Romans 11:22-23, “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again.”
You'll never hear the truth about Israel any simpler than what I'm about to
tell you. After years of pondering this subject, the Lord settled my heart a
couple years ago concerning this matter, revealing the plain truth in His Holy
Word. Like most Christians, I had grown up misled (from reading Zionist
commentaries), thinking that Jews were more special than Gentiles. Boy was I
wrong!
Our text verse says it all from Romans 11:22-23. The Biblical truth is that believing Gentiles (the branches) are grafted into true Israel (the olive tree, i.e., Abraham's spiritual seed). Please note that I don't believe in Replacement Theology (i.e., the belief that the Church replaces Israel). Our text Scripture is so important as a key to understanding Israel. The Church does not replace Israel. The Church is the Church and Israel is Israel. The Bible teaches that Gentile and Jewish believers alike can be grafted into the olive tree (true Israel, i.e., Abraham's spiritual seed), BUT ONLY BY FAITH IN THE LORD JESUS CHRIST!!!
To “graff them in again” in Romans
11:23 doesn't refer to Jews losing and regaining salvation; but rather, many
Old Testament Jews perished in unbelief (Hebrews 4:2), and went to Hell, not
being of the spiritual seed of Abraham; but now Paul says that there is still
hope for Jews today, because they can still be grafted into Abraham's
spiritual seed once again by faith in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:26), and this
promise applies to both Jews and Gentiles alike (Romans 1:16). Galatians
3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for
ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
If the Jews Abide Not Still in Unbelief
Please notice again what the Holy Scriptures say in Romans 11:22-23, “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell [OLD TESTAMENT JEWS], severity; but toward thee [GENTILES], goodness, if thou [GENTILES] continue in his goodness: otherwise thou [GENTILES] also shalt be cut off. And they [JEWS] also, if they [JEWS] abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them [JEWS] in again” [words in brackets added for clarity]. Paul was speaking to the Roman Gentiles in this passage. God is plainly telling us that ONLY BELIEVING JEWS AND GENTILES WILL BE GRAFTED BACK INTO TRUE ISRAEL (ABRAHAM'S SPIRITUAL SEED). Galatians 3:29, “And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Although the physical nation of Israel had been cut off, there was still hope. Anyone, Jew and Gentile alike, can be grafted back into true Israel, of the spiritual seed of Abraham, simply by believing the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Galatians 3:29 says that all the promises of God apply ONLY to those who are in Jesus Christ.
Now there will be a restored nation of Israel. There will be 144,000 Jews saved during the Tribulation period. Christ will literally reign over the earth from the throne of David in Israel. God will once again deal with the nation of Israel during the Tribulation, when a remnant of Jews repent toward God by faith in Christ Jesus. The Church will be removed from the world at the Rapture. God dealt with Israel in the Old Testament. He's dealing with the Church now in The Times Of The Gentiles (Luke 21:24). And God will deal with Israel again during the Tribulation.
Today, Jews and Gentiles alike who believe the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ are members of the New Testament Church. We are all a part of God's family (the house of God) as born-again Christians (Galatians 3:26). The true nation of Israel has not yet been restored to the land. It is Satanic heresy to recognize, honor, praise and support the unbelieving, wicked, Marxist-Communist, homosexual, present-day, Wall Street funded, secular state of Israel and the professed Jews who are part of it. Old Testament Israel was unfaithful to God, and so the Lord finally (after much longsuffering and pleading) reluctantly signed the divorce papers. Jeremiah 3:8, “And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.” Israel played the whore continually, in perpetual whoredoms, committing spiritual idolatry and adultery.
Please understand from reading Romans 11:22-23 that no unbelieving Jew (i.e., a Christ-rejecting Jew) will ever be grafted into God's olive tree (Abraham's spiritual seed, or true Israel). Galatians 3:29, “And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.” That's what the apostle Paul meant in Romans 9:6, “Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel.” In other words, a physical Jew is not necessarily a spiritual Jew. You're not a born-again Christian just because you're Jewish. Jews must be born-again, just like Gentiles (John 3:3).
Nearly all present-day Jews still abide
in unbelief. This means they are not grafted into God's family tree. The
Holy Bible couldn't be any more plain in Romans 11:22-23.
God's Promise to Bless the Jews is Conditional
Millions of U.S. churchgoers and Christians mindlessly sing praises to present-day secular Israel and Christ-rejecting Jews, ignorantly misunderstanding the Words of God concerning Israel. Exodus 19:5 plainly states, “Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine.” Notice the conditional promise... IF, IF, IF!!! If the Jews obeyed God, only then would they be a peculiar treasure above all people on earth, as God's ambassadors to the Gentiles. Their elevated social status was not because they were biological Jews; but rather, because they were doing God's work as God's obedient people. The very notion that Jews are superior merely because of their biological origin is insane.
God divorced His people after centuries of rebellion and spiritual idolatry and whoredoms. It was a business agreement gone bad. The Jews refused to cooperate for so long that God gave up on Israel (i.e., as far as His hope of the Jews proclaiming His Word to all the world). So instead God turned to the Gentiles to provoke the Jews to envy (Romans 11:11). Romans 11:22-23 makes very clear that unbelieving Jews today are NOT grafted into the olive tree. The Apostle Paul says that the fallen Jews CAN BE GRAFTED BACK IN, but only thru BELIEVING ON THE LORD JESUS CHRIST!!!
The unbelieving Jews in the New Testament had the same arrogant attitude that so many have today, and John the Baptist sharply rebuked them, calling them nothing. Matthew 3:9, “And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” Wow! John the Baptist told the Jewish religious leaders that they were NOTHING, and that God could raise up some rocks to be Abraham's children. If God can give life to a clump of dust and make a man, and can calm the winds and waves as Christ did, He can certainly raise up some stones as Abraham's physical descendants if He wanted to. John rebuked the arrogant Christ-rejecting Jewish leaders, who thought they were something special merely because they were biological Jews.
As Pastor J. Vernon McGee Biblically
points out in the following article and MP3 clip, God promises to restore
future Israel to the Promised Land when they turn to God.
Pastor J. Vernon McGee Refutes Zionism (present-day Israel is
NOT the fulfillment of Bible prophecy). There has been no
genuine turning to God in Israel. In fact, it is quite the contrary today.
Dr. McGee, before his passing into Heaven in 1988, firmly believed that
there were less than 300 born-again Christians in all of modern-day Israel.
The truth is that
The
Council On Foreign Relations (who started the United Nations after World
War II) put secular Israel back on the map in 1948, not the Lord God of the
Holy Bible. Present-day Israel is a Satanic counterfeit, awaiting their
counterfeit Messiah, i.e., the Antichrist.
Only Believing Jews and Gentiles are God's People
But you say. Brother Stewart, I'm confused. I always thought that the Jews were God's people and Israel was God's nation. Isn't that still true today? We must differentiate between true holy Israel and counterfeit Israel (aka, present-day Israel). Hosea 2:23, “And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.” This Scripture refers to believing Gentiles throughout history who've been grafted into God's family tree (i.e., Abraham's spiritual seed - Galatians 3:29).
Present-day Israel is a Satanic fraud, created by The Council On Foreign Relations (CFR). The physical seed of Abraham (Jews) have been scattered across the world since 70 AD, and have intermarried over the past 1900 years. There are no pure ethnic Jews today. So who are God's people today...20% Jew... 50% Jew... 70 % Jew, et cetera? Or is it Orthodox Jews? National Jews? Cultural Jews?
Here is some helpful information . . .
The idea that the so called Israelite peoples are a distinct ethnic group differing radically from others seems to me to be flawed by the simple fact that there are virtually no ethnically pure groups on earth today. When Yair Davidiy claims [without any serious evidence] that "the Danes" are Israelite because of the verbal similarity with the tribe of "Dan", this implies that actually the "Danes" aren't ethnically Scandinavian but Semitic. That proposition is ridiculous. Further, the implication seems to be that whoever lives in Denmark is also a "Dane" and therefore also Semitic—because so many tribes moved around and came to live in Denmark over the past few millennia. But these theories presuppose that the original Jewish or Israelite tribes who supposedly moved to Denmark and Anglo-Saxon countries were themselves pure. A brief review of their history shows this is far from the case:
- Abraham, father of the Israelite peoples, was not an inhabitant of the land we now know as Israel. He was from far away, in modern day Iraq.
- Isaac and Jacob both took wives from tribes who were the forefathers of the Arabs. God reminds Israel of this later: "Your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite" (Ez. 16:3,45)—as if to say 'Listen Israel, ethnically you're really no different from the surrounding Arabic tribes'. It is following the faith of Abraham which makes people his children, rather than fleshly descent (Rom. 4:12-16; Gal. 3:7-9). Hence Paul's comment: "They are not all Israel who are of Israel" (Rom. 9:6).
— Some of the children of Jacob were by his servant girls, who were also ethnically 'Arabic' rather than 'Israelite'
— Joseph married an Egyptian, Asenath-Ephraim and Manasseh his sons were half Egyptian.
— The community which left Egypt and journeyed to Canaan included a very large "mixed multitude" (Ex. 12:38, Heb. 'a mongrel people'). However there was no ethnic distinction made between them and the descendants of Jacob, neither in the Law of Moses nor in any social legislation. They were assimilated.
— Repeatedly, Biblical history laments how the children of Jacob intermarried with the local Canaanite tribes and surrounding nations.
— Solomon's mother was an Ammonites. Yet he was in the royal line. Other kings also had Gentile mothers.
— In captivity in Babylon, the Jews quickly assimilated, adopting paganic Babylonian names. Only a minority of them returned to the land under Ezra and Nehemiah, and even these were characterized by marriage with non-Jews, to the point that their children couldn't speak Hebrew (Ezra 10 etc.).
— Much research has been done to investigate why despite the small number who returned from Babylon, by the time of Christ a few centuries later, the population of Palestine had increased so many fold. It's apparent that there was large scale immigration into Palestine of various groups who assimilated with the Jews.
— Throughout the past 2000 years, the 'Jewish' people have continued to follow a pattern of assimilation and intermarriage, persecution, separation, acceptance, assimilation...
This brief summary shows that the Jewish people are far from ethnically pure—in fact they have experienced far more dilution of their ethnicity than most other races! What is clear is that being 'Jewish', being the children of faithful Abraham, is a matter of faith and spiritual culture rather than genetics or blood ethnicity. That's why modern Israel includes black Africans, Chinese, Filipinos, Americans, pale skinned, blonde, blue eyed Scandinavians... all wearing skull caps and claiming to be Jews. That simple fact shows that the Jews simply aren't ethnically pure, and to claim that all those nations of origin are somehow legitimately 'Israelite' is therefore a genetical and ethnological fallacy.
READ MORE: Are The Jewish People Ethnically Pure?
