Blog

It was a great time with everyone at the first Young Adults Christmas Hymnsing on Monday night. Good to see so many back from school, and to sing out praise to our God for coming to be with us. Here’s the study from the evening, starting with the scriptures we read:

Isaiah 7:14 – Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.

Isaiah 8:9-10 – “Be shattered, O you peoples, and be broken in pieces! Give ear, all you from far countries. Gird yourselves, but be broken in pieces; Gird yourselves, but be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing; Speak the word, but it will not stand, For God is with us.”

Isaiah 9:2-7 – The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined. You have multiplied the nation and increased its joy; they rejoice before You according to the joy of harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For You have broken the yoke of his burden and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian. For every warrior’s sandal from the noisy battle, and garments rolled in blood, will be used for burning and fuel of fire. For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace There will be no end, Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, To order it and establish it with judgment and justice From that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this. –

Matthew 1:18-23 – Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: After His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to put her away secretly. But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.” So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.” –

Revelation 21:1-4 – Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

What the Birth of Jesus means.

When God says something, we know it’s significant. It’s significant because it’s God talking, and also because His speech is the essence of the universe we inhabit. His speech started the universe, and his word keeps it going. So this means that, even though we might not think about it this way a lot, our universe is communication as much as it is anything else. It’s always telling us something, always preaching a message about the goodness of God.

But all we have to do is look around and we can see that it’s not really at its best right now. What we see is an imperfect version of it all. Even just in our world, the world of people, just by watching the news, for instance, you can see how we humans are doing running the planet. It’s funny, but even among people who don’t claim any belief in God there’s a basic consensus with lots of groups today (for instance, environmental groups) that humans are what’s wrong with the planet.

But we don’t need to get that from the news or PETA.

We can turn to God’s word—the words that have been written down for us, the Bible, and we can read that, yes indeed, it’s human sin that’s messed everything up. It’s God who tells us this. It’s God who spoke and explained it all, and had it written down for all time.

And it’s God who tells us that he’s going to fix it. So when he tells us how he’s going to fix the mess that human sin has made of the world, we should sit up and take notice. What I want to look at tonight is this one part of God’s plan that he announces several times in the Old Testament. It gets brought up again in the New Testament, and we see it finally fulfilled in a pretty surprising way at the very end of the Bible.

It’s this little phrase, “God with us.” It’s really the heart of what Christmas is about.

How God uses this phrase, and who and what He applies it too, tells us so much about so many things. For the next few minutes I want to meditate with you on what these three words tell us about God, what they tell us about Humanity, and what they tell us about the world God made for Humanity to live in.

How we learn about “God with us.”

Let’s look at the first time God uses these words. In Isaiah 7:14, we get this surprising prophecy from Isaiah, where he says it to Ahaz, a king of Israel who refused to really trust God when He was in trouble. Ahaz’ family, the house of David, God’s royal house of Kings, which he established himself, was totally failing to be and do what God founded it for. At this point, this great-grandson of the famous King David won’t even let the prophet give him a sign to strengthen his faith. He’s like, “I don’t want it.” And God says through the prophet, “Well I’m going to give you a sign anyway, a sign to your whole house, but it’s not what you’d expect. While you worry about kings and armies, I’m going to take a young woman who everyone thinks is insignificant, a virgin, and do something impossible with her—she’s going to have a baby, and that baby will be called, “God with us.”

Now, we can imagine that when the king heard this from Isaiah he was like, “Ok, so…that doesn’t really mean anything to me.” But God had spoken. It was His plan to fix the problems the king couldn’t fix. In fact, it was to fix the problem of bad kings like Ahaz too, leaders who can’t really lead and who won’t trust God to find what they need to lead people. And so as Isaiah kept speaking and writing messages from God for the people of His day, God kept coming back to this idea he had cryptically spoke to the King.

In chapter 8 God addresses the people who are all afraid of the geo-political unrest of the day (the same situation that was freaking the king out), and tells them that since they want to trust in political alliances and military strength instead of God, they’ll ultimately fail. It will break them all, and even if they all banded together to try to accomplish human purposes in human strength, it won’t ultimately work, because, as Isaiah says, “God is with us.”

What’s going on here? Well it’s still a little hard to tell, except that we know Isaiah must be referring to the prophecy from the last chapter, and so he must be saying that this baby whose going to be born will be the reason that military power ultimately fails humanity.

Now it’s nice as we go on that Isaiah doesn’t really leave us hanging there, because if you catch the hints he’s dropping, I think you start craving more information.

How will this baby become the one who brings all that political intrigue and military power to nothing? Who could this be? And why is this baby called, “God with us?”

It’s in chapter 9 that we really start to get some insight. Now, if you had lived in Isaiah’s time, and heard him preach these things or read it in one of his books, what he says here would be shocking to say the least, and probably unbelievable, at least at first. It would probably seem like some sort of “theological mystery” which we’ll “never be able to figure out” or something like that.

But here in chapter nine he says that one day all the equipment used for military action, all the effects of war, will be done away with (that’s verse 5), because of this child He keeps bringing up. This child will assume all the authority of government. In other words, He’ll rule. And then Isaiah gives some explanation about all this “God with us” language. This child will be called “Mighty God.”

This child will be called God. The real God. This is crazy. It must have left the first people who heard it dumbfounded. (It probably confused Isaiah too.) But there it is. God has just, in the space of three chapters, said, “I will not let the everyone’s sin, including inept rulers who don’t trust me, continue to mess everything up. I’m sending a child, and that child will be God.” In other words, it’s like God says, “I’m about to take matters into my own hands.”

The people of Israel had to wait some 700 years to get a full explanation of what all this means, but it did come. After the house of David had surrendered its throne to Babylonian conquerors, after Alexander the Great and the Caesars had extended their power over Israel’s land, after generations had come and gone, God sent an angel to—just like he said—a seemingly insignificant young girl. She was a virgin, and when the angel made his announcement to her, she must have been as shocked as the king was that first day the prophecy was spoken. In the book of Matthew we read about how the angel visited to her fiancé too.

The angel told Joseph: “Mary is going to have a baby,” (and he was in a position to know how biologically impossible that was), and the angel said “call him Jesus, since that name means that God is our Savior.” Matthew writes that this was how God fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecies. This was the baby. This was God, coming to be with us.

The rest of Jesus’ life is spent proving that “God with us” is exactly who he is. He perfectly resists temptation, he heals tons of people, he does miracles which show that he rules over the physical universe, he teaches crazy deep truth in super simple language, and he never lets anyone down. Then, when he’s false accused and beaten and killed, he just keeps asking his Father to forgive everyone. And then, he rises from the dead and tells his followers to go proclaim forgiveness to anyone anywhere who’ll repent and believe. And he promised to come back to finally make everything right and be the king Isaiah promised he’d be.

He also threw in one more “God with us” moment, just before he ascended into heaven, and told his followers that, as they went around telling people about him, “I’ll be with you, even to the end of the age.”

A word about how God is God

Before we go on, let me just say one thing about how God could both send Jesus and be Jesus. Last winter we spent nine weeks looking at how the Bible describes God as not simply a monolith, just one solitary God, but as One God who exists in an eternal bond of three persons, in total unity. This is what Christians call the Trinity. So God is God by being Father, Son and Holy Spirit in complete union of being, though they are three separate persons. This wasn’t fully seen until Jesus came. Then we could see that he was both God, and sent from God. And it was why Jesus always referred to Himself as “the Son” and to God as “My Father.” God the Father sent God the Son, empowered by God the Holy Spirit, to save us. So God sent, and God came. And here we had the unraveling of Isaiah’s mystery: the child who was called “Mighty God.”

What “God with us” tells us about God.

So I said that all this tells us some things about God, humanity and the universe. So what does it tell us about God?

1. This was all God’s decision.

This solution to the world’s problems, this coming and being born as a baby and living among us as one of us, was God’s idea. It was what He thought up, and what He followed through on. At any point He could have backed out. He could have decided something less than this was what he preferred. No one forced his hand. He did it purely out of the goodness and generosity of his own heart. It’s just who he is. The Bible calls this “grace.”

God didn’t want to be God “apart from us” or God “without us.” He wanted to be God with us. He wanted to be among us and to have us near him and with him. He wanted us to be “Us with God.” God isn’t far away, aloof or distant. He’s not emotionally detached. He’s not actually remote.

2. God wants us to know Him.

God knew that in our sins and our guilt one of the main thing that got messed up was our minds. Our thinking just isn’t right anymore. We couldn’t have ever known about him, much less really know him, if he didn’t bridge the gap between himself and humanity. And so he did. He came to explain himself in a way we could understand. He becomes one of us. He looks out of human eyes. He speaks with a human mouth, in human words. He walks dusty roads with human friends and eats first century Jewish food. He goes to weddings. He goes to funerals. He gets hungry. He gets tired. And in doing this, he reveals God in a better way than he had ever done before. Now, we can say, if you want to know what God is like, just look at Jesus.

3. God is a saver.

By coming to be “God with us,” God shows us that He is the kind of God who doesn’t throw us away when we’ve failed and we’ve ruined ourselves. He didn’t want to just start over or wipe the slate clean. He is a God who prefers to win by redeeming, fixing, and reclaiming, rather than by destroying or walking away. So when we approach God, we can know that he is that kind of God.

4. God is hands on.

With Jesus, we also see how God redeems. He saves by entering into the situation Himself, and doing what no one else could do. To save Man, he becomes one of the men. To undo suffering, he suffers. To destroy sin and death, he takes sin on himself and dies. He doesn’t keep himself separate from unpleasant realities, but instead fully experiences them in order to finally change them.

Because Jesus was born, and was “God with us,” we have full assurance that God is committed to us, he is God for us, because he became God with us, to deal with everything that separated us from Him.

What “God with us” tells us about Humanity.

So what does the fact that God came to be “God with us.” Tell us about ourselves?

1. Humanity is not hopeless.

When we look around at the world, we don’t have to judge what the human race’s destiny is by what we see in the news or on our block. We have the assurance that God is committed to the salvation of humans, and to fixing the world. Because Jesus who came once and died to destroy sin and death will come again and finish the job fully. He’ll eradicate evil and live with us as king. That’s what the passage in Revelation 21 is about. What God ultimately wants is to be “God with us” forever, in actual experience, on earth.

2. Humanity is not alone.

The birth of Jesus preaches a pretty amazing message: We’re not in this thing on our own. We don’t face the universe in our own strength, based on our size and our ability and our smarts. We were never made for that. We were made to be in a family, with God as the Father. We were made to be a body, with Christ as our head. We were made to be eternally connected to God and each other. The way God made sure this would happen all the way is to become one of us. He takes a human body to himself, forever, to take humanity to himself, so would never face eternity without him. The birth of Jesus makes sure that all who believe will experience this community, this family, forever.

This leads us right in to thinking about the next thing we see in all this:

3. Humanity is affirmed, eternally.

If we have ever started to think that becoming more spiritual means becoming less human, the birth of Jesus to be “God with us” shows us this thinking is just wrong. God the Son himself took a human body, forever. He didn’t step down from becoming God, or become something less than who he was. Instead, God the Son added a human body to himself.

So the bible teaches that, now for all eternity, one of the humans is God. And by doing this, he made sure that, humanity would always exist and always be one with God. Think about this. Physical bodies joined to eternal spirits, in relationship with God, forever.

Being fully human is exactly what you were made to be, and even though sin wants to destroy that, the work of God in Christ is to make sure that you can be you and humans can really be humans, forever. Humanity will not be thrown away. God’s purpose, which he announced all the way back in Genesis 1, will be accomplished. We will rule the earth, for its good, and for our everlasting happiness. Only sin, and refusal to bow the knee to Jesus as our king, can make any of us miss out on this future.

But God’s message of forgiveness is still going out today—“believe that Jesus Christ is God who came in human flesh and lived the life we couldn’t live and died in our place on the cross to pay for our sins. And believe that he’s risen from the dead and returning to be the king. Believe and find your place in his kingdom.” When you believe you’ll find the true and living God who judges and eradicates your sin but who loves and affirms you as his own son or daughter, the creation he made in his own image.

What “God with us” tells us about the universe.

On Monday nights we’ve been studying Paul’s letter to the Romans, an essential part of the New Testament. In chapter eight we saw that Paul explained that the version of nature we see now is a fallen, restrained version. One day, Paul wrote, it will be released, and it’ll be freed up to be a glorious home for all the redeemed sons and daughters of God. He literally says that we are being made into true siblings of his Son Jesus, and as we read in Revelation 21 we have John’s report of what he saw in the vision God gave him—a vision of a new earth where God lives with His people.

In other words, the birth of Jesus ensured that the universe would not end the way science says it will—slowly grinding to molecular powder until loss of heat leaves it cold and dead and silent forever. And also it won’t end in the way it might have if God had been less gracious—burned up in a blaze of his wrath at sin.

Instead, even though he let it all be twisted and cursed by our sin, in fact he himself subjected it to this, this was because he is patient, and merciful, and he wanted to allow the process of his saving purpose to work out. And then, at the right time, about 2000 years ago, the Father sent the Son and actually became part of His creation. The Son, in whom all things were created, took a body. And when He did that, he showed, not just his commitment to Man, but his commitment to all of creation—the whole universe—this home he made for us. He showed that one day he’s going to heal and redeem the earth so that his healed, redeemed people can live in it, with him, forever.

Worshipping “God With Us.”

It’s not for nothing that Christians worship God. We’ve met him and begun to see all these amazing things about him. And we get more excited every passing day about this God, the only real God, who shows Himself to us in Jesus. We realize more and more how hopeless we would have been without Him, and how secure our destiny is now that He’s with us.

All the best Christmas songs sing out this amazement, the amazement of a person who’s discovered this God.

And that’s what we’re going to do tonight. Let’s hear and feel every word. And while we do, we can enjoy one final way God is with us. Because in Matthew 18:20 Jesus promised that, after his physical body had ascended to heaven, and he could no longer been seen that way for a time on earth, wherever there were at least two people gathered in his name, he would be with them, right in the midst. And so tonight we don’t just sing about Him, we sing to Him.

Because God is with us.

And His name is Jesus.

On Monday night we continued our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans by looking at chapter 12 and the description of the kind of life that the “renewed mind” (which he wrote about in 12:2) produces. Here are the notes:

A mind that’s being renewed produces a life that…

…Doesn’t think more highly of ourselves than we should. ( 12:3-8 )

…but instead you see yourself as part of the Body
…and you use your gifts faithfully

So the renewed mind leads us to see ourselves as being connected to others in the church in a way that is undeniable and unbreakable. It leads us to acknowledge our need for other believers and their need for us, and it leads us to live in ways so that we benefit the body of Christ and are benefited in return. It sees these connections as alive, and it see this all as an intrinsic part of what it means to be born again.

…Loves unhypocritically. (12:9-13)

Or, as he spells out in this passage, the renewed mind produces a person that:
(v. 9) doesn’t love evil
(v.10) is actually kind and affectionate towards other believers
(v.11) isn’t lazy and doesn’t give up in love
(v.12) doesn’t let trials ruin love, is faithful to pray
(v.13) gives things to those in need.

This tells us, conversely, that it would be hypocritical to claim to love others and to do the opposite of any of those things.

…Knows the appropriate way to relate to all, at all times. (12:14-21)

He proceeds to list a bunch of different situations:

(14) with those who persecute, we bless
(15) with those who rejoice, we rejoice alongside them; with those who weep, we weep alongside them
(16) with other believers, we are of one mind; with the humble, we associate
(17) with evil doers, we don’t give it back; with everyone, we pre-think doing good before all
(18) with everyone, we live peaceably when we can
(19) with those who wrong us, we give no vengeance
(20-21) with enemies, we overcome evil with good

The renewed mind teaches us when to enter in to a situation with someone and go along, when to resist and give back the opposite, and how “love” looks in each instance.

One thing that seems to come out in this chapter is that the renewed mind is restored to seeing everything relationally, in terms of how our new connection to God brings new life to our relationships and puts them at the center of who we are. We are delivered from loving things and ourselves to be like Jesus—loving God and loving others.

See Rom 1:7-16, 5:1-8, 8:31-39, 9:1-3

Summing it Up:

1. So…the sacrifice of our bodies (12:1) is giving them up to this kind of life, where our minds get renewed (12:2) to begin to see everything this way and then willingly press into it all to prove out the kind of life God has for humans to live. This kind. (see 8:2 for the power)

2. The message of Christ doesn’t just produce people who join an organization or try to be better. It actually creates whole new kind of people.

3. Anything else is less than what you were made for. And, it dishonors the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God is calling everyone, everywhere to bow the knee to his love and be remade according to the pattern of Jesus. The good news is that God has made a way for us to escape the sin that ruins us and fights against his good purposes.

Last night we continued our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans by looking at the first two verses of chapter twelve. Here are the notes:

The exhortation: Whole-Life Response to God’s Mercy

1. “By the mercies of God” – Learn, know and be moved by God’s mercies.

What does Paul mean by “God’s mercies”? It’s hos way of summing up everything he’s written about in the first eleven chapters of Romans: The good news about what God has done to accomplish total salvation, by total grace, enabling a new life now and a new destiny for the future. Humans are all guilty before God, we will face his wrath, and we’re slaves of sin as well. But He has done something that can completely save us from all that: sent his own son to meet the demand and die in our place, and rice again from the dead to offer a whole new kind of life to us.

In Romans, we’ve already seen that this good news is about the power of salvation from:

1. A debased mind: 1:21, 28; 6:11; 8:5-8
2. A dishonored body: 1:24, 4:19, 6:12-13, 7:25, 8:4

2. Present your body to him (as a “living sacrifice”)

“body” = body, but whole self…
“present” = offer as a sacrifice
“sacrifice” = one that does not die to be offered, but lives. My living is my sacrifice. “My worship is not special sacred times of places, but daily living out a holy life in a profane world.”  See Rom 6-13-19. (see also 1 Cor 6:13-20, Phil 1:20)

The point: Whole-Life giving of yourself to the Lord. A complete discipleship. Nothing piece-meal.

How? Inner Transformation.

3. Resist being confirmed to this world.

That is, resist being conformed to the world…in any way that would keep you from presenting your self as a living sacrifice.

To understand this, we can ask ourselves: What, in our current culture, would…

…belittle God, and make him seem not worth giving yourself to?
…interpret your life without reference to God?
…preach other messages to you about who you are or what you should be doing with your life?
…offer fulfillment that does not include God?
…present a way of thinking and living that is opposed to God’s purpose of setting up Jesus as king and glorifying the Father through him forever?

Other verses about the pressures to conform in this present age: Eph 2:2, 1 Jo 2:15-17, Gal 1:4

4. …but pursue transformation through mind-renewal. (or, allow the Spirit to do this renewal)

“mind” (Rom 1:28) – ***The center of Christian transformation in this life is not the transformation of our bodies, but of our minds.

The Result: A Visible Exhibition of God’s Will.

5. Then, you’ll be able to know and live out a proof of what God’s will is.

A mind that’s remade in God’s pattern will lead to a whole life that worships him. In other words, you’ll know (in your mind) what things God desires, and your actions will show it.

Sum up: The response of someone who has been gripped by the truths Paul shared in chapters 9-11 is a whole new kind of thinking, which enables a whole new kind of living—one that is a daily offered up sacrifice of worship to God. “This is Yours God! This is for you!” When you look at that kind of life, you can see what God really has for people.

Last night we looked at a difficult and glorious passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 9 through 11. Here are thoughts and notes:

As I studied this passage over the last month, I found that the key to understanding it was to remember the rest of the letter and the things Paul has already written to the Romans in chapters 1 through 8. Many of the concepts (especially in chapter 9) he’s working with have already been explained in the first eight chapters, and since this is a letter (which means Paul would have expected the Roman church to read it as a whole), we can assume that he expected us to keep the things he has already explained in our mind when we read this section. In other words, if I separate out these chapters and read them as if they stand alone, I run the risk of misunderstanding the points Paul wanted the church to get. (I find the chapters also appear much more troubling when read that way.) But no worries, we simply need to read these things with an attention to the things Paul’s actually written, and a heart to hear the voice of God in them, regardless of what He might say to us.

Intro:

First, we need to see the back story to these chapters. Read Acts 13:46-47, 15:1-2, 21:17-28; and Romans 15:30. Paul had acquired a reputation for being anti-Jewish, even though he wasn’t. This really comes out in the first few verses of Romans 9. Second, we need to see where this discussion of Israel comes from, by seeing what he’s already written about Israel in Romans. See 1:1-4, 1:16, 2:10, 2:24, 2:28-29, 3:9, 3:19-24, 3:28-29, 4:13, 5:1. The upshot is that he’s been saying that simply being descended from Abraham doesn’t put someone in a right relationship with God. Neither does doing the works of the law. Everyone, Jew or Gentile, must believe in JEsus in order to be counted righteous.

9:1-14

9:1-6. Paul’s heart is broken, not cold. Israel has much blessing…but nothing God said (promised) has failed.

First problem: But why are so many lost in unbelief?

9:6-9. It has never been that anyone is “saved” by being physically related to Abraham. (This is the question he’s answering, so it must be what they would have asked.) Because, righteousness only comes by faith in Christ. (So “Israel” is the seed of Abraham who believe (see 4:11-12)).  God never promised to eternally save all descendants of Abraham.

Second Problem: Israel seems to not be blessed by their own Messiah (as the OT said) (see ch 11…)

9:11-13. Who’s included in Israel? God decides. Just like always.  And just like now: Who does he include? Those who believe in Christ.

9:14. Same idea as v. 6. Is God allowed to decide who he will bless? Must he bless all Jews (or, for us, all humans? Regardless of whether they believe in Christ or not?)

9:14-24

9:15. The point: God would be “unrighteous” if he was inconsistent with what He said. But God is consistent. He’s always shown mercy to who he wanted to.

9:16. You don’t earn or demand God’s mercy. (see 3:20, 27, 30; 4:2-5)

9:17. Ex: Pharaoh. God raised him to power for hi own purposes. [in other words: God raised up a non-believer to power to show His own power]

9:18. Is God obligated to show mercy to anyone? No! (see Gen 2:17, Rom 2:5)
9:19-21.   …It is totally God’s prerogative.

9:22-24. “endured”  Does this refer to God waiting …up to time of Christ? (3:25)  …up to present day? (2 Pet 3:8-9) Either way, it comes out to this: If God wanted to allow sin to run rampant, people to be prepared for destruction, for long periods of time, and endure it so that He could save some, is He unrighteous?

9:1-23 Sum Up: If God has chosen to save only those Jews who trust in Christ, not those who work for it by keeping the law (ch 8-11) or all of them because they are related to Abraham (ch 9), that is his prerogative as God. He is not unjust, and he is not inconsistent, because he is not obligated to save all of any one bloodline, either Abraham’s bloodline, or Adam’s.

9:25-29
This is totally in line with the OT. Who said that God would do surprising things with who he called his people, and that He would actively save a small remnant of Israel.

9:30-10:13
Israel is like everyone else when it comes to salvation (10:12) They must believe (10:9). Whoever does not is lost.

10:6-8. The secret to obtaining righteousness is not an esoteric mystery.
10:9-10  …It’s the simple trust in the word of the Gospel.

10:14-21. They don’t need special insight, a bloodline, or work, just a preacher, and faith in what he says. Israel has that, and most of them have not believed.

11:1-10

11:1. God’s purpose, which he announced beforehand, is moving forward.

11:2-5. He’s keeping his promise to bless Israel by preserving a remnant (like always). [He’s not obligated to save all ethnic Israelites, but he did promise to bless and use Israel as a nation, and he’s doing it.]

11:6 … and it’s only grace, not works – the way God works.

11:7-10. But all who reject Christ have been judged.

11:11-15 … But, that rejection was not to destroy Israel, but to save the world.

11:16-24 …so Gentiles who are saved can’t be arrogant towards Israel…(11:18)

1. Because your salvation is from them and depends on them (17-18)
2. Because you, like them are only included by faith in God’s grace (20)
3. Because they can still believe and be included

11:25-32 …and, the present state of things is temporary. Soon many Jews will believe.

11:33-35 Paul’s response to all this? Praise!  God’s ways could not have been guessed at, but he has shown us that he has a better plan than we could have imagined. He glorifies himself, he shows mercy, people are saved by his grace. And all things return to the one who made them.