A Warning To The Gentiles
A WARNING TO THE GENTILES
ROMANS 11:13-16
Were there some in Rome who spoke with contempt of the Jews and who had misconceived their heritage?
Almost abruptly Paul turns to the Gentiles among his hearers. It is possible to feel here the first whiff of antisemitism which has left, in some places, and at certain times, a dark stain on the church. Were there some in Rome who spoke with contempt of the Jews who had so misconceived their heritage and had done their Messiah to death? Paul himself has just spoken with tenderness and love of his erring people. He has just expressed the lively hope that, in the course of history, Jew and Gentile will be seen together in the fold of Christ. Perhaps he turns to the next phase of his argument because he has at times been conscious of a sense of impatience among his Gentile hearers at the “stiff-necked” race (11:13).
Israel’s failure, he points out, has been the Gentiles’ opportunity. Frequently in Paul’s own ministry of the gospel, he had turned to the Gentiles only after the Jews refused to hear him (Acts 13:46-48; 18:6; 28:25-28). And he makes the strange confession that some of the zeal which infused his own ministry was the consciousness that it might “make his fellow Jews jealous” (11:14).
Besides, speaking as a devout Jew, he tells his Gentile hearers to have respect for history. Alluding to the ritual consecration of the dough in the process of bread-making (Numbers 15:17-21), he points out that the race was one of old renown and ancient dealings with God. They were still, for all their individual rebellion, under the glow of God’s past favor. He still remembered the consecration of their beginnings. Or, does the figure imply that the first Christians were Jews, and does Paul suggest that the firstfruits were typical of wider dedication? It is difficult to be dogmatic here in the light of his earlier insistence that the race as a whole had willfully rebelled. But does not the use of such an argument imply that, whatever the constitution of the Christian community in Rome, it was composed of people uncommonly well taught in the Jewish Scriptures?
The last word to the critical Gentiles reinforces this figure by another: what was the Gentile Christian but a twig on a tree whose roots ran deep into Old Testament history?