Paul asks has God cast away His elect and responds with a quote from Elijah and the prophets of Baal incident. There is always a remnant even among apostates as Elijah found himself and as we do with apostate churches. Dr. Sproul discusses that it is ethnic Israel being talked about in chapter 11.

Today, we will start chapter 11 in our pilgrimage through Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. We will be reading from Romans 11:1–10. I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel, saying, “Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”? But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work.

What then? Israel has not obtained what it seeks; but the elect have obtained it, and the rest were blinded. Just as it is written:

“God has given them a spirit of stupor,
Eyes that they should not see
And ears that they should not hear,
To this very day.”

And David says:

“Let their table become a snare and a trap,
A stumbling block and a recompense to them.
Let their eyes be darkened, so that they do not see,
And bow down their back always.”

Dear friends, what you have just heard is the unvarnished Word of God. It is that Word that comes from His eternal wisdom, which is binding upon our consciences and our hearts. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, O Lord, we cry out to Thee for help, for we are not able to plumb the depths of those things that You set forth for our benefit in Your Word. May Your Spirit accompany that Word, that we may be changed by it, because it is Your Word, and Your Word is truth. We ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Last Things

I am sure you are all aware of one of the most controversial subdivisions of the science of systematic theology, that subdivision known as eschatology. Eschatology is the science or the study of last things. It has to do with the future prophecies of the Bible, including both those found in the pages of the Old Testament and those contained in the New Testament.

It was observed by one biblical scholar that two-thirds of the doctrinal material of the New Testament focuses on eschatology, on the future of the kingdom of God. We see the church in our day divided among various competing camps. There is post-millennialism, pre-millennialism, amillennialism, pro-millennialism—that is for people who are for it. Then there is pan-millennialism, for those who say it will all pan out in the end. There is preterism, partial preterism, dispensationalism, and all the rest.

The best-seller lists always include works that deal with eschatology, such as The Late, Great Plant Earth and the Left Behind series, which swept through America’s fiction market. I say that for this reason: How we understand eschatology is, to a large degree, connected to how we understand chapter 11 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. This is Paul’s most complete teaching on the subject of the future of the nation of Israel.

So many of the disputes about eschatology in our time focus on the question of what, if anything, is still to happen with ethnic Israel—the Jews who still exist in the world today. I can remember in the decade of the sixties when the Six-Day War occurred and Jerusalem was recaptured by the Israelis. I will speak more on that later in this text. Biblical scholars were saying of that event that the time had come such that theologians were reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Since 1948, with the reconstitution of the Jewish state of Israel, there has been a strong interest in the question, Are we living in the last generation? Are we living in the end times? Many of the answers to those questions may be found locked within this eleventh chapter. So, I approach chapter 11 with a certain spirit of fear and trepidation because there are some really difficult problems found in this text. I will try to point those out as we encounter them.

Jewish Identity

Let us begin now at the beginning of the chapter and read verse 1 again. The Apostle, as he has done so often throughout this epistle, begins with a rhetorical question, which he is quick to answer in his characteristic emphatic terms. Here is the question: “I say then, has God cast away His people?” That is the question on which he is focusing.

At the beginning of Romans 9, Paul took a vow. He swore that he was concerned for his people according to the flesh, kata sarka—that is, for ethnic Israel. His concern was for the Jewish nation, which had been called out of paganism in the Old Testament and set apart as a nation. They were established as a theocratic nation, with God as their ultimate King, and they were given a mandate and a destiny.

It has been said by some historians, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who once asked a theologian of his day for some certain proof of the existence of God. The theologian replied to Shaw, “I can prove the existence of God with two words: the Jews.” The history of Israel—all the way back to Abraham and up to the present day—is a striking testimony to God’s providential government of human history, and especially of redemptive history.

It is a remarkable thing when you consider just a small portion of the history of ancient Israel. After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in AD 70, the Jews went into the Diaspora. They were dispersed, sent out of their homeland, and sent to the four corners of the earth. After almost two thousand years of having been in exile from their homeland, they never lost their ethnic and national identity. It is axiomatic among Jews today to say to one another, “Next year in Jerusalem.” For two thousand years, this people that would not be made extinct from the globe have dreamed of returning to Mount Zion. We have to take that seriously.

When I was a little boy, there were two days during the year when my mother gave her blessing for me to skip school. One day that I could skip school was the opening day of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ season at Forbes Field. The other day I was allowed to stay home from school was on Saint Patrick’s Day. In Pittsburgh they had the Irishman’s Parade, the Orangemen’s Parade. My grandfather marched in the Orangemen’s Parade.

All day long on Saint Patrick’s Day in Pittsburgh, the disc jockeys would concentrate on Irish music. My mother used to sing Irish lullabies to me that put me to sleep each night. I know that is the one day in the year where everyone else in the world becomes Irish wannabes. But ours was authentic. I would hear stories of my great grandfather migrating to this country from Ireland during the potato famine and settling in Pittsburgh.

But how long ago was that? It was in the middle of the nineteenth century. I am still aware of those roots in my own family that go back to the old sod, but I do not sit around and dream about next year in Dublin. I have been assimilated. I do not think of myself as an Irishman. I think of myself as an American. Don’t we all? This is the melting pot. Except for the Jews. They still have an unquenchable awareness and consciousness of their roots, of their ethnic and national identity.

That is what Paul is wrestling with in chapter 11. He has already told us about how Israel missed their Messiah—how they had a zeal for religion, but not according to truth. They sought the kingdom of God through their own works. They sought it through the law, and they missed the gospel. Jesus came to His own and His own received Him not.

Cast Away?

Paul starts chapter 11 with the question: What do we come to then? What is our conclusion? Does this mean that God has cast away His people? Has God taken His people, whom He made a people out of nothing, and discarded them? Has He thrown them away? Has God exercised a full and final rejection of the Jewish people? That is the question. Let me ask again: Has God exercised a full and final rejection of the Jews? Has He cast away His own people?

How does Paul answer the question? “By no means! Do not even think about it.” God has not categorically rejected Old Testament Israel. Listen to the strange proof he offers to argue that God has not cast away His people. Paul argues from the lesser to the greater. His argument chooses as exhibit A what he considered to be the least of the lesser: himself.

Look what Paul says: “Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite.” What is he saying? “If God has rejected all the Jews, if He has cast off His whole people totally and finally, that means He would have cast me off, too. But I am an Israelite. I am from the people and the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. My name is Saul, who was the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin.”

Paul cites his pedigree, and he gives a brief excursion of his genealogical background. He traces his roots back to Abraham, back to the tribe of Benjamin. He essentially says, “I’m a Jew, and I have not been cast away.”

Paul continues, “God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew.” The force of that, I believe, is this: “God has not cast away His elect.” God is incapable of casting away or rejecting a people whom He foreknew from the foundation of the world, the elect whom Paul has spoken of from chapter 8 through chapter 9 and into chapter 10. Now, Paul brings that election concept to the question of the nature of Israel.

Paul said earlier in Romans, “They are not all Israel who are of Israel” (Rom. 9:6). He argued that not everyone who is circumcised is automatically saved, but only those who are circumcised in their heart. Not all the seed of Abraham were the chosen from the foundation of the world. Ishmael was of the seed of Abraham, but he remained a foreigner to God’s redemptive purposes. “In Isaac your seed shall be called” (Rom. 9:7; see also Gen. 21:12).

Paul puts on the brakes in Romans 11 and essentially says, “After all of the weighty things I’ve said regarding the Jews’ rejection of their Messiah and the dreadful things that have taken place—people missing the kingdom, missing the grace of God, despising the gospel, and trying to make it into the kingdom through the works of the law—don’t conclude that God has rejected His people totally and completely, because I’m part of that people.”

The Elijah Syndrome

Paul continues in verse 2: “Or do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel, saying, ‘Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life’?” This cry from the prophet Elijah came in the midst of one of the worst—if not the worst—periods of apostasy in the history of Old Testament Israel.

Elijah made this plea while Ahab was king in Israel. Ahab ruled with his consort, Jezebel, who was a priestess of the cult of Baal. Using her influence with the king, Jezebel invited pagan idolaters into the royal house and persuaded her husband to sanction an idolatrous religion in the high places of Israel. So, under Ahab and Jezebel, a massive persecution was instituted against any who would speak in favor of the classical religion of the Jews. In this iconoclastic movement of paganism, the sacred altars of the Jewish people were physically destroyed. They were dismantled. They were burned. They were turned to rubble. In their place, shrines were established to the pagan god Baal.

You might remember the classic encounter that Elijah had with the prophets and the priests of Baal on the mountain in 1 Kings 18, when he challenged them to use their power to call fire to come down from heaven. They built the altar on the mountain, and then Elijah stepped back and said, “Go ahead and call upon your gods to ignite the fire of sacrifice on the altar.” They prayed, they wept, and they called, but heaven was silent.

Elijah began to mock the priests as they spent hour after hour pleading to Baal to make his power known in the nation. Elijah said: “Call a little louder. Maybe he’s sleeping. Maybe he went out for a walk.” Although they called and cut themselves and went through all their gyrations of ritual, there was no response. Then Elijah ordered that the altar be doused with water. After it was saturated, he prayed, and the Lord God omnipotent sent fire from heaven that consumed the altar.

In the midst of this hellish reversion to paganism, in the midst of this apostasy, the soul of Elijah was tried to the uttermost. He was exhausted with living in daily persecution and being a fugitive from the power of the throne. In the midst of this apostasy, he cried out to God. He said: “O God, I can’t take it anymore. No one cares. Everywhere I look, the people are rushing to the pagan altars. They’re killing Your prophets, they’re tearing down Your altars, and I’m the only one left. I can’t find anyone anywhere who still worships You, the only true God.”

I call that the Elijah syndrome. It’s the syndrome that true believers experience when they are surrounded by apostasy. What is apostasy? Apostasy is not the same thing as paganism. For someone to be an apostate, he must have at some point renounced paganism and professed the only true God. The only place apostasy can happen is in the house of God. People become apostate when they repudiate the faith that they once professed.

Whole churches can become apostate. When churches denounce essential truths of the Christian faith, they are apostate churches. Denominations, even Protestant denominations, can become apostate. The church I grew up in, the church in which I was ordained, I believe today is an apostate denomination. It celebrates the imaging of pagan goddesses. It sanctions abortion on demand. Its official church councils have argued that it is not necessary to affirm the deity of Christ or His atonement to be a pastor in that denomination. When a church does that, it is apostate.

Does that mean there are no Christians in an apostate church? No, though I do not think there should be Christians in an apostate church. I think that when a group becomes apostate, it is our moral obligation to leave it and to distance ourselves from it. We are not to break fellowship over every minor difference of doctrine. But when real apostasy manifests itself, it is time to shake the dust off our feet and get out. But not every Christian does that. There are multitudes of Christians still working, striving, laboring, preaching within apostate bodies in this world. Those who do that sometimes experience the Elijah syndrome and feel like they are the only ones left.

A Remnant According to Grace

Elijah uttered his complaint to God and cried out, all alone, saying, “They seek my life.” Paul asks the question again: “But what does the divine response say to him? ‘I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’” In other words, God said: “Hold it, Elijah! There’s not just one of you, five of you, or even just one hundred of you.” He didn’t say, “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand who kept themselves from apostasy by their own efforts and their own merit.” That was not what God was saying, but rather: “I have kept for Myself seven thousand within this godless nation. Some may be in the courts of Ahab and Jezebel. Some, perhaps, are in areas that you would never guess you would find one of My own. But in this nation, there are seven thousand that are Mine, whom I have preserved. I have kept them from apostasy.”

I trust and pray that no one in this room is apostate, having repudiated the faith. I believe that I am not an apostate. But the only reason I can give that you and I are not apostate is because the Lord God, in His sweet grace and mercy, has reserved us. He has put our names on the reservation list. He has kept us from falling away. I believe in the perseverance of the saints only because I believe in the preservation of the saints. The Lord God, in His grace, preserves His people.

“Even so then,” Paul says, “at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace.” Let us unpack that phrase for just a moment. We see this concept throughout the Old Testament, in which God speaks of preserving a remnant. If you go to a rug store and they are having a remnant sale, you are not buying whole rugs. You are buying what is left over after the other rugs have been trimmed, the scraps that remain.

A remnant is the seed that is left after the field has been plowed, or the dregs that are found in the bottom of the cup, or the loose ends that seem to be fit only for the trash barrel, to be cast out and thrown away, or the stump that is left after the tree has been cut down—that is the chief metaphor for the people of God. That is who we are: dregs that God reserves because of election. He has preserved His remnant, which He has determined to redeem from the foundation of the world.

That is why I know that the church of Jesus Christ will never be erased from the face of the earth. Individual parishes may fall. Whole denominations may crumble. But God will preserve His elect. He will preserve His remnant in every generation. You will never be asked to stand alone in a dying world, because God has a people who cannot fail. Remember that the church belongs to Christ. It is His church. It is His bride. The bride has been given to the Son by the Father.

Do you remember the last prayers of Jesus before He went to the cross? He said, essentially: “I pray for the ones that You have given to Me. I thank You that not one of those whom You have given to Me has been lost, save the son of perdition, who was the son of perdition from the beginning”—referring to Judas—“but none of the elect whom You have given to Me have been lost. Keep them. Preserve them. I pray for them. I pray for My church. I do not pray for the world. I pray for My sheep, Father, that You would reserve them until that day.”

The remnant is a remnant according to election. It is a remnant according to the election of grace. And Paul says, “And if by grace, then it is no longer of works.” Those two concepts of grace and works, as we have seen throughout Romans, are mutually exclusive. If you earn it, it is not grace. If you deserve it, it is not grace. If you merit it, it is not grace. Grace, by definition, is unmerited, unearned, and undeserved. If it is by works, if it is earned, if it is deserved, if it is by merit, then it is no longer of grace.

Do you see how simple Paul makes it? If it is grace, it is not earned; if it is earned, it is not grace. It is one or the other. Our only hope in heaven and earth is not from our works but from the grace that remains grace.

Blind and Deaf to the Word

Paul poses another question in verse 7: “What then? Israel has not obtained what it seeks.” Israel here is the entire nation, the Jewish people as a whole. In anticipation of some issues that come forward later: At this point in the text, following Romans 8, 9, and 10, when Paul speaks of Israel, he is talking about ethnic Israel, not spiritual Israel. He is talking about the Jewish people who were his kinsmen according to the flesh. We see it in this verse.

“What then? Israel has not obtained what it seeks; but the elect have obtained it,”—that is, within Israel, a remnant of that people have obtained it—“and the rest were blinded.” Let me move quickly here, as he quotes the Old Testament again:

Just as it is written:

“God has given them a spirit of stupor,
Eyes that they should not see
And ears that they should not hear,
To this very day.”

The reason the people of the nation did not find what they sought is because they were blind. The reason they were blind and groping in the darkness is because God made them blind. Their blindness was a punishment for their sin. They did not want to see the things of God. God, as He often does throughout redemptive history, in His poetic justice, gives people over to their sins. He abandons them to their own sinful desires.

Do you not want to hear the Word of God? Does the Word of God bore you? If you do not want to hear the Word of God, be careful. If you do not want to hear it, God may make you deaf, and you will never hear it. Do you not want to see the kingdom of God? Be careful. Whatever you see in vagueness now may be taken away.

If you are not alive and energetic to the things of the Spirit of God and your soul is not excited by these things, be careful. God may visit you with the spirit of lethargy to take from you whatever weak zeal you presently have. When God does that, it is always a punishment for the evil inclinations of the people.

Honey and Poison

Paul goes on to cite David with these words:

Let their table become a snare and a trap,
A stumbling block and a recompense to them.
Let their eyes be darkened, so that they do not see,
And bow down their back always.

David is talking about the enemies of the kingdom of God. We love the twenty-third Psalm, do we not? “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Ps. 23:5). That idea refers to the table of the banquet feast, the table of blessing. It is a table that is prepared by God Himself, and it is public and visible to the enemies of the kingdom. That is what David said: “He has anointed my head with oil. My cup is running over.” Why? Because God has prepared this table.

Luther looked at the imagery of the Old Testament and said, ultimately, the table that the Lord God, in His grace, has bestowed upon the nation Israel is the table of His Word. He has spread the banquet feast with the oracles of God. The supreme advantage that God gave to Israel was His Word. He did not give it to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or the Akkadians. He gave His Word to Israel. They had the oracles of God. Luther said that was what was spread on the table.

David saw how his enemies hated the Word of God. David saw how his enemies hated the kingdom of God and the church in its Old Testament manifestation. He said: “God, make their table a snare, a trap. When they come to that table and see the sumptuous food placed upon the table, so inviting and attractive, it’s like a wild animal whose trap has been baited with meat. When that animal pounces on the meat, he finds his neck in a noose or his body in a cage. Let the table be a snare. Let it be a trap. Let the Word of God be a hammer on the heads of those who hate it.” You may remember the old poem:

Hammer away, ye hostile hands;
Your hammers break, God’s anvil stands.

Luther, looking at this text in Romans 11, compared it to a flower in the field, whose nectar is used to make honey for the bee. But that same part of the flower, when tasted by the spider, is poison, and it kills them. To those who are being saved, the Word of God is sweetness and honey, more precious than silver and gold. But for those who perish, it is poison. May it be for you, dear friends, nothing but sweetness, nothing but honey, that you may feast on the table God has prepared and reserved for you from the foundation of the world. Let us pray.

Father, we thank You that You have reserved for Yourself a remnant. We thank you that there will always be a remnant, and that we are never left to labor alone in Your vineyard. We thank You for the church that You have called out of the world and blessed with Your Word. Let us come to the feast of that Word, that we may hunger and thirst after it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.