The Salvation of All Israel | Romans 11:25-32

Scripture

• Romans 11:25–32

About this sermon

Introduction: We now come to the culmination of an explanation that Paul began offering back in the 9th chapter and the 6th verse. The question that his teaching addresses, as you will remember, is whether the unbelief of Israelites — the rejection of the Messiah by most of the people of Israel — represents a failure of God’s Word. Have God’s purposes somehow failed. Has God’s plan for the nation Israel, somehow come up short? His answer is a firm “no.” ESV Romans 9:6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, 7 and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but "Through Isaac shall your offspring be named." 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. From that point forward he has been walking us through the evidences that God’s purposes according to election will always stand. He has not only walked us through the evidence, but he has also demonstrated how this affects him personally, and how it should affect his primary audience —Gentile Christians. The two-fold affect that we saw last week was motivation and humility. The knowledge of God’s revealed purposes should motivate us for ministry, and should humble us in our walk with God, and in our ministry of the gospel. But now, He brings this all to a close in this final section of Romans 11. He nails down the idea that God’s Word has not failed, because God has revealed that He will pour out salvation upon Israel at the end of the age, and as He does this, He will fulfill all of His promises made to their fathers. There will be a believing nation of Israel and the promises and purposes of God will be upheld. That is the final nail in the argument that demonstrates the faithfulness of the Word of God. There are four parts to what we see in verses 25-32, but this morning we will look at the first three. We will come back next week and look at the 4th. A HUMBLING MYSTERY (vs.25a) The first thing we see is a humbling mystery. What Paul expresses can be organized into two parts. A DESIRE FOR THEIR KNOWLEDGE Paul does not want them to be ignorant of something that God has revealed. A mystery in the New Testament is not something hard to understand. It is not something hidden in the sense that the pagan mystery religions thought of mysteries. Rather, a mystery is something that cannot be known apart from God telling us, and it is about something that was unknown to us previously but now He has brought it to light. There are many of these mysteries spoken of in the New Testament. H.A. Ironside wrote a book that focused on those mysteries. He dealt with 7 of them. 1. “The Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 13:11) 2. “The Mystery of the Olive Tree” (Romans 11:25) 3. “The Great Mystery of Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32) 4. “The Mystery of Piety” (1 Timothy 3:16) 5. “The Mystery of the Rapture of the Saints” (1 Corinthians 15:51) 6. “The Mystery of Lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:7) 7. “The Mystery of God Finished” (Revelation 10:7). The point of a mystery is that it is information that we would never arrive at on our own. It has to do with a set of facts, a particular bit of instruction, information about the future, that we could not access within ourselves, or by observance — God had to tell us. And what Paul is used by God to reveal in our text, he does not want his readers to miss. He does not want them unaware of these truths. But it is not just knowledge that Paul wants his readers to have. He tells us why he wants them to have that knowledge.

Topics

• Salvation
• Prophecy & End Times