Romans 11:1-6

The Remnant of Israel
1 I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. 2 God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don't you know what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel: 3 "Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me" [a]? 4 And what was God's answer to him? "I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal." [b] 5 So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. 6 And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.


Dig Deeper
As a high school teacher in the inner city, I daily dealt with students who felt that they were stuck in their circumstances. They were born into poor families in poor neighborhoods and they often felt that it was their fate in life to remain poor, or as they put it, to remain “stuck in the hood.” Beyond that, many of the young men felt that they had no choice but to be enslaved to the gang violence into which they were born. They believed that there was no escape and that it was likely their fate to die young. They just didn’t see a way out. They could see no light at the end of the tunnel. There is nothing quite as hopeless as feeling like there are no other options and that you are stuck where you’re at. In fact, I don’t think I could have continued to go to work each day if I had believed that but I knew something that perhaps they didn’t. I knew people who had grown up in the same environment of poverty, violence, and crime, and I knew that they had and had made it out. My own wife had grown up under such circumstances but was hardly enslaved by them. She fought her way through incredibly difficult circumstances and worked her way through college. There were also students from the very school that I was teaching at that had worked hard and gone to college and become quite successful. If anyone was tempted to say that the situation was hopeless and there were no options, these people stood as as important reminders and signs that the situation was not hopeless. Some people had made it out of those circumstances. It was indeed possible to make it out so why couldn’t they?

The obvious question following the realization that ethnic Israel has continued in their obstinacy and rebellion by rejecting the salvation found in the Messiah is the one that Paul asks as this passage begins. Has God left Israel? Were the Gentile Christians, who were apparently urging that taking the gospel to the Jewish people was no longer a valid mission, correct? It may have seemed quite hopeless for Paul as he looked and realized that the influx of Jews into the kingdom of God through the Messiah was not happening in the numbers that he had so desperately hoped for. He has already, however, argued that this by no means meant that the gospel was defect or lacked power. God had promised all along that this would happen. But, the ray of hope, is that God promised a remnant. Some would make it. Some would come to Christ. And Paul, himself, was evidence of that fact. Paul was a shining example for all, that Jews could still come to the gospel. It wasn’t a hopeless endeavor.

As we have already stated, it seems apparent that at least some Gentiles in the Roman church were pushing for the idea that God had rejected the Jewish people and that Christianity was strictly a Gentile religion now. That viewpoint was probably exacerbated by the expulsion of Jews from Rome and their five-year absence in the church. But was the fact that a majority of Jews were rejecting the idea of the Messiah’s kingdom, despite the fact that the first Christians were almost exclusively Jewish, a clear indication that God had completely rejected his people? “By no means,” says Paul emphatically. Paul’s first argument against that viewpoint is that he was not one of the disciples during Jesus’ lifetime. He was a skeptic and a persecutor of the church. He was a zealous Israelite. He was of the seed (rather than the TNIV’s “descendant”) of Abraham. Paul’s existence as a Jewish Christian is evidence in the flesh that God has not completely turned away Israel from the possibility of salvation.

His second line of reasoning against the thought of God completely rejecting Israel comes from Scripture. Paul says the Lord “did not reject his people,” using language from Psalm 94:14, and 1 Samuel 12:22. Israel were the people that God foreknew. They were the elect, the ones through whom God would bless the world. It is here that we must keep Paul’s point from chapter 9 in mind. God promised to bless the world through the one family, yes. Those promises were given to Israel, Abraham’s descendants, yes. But part of that promise, as Paul has already shown, was that the one family would include people from all nations. Thus, it is vital to follow Paul’s train of thought. Just as the promise from the very beginning was passed to some of Abraham’s descendants and not others based on God’s grace and mercy, because none of them deserved the promise in and of themselves, so now the promise has rightfully been passed to the Messiah. God has not rejected Israel. He has merely redefined it around the Messiah. It was always God’s plan to have a Christ-shaped people and now that time had arrived. Paul will not abide the charge that God has completely abandoned his promises to Israel and started over. The people in the Messiah are Israel and it is just as available to an ethnic Jew as to anyone else in the world. God had indeed chosen Israel and the Messiah-shaped Israel would continue to be his people but that does not guarantee the salvation of every single ethnic Israelite nor does it signal their complete rejection.

Paul’s third argument in showing that God has not now shut out ethnic Israel from the Messiah’s Israel is to turn again to Scripture and show that God always promised to have a remnant. Once again, the gospel, rather than showing God to be unfaithful to his covenant promises, shows that God has truly kept every bit of his word. If the Jews are to truly hold to God’s word, then they must accept the Messiah as Paul did.

It seems that Paul held a special affinity for Elijah and can certainly identify with his feelings as Paul alludes to the time just after Elijah’s incredible victory of the prophets of Ba’al. But then he suddenly found himself on the run and feeling very much like he was by himself. Perhaps Paul is hinting that he, at some point, had struggled with similar feelings. He had experienced the thrill of spreading the gospel around the Roman world but at the same time, began to feel the pressing grief of seeing his kinsmen turn away from the Messiah and started to wonder if he was all alone. But God had buoyed Elijah and declared to him that he had reserved for himself “seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Ba’al.” God had reserved a remnant that had remained faithful to him. Just as Elijah had seen God’s grace in the choosing of a small remnant, and Israel would send a remnant back to Jerusalem following their exile, so once again God had preserved a remnant.

If we are going to fully understand what Paul says in verses 5-6 it helps to understand a bit of the circumstances in which Paul was writing. There were Jewish groups, among them the Qumran group that was responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, at the time of Paul that believed, like Paul, that God would create a new remnant that would be faithful to him. They each believed that they were the small group, the remnant, that would truly keep the law. The Qumran community separated themselves, in large part, from the rest of the culture and believed that they would be the fulfillment of God’s remnant as the ones that clung tightly to the works of the law and to their privilege as the true descendants of Abraham. They were the ones that would be true when all others had fallen away from following God’s law. They would find their status as the remnant of grace through the works of the law after all, they believed.

Paul agrees that there is indeed a remnant but they are part of the elect by the grace and initiation of God through the life of Christ. This remnant would be Christ-shaped not law-shaped. It would be by grace not through the works of the law. If there really was a possibility that after all, a group would be God’s remnant through keeping the law, then Paul’s entire argument that God’s people were not defined by the law but by faith and the grace of God would completely fall apart. Just as he did in the time of Elijah, God has found a way to stay completely faithful to his word and to still keep a remnant through his unmerited favor alone. There was a remnant of Jews that had been preserved by God but they were Jewish Christians like Paul who had been called by God’s grace through the gospel into the people of the Messiah. If Paul and others had been found as a part of this remnant, looking ahead to Paul’s argument in the rest of the chapter, then there is nothing stopping other Jews from joining them.

Perhaps it is worth a moment of reflection for Christians today to marvel at how Paul took very difficult problems of his day and constantly filtered them through the lens of the Scriptures and the enveloping truth of God’s grace in the Messiah. It is up to us to solve some of our most difficult issues in the same way.


Devotional Thought
Have you ever thought about your own church as being part of God’s Messiah-shaped people? 1 Corinthians 12 speaks of being baptized into the body of Christ. How does it change our mentality to realize that we are part of a people, a family, rather than our salvation being an individual thing?