passage which came with special force to the early Christians (Psalm 69:21, see Matthew 27:48; Psalm 69:9, see John 2:17; Psalm 69:4, see John 15:25). And, again from the same psalm, Paul uses the imagery of blindness which recurs in 11:10 in our passage.
This, however, is not the end of the argument. “Out of the eater came something to eat,” as Samson’s riddle had it, and out of Israel’s tragedy comes, by God’s transforming strength, the salvation of the Gentiles. Then Paul indulges a great hope. What of the glad day when a “chosen people,” Jews and Gentiles combined, the new Israel, should stand together “in Christ”! He is confident that Israel’s blindness must be a temporary phenomenon. He was witness of the ingathering of the Gentiles. Then, surely, would come the harvest of the Jews.