Romans 11:25

For I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery, lest ye be wise in your own conceits, that hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in; and so all Israel shall be saved: even as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the, Deliverer; He shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.

This mystery ... A mystery in the New Testament means something revealed, rather than something hidden, but implies that it had been hidden until revealed. The term is appropriate, however; because, even when God reveals a mystery, the knowledge of it still appears arcane or enigmatic, due to man's imperfect understanding. This is especially true with the mystery revealed here.

What is the mystery that Paul revealed? That Israel was hardened? No, for this had been open knowledge since the ministry of Christ. Was it that only part of Israel had been hardened? No, because the separation of the two Israels, the true Israel and the hardened Israel, had been in view for a whole generation. Was it that the hardening of Israel was scheduled to terminate? No, for that is not stated, either here or elsewhere in the word of God. So that is not the mystery.

What, then, is the mystery? It is that HARDENING HAS BEFALLEN ISRAEL UNTIL THE FULLNESS OF THE GENTILES BE COME IN. But "hardening" (until that of Israel) had invariably meant the destruction and disappearance of the people hardened, as occurred with the ten northern tribes, and all the instances cited under Romans 11:7 (which see). Paul here knocked down the conceit of the Gentiles by the declaration that God had spared hardened Israel! They would not be destroyed in the final sense at all, nor would they disappear. Their continuation upon the earth was here revealed to extend until the entire harvest of Gentile Christians was reaped; and, in the light of what is now historical truth, God here spared, or announced through Paul that he had spared, hardened Israel for a period of two millenniums (at least) upon the earth. In view of the shocking disappearance, due to judicial hardening and destruction, of the great Gentile nations of Sodom, Gomorrah, Tyre, Sidon, Assyria, Nineveh, and Babylon, the Gentile Christians (some of them) were anticipating the same fate of the hardened Israel, and were GLORYING IN IT. It is impossible to understand this chapter without focusing upon that problem of Gentile pride and conceit which dominates the thought in Romans and which was concisely stated in Romans 11:25 as the reason for the revelation of the mystery: "lest ye be wise in your own conceits." Now, what was there in this revealed mystery to allay the conceit of Gentiles glowing against the Jews? It was the thundering fact that God had spared hardened Israel from the fate hitherto inseparable from the hardened; and Paul's phrasing of this announcement was equivalent to saying, "The Jews will be here as long as any Gentiles are being saved."

Furthermore, Paul brought dramatically to the spotlight in this that there was a fullness, or completion, in view for the Gentiles; even the saving of Gentiles was not to be thought of as something inevitable and eternally continuing. The Gentiles under God's favor would run their course, just like the Jews; and in their "fullness" one must read the time when the Gentile position up stage center in God's favor will be no more, and for the very same reasons that removed Israel from that favor.

Fullness ... speaks of something else also. The fullness of Gentiles is not the whole of God's concern (Where art thou, conceited Gentile?). In the same breath, Paul said,

So all Israel shall be saved ... Could this possibly have any reference to hardened Israel? The very fact of their being "saved" identifies Israel here as the spiritual Israel. And what Paul was saying was that when the Gentile harvest had been reaped, that reaping, or fullness, is the means by which the determination of the whole body of the redeemed from earth shall at last be concluded. Thus, in that manner, God's precious harvest of the earth shall be concluded. Or, as Paul stated that very truth, "So (in that manner) all Israel (the entire spiritual Israel of Jews and Gentiles and whomsoever) shall be saved. A final blow, a coup de maitre, to Gentile pride is in "all Israel," here said to be the Gentiles themselves who have been saved and brought into the spiritual Israel (!). They themselves are Jews (!), spiritual seed of Abraham. God could find no way of saving a Gentile, except by making him a Jew (!) (in Abraham through Christ). If such a thought as this could not kill Gentile pride, what could?

Until the fullness, etc. ... This is sincerely thought by many to mean that the hardness will cease at whatever time is indicated by "until"; and, in all fairness, the word could mean that, and often does, as, for example, when it was written that Joseph knew not his wife Mary "until" she brought forth her firstborn son and laid him in the manger (Matthew 1:25). The problem lies in the utter lack of authority in any man to affirm that a particular meaning must be understood here. The other frequent meaning of "until" leaves all thought of termination out of sight. R. L. Whiteside called attention to this, thus:

"And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month" (Genesis 8:5). That does not indicate any change after the tenth month: the record shows that the waters continued to decrease. "Thy servants have been keepers of cattle from our youth even until now" (Genesis 46:32). This does not mean that they were then going out of the cattle business. "My Father worketh even until now" (John 5:17). And, of course, God kept on working as he always has. "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth until now" (Romans 8:22). Nor did Paul mean that the creation quit groaning upon the publication of Romans.[26]

Thus, in this very place where the future conversion theory regarding Israel is supposed to be promised, it does not appear. The choice of a meaning for "until" which could imply that is unjustified, for no such meaning may certainly be inferred from it. This verse simply does not tell what will happen after the fullness of the Gentiles is come in; the most probable event to follow that is the loosing of Satan for a little season, and then the end. When the Gentiles have run their course in God's favor, as fleshly Israel have already run theirs, what, except the end, may be logically expected?

THE MYSTERY OF HARDENED ISRAEL'S PERPETUATION

The mystery, as more fully identified above, is that Israel, judicially condemned and hardened by God himself, in consequence of their own self-hardening, and formally and officially sentenced by Christ himself to condemnation and destruction (Matthew 23:37f), shall nevertheless continue to exist in that condition until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in, which may very well mean the end of time, and certainly does mean that, if the fullness of the Gentiles and the end of the world occur simultaneously, as many believe.

God reduced the penalty of total destruction and oblivion for Israel, contrary to all that might have been expected. (See under Romans 11:7.) This commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment, as it were, was formally announced by Paul in Romans 11:25, for the purpose of countermanding the conceit of the Gentiles; but there were doubtless other valid reasons for God's action of sparing hardened Israel which will be noted below.

Israel's hardening in part (the part hardened being the fleshly Israel) was made, through God's commutation of their sentence, to be a perpetual thing. Far from perishing, the nation would stand in ceaseless petrifaction throughout the long ages of Gentile acceptance of the gospel, frozen and hardened against the God of their noble ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a gaunt and terrible witness unto all ages of the absolute truth of every word of their sacred Old Testament, and also of the indisputable verity of the New Testament and all that is revealed there of the Lord Jesus Christ. The nation stands, a stark and awesome monument of God's displeasure vented upon them throughout history in the dispersions and persecutions that have dogged their steps all over the world. Mystery indeed! There was never anything like it, nor shall there ever be. This judicially doomed nation, bound in a cohesive and indissoluble union, flowing through the oceans of earth's populations like a human Gulf Stream, retaining an identity and destiny of their own across centuries and millenniums, is a manifestation of God so tragic and heartbreaking that the very thought of it mists the eyes with emotion. Behold the mystery of hardened Israel, worse than Sodom and Gomorra (Jeremiah 23:14), but not annihilated like Sodom and Gomorra, but moving blindly through history, still hardened, still disobedient, still blaspheming the name of Christ, still enemies of the gospel of grace, still hating Christ and his religion; but, despite all this, being in themselves, by their very existence, the most eloquent and convincing proof on earth of the total truth of their sacred scriptures, and of the absolute truth and authority of the Lord Jesus Christ and the faith he revealed in the New Testament.

And furthermore, even if God's wisdom should have concealed from us such a thing as the future return of this hardened nation, and if human speculation should prove to be true, it would still stand that what is said here is the way it has been for nearly two thousand years!

So all Israel shall be saved ... has been treated here as reference to the spiritual Israel, it being the conviction that both the Israels which dominated Paul's mind throughout the epistle are in view in these two verses, being designated here as the hardened Israel (Romans 11:25) and the saved Isreal (Romans 11:26). Another widely held view construes both Israels as a reference to the hardened Israel. Although disagreeing with that, this writer offers the following as a viable meaning of this clause, in the event of referring it to hardened Israel, best understood by stating it negatively:

No Israelite Will Ever Be Saved Any Other Way.

Paul expounded throughout this letter the teaching that salvation is only in Jesus Christ, through union and identification with Christ, and by no other means whatsoever.

The people who would be saved must believe and obey Christ, God making no distinction between Jews or Gentiles, That there is a definite emphasis upon "the manner" of salvation, inherent in the word "so," appears in these words of Lard:

"And so ..." is of particular interest, because it means, "thus, or in this manner."[27]

So much for the view of construing this as a reference to hardened Israel. It is precisely in the meaning of "so" that the difficulty of thus understanding it lies. By this word, Paul was saying, "In this manner of being saved"; and the only example in the context of any salvation having occurred is that implied in the fullness of the Gentiles, a reference to gathering God's people out of the nations into the spiritual Israel and summing up into a single "all Israel" in the sense of spiritual Israel. That it is the spiritual Israel intended here is seen in Paul's immediate introduction of two quotations from Isaiah (Isaiah 59:20; Isaiah 27:9), where, especially in the former, the new covenant is prophesied. This diverse use of "Israel" in two senses is not unusual with Paul, for in Romans 11:11 he used the pronoun "they" in exactly the same way (see under Romans 11:11).

Of particular interest is a significant change Paul made in Isaiah 59:20, which reads thus in the Old Testament:

And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and to them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the Lord.

Paul quoted it, "shall come out of Zion." This change by Paul was due to his avoidance of a misunderstanding. Isaiah's prophecy referred to the first advent of our Lord, in which the Lord both came out of Zion, and also to Zion; and without the change he made, the passage would have seemed to refer to the second advent. By the change, Paul said that the Lord has already come to Zion, and also has already come out of it. This forbids any supposition that Christ will return "to Zion," as some vainly suppose will be the case when all the Jews are converted! Paul's use of Isaiah's prophecy makes it mandatory to construe it as already fulfilled. As McGarvey has it:

Christ the Deliverer Had Already Come, so that Part of the Prophecy Had Been Fulfilled.[28]

These quotations make it certain that, in whatever sense "all Israel shall be saved," everything is contingent upon their acceptance of the Great Deliverer who has already come.

[26] R. L. Whiteside, op. cit., p. 241.

[27] Moses E. Lard, op, cit., p. 370.

[28] J. W. McGarvey and Phillip Y. Pendleton, The Standard Bible Commentary (Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio: Standard Publishing Company, 1916), p. 473.