The gospel of God and the nation of Israel
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📚✭I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience✭ also is bearing witness for me in the Holy Spirit, 2 📚that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart; 3 📚for I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, 4 📚✭who are Israelites. To them belongs the adoption✭, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the promises. 5 📚Theirs are the fathers, and from them, as concerning the body, came Christ, Who is over all, God, forever blessed✭. Amen.God is absolutely sovereign
6 📚✭It is not as though the Word of God had failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel. 7 📚✭Nor are they all the children of Abraham because they are the offspring of Abraham; but, “through Isaac your offspring will be called”. 8 📚That is, those who are the children of the flesh are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. 9 📚For this is the word of promise: “At this time I will come, and Sarah will have a son”.
10 📚✭And not only this, but also when Rebecca had conceived by one man, by our father Isaac 11 📚(the children being not yet born, never having done any good or evil, so that the purpose of God according to his choice might stand, not by works, but by him who calls), 12 📚it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger”. 13 📚✭As it is written, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated”.
14 📚✭📚What, then, shall we say? Is there injustice with God? Absolutely not! 15 📚For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom
I will have compassion”.
16 📚✭So then mercy is not of him who wills it, or of him who runs for it, but of God who shows mercy. 17 📚✭For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very same purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be declared through all the earth”. 18 📚✭Therefore he has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and hardens whom he chooses to harden.
19 📚✭You will, then, say to me, “Why does he still find fault? For who has resisted his will?” 20 📚But who are you, O man, that you reply against God? Shall the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this”? 21 📚Does not the potter have power over the clay, of the same lump✭ to make one vessel for honour, and another for dishonour?
22 📚✭What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23 📚And did so that he might make known the riches of his glory to the vessels of mercy, whom he had already prepared for glory, 24 📚even us, whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles✭? 25 📚✭As he says also in Hosea,
“I will call them my people,
who were not my people;
and call her ‘loved one’
who was not loved”.
26 📚And
it will happen that in the place
where it was said to them,
‘You are not my people’,
there they will be called the children
of the living God.
27 📚Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel:
Though the number of the children of Israel
be like the sand by the sea,
only a remnant will be saved;
28 📚For he will finish the work,
and cut it short in righteousness;
because the Lord will make
a short work on the earth.
29 📚✭And as Isaiah said before,
Unless the LORD of hosts✭ had
left us offspring,
we would have been like Sodom,
and become like Gomorrah.
Israel’s unbelief
30 📚✭What, then, shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not follow after righteousness, have laid hold of righteousness, the very righteousness which is by faith. 31 📚But Israel, who followed after the law of righteousness, has not reached the law of righteousness. 32 📚Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as if it were by the works of the Law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone. 33 📚✭As it is written,
Look, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone
and rock of offense,
and whoever believes in him will not be
put to shame.