Hope Blog

▶ 1:03:09

Three weeks into Romans 11, Matt stopped to do something he does not always do:
back all the way up and tell the story from the beginning, for anyone in the room who has been
hearing the word Israel every Sunday without a firm sense of what it refers to. Paul
keeps talking about Israel because Paul is writing chapters 9 through 11. So it is worth knowing
who is being talked about.

1. Israel is a man, and Israel is a nation

▶ 1:04:46

God made promises to Abraham — land, descendants, blessing, and the line that has always set
the scope of the whole project: in his offspring all the families of the earth would be blessed.
Every family means every family. Matt’s word for it was that all the peoples of the earth are in
God’s crosshairs for his love. The promise passed to Isaac, then to Jacob, who wrestled through
the night and came away with a new name
(Genesis 32:28).

▶ 1:05:20

Jacob had twelve sons who became twelve tribes, and the whole collection took his new name.
That is not a case of a good name being reused. Scripture goes the other direction and calls the
nation Jacob —
“let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad”,
and “he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel.”
The man stands for the people. Paul has already run that move once, in
Romans 5:
Adam is one man walking around a garden, and all of humanity is walking with him. Hold onto that,
because it is doing quiet work in the plant metaphor that follows.

2. What is holding the tree up

▶ 1:07:35

Matt waved off the long debate about exactly which Jewish farming practice Paul had in mind —
he will send you an article if you are desperate — because the idea is plain enough: something
sacred represents the whole. The people in view are his fellow Jews of the first century, and the
firstfruits are plausibly the believing remnant, or the faithful foundation running back through
Noah, Abraham, Joseph, David.

▶ 1:09:44

But Matt thinks something older sits underneath even the patriarchs, because Jesus, who comes
from Israel ethnically, precedes them.
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day”
— Abraham, in his own lifetime, was already leaning forward toward Christ. And then the sentence
that ends the argument:
“before Abraham was, I am.”
Paul says the same thing in his own vocabulary: Christ raised is
the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep;
he is before all things, and in him all things hold together;
he comes from the race of the patriarchs and is also
God over all, blessed forever.

▶ 1:11:57

And once, Paul simply says it outright about the wilderness generation:

Matt’s point from the plant is blunt and hard to argue with. Branches can be removed or
replaced without killing anything. Pull the root and it is over. God could conceivably have made
those promises to some other man in some other place — but there is no version of this where you
swap out Jesus and the program runs the same. He is the
Lamb slain before the foundation of the world,
which means the most ancient patriarch is redeemed by exactly what redeems you: grace, through
faith, hidden in Christ. “There’s no chance at all that you’ll be in the kingdom and find a bunch
of people hidden in Christ and then a bunch of people there by some other means.”

3. “Do not be arrogant toward the branches”

▶ 1:15:00

Matt read verse 19 in a small, self-satisfied voice, because that is the tone Paul is
imitating — they were removed so that there would be a spot for me. Yes, they were
broken off. No, it was not about you. It was unbelief, and your standing is faith, and neither
of those is an achievement. The whole question, start to finish, is belief against unbelief —
not ancestry, not ethnicity, not culture, not kosher, not circumcision.

4. Faith in a person, not in your faith

▶ 1:17:54

Which raises the obvious follow-up: faith in what? Not a system you memorize, and not
a vending machine that returns a fixed outcome when the right thoughts go in. Matt put it as
carefully as he could: “I don’t trust in my trust of Jesus. I trust Jesus. I don’t have a ton of
faith in my faith regarding Jesus. My faith is in Jesus directly.” Responding in faith is good —
the altar, the tent meeting, the smell of the canvas you still remember. But “really, you’re
saved because Christ went to the altar.”

▶ 1:18:42

One more plant, he promised, and then no more:

So the anxious questions dissolve. Does a Gentile need to become more Jewish to be upgraded?
Does a Jewish believer need to stop living Jewishly to prove the point? Moot, both directions.
“It’s not that you’ve been invited to join the Christianity team. You’re invited to join into
Christ himself, the person.” Matt does not want benefits arriving downstream from something Jesus
did over there. He wants Jesus.

5. Kindness, severity, and the power to graft back in

▶ 1:20:36

Paul sets kindness and severity side by side,
and Matt located the severity somewhere most people do not expect it. God’s severity is that he
insists the gift stay a gift. “The master of the banquet insists you don’t pay. That’s the only
way he’ll have it.”

▶ 1:21:45

Then verse 23, which Matt called remarkable, and it is. Paul does not set terms — no window
that closes, no cap on how many refusals are too many. He frames it entirely around God: God
has the power to graft them in again. “So people who are, in your mind, way far gone,
super-duper rejecting of Jesus, and have been for a long time — it’s God’s power.” That is Paul’s
affection for his own people showing again, the same affection that opened chapter 9.

And the one being trusted is worth the trust. Jesus is God and man without seam — no Mondays
off where he is only a man, no lunch break where he is only God. Manger, tomb, resurrection,
ascension, and now: a perfect harmony, which is exactly why he can be our covenant of peace with
God.

6. We are only branches

▶ 1:24:13

Whether the olive tree’s root takes in the patriarchs or is mostly Jesus alone, Christ is
behind it either way — and either way, you and I are branches. Others were broken off only by
unbelief; we were added only by faith. So the arithmetic never works out to superiority. “We only
bear fruit because we’re in him. Apart from Jesus, we are unfruitful.” Matt guessed the impulse
is often insecurity — you scan whatever bus you are on and decide you are probably above average.
In what way, exactly, would a branch have the right to feel better than the people not yet on the
tree?

▶ 1:26:37

The we is the redeemed sitting in church on a Sunday. Matt read the list of vices
back as the description of someone we might write off, and the room laughed, because it is our
own résumé. Nobody is too far gone to be worth telling. Someone brought the light of Christ to
each of us, and probably kept bringing it after we said no the first time. The temptation is to
spend our words only on warm leads. His counter: “Oh, I don’t know if this is going to work — but
do it anyway.”

How the message ended

▶ 1:29:06

Not with an application list, but with a silent prayer and three questions to sit in: What are
you saying to me through this text? What are you saying to me about being grafted in for free?
What are you saying to me about the humility of accepting that I am not simply better than
others? Then, aloud, one request — that God would stir up our faith in him, and help us abide in
him confidently.

▶ 0:53:53

Matt has been reading Romans under two rules he announced at the start, and he
restated them before opening chapter 11 again. First, Paul is a
Christ
and him crucified man, so however tangled the grammar gets, the theology does not drift.
Second, Romans is about one idea. “If what we end up having is a weird soup of random and somewhat
unrelated micro sermons, we didn’t get it.”

1. One letter, one argument

▶ 0:56:16

Paul is writing to real people — Jewish believers and Gentile believers in one room in Rome,
after the expulsion and the return, working out an identity question that will not sit still. Do
Jews have to stop being Jewish now that they are in Christ? Do Gentiles have to level up and
become more Jewish? Paul’s answer is union with Christ, and he threads the needle by insisting
that God was never wrong and has not changed his mind — everything is fulfilled, not
abandoned.

▶ 0:58:28

Which is why chapters 9 through 11 are not a detour. The gospel is
the
power of God for salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The advantage of being
Jewish was real — glory, oracles, covenant — and
their
faithlessness never nullified God’s faithfulness. He is
God
of Gentiles too, and if the heirs are the law-keepers then
faith
is null and the promise void. Same tune, all the way through.

2. What “all Israel” was doing at the end of the chapter

▶ 0:59:30

Matt started last week at the end, with
“all
Israel will be saved,” and he stood by that reading here. In the Old Testament and in
first-century Judea the phrase is close to a technical term — the complete tribal structure
descended from Jacob. Not every individual, since you could marry in or be cut off, but the whole
structure. Paul knew his Old Testament, so he probably had that in mind.

The alternative reading, he pointed out, collapses. If “all Israel” just means everyone who
will be saved, then Paul has written that everyone who will be saved will be saved — “a potato is
a potato.” The point is sharper than that: God is able to bring salvation to a tribal structure so
scattered that ten of its tribes were mixed into the nations “like a cake, not a salad,” and to do
it in one motion with the Gentiles coming in.

3. Chosen to bring it, not to have it

▶ 1:01:23

Here is the hinge for the whole message. We tend to hear “chosen” and think “saved.” But Israel
was not chosen over the other nations in order to be saved — otherwise the Egyptians stand
condemned by ethnicity, which makes no sense of anything God has said. They were
a
kingdom of priests, and the promise was always that
all
the families of the earth would be blessed through them.

So restoration means more than rescue. “If they’re restored, then they’re restored to that,”
Matt said — “not hoarding it, but shining it.” Israel was a noble instrument, a means and not an
end, and that is what is at stake when Paul starts talking about them coming back.

4. Elijah’s arithmetic

▶ 1:04:46

Paul opens the chapter by refusing the premise: has God rejected his people? Not at all — Paul
is himself an Israelite, of the tribe of Benjamin. There is rejection in the room, but it is his
fellow Jews rejecting Christ, not God rejecting them.

Then he reaches for Elijah. Matt gave the
1 Kings
18 cliff notes: 450 prophets of Baal, 400 of Asherah, one of Yahweh, and a contest with an
audience. All day the losing side dances and cuts itself while Elijah needles them about whether
their god has stepped away. At evening Elijah has the altar drenched three times in the middle of
a drought — God does not need our help, and we make it hard on him anyway — and prays a short
prayer. Fire falls. And then Elijah runs, alone and afraid, until God corrects the count:
seven
thousand who never bowed, plus instructions to anoint his own replacement.

▶ 1:07:19

The analogy holds because both halves run on the same fuel. Baal or Yahweh then, rejecting or
receiving Christ now — grace through faith in either century.

5. The stupor was a verdict, not an ambush

▶ 1:08:58

Two notes. “The elect” is not a mysterious third group appearing out of nowhere; it is the
people Paul has already described, receiving grace by faith. And before anyone recoils at the
stupor, go read what Paul is quoting, because he quotes Isaiah constantly in this chapter.

The order is stated plainly: hypocrisy and refusal first, judicial hardness second. Nobody with
a soft heart full of faith had hardness imposed on them by an inscrutable decree. “If you refuse
the light of the world, what are you going to be left with? Darkness. And no one else to blame for
it but yourself.” Paul makes the same move again with
David’s
prayer about the table becoming a snare
(Romans
11:9–10) — the table standing, Matt suggested, for the whole spread of covenant privilege
answered with a spoiled response.

6. Jealousy, and what full inclusion would mean

▶ 1:11:28

The trespass, at minimum, is the rejection and crucifixion of the Messiah — the shedding of the
blood that buys the world’s forgiveness. Gentiles bringing God glory is then meant to provoke
Israel, and if the provocation works, Paul says the return is worth more than the riches already
released.

▶ 1:13:43

Acceptance here is not merely being saved, because chosenness was never merely being saved.
Israel was a missionary kingdom. The evidence is in the details:
Deuteronomy
4:6 has the nations hearing specific statutes, and
Isaiah
43:21 has pagan audiences hearing God’s praises — neither happens without deliberate
communication.

▶ 1:15:31

Which reframes Paul’s own résumé. Being an apostle to the Gentiles is not a defection from his
calling as an Israelite; it is the calling, executed. He is a Benjamite walking in Israel’s actual
destiny. And that is why Matt hears
“the
gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” as a promise about the mission and not only the
rescue. What “life from the dead” means, he left open — some read it as unprecedented revival,
others as the literal resurrection following a completed commission. “Who knows. I don’t know.”

7. We are on the field by mercy

▶ 1:17:39

Until that day, the danger is not theological confusion. It is swagger. “They benched
themselves through doubt and unbelief, and we could do the same. We don’t have an inherent right
to bear his name and bring glory to God in the world.” Israel, sidelined by their own rejection,
can return by repentance. That return would be mercy — and our inclusion is the same mercy. “It’s
mercy all the way down.”

▶ 1:20:37

Then the sharpest turn of the morning. When we read the Old Testament and picture Israel as
people blessed simply in order to be blessed, that is not only bad exegesis — it is a projection.
“I think at the core we have an immaturity spiritually or emotionally, where we feel like God has
given us grace just to have the grace, shined light on us just so that we could have light, given
us mercy just so that we could have mercy, but not to be merciful.” The same reflex makes Israel
the hero of every story we read, which is another projection: us center stage, God a peripheral
character in his own book. Matt started to call it funny and corrected himself. “It’s actually
just tragic.”

8. Blessed to bless

▶ 1:23:21

So the application arrived as a string of rhetorical questions rather than a program. What have
we been given? Are we
keeping
the light under a basket? Are we honoring God with our lips while withholding our hearts —
the exact charge Isaiah brought? Jesus told
a
whole parable about people who receive mercy and are expected to show it, and he understood
why
it
is more blessed to give than to receive — not because giving buys anything, but because
blessing was always meant to travel. The people it travels to are near: neighbors, coworkers, and
a whole world’s worth of Austinites.

▶ 1:24:28

He closed by taking the pressure off. We will probably botch it, and the promise stands anyway
—
the
knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. God has never
depended on our help. Being invited to give it is the grace. Matt borrowed Mark’s Alpha
announcement for the picture: you go, you love it, and you wish you had invited more people.
Standing before Christ will be that, magnified — looking back at whatever we gave him for the love
of it and thinking, that was the best thing I ever did. Which, he noted, is where
Romans
12 is headed. The service ended standing, praying that the last seven seats in Alpha would
fill.

▶ 1:17:29

Matt did not want to skip Romans 9–11. It matters so much to Paul that twice in
these three chapters he simply stops mid-argument and worships — the letter goes on hold while he
praises. There is a glory in this section that most of us walk past, and Matt has been trying to
slow down long enough to see it.

Why this is not armchair theology

▶ 1:18:44

Romans 9, he reminded the room, was not primarily about individuals sorted into heaven and
hell. It was about a group project — a multigenerational plan, different ways of participating in
it, whole families and tribes. Underneath all of it sits one question: is God faithful to his
word?

“Sometimes I say good theology is pastoral care,” Matt said. “I don’t think we have our
thinking over here and our feelings over here and they never touch. We feel our thinking and we
think our feelings, and we act out what we really believe deep down.” Imagine being recruited to
a team, he said — good players, nice court, sharp uniforms — and then someone mentions the coach
has never won a game. That changes how much you want to play.

▶ 1:20:21

Paul is grieved over his fellow Jews rejecting their own Messiah, and behind that grief is a
lingering question. Did God intend to use Israel, find it hard, and give up? Because if so, how
confident do you feel handing him your whole life — knowing that you will eventually become a
problem too?

Define your words first

▶ 1:21:26

Rather than start at the top of Romans 11, Matt jumped to the end of the chapter, where Paul
circles back after the olive tree analogy to warn Gentile believers against arrogance.

▶ 1:23:00

He laid out the readings most of us have absorbed. One: a future great awakening in which
enormous numbers of Jewish people turn to Christ, perhaps as he returns. Two: an awakening in the
modern nation of Israel. Three: a separate path of salvation for Jewish people, which Matt
rejected outright — Paul has been about Christ and him crucified alone for eleven chapters. He is
not against the first two, and suspects there will be such an awakening. His point is that they
are small next to what has Paul so undone by verse 33.

▶ 1:24:32

Here his math degree from UT surfaced. Before a proof, you spend the first page defining your
terms. “I forgot calculus, but I do remember how to define my words.” So: what does all
Israel mean?

▶ 1:26:06

As far as Matt can tell, everywhere the phrase appears in the Old Testament it refers to the
total tribal structure — all the descendants of Jacob, the patriarch God renamed Israel. Not
every single individual, but the whole structure, all the tribes. He pointed to
Deuteronomy 1:1
and Deuteronomy 5:1
for anyone wanting to check the usage themselves, and noted that first-century writers like
Josephus kept the same distinction — “Judean,” from the tribe of Judah, is where we get the word
Jew, and it named the southern people, not the northern ones.

The scattering, and the cake

▶ 1:28:58

God had warned this could happen. In
Leviticus 26
and Deuteronomy 28
he tells them that persistent unfaithfulness will mean being scattered among the peoples, from
one end of the earth to the other. After Solomon the kingdom split — Jeroboam over the northern
ten, Rehoboam over the south, where Judah, Benjamin and a great many Levites remained — and in
2 Kings 17
the warning lands on the north. Jeremiah 8
and Jeremiah 30
hold both halves together: he scatters them, and he means to bring them back.

▶ 1:30:04

Hosea is where the tragedy is named. Matt reminded the room that Paul quoted
Hosea 1
back in Romans 9 — “those who were not my people I will call my people, and her who was not
beloved I will call beloved” — and that the same chapter foreshadows the tribes gathered again
under one head. But Hosea 8:8
says Israel is swallowed up among the nations. Not a salad you could pick apart, Matt said, and
not a stew where you could fish out the onion. A cake.

▶ 1:31:31

So God has a puzzle. If all Israel must be saved, and the northern tribes are dispersed like
dandelion seed and culturally indistinguishable from the pagan nations they married into, how
does restoration happen? Matt’s answer: to recover every one of those broken shards, you would
need the full inclusion of the Gentile nations. There is no other net wide enough. God is killing
two birds with one stone.

What Paul is connecting

▶ 1:33:29

Read the verse again with that in hand and the two clauses are welded together: a hardening
in part, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in — and in this way all
Israel will be saved. Paul goes on to quote Isaiah: “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will
banish ungodliness from Jacob.” Jacob is the man whose name was changed to Israel.

▶ 1:35:15

In what day? The day the righteous branch from David’s house stands and the nations inquire of
him. Jeremiah says it the same way, and with more tenderness:

Some read those as the modern nation, some as the second temple after Babylon, and Matt
allowed both as possible parts. His insistence was narrower and firmer: Paul is the one
tying Israel’s great salvation to the fullness of the nations. Not a small remnant — the whole
tribal structure, as all the nations converge under the banner of Jesus, in one large act of God.
Verse 27 quotes Isaiah twice at once
(Isaiah 59:20–21
and Isaiah 27:8–9)
— the fierce breath that scattered them, and the guilt of Jacob atoned for.

“God doesn’t forget side plots,” Matt said. “He is more faithful than Horton the elephant. He
makes Horton the elephant look lazy.”

Why it matters that he follows through

▶ 1:39:57

The northern ten were not memory-holed. Matt read on:

“So when God says to you, ‘I love you,’ that also doesn’t go away.” Then
verses 30–32,
where God consigns all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all — which Matt read not as
universalism but as a regathering: the northern ten, Judah, Benjamin, the Levites, the Samaritans,
the surrounding nations, all of it under one head. The particular promises to Israel and the
universal blessing of the nations are honored together, and neither is traded away for the other.
It is the promise to Abraham
(Genesis 12:3,
Genesis 22:18)
doing double duty, and it lines up with the two sticks joined into one in
Ezekiel 37:15–22.
This demonstrates God’s faithfulness to Israel rather than replacing Israel.

▶ 1:43:00

And here the letter goes on hold, which was Matt’s point about Paul all along:

▶ 1:47:08

Matt offered the whole reading as a reading — “take it with a grain of salt, this is one way”
— but he was unequivocal about the payoff. We are small people with big problems, and we need to
know God is good and his words are not hollow. “Jesus has never seen my family,” somebody thinks.
Matt’s answer was blunt and kind at once: your situation confuses me too, but it does not confuse
him. Which is why
“do not be anxious about anything”
is something you can actually act on. He closed by praying for confidence in God’s ability to
follow through and remember all the details — and then, having spotted tables going up in the
family room, sent everyone to the potluck.

▶ 1:07:40

Matt has said all along that his aim in Romans is to show the letter to be
more beautiful than we first thought, and God through it more beautiful still. He has been
especially eager to preach chapters 9 through 11 — the stretch where the train of glory
seems to veer off somewhere confusing, and you start to wonder whether God is secretly dark
in some corner you have not been shown.

Where chapter 9 left us

▶ 1:08:14

The sovereignty of Romans 9 turned out to be sovereign mercy — God’s ability to
keep his promise to bless every family of the earth even when the people carrying that
promise fail to cooperate. Pharaoh is the case study: God did not manufacture the
stubbornness, he pressed pause on a rebellion Pharaoh had already chosen and magnified it so
the whole world could see his name. Which sets up the question underneath this whole
section. If Israel by and large rejects Jesus, have the promises stalled? Nothing remotely
like it. God has never needed our participation.

The stumbling stone

▶ 1:12:56

Matt backtracked a few verses, having declared chapter 9 finished a week early.

The fulcrum here is effort. By Paul’s own account his countrymen were zealous and
hardworking; the Gentiles, comparatively, were not laboring over Torah righteousness at all.
Since faith is by definition not a work, a salvation given as a gift is precisely the thing
a diligent person cannot receive. “The point of stumbling wasn’t God’s random capricious
hatred,” Matt said, “but his radical generosity on his terms alone.” He added that the
redeemed still trip over it from time to time.

▶ 1:14:42

The stone Paul quotes is borrowed. In
Isaiah 8
it is the Lord of hosts himself who becomes a sanctuary and a stone of offense; in
Isaiah 28
God answers a people who have made a covenant with death by laying a tested cornerstone in
Zion. The rock is God, and what he offers annuls the covenant with death.

Zeal without knowledge

▶ 1:16:14

The knowledge they lack is not knowledge of Torah. It is the mystery kept hidden through
the ages and now revealed — God incarnate, crucified, raised. And verse 1 is nonsense if the
door has been bolted from the inside: you do not pray for the salvation of people who are
not permitted to repent.

▶ 1:17:17

“End” is telos — the root behind telescope and telephone. In
English as in Greek the word can mean a thing winding down or the purpose it was driving
toward, as in the ends justifying the means. Matt noted that the ambiguity happens to land
the same way in both languages, which is not always so convenient. Jesus is the law’s goal
and its completion, not its cancellation.

Read that carefully, Matt urged: he does not merely give us these things. Our
righteousness is Christ the person. Our sanctification is Christ the person. Our redemption
is God made man — and both the kingdom and the King are our inheritance.

What Paul does with Deuteronomy 30

▶ 1:19:10

In Romans 10:5–8
Paul stages something strange and delightful. He gives the speaking part to “the
righteousness based on faith,” and then has it quote Moses.

▶ 1:21:06

Moses’ point was that obedience is not exotic. You do not have to go to Nepal and
contemplate one hand clapping in a cave, or go under the ocean and talk to sharks, or cross
a desert to find out what it does to your soul. God said it out loud in a booming voice and
wrote it with his own finger on stone. It is right here. Just do it. “And then, of course,”
Matt said, “we still couldn’t do it.”

So Paul reaches into a passage about keeping the commandments and finds Christ in it —
no one has to ascend to heaven to fetch him down, or descend to the abyss to bring him up,
because he has already come and already risen. Which is legitimate, Matt argued, because the
Old Testament does not exist in isolation from its own completion. If the whole Torah points
to Jesus, then so does Deuteronomy 30. Paul deliberately puts belief in the risen Lord where
adherence to the law used to stand.

You cannot order Jesus à la carte

▶ 1:23:48

▶ 1:25:55

Here Matt pressed the point he clearly cares most about. We are not saved piecemeal. “You
can’t be baptized into just his left leg or only his baby years,” he said. “You are locked
into the roller coaster of the whole thing Jesus did. There’s no getting out halfway through
this ride.” We are baptized into his death and so expect
a resurrection like his
— but also into a complete lifetime of flawless obedience, manger to tomb. God did in Christ
what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.
The righteousness of God has been shown
apart from the law, though the law and the prophets bear witness to it;
the law was a guardian until Christ;
and now we serve in the new way of the Spirit, not the old way of the written code.

Which is why there is no distinction between Jew and Greek.
Everything is already maxed out and overflowing in Christ — where would you go from there?
And the promise Paul lands on, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be
saved, is lifted from Joel 2,
where the name belongs to God.

Who is doing the sending?

▶ 1:27:26

▶ 1:29:19

This is the verse that puts the mission back on our shoulders — or seems to. Matt slowed
down on the last clause. Sending is not what happens when churches convene a conference and
make God’s plan go. “There’s a sending agency, if you will, even higher than our missions
organizations.” Paul has been quoting Isaiah all chapter, and in
Isaiah 6
the voice asking “whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” is God’s own. He directs and
empowers his messengers, and he is not short of them. His train has no brakes.

They heard. They understood.

▶ 1:31:13

And in any case, chapters 9 through 11 are not about a people who never got a witness.
“Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?”
— faith comes by hearing, and Paul’s grief is over a message that was heard. Did
they not hear? Indeed they have; their voice has gone out to all the earth.
Did they not understand? Moses and Isaiah answer that one too:
God has been found by those who were not looking for him.
The gospel in Paul’s day had already exploded with a life of its own. This is Pharaoh again
— God hardened his heart, but Pharaoh hardened it first, and God made a name for himself
either way. It was simply the hard way.

All day long I have held out my hands

▶ 1:34:53

Then Matt turned it on the room, and did it by naming the assumption out loud: that God’s
promises ran forward under their own power in Paul’s day, but in the modern era it is
somehow all up to us again. Is the church’s noteworthy incompetence going to void anything?
Does the knowledge of the glory of God covering the earth depend on whether we rally, get
organized, and finally obey? Scripture has never once testified that it does.

That, Matt said, is God’s default posture — not a single attempt withdrawn at the first
refusal. He is still the great sender, still patient, still holding the door open through
Christ. True for us, true for our friends, and true for “the people that we’ve written off
but he hasn’t — the people that he’s still pursuing even though we no longer try because we
feel like it’s too big of a miracle.”

▶ 1:35:56

So the closing question was not whether God will finish. It was what a willing response
looks like once you are no longer carrying the weight of the world’s evangelization. We
cannot shoulder it, and we are not asked to. God will have his bride, and she will be
radiant. The room was given a few quiet minutes to ask him about the state of their own
hearts before the prayer teams came forward.