Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

The fly in the ointment—the infidelity of my own race

9 ^1-3 Before Christ and my own conscience I assure you that I am speaking the plain truth when I say that there is something that makes me feel very depressed, like a pain that never leaves me. It is the condition of my brothers and fellow-Israelites, and I have actually reached the pitch of wishing myself cut off from Christ if it meant that they could be won for God.

^4-5 Just think what the Israelites have had given to them. The privilege of being adopted as sons of God, the experience of seeing something of the glory of God, the receiving of the agreements made with God, the gift of the Law, true ways of worship, God’s own promises—all these are theirs, and so too, as far as human descent goes, is Christ himself, Christ who is God over all, blessed for ever.

God’s purpose is not utterly defeated by this infidelity

^6-7 Now this does not mean that God’s word to Israel has failed. For you cannot count all “Israelites” as the true Israel of God. Nor can all Abraham’s descendants be considered truly children of Abraham. The promise was that ‘in Isaac your seed shall be called’.

^8-12 That means that it is not the natural descendants who automatically inherit the promise, but, on the contrary, that the children of the promise (i.e. sons of God) are to be considered truly Abraham’s children. For it was a promise when God said: ‘At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son’. (Everybody, remember, thought it quite impossible for Sarah to have a child.) And then, again, a word of promise came to Rebecca, at the time when she was pregnant with two children by the one man, Isaac our forefather. It came before the children were born or had done anything good or bad, plainly showing that God’s act of choice has nothing to do with achievements, good or bad, but is entirely a matter of his will. The promise was: ‘The older shall serve the younger’.