Living by Faith - Romans

Israel’s Future and Ours

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 46-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 046

Dictation Name: RR311X46

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing; enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou who dost dwell in the holy of holies dost also dwell with us, art ever near, and has promised that Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us. And so we come to cast out every care upon Thee, knowing Thou carest for us; to rejoice in Thy word and Thy Spirit and the multitude of Thy blessings. We commit ourselves and our loved ones into Thine omnipotent hands, in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture lesson is from Romans 11:7-11, our subject: Israel’s Future and Ours. Israel’s Future and Ours, Romans 11:7-11 or 12.

“7 What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.

8 (According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day.

9 And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them:

10 Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway.

11 I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.

12 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 fulness?”

Paul here speaks of the future of Israel, and touches a raw nerve, intense feelings, as he does so. The history of man from the creation to Christ saw one line of hope appear in history, the rise of Israel. Humanly speaking there was nothing else; granted that Israel was often faithless, that it slew the prophets, that it denied the Lord and the Covenant again and again. The simple fact was, what else was there in history of equal merit or anything approaching the caliber of Israel? Who else had served God at all? Granted that the apostasies of Israel were very great, but the feeling was, could not Israel again purge Israel as of old, and continue to use the nation? Could not a remnant create a new Israel as a nation?

Not so, Paul says. The elect in Israel have been blessed, and they are the foundation of the church, but the rest, he says, are ‘blinded.’ The word translated as blinded is a form of the Greek word which primarily means hardened, calloused, or thick-skinned. Moreover it does not say that they hardened themselves, rather they were hardened by God. They failed, and the elect succeeded them. The word ‘hardened’ can also be rendered ‘petrified.’ It is by the way, sometimes used for the stones that form in bladders. So, when God is finished with a people, Paul is saying, they are petrified. Petrified.

We see something of its meaning then. Israel belongs to the past, Paul says, not to the future, and God is now using u-petrified people as His elect, as pioneers of the future. Thus we see something of what God does in history. Those people whom He bypasses He hardens, He petrifies. The nation which becomes petrified in its ways, however good it once was, becomes soon a part of histories past, not its future.

In verse 8, Paul refers to Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 5:21, Ezekiel 12:2, and Deuteronomy 29:4. “(According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day.”

In Deuteronomy 29:4 Moses speaks of the hardening of his day: “Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.”

Isaiah 29:9-10 also speak of this. They say, and Paul echoes them, that Israel has a Spirit of slumber. The reference is to a deep sleep. They are no longer aware of what is going on around them, and this is what happens when a nation becomes petrified, in their self confidence, and their assurance that they are the elite, because they no longer see themselves as an elect, but as the elite of history, they become petrified and God hardens them in that petrification. They are asleep to God’s reality, they cannot know the truth.

Having said that we must say this spirit of slumber is very much a part of history, again and again nations have come down with this spirit of slumber. A book written in a trilogy, as a trilogy originally, and then published in 31 in Germany in one volume, Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers was a telling account of precisely this fact in the modern work, because Broch, while an existentialist and off-base tremendously in many ways, nonetheless, beginning in the early twenties saw the whole world as sleepwalking, and moving towards total disaster. And so he said: “Can this age be said still to have reality?” He saw that mans thought since the Renaissance had disintegrated into many separate and purely local value systems, so that there was no longer a governing faith over everything, and he said and I quote: “Our age is crumbling away.”

Unfortunately, he saw the future instead of the autonomous code of the south, and so he had no answer. But he was right, the modern world is possessed by a spirit of slumber, of deep sleep. Broch, let me add, saw his age as hungering for a political messiah, and writing in Germany, it was ironic, because he used the word that Nazis subsequently used, Fuhrer. The hunger for a Fuhrer.

Broch illustrates what Paul writes about, the dereliction of peoples in history. Paul has his eyes on the future, the setting aside of Israel, and the possible setting aside of Gentiles later on in history. As a result, his words have relevance to the future, and in the next passage as we shall see next Sunday, he brings this home to the church, the gentiles, their setting aside in time to come.

In verses 9 and 10, Paul cites David: “And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway.”

This is a citation of Psalm 69:22-23. The image is of a man banqueting with security, and he is attacked in the midst of feasting, and his secure posture becomes his downfall. The sad fact is, for a few centuries now, fanciful commentators, more than I could begin to name, have tried to force an antinomianism on Paul and this passage. They say the table was the law, and the law was the death of Israel, and the law is the death to any Christian who follows it.

Now, besides having nothing to do with what David had to say, totally unrelated, David’s image is of men who are out, Nomads or fighters who are out in the field, they feel confident, they spread a table, the table is on the ground, it is a large cloth and the food is on it. And in the process of rising up they are in an unstable position, suddenly attacked with their legs crossed, or leaning on their arm, lying down stretched across there eating and relaxing, they are unprepared and the table becomes a disaster, it becomes a place of death for them because they were not prepared. Now that is its meaning, very simple.

Paul uses scripture realistically. He does not quote David to give it a fanciful meaning. Moreover, if Paul had misused any scripture, the rabbis who resented his departure would have been on him in an instant, to tear him apart as a false exegete. So it is rubbish to say this has anything to do with the law, as virtually all commentators now do.

What he is saying is, that those who have a spirit of slumber, who have become petrified, let their very security be made a recompense unto them; a retribution it can be rendered, and one or two translators have so rendered it.

Then in verse 11 and in verse 12: “I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? 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 fulness?”

Has Israel stumbled to fall permanently? No, says Paul. It is set aside to open the door to the gentiles, to provoke Israel to jealousy, or the word can be also translated as admiration, for the people once despised. And Paul may here have both meanings in mind. Emulation or admiration and jealousy. Jealousy in some, emulation in others.

But why should through their fall salvation come to the Gentiles? This is an important point, and critical to Paul’s argument here. There has been in history a long standing identification of people with a religion, in other words: “This religion is the religion of the white man, or of the black man, or of the Asiatic, or of the Hindu, or of the Chinese, or of the Japanese” and so on. Historically people have associated a religion with a race or a nationality. Thus, Ruth although coming to faith, still saw things that way, to a considerable extent, because she said to Naomi: “Wither Thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

That kind of thinking is very much with us today, identifying nationality with a religion. Not too many years ago, I had to tell a businessman who was central to a great deal of conservative activity that he was misusing the name of God and of Christ, because everything he said made it clear that he was not a Christian. And he emphatically was not, there was nothing in his thinking or in his conduct that manifested Christianity even remotely; and he turned on me savagely and he said: “And what do you think I am, a Jew?” In other words, he identified his English heritage and his American background with being a Christian, not that it was a matter of faith, but it was just tradition. And of course we see this everywhere.

I have known two or three Jews who ridiculed Judaism, ridiculed their orthodox parents, ridiculed the synagogue and rabbis, but they never missed a service on Yom Kippur. Why? Well, they would get huffy at that. It was their religion; no that they believed anything of it, but it was a national act, and they had to be there.

When I was on the Indian Reservation, one of the things I had to do, and it took a great deal of patience and time, to get the idea across to the Indians that the people in the Indian service were not Christian, and they weren’t. When I first went there, there was not a one that was. But they assumed that because they were white men they were Christians, and when I finally got through to them that this was the fact, it was as though somebody had turned on a light switch, because they made that association.

It is interesting, too, that when colonialism ended in Africa, while it created fearful disasters and Christians by the millions have been butchered because they have been seen as aliens, at the same time Christianity has flourished in Africa to a startling degree, as never before; it has spread dramatically. Why? Because it has suddenly become with these suffering natives, a native faith; because of this identification. Now they can see it as a faith that is an option for a black man.

Well, this kind of identification was greater in saint Paul’s day than ours. The rejection of Israel as a covenant nation opened the door for the church and Christianity to be the world religion. Thus full salvation came to the Gentiles. Of course, there was a subsequent problem, the attempt of European rulers to control the church and nationalize Christianity, reproducing the sin of Israel. This is why the Goths became Arians; they could see that their old faith could not stand against the new, and so they could not adopt the Roman faith, and had to have a variation, and Arianism was their version, a kind of Unitarian form.

And subsequently of course, when the Turkish people who settled in Southern Russia, known as the Khazars or K’Hazars, recognized that their old faith was obsolete, they faced a problem. “We cannot accept Islam or Christianity, the one belongs to the Latin’s and the other belongs to the Arabs, what shall we do?” and so they said: “Well, Judaism is intellectually respectable, let’s adopt that.” And they did. It was because of this identification, and the church has had to struggle against it. Paul looks ahead past all this, the breakdown of the old barriers, the breakdown of the national boundaries, to the restoration of the Jews. Their fall enriched the world, their restoration will enrich it even more, and their fullness will mean all the remnants of Israel shall be brought in.

Paul tells us thus that God in history breaks down the old barriers. It is not an obliteration of national or racial differences, but their irrelevance before the governing fact of Christ’s kingdom and His church. Christ’s kingship, His dominion shall triumph all things, and Israel’s apostasy serves God’s purpose, for all things work together for good in His providence.

Thus Paul makes clear that the issue is this; man is responsible to God, he says, and God predestines all things in terms of His purpose. But man tries to use God and to make God responsible to Him, he tries to turn the whole moral universe upside down, instead of being used by God, to use God; and man tries to use God, to make God responsible to him, and to make not God but himself and his institutions the central fact in the universe, the goal and the purpose of God’s activity.

As a result, to do so is to ensure rejection. It makes men and nations petrified. For this reason Israel as a nation was rejected and further hardened by God. The center of the early church was the near East and North Africa. Their intellectual competence was very great, they were the old centers of culture, but they became proud and arrogant and were rejected and set aside, and petrified. Rome, France, Spain, Germany, Britain, and the U.S.; each in turn have become world centers of the faith, and Eastern Orthodoxy, Romans Catholicism, and Protestantism, each in turn have seen themselves as God’s center in history, and each in turn have been by-passed.

This is not to say that none of them from Israel to the present cannot be restored, but restoration requires faith and humility, and living by faith and by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. There is no future thus, for the United States, unless this country recognizes itself as an unbelieving, apostate, and Christ-hating nation. There is no other way we can describe this country. I leave tomorrow for a state where all the homeschools are in trial. Later this month I will be in another state where all the Christian schools are in trial, to destroy them, to deny Christian freedom. This is Christ hating, and the Federal courts are among the worst.

Paul says in Romans 1:18-32 that unbelief is not a mere lack, it is better described as ‘disbelief’. It is not merely an absence of faith, it is a faith that man is his own God; it is a positive hatred of the living God. We cannot therefore deal with unbelief in anyone or in any nation unless we recognize it for what it is, the hatred of God and of Christ, and this is something Arminianism refuses to do. Man’s original sin, Genesis 3:5, is to be his own God, to be his own source of morality and law. All around us men in Christ’s name too often make their own law, and they think they are blessed by God for rebelling against Him and His law. The law of God is God’s grace and His goodness to us, His covenant provision. To despise God’s law is to despise God, it is a horrifying fact that men despise God’s law and expect to be blessed; and it is a sin to misinterpret scripture. And yet, virtually all the commentators great and small for the past few centuries have seen this passage as being against Biblical law, against God’s law, never mentioned in the text; and they do so by taking David’s statement and seeing the table as representing the tables of the law of the Ten Commandments.

Is it not evil and wicked to do so? God gives us this word to prevent us from petrifying, and men who take and misinterpret the word have petrified in their sins, and have been hardened by God to be set aside as useless. We live in a world where the nations and the churches too often seek to petrify themselves and are satisfied, and are blissful, even as they harden.

I am reminded again of General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, who in his day almost a century or so ago, said that the great evil in the churches was that people were, when they were converted, immediately mummified, made into mummy’s, to sit in their pews and to be dead, and incapable of any action except to reach for their wallet when the collection plate came by. He was talking about petrification, and this is what Paul speaks of.

The Spirit of slumber, the hardening, the blinding, that comes upon men when they will not hear God. Let us pray.

Thy word is truth oh Lord, and Thou hast spoken through Thy servant Paul; give us hearing ears that we may hear and believe and obey, that we may serve Thee with all our heart, mind and being, that we might not be petrified, blinded, hardened in our way, but alive in Thy way. We give thanks unto Thee our Father, for the clarity of Thy word; give us joyful and obedient hearts we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes Otto.

[Otto Scott] More of a comment, Israel still considers Judaism a national religion, because there was a case not too many years ago of a Jew who became a Catholic priest and then went to Israel under the law of the return, and was rejected because they said he was no longer a Jew.

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very famous case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the boast of some rabbis that they are not interested in conversion, which a few disagree with, is witness to the fact that it has to be nationality and a religion identified. But petrification nowadays means death, and they are either going to have to change or perish. Any other questions or comments? Yes.

[Audience Member] Outside of converting to Christianity, do you see the Jewish nation as having any special privilege in the modern world?

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience Member] You don’t see the unfolding of current history in the Middle East as having anything…?

[Rushdoony] No, no, the church is now the Israel of God as Paul makes clear. Any other questions or comments? Yes.

[Audience Member] Where was it saying about the table, which verse?

[Rushdoony] The table is verse 9 and 10, quoting from Psalm 69:22-23.

[Audience Member] Right here it says: “Let their feast become a snare and a trap” it doesn’t use table here, feast it is talking about.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is table in the King James, and in David’s psalm.

[Audience Member] It would imply the same thing though, a feast a table.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not let us bow our heads for the benediction.

All glory be to Thee our Father for the richness of thy grace and mercy unto us, and for all thy providential blessings and care. We give thanks unto Thee for Thy word, and for Thy grace.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.