Romans 9:25-29

25 As he says in Hosea:
"I will call them 'my people' who are not my people;
and I will call her 'my loved one' who is not my loved one," [i]
26 and, "In the very place where it was said to them,
'You are not my people,'
they will be called 'children of the living God.' " [j]
27 Isaiah cries out concerning Israel:
"Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea,
only the remnant will be saved.
28 For the Lord will carry out
his sentence on earth with speed and finality." [k]
29 It is just as Isaiah said previously:
"Unless the Lord Almighty
had left us descendants,
we would have become like Sodom,
we would have been like Gomorrah." [l]


Dig Deeper
My youngest son is a wonderful little boy that my wife and I love very much. With that said, he has an interesting aspect of his character that we’ve really had to work with him on, although I have to admit it can be amusing sometimes. He has an incredible ability to invent his own reality especially when it comes to things that benefit him. We can mention something to him and he will run off with it in his mind and create an entirely fictional conversation and really believe it. The other night, for instance, his friend got home from school and as he was getting off the bus which lets out right in front of our house, our son ran out to see him. The friend told our son that he should come over that night and play. Our son immediately ran in and asked if he could go over there and I said that it probably wouldn’t work tonight but we’d try to find some time another day when he could go over there. He had not really listened to what I had said because about an hour later he came up and asked if he could go across the street now. When I told him “no,” he became quite upset, saying that I had told him he could go over there today. When I reminded him that I hadn’t, he said “yes you did, you promised that I could go there.” The funny thing is that when he does things like this he gets absolutely convinced that he is right and it takes some doing, and a careful word-for-word remembering of the original conversation to persuade him otherwise.

Paul has been attempting to demonstrate that God has been faithful to his word and if people think that God has been anything other than faithful to his promises that the problem is with their understanding not with God’s word. Paul has taken great care in re-telling aspects of Israel’s story to show that God is acting in the right by passing the promises of the covenant family to the Messiah. As we left off in the last passage, he had passed through the Exodus era and arrived at the time of the prophets showing that God has consistently acted in the right. In this passage, he is still in the time of the prophets. Paul will quote twice from Hosea and twice from Isaiah to show that God had promised all along in his word that things would happen exactly as they were now happening in the Messiah. God had declared through the prophets that a time was coming when a radical shift in who the people of God were. For anyone to claim anything different now would be to create their own reality and miss what God had actually said.

During the age of the prophets, YHWH (the personal name of God in the Old Testament) came to a prophet named Hosea and commanded him to take Gomer, a promiscuous woman, as his wife. Through this marriage God would teach Hosea and the nation of Israel the very real lesson of how the people of God had been treating him. They had two children together and God told Hosea to give them names that depicted aspects of God’s relationship with his people. With their third son, who was likely the result of Gomer’s unfaithfulness, God decreed should be named Lo-Ammi which meant “not my people” because, said God, there would be a time when Israel would not be his people. Yet, in both passages in Hosea from which Paul quotes, Hosea 1:10 and 2:23, the prophet spoke of restoration coming following a time of judgment. There would be time, said God, that Israel would not be his people, they would not be his loved one. Yet, after that God would once again call them his people and children of the living God.

There it is, we can almost hear Paul saying directly. The prophets themselves pointed to a time when they would pass through judgment and no longer be the people of God so that they could somehow be brought back in as God’s people, as the true children and full heirs in the covenant family of God. In some sense this happened during the exile of Israel. They were taken out of the promised land and seemed to no longer be the people of God, although they would eventually return. Yet that time, implies Paul, was only a foreshadowing of this ultimate fulfillment of Hosea’s words.

But this is only half of Paul’s argument. If he stopped right there, one might claim that if all Israel was called “not my people” before being restored to the status of being his people that they would all be restored. This is where Paul turns to two quotes from Isaiah. The first comes from Isaiah 10:22-23. Isaiah predicted that Israel would go off into exile (again Paul sees the physical exile and fulfillment of this prophecy as something that pointed to the ultimate spiritual fulfillment that was currently taking place) but would not fully return. They would, just as God had promised Moses in Genesis 22:17, be as numerous as the sand by the sea, but after their exile only a small remnant of ethnic Israel will be saved and return. The physical descendants would perhaps become like the sand on the sea but only a small portion will actually find salvation. When God begins to restore his creation and bring judgment on the things that have marred it, Israel will get no special status. They will be part of the judgment as well but God will make sure that a small remnant is saved.

If he didn’t save a remnant and allow the rest of Israel to remain in judgment then they would have gone the way of complete destruction like Sodom and Gomorrah, says Paul, quoting from Isaiah 1:9. Just like there was a small remnant of Lot and his family that escaped God’s righteous judgment, those happenings looked ahead to God’s patient mercy in allowing a remnant of Jews to come into the Messiah and be members of God’s covenant family, the seed of Abraham. Verse 29 changes the word “seed” to “descendant,” thus it is easier to miss the point. The remnant that is left will truly be part of the seed of Abraham, something that the rest of ethnic Israel would no longer be. The promises of the covenant family have been given to the Messiah and those who did not believe in the life of the Messiah would be rejected from God’s family.

This all adds up to prove that Paul’s gospel is not something new or novel. He is not making up something that God himself hasn’t said through his word. God was doing exactly what he said he would, Israel just had been making up their own reality and not listening to what God had promised. In fact, it was far from the case that the gospel that Paul preached so vehemently was standing in opposition to God’s promises, it was a complete fulfillment of all of God’s promises. If all of ethnic Israel, all Jews, were actually part of God’s eternal family then that would make God a liar that did not keep his promises. It would be quite a mistake to think that God has not been faithful to his promises, quite the opposite actually. Israel has not been listening to what God had been saying all along. That was the problem.

God’s promises of a remnant that would be saved from the people of Israel were coming about as the gospel was preached. The problem that only a minority of Jews were coming to faith in the Messiah was actually the fulfillment of God’s promises rather than evidence that the gospel was weak, ineffective, or not according to God’s promises. In our day, though, it is as important as it was in Paul’s, to understand that the idea of God bringing a remnant of Israel into his people at that time was a fulfillment of God’s word. What we cannot do, as some have made an attempt to do, is to claim that the remnant promises are some sort of ongoing promises. This is often grabbed hold of by divisive individuals who wish to justify their own propensity towards disunity and gather their own followers to come after their own teachings. Certainly the gospel will cause division as Jesus promised (Matt. 10:34-36) but this can hardly be used to constantly split groups of believers and justify one’s actions by claiming that God has always worked through a remnant theology of sorts. To embrace such a ridiculous notion would be to run contrary to everything that Paul has said about the life of the renewed humanity thus far and what he will say about the importance of remaining in unity in chapters 12-15.
Paul has reached the end of the first part of his consideration of the role of Israel in the purposes of God and the formation of his covenant people. He has more to say yet on this topic but to this point Paul has laid the foundation quite masterfully. The way that God is working through the gospel to form his family is rooted in the way that God has worked since the beginning and it is a clear fulfillment of his word. Paul’s point stands strong once again; God is faithful to his promises.


Devotional Thought
Have you ever taken the time to ponder and be amazed by the complexity of God’s plan to bring about a covenant family? Do you take being part of that family for granted or do you attempt to live every moment in gratitude for what God has done?