The big idea
God did not get partway through the Bible and change plans. Israel was always chosen for something — and that something turns out to be a person. In Jesus, the truest Israelite, Jew and Gentile are not two peoples talked into getting along. They are one new man, because they are hidden in the same body.
Key takeaways
- “To choose” takes a direct object. Israel was chosen to receive the covenants, bear the law, be a light, and be the family Christ was born into — and Paul writes about that dignity in the present tense, not the past.
- Paul hands Israel’s own titles to the church — chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation — and never once says God went back on his word.
- Election is both narrower and far better than we fear: the chosen people resolve into a single chosen one, and everyone else is chosen in him.
- Hebrews locates the fault in the first covenant with the people, never with God. The new covenant is plan A followed through, not plan B.
- The stumbling stone trips anyone pursuing righteousness by a route other than grace. That is not a Jewish problem. That is the human one.
- Christianity does not produce peace through a better mindset. “He himself is our peace” — the wall came down in his flesh, not at a negotiating table.
- There are no membership tiers in the body of Christ. Heritage, performance, a week of memorization — none of it is chips you can cash.
Matt opened by sending the church’s team off to a camp for orphans in Mexico, then noted that Mandy was away and he had nothing on for the afternoon, so the congregation should get comfortable and locate the bananas in the coffee shop. He then broke the first rule of public speaking and gave away the conclusion at the start — as a mercy, he said, because there are a lot of wrong ways to preach this passage.
Why Ephesians 2 drags Romans 9 into the room
Paul writes Ephesians to stimulate hope, and his repeated phrase is in him — not merely because of him, not next to him. In him. This week that phrase runs into the Jew and the Gentile both reconciled to God, and a dividing wall of hostility that is simply gone.
Matt called the message a dress rehearsal for the fall, when Hope reads Romans and reaches chapters 9 through 11. Those chapters frighten people because “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy” sounds like a God announcing he can smash whomever he likes. But why would Paul, brimming with good news, drop something dark and creepy into the core of the letter he was so eager to write? The questions are real ones: how can Israel be God’s people and Christians also be God’s people? How can the first covenant be obsolete while everything God says still stands? He also asked prayer for Hope’s new friendship with Tiferet Israel, the Orthodox congregation in town.
Paul keeps using Israel’s words for the church
The tour started with Titus 2:11–14, where Christ redeems “a people for his own possession, who are zealous for good works” — language God had used of Israel. Then Galatians 6:14–16, where neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, only a new creation, and peace is pronounced “upon the Israel of God.” Then Philippians 3:2–8: “we are the circumcision.” Matt paused on the insult in that passage — in the ancient world a dog was not a lap pet but a threat roaming the street.
And then Peter, writing to believers:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession… Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
1 Peter 2:9–10Some read that and conclude the church replaced Israel. Matt does not think it can be read that way — but you can certainly say you have been made part of the Israel of God, and that is nothing to sneeze at. Besides, the vine and the branches was said to Jewish people. Outside of Christ there is no life for anyone, Israelite or not.
Chosen — but chosen for what?
“They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.”
Romans 9:4–5Present tense, Matt pointed out. Not was chosen. And then a small piece of grammar that carried the whole message: choosing is transitive. “If I asked you what you did this morning and you said ‘I ate,’ and I said ‘what did you eat,’ and you said ‘nothing, I just ate’ — that doesn’t make sense.” Israel was not chosen to sit on a shelf like a knickknack. A nation was made out of nothing, from two people too old to have children, so that they would belong to him and he would dwell among them — and so that, in the flesh, on his mother’s side, they would be his family.
Which is exactly why Romans 9:6–8 can say the word of God has not failed even while “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.”
Stick figures and Russian nesting dolls
Here Matt put up drawings he had made himself, apologized for them in advance, and started at Noah rather than Adam on the grounds that Adam would have required far too many stick figures. Abraham had eight sons — Ishmael, Isaac, and six more by Keturah, tucked away at the end of the story where nobody notices. Only one is the child of promise. The promise runs through election, not through paternity.
Jacob is the hinge. He is a man, and God renames him Israel, and Israel is also a nation — an individual who contains a people. Matt noted Paul makes that same move with Adam, and the writer of Hebrews makes it when he says Levi paid tithes while still in the loins of Abraham. Nesting dolls — which Matt said he dislikes, because they are full of themselves. It is also a foreshadowing: a single person who is himself a kingdom of priests. “A Trojan horse of destiny,” he called Jesus, twice.
Mercy, not caprice
On Romans 9:15–18, Matt was careful. Pharaoh had already decided he wanted to keep his slaves; God froze a choice the man had made, not a preference he never held. And the point Paul is racing toward is verses 23–26 — vessels of mercy called from the Jews and also from the Gentiles, Hosea’s “those who were not my people I will call my people.” God’s choosing to include is an expression of mercy. We read it as capricious nonsense, he said, and we can stop reading it that way.
Then Romans 9:30–33: Gentiles who were not chasing righteousness got it by faith; those pursuing the law as though it worked by effort tripped over a stone. The completed work of Jesus is precisely a stumbling block to anyone seeking righteousness by any other means than grace.
Do not be arrogant toward the branches
“…do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.”
Romans 11:17–20Call the root the covenant promise, or the word given to the forefathers, or the person of Jesus — Matt’s verdict was that it is six one way, half a dozen the other. “Behind any door you open, ultimately you find Jesus.” Not a newcomer, either: “Before Abraham was, I am,” and in 1 Corinthians 10:1–4 the rock Israel drank from in the wilderness was Christ. On Romans 11:11–12 — their trespass meaning riches for the world — Matt refused to let Gentiles feel superior about it: “I’m not acting like Greeks wouldn’t have done that. They killed Socrates.” And Romans 11:28–32 settles it. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
Then how can a covenant go obsolete?
“For he finds fault with them when he says: ‘Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…’ For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Hebrews 8:7–10The fault is with them. God is not sitting there hunting for the reverse gear. And the terms of the new covenant are the terms he wanted all along — I will be their God, they shall be my people. Plan A, followed through.
Meanwhile Jesus knows he is absorbing Israel’s vocation. Israel was called to be a light to the nations; Jesus says “I am the light of the world.” He told Nathanael “behold, an Israelite indeed” — and is himself the truest Israelite there could be. Seed of Abraham, son of David, never sinned. “Talk about advantages,” Matt said. “And all of that is yours.”
One new man
Which is where Ephesians finally lands. God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ; then Ephesians 2:11–13 tells Gentiles to remember they were once “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel” — two phrases sitting so close together they nearly say the same thing.
“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility… that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross.”
Ephesians 2:14–16Matt would not let the abolished ordinances be a shrug. Jesus did not put a big fat never mind on the law; he fulfilled it in his broken body. And there are not two plans of salvation. He drew the absurdity out: a velvet rope at the judgment, Peter winking someone through a side entrance. No. “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life” — now, then, and backwards through every foreshadowing in the Old Testament.
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.”
Ephesians 2:19–22Full citizens, not half. There is no such thing, Matt said, as a member of Christ’s body and then a triple golden platinum member of Christ’s body. Not male or female, not kept-80%-of-the-law or kept 82, not Jew or Gentile. The mystery Paul says was hidden and is now revealed is exactly this — the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body. So the reason he has unity with a Jewish believer, or with someone from the Congo or Australia, is not a handshake. It is that they are hidden in the same body, reconciled to the same Father.
Don’t settle for being next to him
The close was the same one he gave the week before. If you have chips you were hoping to cash — heritage, a good week, a passage memorized — there is nothing there to stand on. Our standing is in his identity, not our own.
“Please don’t just be next to Jesus,” Matt said, “related to someone who’s in Jesus, enjoying being in fellowship with people who are in Jesus. Don’t be Jesus’ buddy. Be in him.” He does not want people who imitate him from an adjacent seat. That is where life and salvation actually are. Then he prayed for hope with abundant anticipation, and for faith to stand on the merits of Jesus and no one else — and apologized, sincerely, for not preaching as long as promised.