God forbid.For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.God hath not cast away His people which He foreknew.Wot ye not what the Scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying, Lord, they have killed Thy prophets, and digged down Thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life.But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to Myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace."Israel had stumbled and fallen, but this did not make it impossible for them to rise again.In answer to the question, "Have they stumbled that they should fall?" the apostle replies: "God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fullness? For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office: if by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?"It was God's purpose that His grace should be revealed among the Gentiles as well as among the Israelites.This had been plainly outlined in Old Testament prophecies.The apostle uses some of these prophecies in his argument."Hath not the potter power over the clay," he inquires, "of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom He hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? As He saith also in Osee, I will call them My people, which were not My people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.
And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not My people; there shall they be called the children of the living God." See Hosea 1:10.
Notwithstanding Israel's failure as a nation, there remained among them a goodly remnant of such as should be saved.
At the time of the Saviour's advent there were faithful men and women who had received with gladness the message of John the Baptist, and had thus been led to study anew the prophecies concerning the Messiah.When the early Christian church was founded, it was composed of these faithful Jews who recognized Jesus of Nazareth as the one for whose advent they had been longing.It is to this remnant that Paul refers when he writes, "If the first fruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches."Paul likens the remnant in Israel to a noble olive tree, some of whose branches have been broken off.He compares the Gentiles to branches from a wild olive tree, grafted into the parent stock."If some of the branches be broken off," he writes to the Gentile believers, "and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; boast not against the branches.But if thou boast, thou barest not the root, but the root thee.Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in.Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith.Be not high-minded, but fear: for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee.Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in His goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off."Through unbelief and the rejection of Heaven's purpose for her, Israel as a nation had lost her connection with God.But the branches that had been separated from the parent stock God was able to reunite with the true stock of Israel --the remnant who had remained true to the God of their fathers."They also," the apostle declares of these broken branches, "if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again." "If thou," he writes to the Gentiles, "wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.
