The End of the Age-Israel

We are back in our study of the end of the age, and so far, we’ve worked through the major prophecies of Daniel. In Daniel 2, we saw the image of gold, silver, bronze, and iron that represented the empires God would raise up until the coming of the Messiah, who would crush the empires and spread his kingdom into all the world.  In Daniel 7, we found these same four kingdoms represented as four beasts, a lion, bear, leopard, and a final unfathomable beast. That beast was confronted by the Son of Man, who was given the authority of heaven. The Son of Man destroyed the beast and scattered his remains. Last week we covered Daniel 9, where the Angel Gabriel gives Daniel an exact timeline of when God will complete his judgment of Israel. We saw that God had ordained 483 years from the decree to rebuild the temple till the coming of an anointed one that would bring everlasting righteousness, put an end to sacrifice, and judge the nation of Israel. This prediction brings us to 27 AD, the year that Jesus was baptized and began his ministry. In Jesus’s incarnation, he completely fulfilled the predictions of Daniel’s prophecy.

Yet, there is a disturbing question that continues to hang around in all of this. You feel the heart of this question in Daniel’s prayer from 9:19 – “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.” The disturbing question that remains is this: Has God failed to keep his promise to Abraham? If the prediction of Daniel 9:27 is that God will bring desolation upon Israel, destroy Jerusalem and the temple, and put an end to sacrifice and offering, does it mean that his promise to bless Abraham’s offspring is forfeited? The popular view of the End Times, called dispensationalism, answers this by saying that God has not failed to keep his promise to Abraham because he is not done with the nation of Israel. They would argue that Jesus intended to usher in the kingdom of God in his first coming, but he found the Jews to be unwilling. So, he enacted a plan B – the church – which would be a separate covenant people. God would postpone the kingdom until the end of time, when he would bring the Jews back to their homeland, rebuild the temple, and reestablish the sacrificial system, which would continue even through the Millennium as Christ rules over the earth. But, there are all sorts of problems with this explanation. For one, Jesus very clearly says that his kingdom has come. In Luke 11:20, Jesus says, “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” In Mark 9:1, he tells his disciples that some of them will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God. Additionally, there is no sense of a separate covenant for Gentiles. Eph. 2:12-13 says, “Remember that you [Gentiles] were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

So, how are we to answer this question of God’s promise to Israel? Thankfully, Paul deals with this question in Romans 9-11. So, I’d like to answer it by looking at key passages in those chapters. I want to consider these chapters in three points: the Remnant of Grace, the Righteousness of Faith, and the Root of Blessing.

First, consider the Remnant of Grace from Rom. 9:1-13. Let’s read that together. In verses 1-5, you can feel the sorrow of Paul as he mourns the fact that his fellow countrymen, the Jews, have not come to faith in Christ. He is even willing to be accursed for their sake, if they would but follow Jesus. This situation bothers him because the Israelites were well-established by God to receive the Gospel. They had the covenants, the glory of God in the tabernacle and temple, the law, the sacrifices and worship, and all the promises of Abraham. And yet, even with all of that, they had not, as a whole, followed Jesus.

Then, in verse 6, we get the beginning of Paul’s answer to this problem. He says, “It is not as though the Word of God has failed.” He is flatly answering “No” to our question, has God failed? It will take him three chapters to give us the reason why, but one reason why is given in this verse: “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.” We all know the story of Abraham. How many sons did Abraham have? He had two: Ishmael (who was born of a sinful decision made by Abraham and Sarah to have a child by Sarah’s slave, Hagar), and Isaac (the son born to Sarah despite her barrenness and age). In that story, God repeatedly rejects Abraham’s pleas to bless Ishmael. He does this to show that “nothing is impossible for God.” Abraham and Sarah were too old. Sarah was postmenopausal, but none of that was beyond God’s ability to keep his promise. Ishmael was the son of human effort, but Isaac was the son of grace. Paul goes even further with this answer. In verse 10, he moves to the next generation: Isaac and Rebekah. Rebekah conceived twins, and before they were born, God told her that the older would serve the younger. Now, with Ishmael, we could say that God chose Isaac over him because Ishmael was born of sin, but we can’t say that with Rebekah’s children, Esau and Jacob. They are both from Isaac, both conceived at the same time, both from the same womb, and yet, God makes a distinction. Why does he do this? Verse 11 tells us, “Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad – in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls.” God chose Jacob over Esau, not because Jacob was a healthier child (we know that wasn’t the case), and not because Jacob ended up being a good man (we know that didn’t happen), and not because God looked down through the corridors of time and saw that Jacob would have faith. No, he chose him purely based on his grace. And, even though Esau was from the same womb and the same father, he did not receive the promise.

So, here is the first part of Paul’s answer – God has a remnant of grace. Yes, Jesus came to his own people, and they rejected him. Yes, the religious leaders set traps and accused him and condemned him. Yes, the crowds that greeted him with “Hosanna” would end up denying him with shouts of “Crucify him.” But, there was a remnant of grace. His disciples believed. As Jesus told them in John 15:16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.”

This answer begs another question, though. OK, if the children of God are those who are saved by his grace, how do we know who those people are? To answer that, we need to look at Romans 10:1-13. Let’s read that. With this passage we see my second point: The Righteousness of Faith. The trouble with most Paul’s kinsmen is that they failed to understand the purpose of the law. As Paul says in verse 2, “They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” The Jews believed that they could obtain righteousness through strict obedience to the Law, but the law itself was pointing to something greater. For one, the law serves as a mirror to reveal our sinfulness. You cannot keep the law perfectly, and if you cannot keep it perfectly, you have not kept it at all. But, there is another righteousness that is based on faith. So, Paul says, in verse 9, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Faith is the means by which we receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Faith is a recognition that we are worthy of judgment, because we have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. It is also a confession of our dependence on the sacrifice of Christ to cover our sins. And, it is a pledge of devotion to Christ as our king. This faith marks us out as children of the promise.

Because this righteousness is by faith, it means that it is open to everyone. Paul says, in verse 12, “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek… for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” This was a great mystery for the Jews – how is God going to save the rest of humanity? The Jews had the law and the sacrifices and the promises, but the Gentile world was left in the dark. So, how are the Gentiles going to be brought into the promise? Here is the answer: by faith in Jesus Christ. Everyone who believes on the name of Jesus - regardless of race, ethnicity, nation, or language – is a child of the promise through faith.

This brings me to my final point, the Root of Blessing, from Rom. 11:11-24. In this passage, Paul gives his final answer to the question of God’s promise to Israel. He explains that God is using this rejection by Israel as an opportunity to bring the Gentiles into the promise. And, he uses an analogy to help us understand. He says, in effect, imagine that you have an olive tree that you’ve cultivated and grown for hundreds of years, but some of the branches of that tree have withered and stopped producing fruit. What would a good farmer do? He would prune off the dead branches and graft in new branches to produce new fruit. The Jews are like those dead branches. They were the first to grow. They even produced fruit for a time. But, they rejected the righteousness of faith, and as a result, they failed to produce the fruit of righteousness. So, in their unbelief, God is pruning them away. In their place, God is grafting in the Gentiles, which he calls “wild olive branches.”

There are several things to recognize about this analogy. First, the Jews are cut away from the tree because they did not believe the Gospel. The dispensationalists maintain that, even today, the Jews are saved through obedience to the Law, while the Gentiles are saved through faith. This is not the view of Paul. As Peter told the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:12, “There is no other name given among men whereby we must be saved.” No one is saved apart from faith in Jesus Christ: not the English, not the African, not the Polish, and not the Jew.

Second, we often conceive of the Chosen People of God in a wrong way. We tend to think that Israel are God’s chosen people, and Gentiles are included into Israel through Christ. But that is not the way Paul portrays it. The Jews are not the root of the tree. They are a branch. And, the Gentiles don’t replace the Jews as God’s chosen people and become a new root. They are a branch that is added to the same tree. So, the tree and its root are the true source of God’s blessings, and you receive the blessings of God by being grafted into that root. So, what or who is this root? In John 15, Jesus says, “I am the true vine… every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes that it may bear more fruit… Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” Jesus is the true root and tree of God’s blessing. Jesus is the true seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. He is the true offspring of Abraham who would bless the whole world. He is the true shoot from the stump of Jesse that would reign forever. As 2 Cor. 1:20 says, “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.”

So, if you would receive the blessings of the Kingdom of God, if you would be a child of God, if you would be a part of the true Israel, you must believe that Jesus is Lord and confess that God raised him from the dead. You must be grafted into the tree of God’s grace.