Did not this endurance imply opportunity to repent, and assume that destruction was not God’s arbitrary choice, but theirs ?
Still further, what if God, through this same endurance, was working, not only to save the Jewish people if possible, but also to carry out a larger purpose toward a people which, in His eternal counsels, He had destined for the glory of the messianic kingdom ?
Here He introduces the subject of the inclusion of the Gentiles in the messianic kingdom. God is merciful in carrying out His will, but in His mercy He none the less carries out His will. Both His sovereignty and His mercy will be vindicated in His making a people for Himself from the Gentiles and from the believing Jews. What has Israel to say? The word of God has not been brought to nought by his rejection. The principle of divine selection which operated in Abraham and Jacob is carried out in the selection of believing Israel from the unbelieving mass, and in the call of the Gentiles. The elective purpose of God was broader than Israel thought. In choosing Israel God was contemplating the salvation of the world, and did not abdicate His liberty to reject unbelievers, or to call others not Jews.
With this should be compared the discourse of Jesus in John vi. After having given a sign of His divine power and commission by the feeding of the multitudes, His announcement of Himself as the bread from heaven, the true and only life of the world, is met with a stupid, materialistic construction of His words, and with obstin- ate incredulity ; whereupon He says, ‘‘ Ye also have seen me and believe not” (ver. 36). At this point He seems to pause and con- template His failure to reach the Jews, and to ask Himself if His mission is indeed for nought. It is the answer to this inward question which explains the apparent disconnection of ver. 37 with what precedes. Though the Jews reject, yet God will have a people for Himself. “All that’ the Father giveth ‘me shall come to me.” There is a clear foreshadowing here of the call of the Gentiles. oe
(25, 26.) But not only is God’s word not annulled ; it is ful- filled. For He says, by the prophet Hosea, that He will call by the name my people those who are not His people, and that nation beloved which was not beloved ; and in the Gentile lands, where God, by the punishment of exile, said to Israel, ‘Ye are not my
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people,” there God would visit them and recall them along with the Gentiles.
Here the apostle applies to the Gentiles what Hosea said of the Jews only. The tribes, by their lapse into idolatry, had placed themselves on the same footing with the Gentiles (not His people), so that the general truth could be applied to both. In Isaiah xlix. 22, the Gentiles are represented as restored to grace along with the Jews.
(27-29.) But this people shall not consist of Gentiles only ; for God says by Isaiah that a remnant shall be preserved out of Israel, a small number out of the great unbelieving mass, which shall at- tain to the salvation and privileges of the messianic kingdom: a remnant, for God in His righteous judgment will make a summary reckoning with the Jewish nation, and the great body of it shall be cut off; but a remnant shall be left as a seed by which the true peo- ple of God shall be perpetuated. This preservation of a remnant is a mark of divine mercy. But for this, the whole nation would have been destroyed like Sodom.
(30.) Paul now turns to the facts of human agency, moral free- dom, and consequent responsibility, which, up to this point, have been kept in the shadow of the truth of divine sovereignty. There is a correspondence between God’s freedom in His government and the freedom of men in their faith and unbelief. He summarily states the truth which he develops in ch. x. ; namely, that Israel was the cause of its own rejection, alluding at an same time incidentally to the cause of the Gentiles’ reception.