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I do not wish to tackle these scenarios right now, but the issue of “chosenness” is one that has created a great deal of confusion and even intense persecution because of misunderstandings about what God is really like and how He relates to us. The last part of Romans 9 addresses this issue a great deal and there is much to learn here. It also sheds a useful light on the surrounding passages that I have been moving through over the past few days and weeks that I want to take time to explore further.
I think it is well known that Jews in the times of Jesus were very hung up on the idea of their supposed exclusive advantage with the emphasis on “exclusive”. They firmly believed that only the biological descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were of any notable consideration by God. With very few, and very carefully filtered exceptions (see Matt. 23:15) the Jews considered themselves to be the only breed on earth from which God would chose the saved. Therefore, in their minds the rest of the pagans and mixed breeds were considered to be hopeless and unsaveable and therefore objects of their scorn and, of course, the wrath of the Almighty.
But even within the Jewish community there was marked separation and distinctions in classes and factions of people who were considered to be more “holy” than others. This struggle to define one's self as being worthy of God's favor was a constant and public issue especially among the Pharisee's, Sadducee's and other teachers of the Law. Not unlike today, the “chosen” people of God were fracturing themselves into divisions that argued and split hairs over details of the righteousness of the Law that caused them to reject and revile anyone who did not agree with them. While they went to enormous lengths to be obedient to every rule in the Law and many more that they came up with themselves to protect the Law, the spirit that they possessed was the very opposite of the spirit of the Lawgiver Himself who showed up in their midst in human form to demonstrate to them the way God feels and acts when He comes into the arena of humanness.
In Romans, one of the groups that Paul is addressing and is identified in chapter 2 is the Jewish converts to Christianity who still carried some baggage from their past about righteousness by rule-keeping. We have developed our own version of this kind of thinking today that is nearly identical but without the biological ingredient. While righteousness is not the absence of obedience to God's laws, the tendency to think that keeping rules makes a person righteous is one of the lies of Satan that has to be exposed and corrected if we are to grow in grace and the true knowledge of God and the principles of life. Paul is also directly addressing the prejudice of the “exclusiveness mentality” that was not only still very prevalent in the minds of Jews back then but is also seen in many Christians today.
When we begin to think that we are quite sure we know who God is saving and who is going to be lost we are becoming deeply infected with this same poison that caused God to become divorced from His “marriage” to the Jews as a chosen nation. This was due to their rejection of His last attempt to reconcile the marriage in the person of Jesus His Son. When they killed off this last offer of mercy and subsequently began killing off His Spirit-empowered followers, God was forced to accept their final decision and the divorce became final. That does not mean that Jewish individuals cannot be part of the redeemed through faith, but they must now enter into that intimate relationship with God apart from any advantage formerly enjoyed as God's “chosen nation”. Under the new covenant (new marriage), those who make up the bride of Christ are from every class and people on the earth who accept the invitation of God to become intimate with Him and submit to being led by His Spirit.
How Paul explains this and the illustrations he uses in this chapter I believe will be very instructive as I further examine them. But due to lack of time again I will leave that for another day.
