In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of understanding the relationship between the church and Israel. He emphasizes that the gospel should not be truncated or abbreviated, as it loses the vital dynamic and mystery of this relationship. The speaker highlights Paul's cry in Romans 9:3, where he expresses his willingness to be accursed for the sake of his fellow Israelites. This cry serves as a reminder that the issue of Israel is also the issue of the church, and that the church must have a deep understanding and love for Israel in order to fulfill its role as God's instrument of salvation.

The most holy text, Romans 9 through 11, that may well be the pivot, the hub, the nub, the nexus, the whole turnstile of the holy scriptures, my God, and the great apostles' perception of the faith, which ought always also to be ours. And we're asking, my God, a special blessing as we lift our skirts, so to speak, and come in, my God, with our feet, and testing these waters, and want to come in more deeply, Lord, even finally waters that are too deep to swim in, beyond our own ability, my God, and that you would bear us up and carry us where you will by the logic of this divine word, in preparation, my God, for our own last day's calling to the church and to this people Israel. Bless us, my God, in such a way. Thank you for Paul, my God, upon whose heart you registered these truths, and had such a vessel so yielded to you, my God, that it came out in this holy ghost expression that has bewildered even Bible commentators throughout the generations, some just relegating it as some kind of confusing parenthesis that somehow is not to be understood and to be passed over. God forbid, my God, that we should fail in that way also. So we're asking grace, Lord, that you who have given these scriptures will also, by the same Spirit, interpret them to our hearts. And Lord, we're old enough in the faith to know that to whom much is given, much is required. We're asking much, and we're willing to be required of much. Bless us together with that understanding, Lord, we pray. We thank you and give you the praise for this beginning of days in this remarkable text. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So Romans chapter 9, servants and commentators, it's just a bewilderment. They don't know how it was included, and whether it's just a parenthesis that is to be leaped over, that the real meat is Romans 1 through 8, and then the practical outworking is 12 through 16, but somehow Paul inserted this mystery of Israel in these three chapters. Very few, and I'm one of the few, believe that everything from 1 to 8 is preparation for 9 through 11, and everything that follows out of the logic and the weight of 9 through 11 is the content of 12 through 16, the practical outworking. That the very first verse of chapter 12 about making your bodies, therefore I entreat you or plead with you to make your bodies a living sacrifice, that this 9 through 11 is not going to be fulfilled short of that kind of ultimate or utter sacrificial living on the part of the saints who take the text seriously, because the issue of Israel is the issue of the church. A church that is ignorant of that nation, its destiny, and its call cripples itself. I don't have a word for it. I use the word truncated, the truncated gospel, an abbreviated and inadequate, impoverished gospel, because it loses the vital dynamic, the mystery of the relationship between the church and Israel, and that's what Paul takes up. So, interesting that it should all begin with a great cry, of which there's no comparison except the cry of Moses, who was himself willing also to be blotted out for the same people, and so it seems also Paul, where he says in verse 3 that I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. What can we deduce from that cry that has a very important application for today, which is an hour in which there's a two-covenant theory going around, and what's another name for it? A kind of an understanding that one of two things, either that God is finished with Israel, and that we are the inheritors of their promise as the church, or God has another covenant for them. They still are under the Abrahamic covenant that will assure their ultimate salvation, which in a certain sense it really does, and that we need not occupy ourselves with them. We have the new covenant that's intended for the church. They have their own of the old. What does that do for the church with regard to Israel, if you believe that? We're absolved from all obligation or responsibility toward them, that somehow magically or supernaturally at the end, God does his independent and sovereign thing without any regard to the church at all. I think that that's a tragic view, because first of all, it's not God's way. As we're going to see in these three chapters, the church is the explicit agent chosen of God to obtain the restoration of Israel in the last days. And the question, when you see the magnitude of this, and know Israel's historic opposition to the gospel and against Christ, and it's very anti-Christ spirit, historically and even presently, and right to the end, that Paul rightly says in Romans 11, they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake. So, if that's going to be turned around and turned around through a church, it raises the great question, a church of what kind? It's a church of an ultimate kind, and in fact, it's got to be a church that to some significant degree, even incorporates Paul's own heart cry. In a word, a church that merely gives clinical condescension or assent, yes, to the significance of Israel, but has not the heart for that people in the way that Paul exhibits it in his cry, cannot possibly succeed in being the instrument of God's salvation. I've never before said that or seen that, but I'm seeing it now. That's why I enjoy this, because I like to hear what I have to say when I have to say it. That's the beauty of interacting over the word. Now, I'm holding here a little booklet, undoubtedly out of print, by David Barron, one of the great Hebrew Christian biblical commentators of the 19th century, the late 19th century, who lived in East London, I believe, and was, I believe, involved in the Whitechapel mission to the Jews a block and a half from my mother's house in the Brady Street buildings, where she grew up as a girl, and where her grandfather died, and whom I had opportunity to see in 1952 or 53, being in the army in Germany, I came to learn that they were still living in the same five-story tenement building that my mother grew up in, which has since been demolished. And that whole neighborhood that was once a Jewish ghetto is now the location of East Indians, Africans, Caribbean nationalities, and that mission is boarded up, and across the street, as you may have heard me say, is a new Muslim mosque. This great commentator died, I think, before the turn of the century, in the early part of the 20th century, and all of his works, manuscripts, and the plates for his books were destroyed in the Nazi bombing of London. So, somehow I found this in my collection, Israel's inalienable possessions. If you can get hold of two Jewish writers, Adolf Safir, S-A-P-H-I-R, and David Barron, they were both contemporaries. Barron was the younger of the two, and even refers to Safir in here as being a great mentor. They were outstanding commentators on the word. Here's his statement about Paul's hot cry, as it pertains to the church. It is only in this same spirit of a love which never fails, and of Christ-like compassion, that we too shall be able to persevere in our prayers, and in our efforts for the salvation of gainsaying, disobedient Israel. Else we shall soon turn away from them, discouraged, if not embittered, as has been the case, alas, with some who began well, but whose knowledge of this peculiar people has been shallow, and whose interest did not rest on the deep enough basis of an intelligent understanding of God's will and purposes, and was not impelled by the all-constraining love of Christ, which alone can prevail. This is a profound statement, more profound now than it was written, because now we have a glimpse of what it is that perhaps he himself did not see in that earlier generation, namely, that the final drama is Israel's flight in persecution through the nations, as it says in Amos 9, throughout all the nations, includes Africa. And in fact, there's references that are being scattered beyond the river Cush, beyond Ethiopia, and so therefore, evidently even further south into Africa, and who knows what this drama will mean before it's ended. And if you say, but why is it necessary to proliferate this people throughout all the nations? Because not the least of the purposes is not only the sifting of that people, but the sifting of the nation, or the nations themselves, and expressly the church within those nations. And if this man is right, the church will fail that test if its relationship to Israel is only clinical, or what shall we say, religious, mechanical, obligatory. We have got to come to a place of hot attitude of a kind that transcends anything that we presently know, even for each other, let alone for unsaved Jews in the most untoward condition of their life, when they'll be absolutely rattled, panic-stricken, disheveled, and altogether undone. It's a remarkable thing when they have all things together, their comfort, their security, their culture, their homes, their possessions, their distinction, and their honor, they are imperturbable. That means they can't be bugged. But pull the string, and what's the word about the yarn when you unravel it, of people who seem to be so well-collected will come apart in a way that we cannot now imagine. And I say all that to say this, how will we bear it? We're going to be faced with a challenge of the uttermost kind in terms of the depth and the truth of our sanctification, and that is not accidental, but part of the genius of God's very design, and shows, as we will see in Romans 11, the mystery of Israel and the church is that God has so constituted both people that the one without the other cannot succeed in coming to the place of God's intention as it pertains to their millennial and eternal destiny. We need Israel, in the challenge that it represents to us, to bring us to a transcendent place of faith and actuality of a kingdom kind, which if they do not see it, they remain unsaved. The issue of reward or judgment on the basis of a Matthew 25 response to the least of these, my brethren, is the issue of eternal reward or judgment. It's not just like getting your knuckles wrapped in booboo for having failed to recognize that in the least of these, my people was himself, but you're consigned to the lake of fire reserved for the devil and his angels. I mean, it's the severest eternal penalty for failing to recognize in the least of these his people himself, whereas those who do recognize, or at least extend themselves in mercy to that people, receive the highest reward, enter the kingdom of heaven that has been prepared to inherit the kingdom, and they're called the righteous. Although they say the same thing, when did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty? So, though they may not have recognized the identification, nevertheless, they were in such a spiritual place that they could not allow a people reduced to that condition to pass through and not to extend to them water, food, clothing, shelter. What makes it all the more remarkable that any mercy extended to Jews at that final antichrist time will suffer the same penalty from the world as was extended to them during the Nazi time. So, for example, everyone who took in the Anne Frank family perished with the Anne Frank family, except I believe there was one survivor. And this for a people who will not commend themselves in their attractiveness puts the premium on the message that we bear to set in motion such a preparation, not only physically, but spiritually. Because even if we were completely prepared physically, had places of refuge, but received them with a dour expression on our faces, or a visible irritation, and we're going to be moved to that, they're going to be very grating, very abrasive, very demanding, and inconsiderate, and unthankful. If there's anything in our flesh that can yet be found and touched, anything that can be pressed and triggered, they will find it, unfailingly, which has in fact been the Jewish capacity historically toward the church. And some of the church's greatest saints have been stung and revealed an aspect of their unsanctified self that would never have been shown except through the provocation of Jews. Can you name names? Luther, Christosthen. The church fathers, there's a deep grain of anti-Semitic reaction that they did not have a grace to bear this people. Now the question is, how does Paul come to this disposition of heart and spirit? How does he have such a compassionate attitude toward them, and so great a concern for their eternal salvation, that he's willing himself to be anathema, to be cut off from Christ, and to lose his own salvation if only they could be saved. Does he have that because he's Jewish? You know, some of the greatest anti-Semites are Jewish, ironically. It's not because he's Jewish, then by what virtue? It is Paul's union with Christ, and not his Jewishness by birth, that explains this compassionate disposition. And where can you see that in chapter nine, right from the verse one, as good exegetes and students of the word, where do you see? The truth in Christ. I am telling the truth in Christ. Where else? In the Holy Spirit. Twice in his very first and initial statement, without a self-conscious design to show anything, and that's the beauty of scriptures, and that's the beauty of the apostolic man. It just comes out of the wash. He's making a statement of such a strenuous and ultimate kind, that someone would be tempted to dismiss it as a man just speaking out of his own identification with his own nation, and by that means absolve themselves from having to have a heart like that, because I'm not Jewish. But he shows that the basis for the depth of his compassion is not his natural identification with his people, but his union with Christ, and that's got to be our basis also, or we miss it. And in fact, the whole challenge is to compel us to that relationship with Christ, that we might not otherwise have earnestly enough sought, because as anybody knows who is concerned for this, it is no snap. To be in Christ in your emotions and your will, even to the point of the willingness to be considered anathema, means that you're out of any self-concern, even for your eternal destiny. And there's no way to come from that one place to the other, except by such a process of separation at the cross. So, whenever you scratch deeply enough any issue of the faith, in the last analysis, it's always the issue of the cross. But we need to be discerning and recognize that it's implicit right here from the beginning of chapter nine. And if this is true for the apostle, it has got to be true for the whole apostolic people that Israel will meet in the wilderness, whether it's Minnesota or Zaire, and it'll be in both places. They'll be proliferated throughout the world, but they've got to see Paul, because to see Paul is to see Christ. And it's that recognition that brings them into the bond of the covenant and under the rod of his authority. It's in the wilderness that they meet with him face to face. Ezekiel 20 from verse 33. Okay, I am telling the truth in Christ. I am not lying. Who would ever think that the apostle would or could? But why does he have to say that? Because the statement that follows is so horrendous, so elaborate, that the only thing to which we can equate it is the cry of Moses, block me out of your book. My conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit. How would you like to live like that? Not just with regard to the Jews, but in everything. My conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit. In fact, if we don't live like that consistently, before the advent of the last day's call of the Jews, we're not going to find it in the last day. You have a sensitive conscience before God and before man in the Holy Spirit. I mean, it's enough to have a conscience. And for how many is conscience seared or dulled? How does that happen? Conscience is a mechanism that God has implanted in mankind as a device to keep even unregenerate men away from the evil that will consume them. How then do they act despite conscience? What happened to that faculty? That's why we can see men in courtrooms paying millions of dollars for the defense of their lives, who seem so patently guilty, and yet have wide-eyed innocent looks like me, and come even to believe the lie of their innocence. To be restored and to be brought back to an original place in God, where our consciences are so sensitive. A wrong word, a wrong look, a gesture of thought, a disposition of spirit, and we feel it. We stop immediately. There's a check. There's an awareness. So, as I've said many times, and you'll hear it again and again, I'm not worried about Israel. Israel will take care of itself. It's already on its downward course. The church, and the church of this kind alone, whose conscience is confirmed by its witness in the Holy Spirit, but at that first sentence is a blockbuster. And what is he confirming? And what's the truth? That I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. This implies that salvation is not an option, that the rejection of Christ has a grievous consequence. And I'm sure he's looking, as Jesus did when he wept over Jerusalem, to the future of what did that rejection mean, which we've discussed over this table. Like to the Holocaust. Okay, my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh, these are the same brethren who said to Paul that he's not fit to live, and who vowed neither to eat nor to drink until he was dead. You know, to have this kind of sensitive and tender regard for people who are out for your life is a remarkable thing. But always remember, Paul is the foundation of the church. It's what God is after in the whole of his people. So, my kinsmen, according to the flesh, you are Israelites. Now notice the difference between Israelites and Israel, because later we're going to read, not all Israel is Israel, but all are Israelites. Can you understand there's a difference? One is a physical and generic ethnic description, and the other is a spiritual statement. Not every Israelite is the Israel of God, but every Israelite is a native-born generic ethnic Jew in Israel. And these are yet his brethren, according to the flesh, to whom belongs the adoption of sons, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, and the promises. It would take us an hour or two to go through every one of these distinctives, and perhaps we should, and maybe we will at another time. But maybe this helps us to understand the depth of Paul's grief. This is not just a people who are missing their salvation, but this is a people missing their call. This is a people who are acting in the rejection of Christ, contrary to every advantage to which God has called them uniquely among all the people on the face of the earth. This reference to sons goes back to Exodus 4, and Moses said to Pharaoh, let my people go that my sons may worship me. The first reference to sons is in Exodus, speaking of Israel as an entire people. What a privileged status to call God Father in the whole history of the human race that knew nothing but paganisms and idolatries and objects of worship other than God. Privileged call and the glory. What can we say about that? What instances do you know of in Israel's Old Testament experience where the glory of God was not just an abstract category, but a visual and experienced phenomenon? Glory that filled the temple where the priest had to come out, they could not minister? How about the light by day and the fire by night that was with them continually for 40 years? The visible glory, because that pillar of fire came out and up and over the arc of the tabernacle in the holiest place of all. God's literal glory presence, glory, shekinah, and presence are all one in the same thing. For us, what should we say? It's hypothetical. It's sentimental. It's an allusion to something theoretical, but never been actual. And for that reason, we don't even have a jealousy for the glory of God. And we think of the glory of God as some kind of an abstraction, some kind of ephemeral, ethereal thing that is not visible or demonstrable. But God wants to fill his house with his glory. That, I mean, the smoke will fill the house. And probably we can fairly say it's the absence of any sense of God's glory that accounts for the shallow condition of the church today. Because the glory also inspires the fear. Men fell on their faces, the Lord hears God. Didn't they know that before? They knew it, but they didn't know it. They didn't know it now as deeply as when that glory is revealed. So, to this people, what's the glory? We just have to contemplate why Paul is knowing such grief, what they have turned their back on, given such a heritage. The covenants, the promises, the temple service, whose are the fathers and from whom is the Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. So, he goes from temple service, the promises, the fathers, the reference to the patriarchs. I mean, who has such a lineage that they have Isaac, Jacob, and who else? Abraham for their fathers. What a distinguished lineage that you have a continuum with men of that kind who knew God and walked with God. And from whom is the Christ. Paul can't resist bringing in this last great glory that was Israel's, that out of it would come, not only the Messiah of Israel, but of all mankind, according to the flesh, showing according to Jewish flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. Anything about that before we shift gears? That's the introduction. That's the sounding of the theme. That's Paul in his grief. And in fact, if he did not begin that way, I think it's safe to say nothing else would have followed. Revelation of mystery is something given by the Spirit to whom it can be received. Those people who don't see this, have no sense of this, they're bewildered, God has finished with Israel. I don't even mention names. Some of the most prominent, internationally known ministers, anointed, have told me Romans 9 through 11 is a complete mystery. I don't understand it. And I was at the same brother's poolside, pleading with him to understand, opening the scriptures and giving what little insight I have, non compus mentis. I spoke Sunday at his fellowship and addressed the same theme again. He died not knowing and ever having been touched by the grandeur and the glory of this great thing. Now, how is that? I think it has to do with a condition of heart toward the Jew. And the issue of heart toward the Jew, the least of his brethren, even before their persecution, is the issue of the heart toward God. I'm just saying that by faith. That anti-Semitism, show me an anti-Semite and I'll show you a hater of God. Show me a lover of God and I'll show you a lover of the Jew. The two are inseparable. It's as if God has deposited into the earth and in the midst of the nations, a people. They're stubborn. They're stiff-necked. Their history with God is an abhorrence. They have blasphemed his name. We have every natural and religious reason. In fact, it's the religious who are most stirred up against them. And God makes them the test. What do you call that chemical thing where you touch people? A litmus test of our authentic spirituality and the measure of our love of God. Because as Paul even says elsewhere, if you love those who love you, what is that? Even the Pharisees can do that. But to love the unlovely and the unloveliest of all, particularly in their last days, extremity and condition, is a remarkable test and revelation of where we are, not with regard to the Jew, but with regard to God. Paul, as the quintessential apostolic man, is a paradigm for the entire church. God is calling the church to an apostolic stature, an apostolic being. And this is one of the deepest expressions of it. And what makes it all the more beautiful and profound is that it's completely unselfconscious. It's not a matter of saying, now, what must I write that 2,000 years later the church will understand what condition it must be in. It's just a man being himself with utterly unselfconsciously that really reveals the depth of this union with Christ. The man who murdered the Jewish believers, their principal persecutor, if he had not been profoundly transformed, would have carried that same animus now not against the church, but against his own former kinsmen. He would have retaliated against them in kind in the way that they were against him. But we see the whole transformation of a man. And the whole issue, I believe, of Israel is God's provision for the transformation of the church, and that we will not obtain it independent of Israel. I know that there's a sanctification that works continually, but the depths of it is reserved for that final relationship with Israel and our conscious, willful preparation and anticipation of that relationship. You say, well, what if God changes his mind and diverts them away from La Porte, Minnesota? Well, let God be God. But as far as we're concerned, we have every incentive to anticipate and to be prepared. And if it should not be employed toward the Jew, is it wasted? We'll still be a glorious church, still bless the Gentiles round about us with the same compassion and mercy as we would have extended to them. And beyond that, this is our final finishing school for our own eternal destiny to rule and reign with him from heavenly places. The rule of God is not bureaucracy, and it's not self-conscious political self-aggrandizement. Now you listen to me, I'm with him and you guys. It's ruling and reigning with him in his own character, in the meekness of the lamb. The rod of iron, I think, is some kind of an ironic expression. His rule will be absolute and uncompromising, but it will be in the gentleness and the meekness of the lamb, or else we don't rule with him. We will be disqualified. So I just want to go over David Barron's statement again. It's just too choice to rush over. It is only in this same spirit of a love which never fails and of Christ-like compassion that we too shall be able to persevere in our prayers, in our efforts for the salvation of gainsaying disobedient Israel. You can put in parentheses anything that is appropriate in place of Israel right now. Your wife, your spouse, anyone who's now the greatest vexation, challenge, and difficulty in your present life. And the sense is completely the same. And it may well be that that's why he or she is the greatest present difficulty. Can you relate to that one as Paul is relating to Israel? Good point. How do we think that this attitude of heart is going to be obtained? How far will God go to obtain it? It is only in this same spirit of a love which never fails and of Christ-like compassion that we too shall be able to persevere in our prayers and in our efforts for the salvation of gainsaying disobedient Israel. I would add unthankful, ungrateful, vexing, irritating. You just list the adjectives. It'll be brought to a boil. And if there's any place where a button can be pushed, I'll find it. As my dear unnamed spouse has an uncanny ability also to find things that I did not even know I possessed. Oh, the deepest sanctifying work. And that's why God is already employing our present spouses and situations in the body and in the church and in relationship and in our own physical bodies as a preparation toward that end. Because this is not magically obtained. What God is after is so ultimate, so beyond what we would be satisfied with spiritually. We're all content essentially with our present condition and even applaud ourselves. And yet we're so removed from where we need yet to be because we haven't fully reckoned on the magnitude of the challenge that will come to us, which if we miss it, it's not to our eternal embarrassment, but it means that they do not see the Lord. They do not meet with him face to face. They meet with a religious people whose smile is feigned and whose patience is short. And they move on without having been turned. And they do not constitute the redeemed of Israel that returned to Zion. The Lord remains pent up in heaven. The kingdom does not come. I mean, the whole redemptive conclusion of the age is set back for the want of this one thing. So critical is the condition of God's people in the last days. Centrifugal factors are working to polarize and to radicalize and to bring us or to allow ourselves to be brought to the one or the other. And I've said this countless times, apostolic or apostate, that in the end, it'll be the lake of fire or the eternal reward, the righteous or the wicked. And the dividing and the issue itself that will reveal it is the Jew. Will the real church, as Simon Serban said many times, please stand up. What will reveal the real church is its attitude toward the Jew. It's one thing to think yourself spiritual, sing the hymns, say amen, hallelujah. But when the fat is in the fire, the rubber hits, I think of every cliched expression. How do you respond to this people in the hour of their extremity is the statement of where you are in God. So if we're not in this condition, we'll turn away from them discouraged, if not embittered, as has been the case, alas, with some who began well, but whose knowledge of this peculiar people had been shallow. Now this is an interesting statement. He's talking about people who have failed at this, even historically, whose knowledge of this peculiar people has been shallow. So it behooves us to have a knowledge of their history, their destiny, their call, that we need to know that to them was the covenants, the promises, the fathers, the glory. We need to know the history of their failing. We need to know even their judicial blindness that allowed the Gentiles to come in through the gospel in the mystery of God. Knowledge is critical. And of course, no one is going to have that kind of knowledge or seek it who has not a heart disposed toward God and toward them. Whose interest did not rest on the deep enough basis of an intelligent understanding of God's will and purposes. And we're going to get into that part right now, that by election, there's an election according to grace, and there are things operating that we need to understand or will have a wrong attitude toward Israel that will be condemning rather than, what shall we say, affirming and patient. And by the way, the revelation of God's dealing with Israel and the issue of election and covenant and promise is the revelation of God. Nothing more acutely and accurately reveals God as God than in his relationship to his people. So, to miss the history of that relationship and what is spoken of in this future and destiny call is to miss God. It's to have an inadequate notion of God, which in fact is not God. And that's why the issue of the Jew and of Israel is critical to the church for its own understanding of God as that relationship alone reveals it. It's an intelligent understanding of God's will and purposes, and I'm saying now of God himself, and was not impelled by the all-constraining love of Christ, which alone can prevail. Any other love will be inadequate. Sentimental love. I think we're going to see that many of those who now exhibit loudly such affection for Israel, oh how they love the Jew and how they love Israel, and can't run fast enough to attend a conference and to plant a tree may well be the very ones, when the bottom falls out and these people disappoint them, that they'll react with anger. There's no fury like a woman scorned. There's something about betrayal and disappointment that invokes the deepest kind of hostility and anger, and that's exactly what is ahead. If they've had a romantic notion of the Jew and of Israel, and they want to pinch the cheek, and they think that they're all like David, and then they come to Israel and find out these men are fornicators, you can't trust the women in your tour group to your bus driver or to the guide, and their morals are putrid, and in fact women are actually being sold in Israel now as concubines out of Russia and Eastern Europe, and I mean just it's horrendous, and it's going to get worse. Financial schemes, political corruption, that the disappointment of the idealistic view that was held by the naive will eventuate in a hatred in what was once only an inadequate shabby and sentimental love. The only love that will prevail is the love of God that cannot be disappointed. That's how much Israel is a hermeneutical key to the entire faith, and that's why one brother has written a book that he calls Israelology, that the subject of Israel ought to be as distinctly included in the other branches of theological investigation like Christology, and he's claiming that Israelology is the central one, and it's not even part of the church's consideration. I wrote a little footnote at the bottom of the page, can we rule and reign with him as I've mentioned millennially in any condition less than or other than this, and the answer is no. This is the overcoming that qualifies for rule, and it's obtained in the final redemptive relationship with Israel, and can we obtain this condition in any way other than this, and the answer is no, and so we're coming to the consummation, and these are the vital dramatic ingredients of the last days, but it's interesting how the whole great three-chapter dissertation on this mystery begins with Paul's hot cry. It's not a clinical dogmatic theological presentation, it's a cry, so everything has been rejected from the adoption of sons to the messiah in the rejection of the messiah. You can't have these other distinctions that were given to Israel and missed that. To miss that's to miss them all. In fact, if they had properly esteemed and maintained and kept the adoption of sons and the priestly service and the covenants and the promises, they would have been prepared for the messiah. The messiah's coming revealed the covenantal failure that had a much longer history. Can you understand that? We talked about this when we talked about the holocaust. Israel's rejection of its messiah and the bringing of him to death is not so much the sin in itself as a final statement of a much longer history of apostasy and alienation from God, that we had his final crystallization and expression in the rejection of him unto death. It was the final statement of what had a much longer history by which they had already turned their back on many of these things. How many of you know that prior to the Maccabean revolt in that interim where Israel was under Greek and Syro-Phoenician rule, that even the priest was so impressed with Greek civilization that they changed their Hebrew names to Greek names. And that's why many of the characters in the New Testament, though they are Jewish, have Greek names. Like Luke. And that many even surgically removed the evidence of their circumcision because it was considered an embarrassment and a shame because the Greeks celebrated the new body when they ran the Olympic races, they ran them nude. And so they were so impressed with the glory of Greece and the grandeur of its culture and civilization that they forfeited and diminished their own Hebraic heritage. So there's a whole history of apostasy. So that's I think that that great sorrow and unceasing grief is the whole recognition of that that has had its final expression in the rejection of their own Messiah who came out of the fathers and who is over all and God bless forever. Okay. Now from verse six on, Paul rolls up his sleeves and begins to dig into the great issues that are raised by Israel's rejection of its Messiah. How could Israel reject its own promised Messiah and deliverer according to its own scriptures has got to be one of the greatest anomalies of history. I forgot the statement of a Dutch theologian, Hendrik Berghoff, in his study of history. He fingers this out. I'll get it for you next time. The failure of the Jews to recognize and to receive their own expected Messiah has got to be the single greatest anomaly contradiction in the history of mankind. It's staggering in its proportions, but it not only raises the question of Israel's failure, it raises a significant question of God's failure. How could God have failed?