[182] Ἐμὲ is emphatic in both clauses. Ἐπερωτᾶν is used of the consultation of an oracle. Our translation thus seems better than the more secondary explanation, "who sought not to do My will."
CHAPTER XXII
ISRAEL HOWEVER NOT FORSAKEN
Romans xi. 1-10
A PEOPLE disobeying and contradicting. So the Lord of Israel, through the prophet, had described the nation. Let us remember as we pass on what a large feature in the prophecies, and indeed in the whole Old Testament, such accusations and exposures are. From Moses to Malachi, in histories, and songs, and instructions, we find everywhere this tone of stern truth-telling, this unsparing detection and description of Israelite sin. And we reflect that every one of these utterances, humanly speaking, was the voice of an Israelite; and that whatever reception it met with at the moment—it was sometimes a scornful or angry reception, oftener a reverent one—it was ultimately treasured, venerated, almost worshipped, by the Church of this same rebuked and humiliated Israel. We ask ourselves what this has to say about the true origin of these utterances, and the true nature of the environment into which they fell. Do they not bear witness to the supernatural in both? It was not "human nature" which, in a race quite as prone, at least, as any other, to assert itself, produced these intense and persistent rebukes from within, and secured for them a profound and lasting veneration. The Hebrew Scriptures, in this as in other things, are a literature which mere man, mere Israelite man, "could not have written if he would, and would not have written if he could."[183] Somehow, the Prophets not only spoke with an authority more than human, but they were known to speak with it. There was a national consciousness of divine privilege; and it was inextricably bound up with a national conviction that the Lord of the privileges had an eternal right to reprove His privileged ones, and that He had, as a fact, His accredited messengers of reproof, whose voice was not theirs but His; not the mere outcry of patriotic zealots but the Oracle of God. Yea, an awful privilege was involved in the reception of such reproofs: "You only have I known; therefore will I punish you" (Amos iii. 2).
But this is a recollection by the way. St Paul, so we saw in our last study, has quoted Isaiah's stern message, only now to stay his troubled heart on the fact that the unbelief of Israel in his day was, if we may dare to put it so, no surprise to the Lord, and therefore no shock to the servant's faith. But is he to stop there, and sit down, and say, "This must be so"? No; there is more to follow, in this discourse on Israel and God. He has "good words, and comfortable words" (Zech. i. 13), after the woes of the last two chapters, and after those earlier passages of the Epistle where the Jew is seen only in his hypocrisy, and rebellion, and pride. He has to speak of a faithful Remnant, now as always present, who make as it were the golden unbroken link between the nation and the promises. And then he has to lift the curtain, at least a corner of the curtain, from the future, and to indicate how there lies waiting there a mighty blessing for Israel, and through Israel for the world. Even now the mysterious "People" was serving a spiritual purpose in their very unbelief; they were occasioning a vast transition of blessing to the Gentiles, by their own refusal of blessing. And hereafter they were to serve a purpose of still more illustrious mercy. They were yet, in their multitudes, to return to their rejected Christ. And their return was to be used as the means of a crisis of blessing for the world.
We seem to see the look and hear the voice of the Apostle, once the mighty Rabbi, the persecuting patriot, as he begins now to dictate again. His eyes brighten, and his brow clears, and a happier emphasis comes into his utterance, as he sets himself to speak of his people's good, and to remind his Gentile brethren how, in God's plan of redemption, all their blessing, all they know of salvation, all they possess of life eternal, has come to them through Israel. Israel is the Stem, drawing truth and life from the unfathomable soil of the covenant of promise. They are the grafted Branches, rich in every blessing—because they are the mystical seed of Abraham, in Christ.
Ver. 1.
to
Ver. 6.
I say therefore, Did God ever thrust[184] away His people? Away with the thought! For I am an Israelite, of Abraham's seed, Benjamin's tribe; full member of the theocratic race (Ἰσραηλίτης), and of its first royal and always loyal tribe; in my own person, therefore, I am an instance of Israel still in covenant. God never[184] thrust away His people, whom He foreknew with the foreknowledge of eternal choice and purpose.[185] That foreknowledge was "not according to their works," or according to their power; and so it holds its sovereign way across and above their long unworthiness. Or do you not know, in Elijah, in his story, in the pages marked with his name, what the Scripture says? How he intercedes before God, on God's own behalf, against Israel, saying (1 Kings xix. 10), "Lord, Thy prophets they killed, and Thy altars they dug up; and I was left solitary, and they seek my life"? But what says the oracular answer (ὁ χρηματισμὸς) to him? "I have left for Myself seven thousand men, men who (οἵτινες) bowed never knee to Baal" (1 Kings xix. 18). So therefore at the present season also there proves to be (γέγονεν) a remnant, "a leaving" (λεῖμμα), left by the Lord for Himself, on the principle of (κατὰ) election of grace; their persons and their number following a choice and gift whose reasons lie in God alone. And then follows one of those characteristic "foot-notes" of which we saw an instance above (x. 17): But if by grace, no longer of works; "no longer," in the sense of a logical succession and exclusion; since the grace proves (γίνεται), on the other principle, no longer grace. But if of works, it is no longer grace; since the work is no longer work.[186] That is to say, when once the grace-principle is admitted, as it is here assumed to be, "the work" of the man who is its subject is "no longer work" in the sense which makes an antithesis to grace; it is no longer so much toil done in order to so much pay to be given. In other words, the two supposed principles of the divine Choice are in their nature mutually exclusive. Admit the one as the condition of the "election," and the other ceases; you cannot combine them into an amalgam. If the election is of grace, no meritorious antecedent to it is possible in the subject of it. If it is according to meritorious antecedent, no sovereign freedom is possible in the divine action, such freedom as to bring the saved man, the saved remnant, to an adoring confession of unspeakable and mysterious mercy.