And So All Israel Will Be Saved

1. What does 'all' mean? It doesn't always literally mean all - not in the Prophets; not in the gospels; nor in the Epistles

2. What does 'Israel' mean. Even elsewhere within Romans itself, Paul discusses the topic in a special way 

3. Paul said "...and 'so' (not, and 'then') all Israel will be saved..." Manner/not sequence

4. And Paul immediately proceeded to quote a couple of verses from the Prophets which, if they hadn't begun to be fulfilled already - if they were only about a time still-future - then no-one yet was saved!

5. Paul was likely therefore not forecasting a future dispensation, but explaining a reality that was intrinsic to the gospel-scheme itself

6. That is, he was explaining something that was already a reality about the gospel, and already seeing its outworking in the first-century AD, something pertinent to the congregation at Rome 

7. So, what was the pertinent issue? In most cities, Paul had to deal with Judaizers. He dealt with them in his Epistle to the Romans too. But the city of Rome was unique in that Paul also wanted to nip in the bud an opposite problem: tinges of antisemitism. (Remember, this is the city from where Claudius had previously expelled all Jews.) 

8. So Paul's objective in this section - and the immediate context in Romans also shows this - was to correct any misconception among the congregation at Rome that God may have been finished with saving Jewish people and that the mission may as well only be to Gentiles from now on. 

If Paul's answer meant what the futurist Dispensationalist assert it means, then rather than proving that God was still just as much into saving Jews as ever, it would instead have confirmed the misconception that the gospel-program wasn't really so much for Jews anymore at least not for now anyway

9. And all of this built on his earlier explanation that God's promise to Israel hadn't failed, because the remnant had obtained it

10. Besides, many passages in the Prophets which futurist Dispensationalists take to be about Israel's grandiose future, didn't quite describe nationwide salvation - rather, they mentioned details like only a third of the population surviving; and anyone claiming to be a prophet being killed by his own family

11. John the Baptist; like Malachi before him; and our Lord Jesus Himself, portrayed a very different picture of Israel in the End Times, and warned that not all Israelis were automatically going to be saved and enter the kingdom

12. It's too late to get saved once Jesus comes. Because salvation is through faith. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Once He's seen, that's no more faith. So once He comes and they see His hands and feet, it will be too late to have a discussion leading to salvation. Even Jesus' parables warned of this. 

13. Getting back to Paul. When he talked about God being able to graft them back in again, he meant it was still possible right there and then for any Jew who turned from unbelief to be saved. God hadn't shut that door to them. Paul (Saul) himself had been an example of that very thing. 

And he said God was provoking Jews to respond, through Gentiles. That was a first-century reality.

And Paul said he himself was active in that task - making much of his ministry to Gentiles, in order to prompt some of his own countrymen to believe. So it was a process that wasn't about the future - it was going on already.

And Paul said this process - of Gentiles and Jews getting saved together at the same time - was to continue until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in. God won't close the door to Jews or to anyone until then.

14. As Jesus said, This gospel of the kingdom would be preached among all nations and then the end will come. He didn't say, And then God will open the door to Jews again to get saved. 

15. And Paul wound it all up exulting in God's goodness and wisdom! He was praising God for what was now possible in the gospel. Not for having closed that door to Israel until the end of the End.

A Beautiful Story

God's plan from the foundation of the world was to save humanity, through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. 

He told His friend Abraham about this plan long ago. A son of Abraham's was going to become heir of the world; and people of all the world would become beneficiaries of His blessing. 

Abraham believed God, and as a result God declared him righteous - before he was circumcised; before Israel was even born.

Later Abraham got circumcised. And God chose one line of Abraham's descendants to be the custodians of the plan. He formed them into a nation, and in the meantime gave them a temporary Law which set them apart from all other nations. 

But the Law couldn't save them, because sin was too strong. The Jews were, after all descendants of fallen Adam, just as Gentiles were. 

In their sinfulness they handed Jesus over to Pilate to be crucified. But in the wisdom of God, Jesus' crucifixion became the means of salvation not only of Jewish people, but of all humanity. 

A new covenant was made in Jesus' precious blood. Eternal life was inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 

News of this good accomplishment was announced first to Jews, since they had been custodians of the plan - and also to Greeks. Many Jews believed, but some were still hard-hearted and were missing out. Then many Gentiles also believed. 

Some Jews said the Gentiles who believed had to become Jews - but the Apostles and elders said no: they were complete in Christ. In the Messiah Jews and Gentiles alike had now been made one new humanity, by faith. This was precisely what Abraham had foreseen! 

Incase any Gentiles, especially in the congregation at Rome, might have mistakenly thought that Jews could no longer get saved - Paul explained that any Jew who turned from unbelief to faith could still get saved. God was even using the fact that Gentiles were experiencing the very plan of salvation which Israel had been custodians of, in order to provoke some of them to that very response. And many who at first disbelieved, did eventually become believers. Saul (Paul) himself was an example of that happening.

That scenario - in which both Gentiles and Jews were continuing to come to the Lord at the same time - had been foreseen by the prophets, and was to continue for as long as the gospel is still being preached among the nations, because God hasn't closed the door to anyone - and then the end will come.

Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life - no one comes to the Father except through Him.

The Real Meaning of Abraham's Promise

I'm still learning what all Abraham's promises meant. But in the process I'm finding it astounding to see the meaning which the New Testament seems to give to Abraham's ancient promises. 

To begin with, I notice that John the Baptist warned the Jews that physical descent from Abraham wasn't going to amount to anything: and that wouldn't mean God's promises failed, because God is able to raise up sons to Abraham from the very stones. That obviously reflected Malachi's warning: that the coming of the Lord wasn't all going to be roses for everyone in Israel.

Then Jesus astoundingly protested that Abraham had rejoiced to see His day, and that he saw it and was glad. So Jesus seems to have understood that Abraham's promise was really ultimately about Him and all that He fulfilled and inaugurated. But the Jewish leaders were missing it.

Paul also understood the promise to have meant that Abraham would be heir, not just of a tract of land in the Middle East - that would be too small - but heir of the world. Now that gives a whole 'nother tinge to its meaning. 

And Paul made a point of observing that the promise was said to be about Abraham's 'seed' singular, not 'seeds' plural - which Paul claimed was Christ. Not necessarily about an entire nationality. Interesting. 

So the promise seems to have been about the fact that Jesus Messiah would inherit people from all over the world. It was ultimately going to be about Jesus, not just about all ethnic Jews; and it was about the world, not just about a tract of land in the Middle East; and really about the 'peoples' of the world, not just the physical lands. 

Paul claimed that all this had been fulfilled by Christ's inheritance in the saints - beginning in Jerusalem, yes - but even broader, among the Gentiles. Paul described this as the real riches of His inheritance. 

That was something he said spiritual enlightenment was required in order to fully grasp. He said that many readers of the Old Testament were reading with veiled eyes, and couldn't see it: but when a person turned to the Lord, the veil would be removed, and he'd see it. 

Paul claimed that the meaning of the promise of Abraham was really that God had preached the gospel in advance to Abraham. Thus the promised 'blessing', Paul explained, was the blessing of receiving the Spirit - the blessing of being justified - by faith - even among the Gentiles. 

Paul even claimed that the fact that only Isaac and not Ishmael had become custodians of the promise, even though Ishmael also was a child of Abraham, meant in principle that the promised blessing was always ultimately going to be received not on the basis of Jewish ethnicity, the people distinguished by Judaism, but by faith - even by Gentiles. Just as Abraham himself also had believed the promise and his faith was counted to him for righteousness before he was circumcised and before there ever was a nation named Israel. 

Paul asserted that the promise was not about the physical city of Jerusalem with her ethnic Jews which had become subject to Rome - but about the heavenly Jerusalem, which Paul said is the mother of us all, not only of ethnic Jews. 

So Paul understood Abraham's promise and blessing as something that was now being received among them, despite much of the physical Israel being in the opposite state.  

The Book of Joshua had said that not one thing which God had promised the children of Israel had failed: all had come to pass. Already. Yet hundreds of years later in the Psalms it was written that a rest still remained for God's people. So the promise was always really going to be about something bigger than Canaan land. And it was going to be for 'God's [true] people'. 

First century Jews were obviously therefore expecting something more too. The radical claim made by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was that it is Jesus who has now brought His people into that true rest, and that it is by faith that they enter it, and warned that even ethnic Jews could miss out if they shrunk back from faith in Jesus. 

He explained that what Abraham had really been looking for all along, was really a city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God. In fact all the forefathers had really been looking for a heavenly country, he said, because God has made for them a city. 

Peter the Apostle also claimed the same thing: that God had now fulfilled the promises which Israel had been custodians of, by Jesus raising Jesus Christ from the dead, and that the inheritance is now reserved for us in heaven. 

The resurrection of the dead had become the hope of Israel, so those who had died would not miss out on the promise. Abraham's bosom was the place where the dead went in waiting for that Day. The claim of the New Testament is that 'resurrection' has now been inaugurated - through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Sin had been dealt with. That's the gospel.

These claims about Israel's promises seem so radical - on first glance I wondered "How did you get that out of Genesis, Paul?!" It's such a radically different reading of the Old Testament to some contemporary popular Dispensational or post second-temple Orthodox-Jewish readings of it. 

The New Testament's claim doesn't seem to me to be that this understanding of the scope and meaning of Abraham's promise was merely 'a' way of understanding it - nor that this was only some temporary, spiritual or allegorical way to apply the promise as if the real physical political ethnic meaning of the promise was yet to come. But this was 'the' meaning it was always going to have. So it's really about Jesus - the gospel.

When all this was written in the New Testament, Israel were in their land - they even had a functioning Temple with sacrificing - yet none of that was seen to be the essence or the apex of the promise. Even non-Christian Jews in the first century AD knew there had to be more to it than that. The claim of the New Testament was that the promise was really all about Jesus, about the gospel, and that the blessing was even being enjoyed among the Gentiles as Abraham had foreseen, while unbelievers, even Jews, could miss out, as all the prophets also had forewarned. 

But God was still saving Jews too - the New Testament was careful to remind Gentile believers, especially in the congregation at Rome. So, this took nothing away from ethnic Israelites.

Coming to Terms with the New Testament

Paul's message was not that Jesus died on the cross merely to take away our guilt before Moses' Law so that we could all then become or carry-on being better Observers of Moses' Law. 

No, Paul's message was that the cross brought Moses' Law to an end! Whether someone had been a circumcised Jew or an uncircumcised gentile was no longer of the essence.

Neither did Paul think that the gospel was merely something 'else' God was temporarily doing - mainly for Gentiles - while we wait for God to resume His real program for Israel at some time in the future.

No, Paul saw the gospel as the very fulfilment - the apex - the inauguration - of everything the Jewish Old Testament Scriptures had been anticipating. The real thing. 

Sooner or later we have to face the magnitude of the claim Paul was really making. 

Once we've grasped and accepted the significance which Paul was claiming in the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus, in relation to Israel's story in the Old Testament, it will banish any thought that believers should now become Observant of modern Judaisms; or that God might have some other means at His disposal of saving modern-Israelis other than through believing the gospel before it's too late.

God's plan - for Israel, for everyone - was always ultimately going to be all about JESUS: and that promise has now come to pass. That message is called the gospel.

So that's what our sole focus should be too - as Paul's was - in order for us to be true to the message the New Testament is telling us. 

Focus only and always on the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus the Messiah - no matter where, no matter when, and no matter whom.