Let this be remembered in every enterprise for the spiritual good of the great Dispersion now. Through such efforts God is already approaching His hour of blessing, long expected. Let that fact animate and give a glad patience to His workers, on whose work He surely begins in our day to cast His smile of growing blessing.
Now the argument takes a new direction. The restoration thus indicated, thus foretold, is not only sure to be infinitely beneficial. It is also to be looked for and expected as a thing lying so to speak in the line of spiritual fitness, true to the order of God's plan. In His will, when He went about to create and develop His Church, Israel sprung from the dry ground as the sacred Olive, rich with the sap of truth and grace, full of branch and leaf. From the tents of Abraham onward, the world's true spiritual light and life was there. There, not elsewhere, was revelation, and God-given ordinance, and "the covenants, and the glory." There, not elsewhere, the Christ of God, for whom all things waited, towards whom all the lines of man's life and history converged, was to appear. Thus, in a certain profound sense, all true salvation must be not only "of" Israel (John iv. 24) but through him. Union with Christ was union with Abraham. To become a Christian, that is to say, one of Messiah's men, was to become, mystically, an Israelite. From this point of view the Gentile's union with the Saviour, though not in the least less genuine and divine than the Jew's, was, so to speak, less normal. And thus nothing could be more spiritually normal than the Jew's recovery to his old relation to God, from which he had violently dislocated himself. These thoughts the Apostle now presses on the Romans, as a new motive and guide to their hopes, prayers, and work. (Do we gather from the length and fulness of the argument that already it was difficult to bring Gentiles to think aright of the chosen people in their fall and rebellion?) He reminds them of the inalienable consecration of Israel to special divine purposes. He points them to the ancient Olive, and boldly tells them that they are, themselves, only a graft of a wild stock, inserted into the noble tree. Not that he thinks of the Jew as a superior being. But the Church of Israel was the original of the Church. So the restoration of Israel to Christ, and to the Church, is a recovery of normal life, not a first and abnormal grant of life.
[Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But if the first-fruit was holy, holy is the kneaded lump too.= Abraham was as it were the Lord's First-fruits of mankind, in the field of His Church. "Abraham's seed" are as it were the mass kneaded from that first-fruits; made of it. Was the first-fruits holy, in the sense of consecration to God's redeeming purpose? Then that which is made of it must somehow still be a consecrated thing, even though put aside as if "common" for awhile. =And if the root= was =holy,= holy are =the branches too;= the lineal heirs of Abraham are still, ideally, potentially, consecrated to Him who separated Abraham to Himself, and moved him to his great self-separation. [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =But if some of the branches= (how tender is the euphemism of the "_some_"!) =were broken off, while you, wild-olive as you were, were grafted in among them,= in their place of life and growth, =and became a sharer of the root and of the Olive's fatness,--= [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =do not boast over the= torn-off =branches. But if you do boast over them--not you carry the root, but the root carries you.= [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =You will say then, The branches were broken off--that I might be grafted in. Good:= true--and untrue: =because of their unbelief they were broken off, while you because of your faith stand.= They were no better beings than you, in themselves. But neither are you better than they, in yourself. They and you alike are, personally, mere subjects of redeeming mercy; owing all to Christ; possessing all only as accepting Christ. "Where is your boasting, then?" =Do not be high-minded, but fear,= fear yourself, your sin, your enemy. [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =For if God did not spare the natural branches, take care lest He spare not you either.= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =See therefore God's goodness and sternness. On those who fell,= came His =sternness= (ἀποτομία, not ἀποτομίαν); =but on you,= His =goodness, if you abide by that (τῇ) goodness,= with the adherence and response of faith; =since you too will be cut out= otherwise. [Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =And they too, if they do not abide by their (τῇ) unbelief, shall be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again.= [Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =For if you from the naturally wild olive were cut out, and non-naturally (παρὰ φύσιν) were grafted into the Garden-Olive, how much more shall those, the= branches =naturally, be grafted into their own Olive!=