Romans 11:7

What then? That which Israel seeketh for, that he obtained not; but the election obtained it, and the rest were hardened.

That which Israel seeketh for ... refers to fleshly Israel's "seeking" God and his approval, a thing which they did not truly seek at all, for if they had truly sought the Lord, they would have found him, as one of their great prophets said:

And ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13).

Israel did not seek God in the sense of truly believing in him and walking as he commanded, but by the pursuit of their own righteousness (see under Romans 10:3).

Thus, the "seeking" in this verse, as it pertained to the old Israel, is mentioned in the sense of what they really should have done, and not in the sense of what they actually did. Christ made the same distinction in Luke 13:24 and Matthew 7:8.

The election obtained it... refers to the true Israel who feared God and honored him in their lives. Specifically, these were the righteous remnant, as distinguished from the nation.

And the rest were hardened ... This is past tense and refers to the nation in its entirely after the separation of the true Israel which was accomplished by the preaching of the gospel. It is understood as the rest of the COMMINGLED ISRAEL, as distinguished after the commingling ceased. The commingling of the two Israels had continued right up until the ministry of Jesus Christ, as witnesses by the fact that Zacharias and Elizabeth (part of the true Israel) were truly serving God within the institution of the law of Moses, and that Jesus Christ himself was born under the law and submitted to it in perfect obedience. But with Pentecost came the preaching of the gospel to all nations; and thereafter the separation of the two Israels was complete. What appears to be the total Israel, called here "the rest," were hardened. The true Israel had accepted Christ, and the total fleshly Israel were hardened. The totality here should be distinguished. It would have been incorrect to say that all Israel was hardened, for the spiritual Israel, until then commingled with the fleshly Israel, was not hardened; but the "rest" of that commingled Israel, meaning all of the fleshly Israel, were the ones hardened.

The two Israels in this verse emerge clearly under two designations, "the election" being the true Israel, "the rest" being the fleshly Israel. The election received God's blessing through the obedience of faith. The rest received it not through unbelief, rebellion, and self-hardening, terminating finally in God's judicial hardening. The fact of fleshly Israel's culpability in their terminal condition was stated by Christ thus:

And unto them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which saith:

By hearing ye shall hear, and shall in no wise understand; And seeing ye shall see, and shall in no wise perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, And their ears are dull of hearing, And their eyes they have closed; Lest haply they should perceive with their eyes, And hear with their ears, And understand with their heart, And should turn again, And I should heal them (Matthew 13:14,15).

It was Israel's closing of their eyes against the light that made them guilty; and, given that conduct on their part, God did indeed harden them. The same condition is appropriately called "blindness" by the sacred writers. Paul also called it a "strong delusion" and a "working of error" (2 Thessalonians 2:11). To Corinth he wrote that:

The God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Thus, there are three centers of participation in the hardening, or blinding (spiritually) of people who choose to be evil and close their eyes and ears against the truth, these being: (1) the wicked himself; (2) Satan, the god of this world, acting permissively under the will of God, and (3) God himself who wills that the willfully wicked shall be blinded, or hardened, in their condition. The hardening of Israel (all of the fleshly Israel) is of such tremendous importance to the remainder of this chapter, that a further study of it is appended here.

THE HARDENING OF ISRAEL

Biblically, God's judicial hardening of the reprobate is extensively illustrated. The entire antediluvian world, Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, Jericho and the 32 kingdoms displaced by the Jews, Babylon, Nineveh, Chorazin, Capernaum, and Bethsaida are all examples of kingdoms and cities that fell under God's judicial sentence of hardening, and to these must be added the kingdom of Israel as made up of the ten lost tribes. What happened when God hardened such peoples? They were destroyed with cataclysmic destruction and fell never to rise again, eternal death also apparently being included in their doom. To this list of great cities and kingdoms, the scriptures add the names of various individuals who were hardened, such as Pharaoh (ominously introduced by Paul himself in this epistle as an example), and Judas Iscariot. They too perished almost simultaneously with their being hardened judicially.

Something of the nature of judicial hardening and how it occurs was captured by the discerning words of Lenski, thus:

Ten times Exodus reports that Pharaoh hardened himself; then, only in consequence of this self-hardening, we read ten times that God hardened this self-hardened man. In each instance, ten is the number of completeness. Even the hardening by God's agency is not complete at once; it follows these stages, permissive, desertive, and judicial, only the last being final and hopeless. The door of mercy is not shut at once upon the self-hardened so that they crash into the locked door with a bang. WE might close it thus. God's mercy closes it gradually and is ready to open it wide again at the least show of repentance in answer to his mercy; and, not until the warnings of the gradually closing door are utterly in vain does the door sink regretfully into its lock.[9]

Pharaoh is the outstanding Biblical example of hardening, because of the details revealed in the scriptures, and the fullness of the description of it. The utmost significance of Paul's pointed reference to Pharaoh (Romans 9:17) is seen in his application of that example to the hardening of Israel. The citation by the apostle is alone sufficient to justify the assumption of Israel's judicial hardening in a manner like that of Pharaoh, but there are other considerations that make it absolutely certain,, as follows:

(1) There is the Saviour's statement that the prophecy of Israel had been fulfilled in Israel (Matthew 13:14,15).

(2) There is the express declaration of scripture that Israel's conduct was every whit as bad as that of Sodom and Gomorra (Jeremiah 23:14), and even worse than that of Samaria (Ezekiel 16:47), all of which other people were hardened and destroyed; and there can be no doubt that the thing alone which prevented the same fate for Israel was God's plan of bringing in the Messiah through their race.

(3) Christ formally sentenced Israel to hardening and death in some of the most dramatic words ever written, in Matthew 23:37f. No one who reads Jesus' heart-breaking denunciation there can fail to believe that his words were indeed the formal pronouncement of God's judicial sentence upon them. The city of Jerusalem itself was consigned to the torch, the pestilence, and the sword, to famine and death, to the heel of the invader and the dashing of her little ones against the stones, a sentence so terrible that Christ wept as he uttered it; and it was all the more tragic and pitiable because it came of their own willful obduracy. The Lord said,

How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.

(4) Not merely the destruction of the great Jewish capital was announced by Christ. The religious hierarchy that governed the people were called a generation of vipers, the Lord promising that upon them would come the blood even of previous generations which had slain the prophets. He announced the destruction of their temple and the dissolution of their state and flatly declared that they should be trodden under the foot of the Gentiles for a period of time now known to have been at least nineteen centuries. "The King," Jesus said, "would send his armies, destroy those murders, and burn their city" (Matthew 22:7)! There can be no doubt at all that Jerusalem and the nation of Israel were judicially hardened and condemned to death and subjection by none other than the Saviour himself. After such a sentence as that, who could have imagined that Israel (the old fleshly Israel) would still be around after nearly two thousand years? especially when viewed against what always happened before when God hardened a people? This mystery is that of Romans 11:25.

(5) In the analogy with Pharaoh and his changing his mind ten times, hardening himself repeatedly, Israel measured up fully in comparison with it. Their rebellions were so frequent, so willful, so arrogant and extensive that the entire Old Testament is required for the outline of them, thus providing the righteous basis for the declaration of Paul that God, in the case of Israel, "endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction" (Romans 9:22). God indeed endured Israel, through necessity, that the promise of the Messiah through them should not fail; but upon their rejection of Christ and murder of the King himself, the cup of wrath overflowed.