# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S329
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Whether Rom. 11:25, 26, 27 [teaches] a solemn [conversion of the Jews] still to be expected, etc. 329

But, one usually objects, if the apostle, as you would have it, speaks in our passage only of a successive conversion of the Jews continuing through all the centuries, then it is incomprehensible how he could speak of it as of a great mystery. This objection, however, does not amount to much. One need only consider the following.

After the Jews had stood for two thousand years as the people of God, and it had had the appearance that God had utterly rejected the Gentiles, it now had — after the Jews had crucified their Messiah and, while they persecuted the confessors of the Messiah everywhere, countless Gentiles had entered the kingdom of the Messiah — on the contrary, the appearance that from now on God had utterly rejected the Jews and made the Gentiles his exclusive covenant people. Just as before the Jews, relying on their covenant-people status, had looked down upon every Gentile with self-exaltation and contempt, so afterward, already in the apostolic age, a like inclination showed itself among the Gentile Christians: the inclination proudly to regard themselves alone as the elect and to consider the Jews as now the rejected. This inclination the holy apostle meets in our chapter of the text. He shows, first, that God has by no means cast off his people, although it shows itself hardened; a striking proof that this is not so is his own (the apostle's) conversion. (Rom. 10:21, 11:1.) Already in Elijah's time it had seemed as though it were all over with Israel, but nevertheless God had even then left to himself 7,000 of his faithful among them (v. 2–4). Just so it is now as well. God even now has, in the midst of the great mass of the hardened, a remnant of the elect, whom he converts and saves by pure grace, without merit of their own (v. 5). But because his election is an election of grace, all self-righteous Jews must indeed be lost, as has already been prophesied of them (v. 6–10). They did not fall, however, by God's arrangement in order that God might receive the Gentiles; rather their fall became only an occasion for the reception of the Gentiles*), whereby God's purpose was rather that the Jews, when they saw the Gentiles streaming into the kingdom of their Messiah, might be provoked to emulation (v. 11). For if their fall occasioned the calling, and so the salvation, of the Gentiles, how much more would the Gentiles have been converted if all Israel had accepted Christ (v. 12)? For this very reason he (Paul) rightly glorifies his ministry among the Gentiles, because through it he wishes to provoke his own countrymen to emulate the Gentiles and so to bring them to salvation (v. 13, 14). For if their casting away served to bring the Gentiles to reconciliation, what would their reception bring about but life from the dead (v. 15)? Just as once the whole lump was holy, if the firstfruit, the first-

*) Cf. Acts 13:46. "It was necessary that the word of God should first be spoken to you; but since you thrust it from you and judge yourselves (you Jews) unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles."