Gracious Grafting

Introduction

Romans is a letter that is sometimes fiercely debated because Paul makes statements there that have been interpreted in different ways. The book of Romans touches on issues like Predestination vs. Free Will, the future of national Israel, the work of Spirit, and I’m just scratching the surface here. It is one of the most discussed, debated, and written about books in the New Testament. And for that reason it can feel like a minefield to preach through.

But I do not believe that was Paul’s heart when he penned this letter. I think he had something else in mind. Ironically, Paul did not write this letter to foster more division, but more peace. Peace that arrives not by knowing more, but simply by knowing Jesus. Not by doing more, but simply by trusting Jesus.

Paul is writing this letter to the church in Rome. And among the church, there were two groups of people: Ethnic Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus and claim him as their Messiah, their anointed king (or Lord, as Scott showed us last week); and a collective of Jesus-following, multi-ethnic non-Jews, people belong to different tribes and nations—the Latin term for this is gentilis, which is the term the New Testament texts have come to use.

Jews and Gentiles. The Roman church. A beautifully diverse community of love and grace under the banner of Jesus.

But while each claimed Jesus as Lord, there was a major question that needed to be answered: who are the people of God? What is it that qualifies you to called God’s family?

For the Jews, they claimed this amazing story, from Abraham to Moses to David to the Prophets. YHWH had come to their ancestors and pulled them out of the hustle of human society and made a profound declaration:

I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people. (Lev. 26:12)

YWHW actually makes this statement in various forms throughout the Old Testament, again and again over the course of Israel’s history.

WRAP IT UP

The Context for Today

Paul ends Romans 10 with this collection of Old Testament passages that put the Jewish people on notice. He says, listen, the message of a Messiah, a savior who will come and rescue Israel from their captivity, this message must be proclaimed that the Christ as come, and his name is Jesus. Paul says, the word must go out to them that if they merely confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that he was raised from death, salvation will be theirs.

But to a Jew, that’s far easier said than done.

See, for the Jewish people, there is a spiritual practice that captures everything about their theology and belief. It bookends the life of the faithful Jew. It’s called the Shema, a prayer of declaration that is recited every morning and every evening. The recitation is from perhaps the most important passage in Israel’s Torah, their law book; it comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Deuteronomy 6:4–9 CSB

“Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbolC on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.

The LORD God, he is one. There is one God, and he is YHWH. Confess with your mouths, and believe them in your heart.

For thousands of years, the people of Israel recited this two times a day, when they woke up and when they fell asleep, every single day.

Imagine that is you. Imagine that this passage in Deuteronomy encapsulates the most important doctrine of your faith. You love God because he is this faithful one (YHWH means I AM, I WILL BE), and your love for him, your obedience to him with every part of your being, is your declaration of trust that he will come through for you.

Now imagine that, all of a sudden, you get news that a divinely anointed king has come and was killed and yet somehow rose from death days later. And you are being told that this man they call Jesus is the fullness of YHWH revealed on the earth, the only Son of God. And if you want the salvation you seek, you have to, at least in your mind, alter the words of the Shema from “The Lord is One” to “Jesus is Lord.”

Do you think that would be a simple thing to do? Easy right?

It is that simple statement, that Jesus is Lord, that becomes a stumbling block to Jewish faith. Not only that, but their faithfulness to the law, which to the Jew was their statement of love for their God, the way they loved with their being; now people are saying that this Jesus fulfilled every part of the law, and so your righteousness—which Scott defined last week as to be the way things ought to be—is no longer defined by how well you keep the law, but by how Jesus fulfilled it, and so trusting and following him becomes your new act of obedience.

For many Jews, then and now, that is going too far.

That’s what Paul is getting at here. He says for that reason, God mercy will expand and spread out to others, those who do not share the same history. Grace will come and find those who are not looking for it. God will reveal himself to those who did not know anything about him.

Salvation will come to the Gentiles.

BIG IDEA

The good news of Jesus Christ radically reframes the human story from a pursuit of power to a pursuit of peace.

PRAY

From Work to Grace (Romans 11:1-10)

Has God rejected his people? Me genoito (May it NEVER be)! Think about that statement for a moment. I mentioned this earlier, but our God has a name, and it’s not “God.” It’s YHWH. He says so himself in Exodus 3. YWHW means I WILL BE, meaning he will forever be faithful to his character and nature, which is to be compassionate, gracious, truthful, loving, kind, forgiving, and just. YHWH will never not be these things. It also means that when he makes a promise to his people, he will keep it. So when Paul says “may it never be” that’s like saying a God who rejects his people is 180 degrees in opposite direction of his God, YHWH. It is anti-YHWH to believe that he would simply turn away and reject a people he has made for himself.

The point there that Romans 9-11 has been making for us is that the church today is not a replacement of God’s people. That was one of the great fears of the Jewish Christians living in Rome, and it is one of the tendencies of the modern church today. God never replaced Israel.

But he has expanded Israel. More on that in a moment.

Paul then reminds the Jewish Christians about this story in their past of a prophet named Elijah, who spoke up about following YHWH when it seemed the rest of Israel had traded peace with God for power among people. The royal family had set up alters to a Phonecian god of fertility and rain, named Ba’al (which, curiously, means Lord), and had made this deity the primary god of worship. Elijah speaks up and says that, because you chose obedience to a lesser god, instead of the one True God, instead of fertility and rain, you will experience famine and drought. And that’s exactly what happens. And so of course they try to kill him, because that’s often happens to people who speak hard truths. Elijah is on the run, he’s tired and hungry and scared and wants YHWH to take his life because he feels completely alone. But God speaks to him and says, you are not alone. There is a remnant, a small remainder of my people, who still love me. Keep fighting for them.

That remnant, Paul says, was the people of God. The true Israel. When all the other people took God for granted and turned their back on him, God remained faithful to Israel through small remnant of followers.

And just as it was then, so it would be in Paul’s day. God has never left Israel, because he has by his grace and mercy, preserved a people for his glory.

That’s a churchy thing to say, I know. What I mean be that—actually, what the Bible means by that—is that God’s plan throughout human history has always been to reveal his goodness through people to people. When he gives grace and mercy, he shows that he is gracious and merciful. When he forgives sin, he shows that he is a God who is slow to anger and desires to make peace with those who have turned their backs on him. God has always made it his m.o. to reveal himself—to show his glory—as he works through people.

When the entire world rebelled, God saved humanity through the family of Noah. He called Abram out from among the nations and made him the father of a new people. He preserves Israel in the wilderness after saving them from Egypt because of a few faithful people. Later on when Israel goes off the deep end and is handed over to the empires of man, God preserves a small people during their exile and never leaves them behind. And it is not ever because Israel has earned this right. It is only because God is a gracious God, and through his gracious workings with Israel, he shows to the world just how faithful he can be.

Over and over again, Israel gives in to the pursuit of power. And over and over again, despite stumbling and tripping over themselves, YHWH proves faithful.

Even the faithful struggled. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, the heroes of Israel’s history—all of them doubt that God will keep his promises. And that doubt leads them to take matters into their own hands and make a bigger mess of things. Abraham sleeps with his wife’s servant to fulfill the promise that he will bear a son—that son becomes the father of the Muslim nations today. Moses gets angry with his people and pronounces his own judgment on them, apart from God’s leading. Jacob is a cheat and a liar, David is an adulterer.

It is not because they were so great that God showed them grace. God showed them grace because he is gracious.

Romans 11:6 CSB

Now if by grace, then it is not by works; otherwise grace ceases to be grace.

It got to the point in Israel’s history where the remnant was reduced to a single man. One faithful human, who would walk alone with God and trust him wholly, completely, who would speak only what his father tells him, who would only act as led by his father, who revealed the glory of a faithful and loving God fully and completely.

Jesus became the remnant of faithful humanity. The family tree of true Israel was pruned down to a single shoot. And from that shoot sprouts a renewed people, no longer divided by their heritage, no longer driven by their quest for power or promotion. They do not make make peace with their God by the works of their own hands. It is by grace, and grace alone, that they have been saved and reconciled to their God. And even though there are those who still turn their back on God, the tree continues to spread and grow, to expand beyond the people of Israel to include other nations who through Jesus now encounter the same love and compassion and forgiveness.

What this means for you:

Here’s the point that I want you to see, which I believe is what Paul wants his Jewish brothers to see. Often what looks like despair is actually God working out something amazing. What looks like judgment is actually a greater purpose of mercy. What looks like condemnation may simply be God’s agency working out a way to spread his glory further and farther than we could dream.

The stumbling of the Jews led to the flourishing of the Gentiles. God will always work out his plans through grace-filled, and not pride-filled, followers.

You do not serve a petulant God who demands appeasement through ritual sacrifice. You serve a God who never gives up on his people. Who is always working, even now, to show himself to you. And it is through his gracious activity in your life that you become a beacon of truth and love to your community.

Warning: Do not look at this passage and overlay America here. The nation of the USA is not Israel. What we see today is a nation that was founded on Christian principles, but is not driven by humility and grace, but, like all human nations, by pride and power. The church must resist the urge to carry the banner of America’s glory, and instead proclaim, to any who would hear it, the good news of God’s glory. That we do not ascend to the high places of God, but he descends to us.

From Pride to Humility (Romans 11:11-32)

Now, here’s where things get interesting. By pruning the tree of God’s people down to Jesus, God reframes the people of God of redefines what it means to be the people of God. And in doing so, he shows that our the human quest to be right is not the point.

The people of God are not a separate bunch, there is no Israel Tree and Gentile Tree. There is one tree. One root, many branches. As modern day people, we encounter God, in the person of Jesus Christ, not as a consummation of our theological history, but as an invasion into our godless story; no God, with no hope, and suddenly we encounter a savior who brings hope and graciously adopts us into his new family.

What Paul is saying here is, how incredible would it be for the world if his people, with their millennia old story of a faithful God and messianic hope for redemption and reconciliation, finally lay down their law codes and their personal prides and open their eyes and their ears and receive the good news, that Messiah has come, that his name is Jesus, and that this Jesus is in fact YHWH, in flesh and bone! To finish this story is to acknowledge that the gracious and compassionate God, abounding in truth and faithful love, slow to anger, quick to forgive, who judges the one in order to save the many. We do believe that our God, that this God, would abandon one people for another, just as we trust he will not abandon us. The belief I have that God does not give up on me, that he pursues me, that there is grace and mercy and joy abounding for me, despite my stumblings and missteps—that belief gives me hope for my neighbors, and my students, and the people I see around town, and the friends and family members who struggle and despair. God is still for them, even when it seems the world has left them behind.

So I get what Paul’s about here. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s a conviction in the faithful, good, gracious, mysterious YHWH God that he serves.

Here’s the point of this: Don’t miss the point.

If you think it’s important that Christians dress a certain way when they come to church or speak at church, and you are willing to divide over it, you’ve missed the point. If you want to gossip about other churches or Christians who you think are not up to snuff, you’ve missed the point. If you are attending church or going to Bible study or giving because you think you’ll get more brownie points from God and a bigger mansion in heaven someday, you’ve missed the point.

Eternal life: John 17; Bill St. John: eternal life is knowing him, not heaven. If it is only heaven, it is like taking a candy bar, unwrapping it, and then throwing away the candy bar and keeping the wrapper.

From Man’s (Romans 11:33-36)