Salvation Sent to the Gentiles

John 1:11 tells us, “[Jesus] came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” By these words, the Apostle communicates that most first-century Jews did not receive Jesus as their Lord, Messiah, and Savior. After our Lord’s ascension, this pattern continued, as we have seen in our study of the book of Acts. Many Jews, of course, did trust in Jesus under the preaching of Peter, Paul, John, and the other Apostles. Yet when Paul came to Rome in his appeal to Caesar, many Jewish leaders in the city still rejected Jesus (Acts 28:16–24).

Many of us likely find it incredible that the Jews did not recognize their Messiah, but this was not surprising to the Apostle Paul. When he saw the Jews’ persisting in their rejection of Jesus, the Apostle understood that they were doing what so many of their fathers before them had—disbelieving God’s Word. Looking at the Lord’s announcement to Isaiah that the prophet’s message would harden many in his own generation, Paul saw that it was true not only for Isaiah’s day but also for later generations (vv. 25–27; see Isa. 6:9–10). The Chronicler observed regarding the Jews before the Babylonian exile that God in His compassion had sent messenger after messenger to His people, but the Jews mocked and spurned them until there was no remedy but exile (2 Chron. 36:15–16). In the first century, the Jews repeated the same error, only this time they rejected the ultimate Messenger—God Himself incarnate, Jesus Christ—as well as the emissaries He appointed—the Apostles. That generation of Jews, as many scholars and theologians including Dr. R.C. Sproul have argued, received divine judgment in the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70.

The Jews’ rejection of Jesus made it plain to Paul that God was sending the word of salvation to the gentiles, who would listen to it, and he said as much to the leaders of the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 28:28). His observation, of course, aligns with Jesus’ teaching on the subject in places such as the parable of the tenants (Matt. 21:33–44). Importantly, neither Jesus nor Paul meant that all Jews from that point forward would be utterly beyond the reach of God’s grace, would deserve persecution, or should not be the object of the church’s ministry. They were telling us that the gospel would receive a much more favorable reception from gentiles than from Jews. The course of church history has borne that out. Nevertheless, the gospel is for the Jew first and then the gentile (Rom. 1:16), so we must seek to evangelize Jewish people no less than we seek to evangelize non-Jews.