Jesus and the End-Time

Israel and The End-Time
 The Destiny of Israel

Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written,
The Deliverer will come from Zion,
he will banish ungodliness from Jacob;
and this will be my covenant with them,
when I take away their sins.
As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may receive mercy. For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.
 Romans 11:25-32
Think about this passage as written by a man who is concerned about his relative, and you reduce it to human terms. Paul was a Christian Jew. That separated him from his people, most of whom had not become Christians and some of whom hated him because he had. So behind the complicated theology there was the heartbreak of a man who wanted to share what they had in Christ with those to whom he was closest, the Jews-and had largely failed in his attempt. Of course, Paul loved the Gentiles too-he devoted his life to winning them. But the Jews were his people. Any Christian whose relatives are unconverted understands a little how Paul felt.

It is to the argument in this passage that Paul was leading throughout Romans 9, 10, and 11. In it he encapsulated his hope for the unbelieving Jews. His concern here was not for the remnant, the true Israel; he knew their destiny. As might be expected, the argument here is more ambiguous, more mysterious. Indeed, Paul called it a mystery, and the best definition of mystery as Paul used the word is a matter that can be described in human language but cannot be adequately defined,explained, or analyzed. Any interpreter who wants all biblical matters easy, clear-cut, second-grade level had better stay away from any passage where the word mystery appears. There is this comfort, however; many things that are mysteries to us in the second grade are mysteries no longer by the sixth. So it shall be with this mystery and other biblical mysteries. Just because we cannot explain them now we should not conclude that there is no explanation.

Again, as in his discussion of the remnant, Paul relies on basic theological assumptions. In this case they are that God is in control of things, God keeps his promises, and that God is merciful. By seeing how Paul uses these assumptions we will shed some light on the mystery of the destiny of Israel.

First, God is in control of things. One expression of the sovereignty of God is his ability and willingness to work with whatever he has on hand. In unbelieving Israel he has on hand many hearts who have rejected him in the person of Jesus. But he does not reject the in turn ("If that's all the thanks I'm going to get, I'm through); rather he turns their rejection into blessing for others. "A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in." God turned the energy of the apostles away from the Jews, for the time being, to the more ready hearts of the Gentiles.

What would the blessing have been if Israel had, in a massive way, responded to the Gospel? As C.S. Lewis was fond of pointing out in the Narnia stories, we are never told what would have happened, only what will happen. We already know what did happen: Israel rejected the Gospel, but God used the hardness of their hearts to turn his apostles to the Gentiles. He was the host of the wedding feast declaring that if he could not get the guests he had invited, he would take the guests he could get (Matthew 22:1-10). A contemporary song retells the story:
A certain man held a feast at his fine estate in town,
He laid a festive table, and wore a wedding gown;
He sent invitations to his neighbors far and wide,
But when the meal was ready, each of them replied:
I cannot come.
I cannot come to the banquet, don't trouble me now,
I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow,
I have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum;
Pray have me excused: I cannot come.

The master rose up in anger, called his servants by name,
Said: Go into the town, fetch the blind and the lame,
Fetch the peasant and the pauper, for this I have willed-
My banquet must be crowded, and my table must be filled.1
Paul was even willing to say that the Israelites are the enemies of God for the sake of the Gentiles, for that was the way their enmity was used; but he stopped short of saying that God had hardened their hearts.

And the hardening of their hearts is not permanent or arbitrary. No one is arbitrarily shut out of the kingdom; it is by one's own choice that his heart becomes hardened. Yet, paradoxically, the hardening is a step toward the ultimate salvation of Israel.

Paul said, "So all Israel will be saved." He can hardly mean by this that every single Israelite will be saved, because he already said that won't happen when he quoted Isaiah in chapter 9: "And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, 'Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved; for the lord will execute his sentence upon the earth with rigor and dispatch'" (9:27). "So all Israel will be saved" must mean that Israel has the same opportunity for full and complete salvation as anyone else. As N.W. Lund pointed out, "so" does not mean "then." When Paul wrote "so," said Lund, he was "thinking more about the manner than about the time of their salvation."2 Here I think Paul gasped a sigh of relief for his relatives, his "kinsmen by race" as he calls them in chapter 9. God is in control of the situation; he has not allowed the hardening of Israel to exclude Israel from the opportunity of salvation.3

The guarantees of this is the assumption that God keeps his promises. Israel is, after all the elect nation, "beloved for the sake of their forefathers," and God will keep his promises to them because "the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."

But how God keeps his promises is the point at issue. Many interpreters insist that God must keep his promises to Israel in an exclusivistic sense-to Israel after the flesh, no Gentiles allowed.4 This despite Paul's declaration that the Gentiles will be brought in and despite his analogy of the people of God as a single olive tree to which the Gentile Christians are added by grafting and to which they hold fast by faith.

One of Jesus' parables demonstrates that God is not exclusivistic in keeping his promises, though keep them he surely does. He said, "Many that are first shall be last, and the last first" (Matthew 19:30) and then told this story to illustrate his point. Early one morning a householder hired some day laborers to work in his vineyard and agreed with them at time what their wage would be. Then from time to time through the day he hired other laborers, but did not arrange a set rate with them. Finally, when there was just one hour left to work, he hired still others. When the day ended, he paid everyone the same amount, the amount he had agreed upon with those who worked all day-even though some of the laborers had worked just one hour. Jesus' point was the householder's generosity; he hadn't cheated those who worked all day, because they received exactly what he had promised them. That didn't keep him from sharing the promise with others-indeed, with whomever he wanted.

Jesus did not apply the story especially to Israel and the Gentiles, but his principle surely applies. The destiny of Israel Is salvation. But the Gentiles share the same destiny and on the same basis. They come in, Paul says, and the only thing for them to come in to is their inheritance as members of the people of God. Maybe they labored just one hour, while Israel bore the burden and heat of the day, but that is how God does things. Not every single Israelite will be saved, nor every single Gentile; but God offers salvation to all. And Paul was clearly predicting that the people of Israel will, as a whole, have their share in the mercy of God-i.e., will identify with their remnant. That was at least his hope.

He based his hope on the third assumption-God is merciful. There is no difference between the sins of Jews and the sins of Gentiles and no difference in our salvation. "For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all."

At the beginning of Church history the Jewish Christians wanted to leave the Gentiles out. Then for a long time, a horrible period of anti-Semitism, the Gentiles wanted to leave the Jews out. But God doesn't want to leave anybody out.

Mercy is the greatest mystery. Why should God be merciful? Why should Israel receive salvation when they reject Jesus so persistently? Why also9 should we receive so much that we have not earned? Why indeed should anything wonderful happen, except that God is merciful?

The destiny of Israel is salvation, as is the destiny of all men. But that does not mean that all will be saved. It means that God has shown his mercy in the world, through Christ, and has not planned for any to be lost. "For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:17). Each of us can spurn the mercy of God and remain in our lostness, foregoing the destiny God has laid upon us. But that is our doing, not his. He is merciful to Israel and merciful to us.

1 Miriam Therese Winter, "The Wedding Banquet," Vanguard Music Corporation, 1965.

2 Lund, Israel and the Church, p.125.

3 Lund was so committed to the position that the Church is the successor of "Israel after the flesh" that he refused to concede that Paul was referring to his "kinsmen by race" in Romans 11:26. "That Paul is not using the name Israel for Jews is altogether certain. (Galatians 6:16; 3:7, 29; Romans 2:28, 29; Philippians 3:3)." I am afraid it is not "altogether certain." As willing as Paul is to include the Church within Israel's promises, when he is talking about his relatives he has to call them something if he is going to talk about them at all, and it is awkward to say "Israel-after-the-flesh" every time. Lund does not cite Romans 9:1-4 in support of his argument because that passage won't sustain him; it is the introduction to the very argument of which 11:26 is a part. Ibid., p. 126.

4 Lund's analysis of how God fulfills his promises deserves wider circulation (chiliasm is a technical term denoting what is today more often called pre-millenialism):
God's revelation of himself through the ages is not mechanical but organized. Thereto belongs not only that he speaks Greek to the Greeks and Hebrew to the Hebrews according to both testament's own witness, but also that he speaks "many times and in many ways." That signifies that he speaks to Greeks and Romans in terms from the city, the army, the judicial system and the arena, but that he speaks to the Semites in terms from the desert, the hills and the water wells. This difference is so marked in both testaments that no one who is acquainted with the Bible can avoid making it. All this and much more is meant when it says that God speaks in a human way. Though the human, language in the broadest sense includes not only words and sentences, but the whole realm of ideas in which a man moves. It is possible to speak Swedish to a Swede so that he understands nothing if the language moves far enough from the circle of his usual thoughts. So God, in like manner, must adapt himself to those to whom he speaks. The diving revelation clothes itself in human speech. The teacher reduces himself to the child's viewpoint in order to later be able to lift the child from the first level to the higher. Even when the child finds himself on the lower stage of understanding, the teacher makes it understood, among other things, that what he speaks about is much bigger, even though the child for the time being cannot grasp it and that even to those like the teacher it is something other than the plate or wax model which is at hand (Jeremiah 3:16). One waits, obviously for the child, not that he should insist upon holding fast to the method of watching the many approaches when he finally finds the thing itself. Such is the method God has made use of in history according to the New Testament's setting forth of the Old. The Davidic kingdom and the Levitical priesthood were a similar pictorial material through which God educated the chosen people for their mission in the world. All that God has to communicate to those people must, according to the nature of the thing, fall within the forms within which, for the time, it was confined. This cannot be avoided. But to hold to these forms and seek to determine a future by their guidance, a future of pure perfection by imperfect forms, would be equally as ill-advised as if one would reach a higher understanding of American or English international law through a study of the different clothing paraphernalia, which in drawings adorn Uncle Sam's or John Bull's well-known figures. Therefore we can answer Morgan and through him the whole chiliastic school: "God has both spoken and will even fulfill what he promised. But he will fulfill it in that manner he himself from the beginning had in mind. At the final complete revelation, all the Old Testament forms will relate themselves to it as the wax model to the thing it seeks to illustrate."
When one, therefore reads chiliasm's setting forth of Israel's future and in the program finds again the temple's rebuilding, David's throne re-established, the sacrifices brought forward, etc., then one asks involuntarily from the New Testament's standpoint, "What will this serve?" When God once freed his people from this world's children's learning, will he now bind them in it once again? When he once has spoken to them as adults, will he again begin so speak to them as children? (Hebrews 5:11-14) Will a group of people at the close of this age, really at some time be brought back tot hat point where God once in time began to teach their fathers? This would not be like God, because his children may go from clarity to clarity and not from clarity to darkness.
No Christian who is conscious of what this chiliastc standpoint in fullness implies, can follow along with this way. It also shows up soon that a great many hesitate to go all the way to the end and therefore stop halfway. They accept, to be sure, that Jesus will rule from David's throne in Jerusalem over an earthly kingdom of Jews, but they cannot accept that the temple will be rebuilt and the sacrifices re-instituted. This reasoning, however, will not do. Either chiliasm's principle of interpretation is to be accepted or it must be rejected. It cannot be booth true and false. One must in the interest of truth be consistent; either one accepts chiliasm's principle or one does not. Under the above mentioned reference in Jeremiah 33:14-22 the kingdom and the priesthood are mentioned in two consecutive verses and both are said to be of an eternal sort. One cannot therefore differentiate between them in the interpretation of prophecy. We have already seen that the New Testament treats them both in this manner.
Morgan sees this and views the sacrifices, according to his though, as being offered in the kingdom "to the memory" of Christ's sacrifice. This viewpoint is at least consistent, whatever else on may think of it...
Ibid., pp. 111-113.

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