Paul’s Love for His People

We closed our studies last month at the end of Romans 8, an incredible summit of revelation designed to relieve believers of all doubts as to their security in Christ. Now Paul changes direction in order to deal with a potential objection to what he has just taught. It has become clear by the time of Paul’s writing to the Romans that relatively few Jews are believing the gospel message, while gentiles are pouring into the church. One might argue that the Jews were God’s “chosen people,” the recipients of His promises of redemption, but the evidence seems to indicate that God has abandoned them and has opened the doors of salvation to gentiles. If such a case can be made, all of Paul’s teaching on security is called into question. So the apostle sets out to show that God has not altered or abandoned His centuries-old redemptive purposes. Dr. James M. Boice, summarizing this section of Romans (chaps. 9–11), writes that Paul is formulating a “Christian philosophy of history.” Not surprisingly, it envisions God reigning sovereignly over all events in time and space.

Paul begins this section with a heart-rending statement. Three times he affirms the truth of what he is writing—that the large-scale rejection of the gospel by the Jews causes him “great sorrow and continual grief.” Paul himself was a Jew, “a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5), a child of two Jewish parents. And he had labored to bring the gospel to his people, often going first to the synagogue at each stop on his journeys. But he received back primarily hatred, opposition, and persecution from the Jews, for they saw him as a traitor and a threat to their faith. However, Paul never returned hate for hate; he responded to the Jews with incredible love. He manifests that love here, affirming that he would accept being “accursed from Christ” if it would cause the Jews to be saved. He was willing to be separated from Christ if they might thereby be joined to Him. Such could never be, for only Christ could do such a substitutionary work. But with a willingness to die for the Jews, Paul was well content to spend his life taking the gospel to them, for he knew his message was “the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (Rom. 1:16). The door of salvation still stood open for the Jews, and Paul longed to bring them to it.