The Elect Remnant

In yesterday’s study, we looked briefly at two passages from Hosea that Paul quotes to show that God always intended to save gentiles as well as Jews. In today’s passage, Paul quotes portions of two passages from Isaiah to show that God never intended to save all the Jews.

Hosea had given Israel God’s promise that, following the exile, the Jewish nation would recover and would become “as the sand of the sea” (Hos. 1:10). Isaiah picks up on that theme in the first of the two passages that Paul quotes here in Romans 9 (Isa. 10:22–23). But Isaiah is giving a warning: “ ‘Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant will be saved.’ ” In other words, the population of Israel and the ranks of those who will be saved are not synonymous—only a portion of the Jews will find salvation. This portion is described as the “remnant,” a frequently-used Old Testament word that is rich in meaning. “[Early uses of the word] refer to little more than the physical survival of a small number of Jews following a military catastrophe, such as the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians,” Dr. James M. Boice writes in his Romans commentary. “But increasingly, particularly in the later prophets, the remnant becomes not merely a group of survivors but a chastened, regenerated, and converted people whom we would describe as the elect or ‘saved’ within Israel.” Paul himself uses the term in speaking of “a remnant according to the election of grace” (Rom. 11:5). So Isaiah is telling the Israelites that God will choose and save only a portion of them. The rest will perish in His final judgment, when God “ ‘will make a short work upon the
earth.’ ”

In Paul’s other quotation from Isaiah, the prophet attributes Israel’s very survival as a nation to God. If He had not left the people “a seed,” Isaiah says, “ ‘we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah.” In other words, Israel would have been destroyed, for it was every bit as wicked as the two cities God wiped out by fire from heaven. But the mercy of God spared Israel that fate. He maintained a faithful remnant among His people. He has always been about the business of electing and saving some from the larger body of Abraham’s descendants. And so it continues in Paul’s time as a small trickle of Jews come to faith.