Romans 11:25-32 - God loves His chosen people, the true Israel.

We owe a lot to those who went before us. We owe a lot to the generations who passed on their faith to us. We owe our parents for telling us about the Lord, teaching us about Jesus, dying on the cross, teaching us to pray, teaching us to trust. And our parents owe a lot to their parents, who learned it from their parents, and so it goes. We in this church have a good, healthy sense of history. We have a good sense of gratitude to our ancestors. We know where we’ve come from, and we know that steers us in where we’re going. We owe a lot.

But what ancestors are we talking about? How far back are we thinking? Those who came across the ocean to create a new life? How far back was that? Was it our generation? Our parents? Our grandparents? Further back? Do we think of our ancestors on other continents, 100, 200 years ago? All of them deserve our gratitude. If not for them, we wouldn’t be there. And if not for them, we would know very little about our Lord and Savior, Jesus.

But go further back. Not just to the Netherlands or England or Norway or wherever. Go way, way back. Look at our ancestors. See them dating back 2000 years ago. And now, I’m not just talking about biological ancestors, we’re seeing our spiritual ancestors, those who have held the faith and passed it on so that it could come down through the years to us here and now.

Paul would like us to remember our ancestors, here in Romans 11, and his reminder comes at a good time. We have lots of different opinions about the nation of Israel, and those opinions affect politics. They affect budgets. They affect our sons and daughters who serve in our forces. Some see Israel as God’s people, a nation to be defended at all costs because to defend them is to honor God. Others aren’t so sure. To them, Israel doesn’t always act like God’s people, so why should we defend them. It’s a little confusing, how we see these spiritual ancestors.

But let’s face it. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t know about the Lord. God chose to reveal Himself to the people of Israel. Not the people of Egypt, not the people of Babylon, not the people of China. The people of Israel. It was Abraham that received the first promise of God, to be his God and for his descendents to be God’s people. It was Isaac who continued in that promise. It was Jacob and all of Jacob’s descendents who lived all of these stories, like David and Goliath, Daniel and the lion’s den, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

It was Jesus Himself who was a Jew. He wasn’t European, even though most of our pictures show Him that way. He was an Israelite. He was a Jew. Paul remembers us of this, in verse 25:

It’s too easy to think of Christianity without thinking of the Jews. It’s too easy to forget our debt to the Israelites and to think that we own this. It’s too easy to see Christianity as an American religion. It’s too easy to become conceited.

And Paul tells us, "Don’t forget where this all came from. Don’t forget that out of all the nations in the world, God chose a little speck of a nation, a group of people that didn’t even have a plot of land they could call their own… God chose a nation that could only survive by grace, a nation that would be humble before God, knowing they didn’t deserve it.

So Paul doesn’t want us getting full of ourselves and losing that humility. He brings us back to the beginning, that God’s plan of redemption starts with grace and ends with grace, and don’t try anything other than God’s grace.

In fact, it’s only by God’s grace that anyone not a Jew has come to Jesus. In fact, it’s because Israel had rejected Jesus that Italians and English and Dutch and Norwegian even hear about Jesus. Verse 25:

When the apostles went out into the world, the first place they went to were the synagogues in the various cities, to tell God’s people, the Jews, about God’s plan of salvation. But they didn’t want to hear it. So the apostles came to us, the Gentiles. We heard the good news because Israel rejected the good news.

And so, verse 26:

That’s a huge jump, isn’t it? God came to Israel, Israel rejected God. God came to Gentiles. All Israel is saved. How did that happen? Where did that come from? This is the source of our confusion. All Israel is going to be saved? Every single Jew? This doesn’t seem to fit.

Well, it does if we’re understanding "all Israel" right. If we understand that all Israel is every single Israelite, every single Jew that God has chosen to be His. All of they elect. Verse 28:

God has chosen Israelites to be His. God has chosen Gentiles to be His. God isn’t going to lose any of those He has chosen.

We know this about ourselves. We know this doctrine of irresistible grace, that when God has His eyes set on us, He will save us. Nothing is going to stop Him. We find comfort in this, comfort for ourselves, comfort for our sons, our daughters, our loved ones who have walked away from the church for a while.

But Paul wants us to know this about the people of Israel, too. After all, it was the people of Israel who introduced us to our Lord and Savior, Jesus. Each of the disciples who went out into all the world, making disciples, who made disciples, who made disciples, who taught us… each of those first disciples were Jews, Israelites.

The first ones to hear that someone would come to crush the head of the serpent, were Jews. The first ones to hear those words in Isaiah 7:14:

It was an Israelite, probably David, who first wrote those words, in Psalm 22:1

And it was an Israelite, it was a Jew who quoted those words while He hung there on that cross, His blood pouring our for Gentiles and for Jews. That blood was given for each person, Gentile and Jew, that God has predestined, chosen, elected to be saved. And that blood WILL save them, you can bank on it. It will happen. Verse 29:

This is Paul’s reminder for us, to remember our Israelite, our Jewish roots, and to see the Israelites, the Jews of today in this way. We want them to be saved. We want them to know Jesus. We want Prime Minister Olmert, of Israel, to give his life to Jesus, to lead his country to bow their knee to the King of kings and to recognize that Jesus died to save them. We better want this, because the grace that God shows to the people of Israel is the same grace God shows to us. Verse 31:

If Gentiles became Christians because Jews rejected Jesus, then Jews will become Christians when they see God’s mercy shown to Gentiles. They’ll be jealous. They will see Gentiles, they’ll see us receiving what had been promised to them so long ago. They’ll see us knowing the Messiah, the One they’ve waited so long for. They’ll see Jesus through us, and they’ll know Jesus. This is what we want.

All this then teaches us that the nation of Israel is no more special to God than any other nation. Treating the nation of Israel like’s God’s nation is not based on fact. In fact, when the nation of Israel went looking for protection from another nation, they ended up in big trouble. Back around 500 B.C., the nation of Babylon was breathing down the neck of the Israelites, and they were scared. Now, God told them, "Trust Me. I will take care of you." But instead of trusting in God, they turned to Egypt, making a treaty with them for Egypt to save them. Because of that, the Israelites were exiled for 70 years. Now, Israel looks to the United States for protection, instead of the one true God, who appeared to us in Jesus Christ. We need to be careful we don’t mix bad theology with politics and defy the will of God in the process.

And yet, though the nation of Israel does not have a special standing with God, apart from Jesus, we still have a sense of gratitude. These are our ancestors. This is the nation that gave us the Messiah. And, because of Jesus, we are now the people of Israel, spiritual Israelites. We are family. We are God’s chosen people, those of us who know Jesus and belong to Him. Galatians 3:29 says:

Jesus Christ creates this family. This is the family that Nicholas joins today, through baptism. This is the family that we belong to when we believe in Jesus as Savior. We carry the mark, the mark of our own baptisms, the mark that shows that we belong to this family that stretches all the way back to Abraham, and even further back.

And being part of this family sends us back to the whole story. The story of redemption doesn’t begin with Jesus. It begins in the Hebrew Bible, the history of the Israelites. We’re not just New Testament Christians. Our heritage, our family goes all the way back. The rules of Leviticus are in our family tree. The poetry of the Psalms, that’s part of our tradition. The Hebrew culture is woven into our culture. It helps define us as Christians.

So when we think about our Israelite brothers, we need to see them clearly. We are related. We are family. But only through Jesus. We don’t think more of them than we should, but we don’t think less of them than we should, either. We pray for them. We’re grateful to them. We hope that, more and more, we can be connected to them, through Jesus. The nation of Israel with the spiritual Israel.