Romans 11:1–10

1I ASK THEN: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. 2God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel: 3“Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me”? 4And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” 5So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. 6And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.

7What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened, 8as it is written:

“God gave them a spirit of stupor,

eyes so that they could not see

and ears so that they could not hear,

to this very day.”

9And David says:

“May their table become a snare and a trap,

a stumbling block and a retribution for them.

10May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see,

and their backs be bent forever.”

Original Meaning

God’s Faithfulness to Israel Seen in the Remnant (11:1–6)

THE TRIGGER FOR Paul’s question in verse 1, “Did God reject his people?” is his condemnation of Israel in 9:30–10:21. He has claimed that Israel stumbled over the rock of Christ (9:33), willfully turning away from God’s righteousness in Christ (10:3). Does this mean, Paul asks, that Israel has now forfeited any claim on God’s promises? Paul emphatically rejects any such conclusion—“By no means!”—and follows it up with a solemn assertion in 11:2a: “God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew.”

As in 8:29, the verb “foreknow” (proginosko) means “choose ahead of time” (see comments there). The placement of the comma in this statement is critical. Some commentators remove the comma and so treat “whom he foreknew” as a “restrictive” clause—that is, a clause that restricts the word it modifies by identifying it. On this view, Paul is asserting that God has not rejected the people whom he chose. Such a statement would build on the “remnant” idea of 9:6–29, claiming that God remains faithful to that “Israel within an Israel” whom he has chosen for salvation.2 But almost all modern versions, following most of the commentaries, rightly add the comma, making the clause nonrestrictive. “Whom he foreknew” does not identify the “people” Paul is talking about; rather, it explains why God remains faithful to that people.

Paul, in other words, has all of (physical) Israel in view here, and he is reasserting the common Old Testament teaching that God chose Israel as his very own people (see, e.g., Amos 3:2a: “You only have I chosen [lit. known] of all the families of the earth”). What the apostle does in chapter 11 is show what that corporate election of Israel as a whole means for the salvation of Jews in his own day and in the future.

The evidence Paul offers for God’s faithfulness to that election of Israel in his own day is the existence of a “remnant” (vv. 5–6). But he leads up to that claim with two preliminary points. (1) He begins with himself (v. 1b). Paul’s reminder to his readers of his Jewish descent may have three different purposes. (a) He may be explaining why he so strongly rejects the notion that God has rejected Israel: As an Israelite himself, he simply cannot accept any such idea.3 (b) He may be reminding his readers that the very fact God chose a Jew to be apostle to the Gentiles indicates his continuing concern for Israel.4 (c) Or he may simply want to remind us that he himself is both a Jew and a Christian—evidence that God has not abandoned his people.5 The last fits the context best, as Paul hints already at the remnant theme of verses 5–6.

(2) In verses 2b–4, Paul lays further groundwork for his assertion about the remnant by illustrating from an Old Testament “passage about Elijah.” The reference is to the story of King Ahab’s attack on the prophets of Yahweh in 1 Kings 19:1–18. After learning of Ahab’s slaughter of the prophets, his pagan wife, Jezebel, threatens her nemesis with the same fate (vv. 1–2). Elijah flees to the desert, where he bemoans his fate (vv. 3–14) and where God comforts him by assuring him that he is still at work, working out his plan for Israel and the nations (vv. 15–18).

From that Old Testament passage, Paul quotes Elijah’s lament about being left alone after the slaughter of the prophets (Rom. 11:3; cf. 1 Kings 19:10, 14) and the Lord’s concluding reassurance to Elijah that he has preserved a remnant of seven thousand who have not given their allegiance to Baal (Rom. 11:4; cf. 1 Kings 19:18b). We saw evidence earlier in Romans 9–11 that Paul may have identified himself with Moses (9:2–3). Perhaps he now implicitly identifies himself also with Elijah. For, like Elijah, Paul is confronted with the apparent downfall of spiritual Israel, but finds new hope in God’s preservation of a remnant of true believers.6

Paul now draws a conclusion: “So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace” (11:5). He preserves the careful balance he has maintained throughout these chapters as he discusses Israel. God’s Word affirms a continuing role for Israel in salvation history. But Israel cannot claim this role as a matter of right, for it is due solely to the working of God’s grace. This polemical thrust becomes explicit in verse 6. “Grace” means that “works” have no role to play, that God is entirely free to bestow his blessing on whomever he chooses. If those blessings were in fact dependent on our works, God would not be free in his granting of blessing, and “grace would no longer be grace.”

Bridging Contexts

ELECTION AND REMNANT. As is true throughout Romans 9–11, Paul assumes that his readers are well acquainted with the Old Testament and its teachings as he writes 11:1–10. Yet few of us in the contemporary church know our Old Testaments as well as we should. We certainly do not have the kind of everyday, intimate experience with the Old Testament that Paul’s first readers had. The Jewish Christians in Rome were, of course, raised on the Old Testament. But many, perhaps even most, of the Gentile Christians probably also had long acquaintance with the Old Testament as regular attenders of the synagogue. If we are to grasp fully what Paul teaches in verses 1–10, two Old Testament concepts are especially important to understand: election and the remnant. Since these two themes are closely intertwined in the Old Testament and in Paul’s argument, we may look at them together.

Paul specifically refers to the election of Israel in verse 2 by speaking of God’s foreknowing of the people. We have argued that Paul here applies God’s election to the people of Israel as a whole (see also 11:28). Careful readers of Romans (or of this commentary!) may wonder how God’s election of Israel as a people relates to Paul’s claim in chapter 9 that God’s “purpose in election” refers only to some Jews, to “the Israel within Israel” (cf. 9:6), the remnant (9:27; cf. 9:24). Paul seems to be trying to have it both ways. In order to vindicate God’s faithfulness, he reaffirms God’s election of the nation of Israel (ch. 11). But in order to explain the meager response of Jews in his own day, he insists that God only elects some Jews (ch. 9).

But Paul is not the muddled thinker some of his critics have accused him of being. Rather, he is building on a tradition that goes back into the Old Testament and that was developed extensively in the intertestamental period. Central to this tradition is a distinction between corporate and individual election. Some traditional explanations of Romans 9–11 have overemphasized the individual perspective, viewing the chapters as an exposition on predestination. But some contemporary approaches err in the opposite direction. The situation Paul confronts requires him to integrate the two perspectives, or, better, to interpret one in the light of the other.

Paul inherited from the Scriptures and his Jewish heritage the teaching of a corporate election of all Israel. This is the dominant note about election per se in the Old Testament. References are far too numerous to quote, but Deuteronomy 7:6 is representative: “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”9 This strand of Old Testament teaching focuses on the way in which God graciously entered into relationship with the nation of Israel. This relationship is called the covenant, a binding agreement between God and Israel. God, on his part, creates Israel as a people by choosing Abraham, giving him descendants, bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, and settling them in the Promised Land. Israel, on her part, is to honor God by keeping the law he has given her. God promises to bless Israel if she obeys, but to punish her if she does not.

However, almost from the beginning (as Paul points out in ch. 9), another strand in the teaching about election is also clear. God’s election of Israel as a nation provides temporal blessings and an opportunity to enter into genuine spiritual fellowship through a heart commitment to the Lord. But it does not provide for salvation in and of itself. As Israel’s history proceeds, this becomes increasingly clear. More and more Jews, though elect as members of Israel, rebelled against God, breaking his law and serving other gods. Thus there came into greater prominence the idea of the “remnant”: those Israelites who remained committed in their hearts to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Paul himself cites two of the key Old Testament remnant texts, Isaiah 10:22–23 (in Rom. 9:27–28) and 1 Kings 19:18 (in Rom. 11:4; see also Ezra 9:8, 13–15; Isa. 37:31, 32; Jer. 23:3; 31:7; 42:2; Micah 2:12; 4:7; 5:7, 8).10 Election language, to be sure, is not usually applied to this remnant. Strictly speaking, election in the Old Testament is a corporate phenomenon. But the idea of an individual election taking place within this corporate election is present at least in germ form.

The tribulations of Israel in the intertestamental period forced many Jews to develop the notion of a true, faithful Israel within national Israel much more extensively. Under the stress of persecution, many Jews renounced their faith, and many more compromised their faith in a way unacceptable to their pious brothers and sisters. As a result, the Jewish “parties” of this period individualized election by insisting that membership in the true people of God was reserved for certain people rather than for a nation. In the Qumran community, for instance, covenantal membership was reserved for the “sons of light” and in Psalms of Solomon for the “pious.”11

Paul responds to the crisis of Israel in his own day by formulating a similar idea. Only those whom God has chosen by an act of his grace are true members of God’s people. God is in fact freely choosing only some Jews to be saved but many Gentiles. Paul sees this in accord with what the Old Testament teaches about God’s purpose to create an “Israel within Israel.” But, unlike some of his Jewish contemporaries, Paul also continues to affirm God’s election of Israel as a whole. God has not completely abandoned the nation in order to concentrate only on some within it. The promises he made to the patriarchs continue to be valid (11:28). Indeed, chapter 11 is basically about what the continuing implications of that corporate election are for Israel.

Contemporary Significance

IN AN EARLIER PART of this commentary, we suggested that the Jewish people in Romans (and, indeed, in the Bible as a whole) have a paradigmatic role (see Bridging Contexts section of 2:1–11). What the Jewish people do or experience represents, at certain points, a universal condition. To be sure, the principle is easily abused if we ignore those ways in which Israel has a unique position in Romans. But the biblical story of God’s election and the way it has been understood by people contain lessons for the contemporary church.

As we have just seen, the Bible teaches both an election of Israel as a nation to privilege and service and an election of individuals from within Israel (and from outside Israel as well) to salvation. In Israel’s history, we find people who overemphasized one of these elections at the expense of the other. With some hesitation, I suggest we find the same sort of imbalance in the church today.

Some Jews made the mistake of assuming that God’s election of Israel virtually guaranteed spiritual benefits to every member of the nation. Birth into that nation, circumcision (for males), and a reasonable faithfulness in observing the law were all that was needed to ensure one’s salvation. Some segments of the church have much the same kind of attitude. People assume that they will go to heaven as long as they can claim such external credits as baptism, confirmation, church attendance, participation in the mass, and acts of service.

Churches that emphasize the sacraments and use a liturgy are more open to this problem than others. I myself grew up in such a church. Despite my baptism as an infant, the faithfulness of my parents in exposing me to the gospel through confirmation, and my regular church attendance, I had no genuine heart commitment to Christ. Faith had not been awakened in me. The fault is, of course, my own. But the church contributed to the problem by failing to bring home to me personally the need to respond to God’s Word and to the sacraments to which I was regularly exposed. I was presuming on a kind of corporate election—that members of my church or my family were “in” automatically.

In Jewish history, a sectarian view developed that taught that only those who met the strict requirements of a given sect had any hope of salvation. Similarly, some churches today teach that only by conforming to certain expectations can people be saved. While they usually do not come out and say so, many of these churches implicitly teach that you can be saved only if you have had a certain kind of conversion experience. A gradual growth in faith with the moment of conversion impossible to identify is not enough; one must have had a definite, preferably emotional, experience of God’s grace.

I have also known churches that looked askance at anyone who used anything but a King James Version Bible. The elect would surely know the “authorized” Bible! At the other end of a certain spectrum, the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church continues to be that “outside the Church there is no salvation.” Post-Vatican II theology has loosened these parameters to include “unconscious” participants in the church, but the principle is still there.

What is needed in the face of these contradictory impulses is a fresh commitment to the teaching of election we find in these chapters. God chooses those who are truly his. His choice is not based on anything we have done or could do. It is not determined by the nation we live in, the family we were born to, or the church we attend. It has nothing to do with how often we go to mass or how many times we have “come forward” at a Billy Graham crusade. We can put no restrictions on God’s election, nor can we predict whom he will elect. Those who are elect exercise faith in Christ as the single requirement for salvation. (We can skip for now the vexing question of which comes first, election or faith.) Faith must be defined in biblical terms, and we must always remember that many things necessarily flow from faith. But we must resist any attempt to minimize faith in Christ as the central mark of the elect of God.

To borrow a metaphor from the political arena, then, Christians should make the tent of election no larger and no smaller than the extent of genuine faith in Christ. Our culture tugs us toward the former extreme, the “big tent” view of Christianity. The emphasis on tolerance for other views and a postmodern lack of concern with specifics pressures us to enlarge the tent of salvation to include people who give no indication that they are elect. But it is also easy to overreact against our culture and to confine salvation to a very small tent, covered by the canvas of our own particular hobbyhorse.

Original Meaning

Israel’s Present Situation: A Summary (11:7–10)

WITH THE RHETORICAL question “What then?” Paul signals the conclusion he wants to draw from his discussion about the remnant. But his conclusion is also a fair summary of the situation of Israel in Paul’s day as he developed it in chapters 9–10. (1) What Israel as a whole “sought so earnestly it did not obtain” (11:7). This language reflects 9:31: “Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it.” This parallel allows us to supply the missing referent for the word “it” in 11:7a: It is a right standing with God that Israel sought but did not obtain.

(2) Paul then breaks the situation of Israel in general down into two specific entities. (a) One is the “remnant.” Despite the rejection of Israel as a whole, many individual Jews have responded to the gospel. They are the Israel within Israel (9:6), the “remnant chosen by grace” (11:5). These Jews, “the elect” (11:7), have obtained the right standing with God that Israel as a whole was seeking. (b) The other, larger division of Jews consists of those who have not attained this right standing. They have been “hardened.”

The Greek verb for “hardened” is poroo, which in secular Greek often refers to a callous or to the hardening of a bone when it heals after being broken. But in the New Testament, the word always has a metaphorical significance, referring to spiritual obduracy (Mark 6:52; 8:17; John 12:40; 2 Cor. 3:14; cf. the noun form in Mark 3:5; Rom. 11:25; Eph. 4:18). While the Greek verb in 9:18 is different (skleryno), the idea conveyed here is the same. God confirms the spiritual insensitivity that people are locked up under by virtue of their sin in Adam.

The Old Testament quotations in 11:8–10 provide biblical support for the idea that it is God who hardens people. Paul, following Jewish precedent, quotes from every part of the Hebrew canon: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The quotation in verse 8 is a composite. Most of it comes from Deuteronomy 29:4, but the phrase “spirit of stupor” is from Isaiah 29:10. It is probably also the influence of Isaiah 29:10 that leads Paul to change the negative formulation of the Deuteronomy text (“the Lord has not given …”) into a positive one: “God gave….” This change, of course, also suits Paul’s application better, since he is documenting the initiative of God in hardening his people.

In 11:9–10, Paul supports this idea further by quoting from one of the famous imprecatory psalms. In Psalm 69, David laments the unjust persecution he is experiencing and asks God to bring disaster on his enemies (69:22–23). These are the verses Paul quotes. What David prayed that his persecutors would experience God has brought on the majority of Jews in his own day. Paul’s attention may have been drawn to this passage because Psalm 69 seems to have been widely alluded to and explicitly used in the New Testament church (see Mark 3:21; 15:23 and par.; Luke 13:35; John 2:17; 15:25; Acts 1:20; Rom. 15:3; Phil. 4:3; Rev. 3:5; 16:1).

Commentators debate over the precise application Paul intends when he mentions “their table” becoming “a snare and a trap.” The most popular suggestions are that Paul alludes to the sacrificial cult of the Jews7 or to Jewish dependence on the law.8 But it is not clear that Paul intends either of these—or any other specific application for that matter. The language is in the Psalm text, and Paul may not have given thought to any application in his own day.

Bridging Contexts

Contemporary Significance