Debates in the world about the nation of Israel have reignited Christians’ debates about the role of the Jewish people in the end-time. A fuller treatment would require examining passages from Deuteronomy to the biblical prophets, as well as hermeneutical discussions that focus on continuity or discontinuity between the OT and NT. As a NT scholar, I will focus here not on the current nation of Israel or on OT passages, but on what Paul expected for the long-range future of his people.
Because Paul accepted the OT as God’s word, he had every reason to expect the restoration of his people already announced in the prophets. He addresses this matter most clearly in Romans 11. In this chapter he is clear that God has not rejected his people (11:1-2). That a remnant remains, as in times of Israel’s wider apostasy in the OT, indicates that he continues to work among his people (11:2-5). That the Jesus-following “remnant” in Paul’s day included a larger proportion of the Jewish people than was the case in most of subsequent history challenges the idea, held by some today, that the “remnant” must always be small. A remnant differs, however, from the prophets’ expectation of Israel as a whole, to which Paul eventually turns (“all Israel,” 11:26; their “fulness,” 11:12).
In God’s plan, Israel’s stumbling was not meant to be terminal, but to allow time before the restoration for gentiles to come to faith (11:11). God planned the conversion of gentiles to Israel’s God, through faith in Jesus, to make Israel jealous (11:11), a point Paul has already argued from Scripture (10:19, citing Deut 32:21). In God’s plan, this way of doing things would also yield greater fruit in the long run: Israel’s failure brings riches for the gentiles, and Israel’s “fullness” (plêrôma) would bring yet greater riches (Rom 11:12). These riches would include the promised end-time resurrection of the righteous (if Paul means 11:15 literally). Like the “fullness” of the gentiles, i.e., the final, full number of gentiles who would be converted (11:25), the “fullness” of Israel entails fulfilling the number of Jewish people who, in God’s plan, will be saved.
Paul explains that, to give all peoples a chance, God hardened Israel to allow the full number of gentiles to come in (11:25). Jesus had promised that the good news about God’s kingdom would be proclaimed among all peoples (Matt 24:14). When that number is fulfilled, though, at a point known only to God, the hardness will be lifted “and in this way all Israel will be saved” (11:26). The Israel that is saved in 11:26 must be the same Israel to which he refers in the immediate context. Even if many Jewish people in Paul’s day rejected gentile followers of Jesus, they remained special to God because of the covenant he made with their ancestors (11:28), because God would not go back on his calling (11:29). Just as in the OT, Israel’s failures at times did not mean that he gave up on them in the long run. Those who today assume that God has rejected his people, or deny that the Jewish people remain beloved to God in a special way, contradict Paul’s express claim in 11:28-29.
In God’s plan, Paul says, Israel’s failure means that gentiles get a turn at salvation (11:25, 30), but God saving gentiles would also mean that Israel would get another turn (11:31), so that all peoples, equally sinful, might equally receive his mercy (11:32). Israel’s salvation, then, is not the subject only of 11:26; it is the subject of the larger context, showing that God has not rejected his people. As in the OT, Jewish individuals who disobey God are broken off from his covenant of salvation and gentiles who cleave to Israel’s king and God may join the covenant (11:17). Nevertheless, as also in the OT, God remains committed to a long-range purpose for the Jewish people as a whole. Paul expects that when God views the fullness of the gentiles as accomplished, he will bring about the fullness of the Jewish people and the final salvation.
But what did Paul mean by “in this way Israel will be saved” (11:26)? What does that have to do with the “fullness of the gentiles”? Paul argues that the conversion of gentiles will make the Jewish people jealous (11:11). As an apostle to gentiles, he regards his ministry as part of this plan (11:13): by reaching gentiles, he hopes to move his people to jealousy and so save some (11:14). How would his ministry to gentiles provoke his people to saving jealousy? The prophets had spoken of an end-time gathering of gentiles to God’s people (e.g., Isa 19:23-25; Zech 2:11). If the Jewish people could see multitudes of gentiles flocking to their God, experiencing salvation through Jesus, they could recognize Jesus as the promised way of deliverance!
But the plan required the Jewish people to be able to see gentiles recognizing Israel’s God. What if, instead of acknowledging the God of Israel and the role of the Jewish people in bringing them the good news (cf. Rom 15:27), gentile believers instead became arrogant against the Jewish people, the natural heirs of the covenant (11:18)? Through most of history, most Christians have neglected Paul’s warning against gentile followers of Jesus looking down on Jewish people who did not follow Jesus (11:18). The tragic history of Christian anti-Judaism, and the idea that gentile Christians have “replaced” Israel, has obscured for many Jewish people the wonder of (now hundreds of millions of) gentile followers of Israel’s God through Jesus.
To truly obey Romans 11, then, gentile Christians must repudiate anti-Judaism, acknowledging our spiritual debt to the Jewish people in giving us Jesus, and through him the true God and his Scriptures. Paul elsewhere, including in Romans, treats gentile followers of Jesus as spiritually children of Abraham (e.g., 4:11-13; cf. 2:28-29; 9:8; Gal 3:29); in Romans 11, we are grafted into the heritage of God’s people. Following the prophets (e.g., Isa 44:3; Ezek 36:24-27; Joel 2:28-29), Paul regarded the reception of the Spirit as the true mark of God’s end-time people, rendering even physical circumcision, and thus ethnic conversion to Jewishness, unnecessary (Gal 3:2-29). Most of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries, by contrast, would have recognized that righteous gentiles could be saved but would not have accepted them as members of God’s people without the physical mark of the covenant. In Paul’s setting, he needed to argue for gentile inclusion, also predicted in the prophets (Rom 16:25-26), more than for his people’s ultimate deliverance. One could say much more about this, but gentile inclusion (today taken for granted by nearly all Christians) is not the topic of this particular post.
What is relevant here is that gentiles being grafted into Israel’s heritage does not mean that God divorced Israel for a completely new entity. Rather, it summons us to recognize the heritage to which we have been converted, to recognize the value of God’s promises and the people who have so far independently preserved them (9:3-5). In this way, Jew and gentile together may ultimately worship God through Jesus the Messiah (15:7-12).
