The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

There awaits the Gentiles, in their distinctive identity as such, gospel blessing far surpassing anything experienced during the period of Israel’s apostasy, and this unprecedented enrichment will be occasioned by the conversion of Israel on a scale commensurate with that of their earlier disobedience.’

JOHN MURRAY The Epistle the Romans, chapter 11. 11-12

THERE are several reasons why the future of the Jews was a subject of importance in the minds of so many Christians in the seventeenth century. For one thing they considered that a concern for the welfare of that scattered nation is a necessary part of Christian piety. Of the Jews, concerning the flesh, Christ came; to them first was the gospel preached, and from them was it received by the Gentiles: ‘Which should teach us’, writes Edward Elton, ‘not to hate the Jews (as many do) only because they are Jews, which name is among many so odious that they think they cannot call a man worse than to call him a Jew; but, beloved, this ought not to be so, for we are bound to love and honour the Jews, as being the ancient people of God, to wish them well, and to be earnest in prayer to God for their conversion’.

We shall later note how this awareness of duty towards the Jews did enter into the day-to-day living of many Christians in the seventeenth century. And yet their interest in Israel was always set in a wider context than the particular future of that nation; it was Israel’s future within the kingdom of Christ and the relation between their incoming and the advancement of Christ’s glory that was uppermost in their thinking. The future of the Jews had decisive significance for them because they believed that, though little is clearly revealed of the future purposes of God in history, enough has been given us in Scripture to warrant the expectation that with the calling of the Jews there will come far-reaching blessing for the world. Puritan England and Covenanting Scotland knew much of spiritual blessing and it was the prayerful longing for wider blessing, not a mere interest in unfulfilled prophecy, which led them to give such place to Israel.

We shall be concerned, firstly, in this chapter, with what was claimed as New Testament evidence for a future general conversion of the Jews. The two gospel texts Matthew 23.38, 39 and Luke 21.24 were sometimes cited. In these Christ appears to place a limit to the period during which a general judgment will rest upon the Jews and, by implication, to suggest that a brighter day for them would subsequently follow: ‘Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled’; ‘For I say unto you: ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. The words ‘Blessed is he that cometh’ remind us of the greeting and welcome given to Jesus upon his entry into Jerusalem, (Matt. 21.9) and the reference to their future use by the Jews suggests that their long continued hardiness as a nation is one day to end ‘the cordial welcome is contrasted with the factual position at the time’ when Jesus spoke. The fact that Jesus did not entirely dismiss the question put to him by the disciples before his ascension, ‘Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel’, may also be suggestive. Another passage more often quoted by the Puritans was 2 Corinthians 3.15, 16: ‘But even unto this day, when Moses is read the veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away.’ ‘Alas,’ writes Increase Mather, ‘there is a veil of miserable blindness upon their hearts that they cannot, they will not, see the Truth: But, saith the Apostle, “This shall be taken away”. And (saith he) “it shall turn”. What is this? I answer: “It”, there may note the body of the Jewish nation, or the words may be read, “They shall turn” (i.e. the blinded minds of the Jews shall turn) “unto the Lord”.’

Another New Testament text sometimes cited by seventeenth century divines was Revelation 16.12, which speaks of the drying up of the river Euphrates ‘that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared’. It was suggested that ‘kings of the east’ is a reference to the Jews scattered in the East beyond the Euphrates.

Much might be said on these texts but it must be confessed that in the case of each a considerable amount of obscurity remains, and even taken together they scarcely amount to definite evidence of a future conversion of the Jews as a people. It was not, however, upon these texts that Puritan expositors placed the weight of the case. With reference to those who expected ‘a large and visible addition of Jews to Christ’s church’, Johannes Wollebius (1586—1629) the Reformed theologian of Basel, noted that ‘nothing that would uphold this idea may be found in the Apocalypse’. But he adds, ‘Those who teach it look to Romans 11.25-26 for their chief authority’. There can be no doubt that Wollebius’ last assertion is correct and that the Puritan view of Israel’s future, as far as the New Testament is concerned, rests principally upon their exposition of that chapter. ‘I know not any Scripture containing a more pregnant and illustrious testimony and demonstration of the Israelites’ future vocation,’ says Mather, ‘it being a main scope of the Apostle in this chapter to make known this Mystery unto the Gentiles.’ Similarly the eminent Scottish divine, James Durham, writes: ‘Whatever may be doubted of their restoring to their land, yet they shall be brought to a visible Church-state. Not only in particular persons here and there in congregations; but that multitudes, yea, the whole body of them shall be brought, in a common way with the Gentiles, to profess Christ, which cannot be denied, as Romans 11 is clear and that will be enough to satisfy us.’ In the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards was a spokesman for the same conviction when he wrote, Nothing is more certainly foretold than this national conversion of the Jews in Romans 11. To this chapter, therefore, and its interpretation, we must now turn.

The verses referred to by Wollebius read:

v.25. ‘For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

v.26. ‘And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.’

A number of questions are involved in the interpretation of these two verses:

The blindness spoken of in verse 25 clearly belongs to Israel as a race, with the exception of a believing remnant —hence the qualification of the Apostle, ‘blindness in part has’ happened to Israel’. Does the salvation of verse 26 likewise designate a blessing which will belong to the Jewish people as a whole and as a race? Who are the ‘all Israel’ who shall be saved?

Some Reformation commentators, notatbly Calvin, took the view that the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 refers to the sum total of the complete Church, including both Gentile Christians and the remnant of believing Jews. It does not, they thought, designate national Israel at some future point in history. This spiritualization of the term ‘Israel’ is not as strained as some have alleged. Two chapters earlier Paul is careful to show that race as such does not make a true Israelite (Rom. 9.6), and elsewhere Gentile believers are acknowledged as being of Abraham’s seed (Gal. 3.29); in the New Testament perspective, national privileges in regard to salvation have ended and on at least one occasion the term ‘Israel of God’ is taken to describe the whole Church of Christ (Gal. 6.16). But there are strong reasons for not accepting this interpretation of the word ‘Israel’ in Romans 11.26.

(i) It would involve a violent transition from the literal meaning of the term in verse 25 to a spiritual one in verse 26, and the passage gives no indication that such a sudden difference of meaning is being introduced. On the contrary, it may be argued that Paul’s usage of the term ‘Israel’ in this whole section is consistent and uniform. As Doekes observes: ‘In these three chapters (Rom. 9—11) the term “Israel” occurs no less than eleven times. And in the preceding ten cases it refers indisputably to the Jews, in contrast with the Gentiles. What compelling reason can there be, therefore, to accept another meaning here? Not, to be sure, the context, for the differentiation between Jews and Gentiles does not cease in verse 25 but is continued in the verses which follow.’
(ii) If the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 refers to the final salvation of all believers, Jew and Gentile why does Paul call it a mystery? Elnathan Parr’s objection is relevant: ‘Paul saith that he would not have the Gentiles ignorant; of what? That all the elect. should be saved? Whoever doubted it? But of the calling of the Jews there was a doubt. He calls it a secret or mystery; but that all the elect shall be saved is no secret.’
Accepting that Israel in verse 26 means Jewish people and not the Church as such, we must now proceed to a further question.

2. Is the salvation of ‘all Israel’ something that is progressively realized through the ages? Does it refer to the complete number of individual Jews who through the centuries have been added to the Church by faith in Christ, as for example Paul in the first century, Emmanuel Tremellius at the Reformation, Adolph Saphir in the nineteenth century, and so on? Some commentators have answered this in the affirmative and argued that Paul, in verses 25 and 26, is not speaking about a still-future conversion of the Jews as a nation. The apostle does not, they say, teach a temporal sequence in the order of events not ‘after the incoming of the fulness of the Gentiles then all Israel shall be saved’. ‘Paul,’ says a recent writer holding this view, ‘is not thinking about the time but about the way or manner in which “all Israel” is saved.” According to this interpretation, the hardening judicially inflicted upon Israel as a body will continue until the last of the elect Gentiles are saved, that is, until the very end; nevertheless through all the centuries a portion of elect Jews will escape that hardening, and this body — the entire Jewish remnant is the ‘all Israel’ who are to be united for ever with Gentile believers in the fold of God.

If this view is correct, then Romans 11 gives us no grounds for expecting any saving work of conversion among the Jews surpassing what has yet been seen in history: there is no prediction of a great revival among the Jews still to come. This exposition of Romans 11 was apparently common in the early seventeenth century, but it was almost uniformly rejected by English and Scottish exegetes of the Puritan school. Charles Ferme, for example, mentioned earlier as one of Robert Rollock’s students in Edinburgh in the 1580's who later became eminent in his witness and suffering for the gospel, gives this comment on verses 25 and 26:

‘As some, reserved of God through the election of grace, owned Christ as Lord in the days of Paul, so when the fulness of the Gentiles shall have been brought in, the great majority of the Israelitish people are to be called, through the gospel, to the God of their salvation, and shall profess and own Jesus Christ, whom, formerly, that is, during the time of hardening, they denied.... This interpretation of the passage is most pertinent to the scope of the present discussion; but because that recall of the Israelites is not yet witnessed in respect to the majority, most interpreters explain the passage differently, and understand what the apostle here says — “all Israel shall be saved”, of Israel in spirit, and also of all Israelites according to the flesh, who at any time have believed, whether in times of apostasy, as were those of Ahab and Paul, or of open profession, as that of David, or of reformation, as those of Hezekiah and Josiah. In this way the meaning will be — “that the Gentiles having been added, through the gospel, to the people of God, that is, to the Israelites, who are Israelites in spirit, as well as according to the flesh, ‘all Israel’, viz. Israel in the spirit, consisting of the elect from among Jews and Gentiles, ‘shall be saved’ at the second coming of Christ”.”

Ferme’ s valuable work on Romans lay unpublished until 1651 but long before that date the interpretation he held to be ‘most pertinent’ had obtained general acceptance.

As we noted in the previous chapter, it had been advanced in the notes of the Geneva Bible as early as I560 and expounded in Peter Martyr’s commentary on Romans published in English eight years later.

The argument against ‘all Israel’ being interpreted as ‘the entire remnant of Israel’ involves a wider consideration of the whole chapter. In summary form it may be stated as follows:

Paul, in putting the question ‘Hath God cast away his people?’ (v. I), opens the subject of the cast-off condition of Israel and the problem how that condition is consistent with the promises and purposes of God. It is true, he says, that as a body they have fallen, but there is a remnant who believe in accordance with God’s sovereign determination (v v. 2-10). The grace of God has prevented the apostasy of Israel being total and universal. The question, however, remains: Has God finished with the Jews collectively considered as a people? ‘I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall?’ Did their fall fulfill God’s ultimate purposes towards them? ‘God forbid!’ (v.11). We do not, Paul affirms, see the conclusion of God’s design in Israel’s fall because that fall is overruled for the salvation of Gentiles; which salvation is, in turn, intended to prompt Israelites to repentance and faith (‘provoke them to jealousy’). Grace, not judgment, is thus God’s ultimate purpose. Israel’s stumbling is made the occasion for salvation coming to the Gentiles and that is not the end, for, as the apostle goes on to show, God has further planned the salvation of Israel on a scale which will enrich the Gentiles to a degree hitherto unprecedented:

v.I 2. ‘Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?
v.13. ‘For I speak to you Gentiles, in as much as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office:
v14 ‘If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.’

The effect upon Paul personally of the truth declared in verse I2, he wishes his Gentile hearers to know, is to quicken him in his Gentile ministry so that the success of that ministry may serve to awaken Jews. But along with his concern for his fellow countrymen there is a greater end in view because the interests of the Gentiles themselves are bound up with God’s design towards Israel.

v.15. ‘For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’

Concluding the parenthesis of verses 13 and 14 on his present ministry with its hope of saving ‘some of them’, Paul reverts to the prospect already envisaged in verse 12. According to the view we are here opposing, the prediction of verses 12 and 15 has to do with the aggregate of individual Jews saved through the ages and not a future national conversion. But the verses cannot bear that meaning for it ignores a vital part of Paul’s argument, namely that the parallel drawn between the ‘casting away’ and ‘the receiving of them’ requires the subject to be the same in both instances. The people who were rejected are to be readmitted.

The remnant of believers never fell nor were cut off, and it cannot therefore be of them that Paul says they will be ‘received’ and grafted in again (v.23). Thus Elnathan Parr, answering those who denied that ‘any other calling of the Jews to be expected than in these days, now and then one’, asserts: ‘the very reading of the words of the 11, 12 and this verse, make the contrary manifest: If the casting away of them of whom? Of the nation, say learned men: What shall the receiving of them? Of whom? Of them which are cast away; that is the nation: or else we make the Apostle say he knows not what: not that the same individuals of the nation which are cast away shall be received, but the body of the people to be understood.”

The sense of verses 12 and 15, according to the common Puritan interpretation, points to a vast addition to the Church by Israel’s conversion with resulting wider blessing for the world. There is a great revival predicted here!

John Brown, minister of Wamphray, Scotland, gives the following exposition in his Exposition of Romans, 1666, and it may be taken as typical of the whole school to which he belonged.

In verse 12, Brown says, the apostle meets a difficulty which might arise in the minds of Gentiles following the disclosure of verse 11 that the hardening of the Jews was not the final dispensation of God towards them. If room has been made in God’s kingdom by the casting out of the Jews, the thought might occur that the restoration of the Jews would lead to the Gentiles being cast out. ‘To this the apostle answereth, that, on the contrary, the Gentiles shall have braver days then, than ever they had; for if their fall, or stumbling, was the occasion by which the Gentiles dispersed up and down the world, enjoyed the riches of the gospel and of the knowledge of God in Christ, and their diminishing (to the same purpose, and explicating what is meant by their fall) that is, their rejecting of the Messias for the most part, so as there were but few behind, and that nation was worn to a thin company and a small number of such as embraced the gospel, be the riches of the Gentiles, the same with the riches of the world; how much more shall their abundance be? that is, How much more shall their inbringing and fulness, or the conversion of the body and bulk of that nation (for it is opposed to their diminishing) tend to the enriching of the Gentile world in the knowledge of Christ; and so the Gentiles need not fear that the conversion of the Jews shall any way prejudice them; but they may expect to reap advantage thereby.’

On verse 15, the minister of Wamphray continues: ‘In this verse the apostle doth further explain and illustrate that argument set down, verse 12, and useth other expressions to the same purpose; If the casting away of them, that is, if the slinging away of the Jews, and casting them out of the church, be the reconciling of the world, that is, be the occasion whereby the gospel should be preached to the Gentile world, that thereby they might be reconciled unto God, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? Will there not be joyful days thro’ the world, and among the Gentiles, when they shall be received into favour again? Will it not be like the resurrection from the dead, when Jew and Gentile shall both enjoy the same felicity and happiness? Seeing out of the dead state of the Jews, when cast without doors, God brought life to the Gentiles, will he not much more do so out of their enlivened estate? will it not be to the Gentiles as the resurrection from the dead?’

In the verses which follow there are three further reasons why the Jews’ conversion is to be expected: because of the holiness of the first-fruits and the root, v16; because of the power of God, ‘God is able to graft them in again’, v23; and because of the grace of God manifested to the Gentiles, v24, who would in turn be the means of salvation to the Jews, ‘that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy’ v31. Matthew Henry illustrates the last reason thus, ‘If the putting out of their candle was the lighting of yours, by that power of God who brings good out of evil, much more shall the continued light of your candle, when God’s time is come, be a means of lighting theirs again’.

All these considerations lead to the conclusion that in verses 25 and 26 Paul is speaking of the realization in future history of what the predictions of the earlier verses point towards, namely the termination of the long period of Israel’s blindness, and the resulting salvation of a large mass of that people. The ‘all Israel’ is not the believing remnant of all centuries but the body of the Jews received again at a particular period in history. The mystery of which Paul would not have them ignorant is, in Parr’s words, ‘that when the fulness of the Gentiles is come in, there shall be a famous, notorious, universal calling of the Jews’. This is not to say that every individual Israelite will then be converted; despite the thousands of believing Jews in the apostolic period the casting away of the Jews was so general that it permitted the assertion that Israel was cast off, so, despite those who will remain unbelieving, the number to be ingathered will be of an extent which justifies the expression ‘all Israel shall be saved’.

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3. We have already in part anticipated and answered a third and last question, but it now needs closer attention. In the last chapter we noted that a number of seventeenth-century expositors believed in a future general conversion of Israel but placed the event at the very end of history. This view has contemporary upholders, one of whom writes, ‘All Israel can be saved only as the last rays of the sun fade away for ever and light celestial takes’ their place’.’ Justification for this belief is taken from two statements in Romans 11 which we must now consider.

First, Paul’s words on the incoming of ‘the fulness of the Gentiles’ (v.25), are taken to mean the conclusion of the kingdom of God in the world — ‘the fulness’ being equated with the complete number of the elect from among the Gentiles. If this is so, then the salvation of ‘all Israel’ which is to attend this fulness of the Gentiles must take place on the verge of eternity and signal the end of Gospel blessing for the world.

Paul’s use of the word ‘fulness’ earlier in Romans 11 does not, however, necessitate this meaning. The period of Israel’s fall in verse 12 is contrasted with her changed condition at the time of her ‘fulness’; fulness, then, for Israel cannot mean the sum total of elect Jews because there were obviously elect Jews at the time of her fall. ‘Fulness’ in verse 12 means the large numerical increase of converted Jews, but not excluding the possibility others being subsequently added. So in verse 25 it is not necessary to believe that ‘fulness’ means anything more than a large addition of Gentiles, ‘a multitude of the Gentiles’, says Matthew Poole’s Annotations, ‘greater by far, than was in the apostles’ days’. The verse says nothing which requires us to expect no further expansion of the kingdom of Christ thereafter. As a recent commentator writes, ‘“The fulness of the Gentiles” denotes unprecedented blessing for them but does not exclude even greater blessing to follow.”

A second statement quoted from Romans 11 to justify the belief that the conversion of the Jews will be at the end of the world is the phrase in verse 15, ‘what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ In these words Paul is adding to what he has already said in verse 12. In that verse he did not say what the blessing would be which would accompany the incoming of the fulness of the Jews but left it in the form of an exclamation: ‘If the fall of them be the riches of the world.. . how much more their fulness?’ ‘How much more?’ comments Parr, ‘as if he admired it and were not able to express or conceive.’ In verse 15, however, Paul does specify something of the nature of the blessing, it will be ‘life from the dead’. Some interpreters, including Origen and Chrysostom in the early centuries, take this phrase as referring to the physical resurrection of the dead, and so taken the verse would prove that the conversion of the Jews must be placed at the very end of time.

But there is no necessity for the phrase to be so taken in a literal sense. As Poole notes, life from the dead is ‘a proverbial speech, to signify a great change’. Certainly in the Scriptures the idea of resurrection is frequently used with a spiritual and figurative meaning. It is so employed by the prophets as, for example in Hosea 6.2, ‘the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his sight’, and in Ezekiel 37, where Israel’s spiritual revival is forcefully described as their coming out of their graves. In Christ’s teaching, conversion is likened to quickening the dead (John 5.21), and the restored prodigal is characterized as one who ‘was dead and is alive again’ (Luke 15.32).

Not only is a spiritual interpretation of the phrase ‘life from the dead’ possible, there are indeed good grounds for regarding it as preferable.

(i) Verses 12 and 15 speak of the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in the advancement of the kingdom of God, and the riches coming to the Gentiles on the occasion of the Jews’ defection is represented as being exceeded by the blessing which would attend their restoration. While it is true that resurrection and glorification are the final and highest blessings belonging to the Church, they are benefits which do not naturally succeed to the Gentiles as a result of Israel’s recovery. But taking ‘life from the dead’ figuratively, Paul’s progression of thought advances smoothly: if Israel’s fall and dishonour brought the gospel of reconciliation to the Gentiles, how much more will her renewal and restoration to honour bring revival to the world? ‘For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ As Godet paraphrases it, ‘When cursed, they have contributed to the restoration of the world; what will they not do when blessed?’

(ii) The second advent of Christ which will accomplish the resurrection of the dead will bring a consummation of blessing to the Church — not an extension of it to either Jew or Gentile (2 Thess. I .9—I0). If the conversion of the Jews were understood to be in any way linked with the resurrection day the uniform teaching of many other parts of Scripture would require some time lapse to occur between the two. As Parr observes: ‘Though God can save men in an instant, yet he hath appointed means, which means cease at the resurrection, and therefore no calling to be then expected: for that is the time of revealing judgement, not of preaching Mercie.” This qualification of a time lapse must therefore be introduced in the literal view, the conversion of sinners and the coming of Christ to judgment being two quite separate things. On the other hand, if ‘life from the dead’ be understood spiritually it is easily apparent, according to the analogy of other scriptures, how the conversion of a large mass of people — a nation — would at once contribute to far-reaching quickening in the world. ‘And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their offspring among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.

... For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as a garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations’ (Isa. 61.9—11).

(iii) Finally, as John Murray has carefully shown in his recent Exposition of Romans, the standard Pauline phrase to denote the resurrection of the body is ‘resurrection from the-dead’: nowhere else does ‘life from the dead’ refer to the physical resurrection and its closest parallel, ‘alive from the dead’ (6.13) refers to spiritual life.’

For reasons such as these, Puritan exegetes (comparable in this to Ambrose the early Church Father) took ‘life from the dead’ figuratively. Thus the marginal note of the Geneva Bible gives this note on Romans 11.15: ‘The Jewes now remain, as it were, in death for lack of the Gospel, but when both they and the Gentiles shall embrace Christ, the world shall be restored to a new life.’

This belief introduced a new perspective in the Puritan understanding of history. While some retained the view that Romans 11 taught a conversion of the Jews at the end of time, there is evidence that the main-stream of belief became committed to the view given above. In 1652, for example, eighteen of the most eminent Puritan divines, including men of presbyterial convictions as William Gouge, Edmund Calamy and Simeon Ashe, and Independents as John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, wrote in support of missionary labours then being undertaken in New England and affirmed their belief that:

‘the Scripture speaks of a double conversion of the Gentiles, the first before the conversion of the Jewes, they being Branches wilde by nature grafted into the True Olive Tree instead of the naturall Branches which are broken off. This fulness of the Gentiles shall come in before the conversion of the Jewes, and till then blindness hath happened unto Israel, Rom. 11.25. The second, after the conversion of the Jewes… 20

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Before we leave Romans 11 we must comment on one other issue of major significance which cannot be passed over. A great part of the differences among Christians over prophecy relates to the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. Those who insist on what is called the literal principle of interpretation argue that the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies respecting Israel’s future blessing and the world-wide success of Christ’s kingdom cannot be in the present age: the personal advent of Christ must intervene to introduce a new dispensation. According to this view certain of the grand predictions of Isaiah and the Prophets apply not to the Christian Church in her present form but to a future millennial kingdom.

It is difficult to understand how this opinion can be maintained in the light of the New Testament writers’ own use of the Prophets. The fact is that the age of highest blessing predicted by the Prophets is spoken of by the apostles as already in being — God’s gathering to himself a people (Hos. 2.23), Christ’s reign over the Gentiles (Isa. 11.10), and the day of world-wide salvation (Isa. 49.8); these are all texts quoted by Paul as having a present fulfilment (cf. Rom. 9.26; 15.12; 2 Cor. 6.2). Similarly we find James in Acts 15.14, 16, referring the prediction of Amos 9.11, ‘In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen’, to the conversion of Gentiles in the apostolic era, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, far from restricting the great predictions of Jeremiah 3’ to Israel in a future age, considers the privileges there described as already possessed in the New Testament Church (compare Jer.31.31 and Heb. 8.8). There is here not a trace of the idea that the witness of the Prophets to an age of coming blessedness must be referred to a millennial kingdom introduced by the Second Advent. On the contrary. there is plenty to warn us that the literal principle is a dangerously misleading guide to the interpretation of the Prophets. Paul is certainly not employing that principle in Galatian 4.26, 27 when he distinguishes the Jerusalem ‘which now is, and is in bondage with her children’, from ‘Jerusalem which is above’, and which he tells the Galatian believers ‘is the mother of us all’. It is to this spiritual Jerusalem that he then proceeds to apply the glorious prediction of Isaiah 54.1. The assertion that prophecies spoken of ‘Zion’ or ‘Jerusalem’ in the Old Testament can only refer to national Israel is untenable.

Recognizing this, another school of prophetic interpreters has argued that no Old Testament predictions respecting Israel await fulfilment. The fulfilment has already occurred in the Christian Church. But this claim goes too far, for it leaves out of account Paul’s use of the Prophets in the chapter of Romans now under consideration. Having opened, as we have seen, the divine mystery that the casting off of Israel was not final, he turns for confirmation to the inspired testimony of Scripture: ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be Saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins’ (v. 25b—27). This quotation, taken from Isaiah 59.20 and Jeremiah 31.34, would be valueless in this context were it not that the words quoted collaborate what Paul has already affirmed respecting Israel. The way he employs these texts is proof that the full scope of Old Testament prophecy has not yet been realized in history.

This is of major significance. We have already noted that predictions of Christ’s kingdom in Isaiah and in Jeremiah were considered applicable by the New Testament writers to the Church in the Apostolic age. Paul's use of the same prophets in Romans 11.26, 27 now shows that the fulfilment was only initial and by no means exhaustive. A larger fulfilment still awaits the Church, when the same covenant faithfulness of God which has already brought gospel blessings to the Gentile world will be the cause of the removal of Israel’s sins. Gentile and Jew are thus both contained in the same Old Testament predictions, and because these predictions admit of successive fulfilments and speak of the same salvation there is nothing to prevent what has already been referred to New Testament converts being applied to the future conversion of Israel. Jeremiah 31.34 has both been fulfilled (Heb. 8.8) and is yet to be fulfilled in a day of greater gospel blessing (Rom. 11.27).

If this is the right lesson to draw from Paul’s use of the Prophets in Romans 11 then there is a key given to us for the interpretation of a number of Old Testament prophecies which are similar to the two particular texts which Paul quotes. The Puritans saw this clearly and used the key to good effect in their expositions of the Old Testament. An illustration of this can be taken from the works of the eminent Robert Leighton. In a sermon on Isaiah 60. I entitled ‘Christ the Light and Lustre of the Church’, preached when he was minister of Newbattle, Scotland, in January, 1642, he had no hesitation in applying the exhortation, ‘Arise, shine; for thy light is come’, to the whole Church. At the same time he knew that Isaiah 60. 1-3 stands related to what is predicted in Isaiah 59.20, and that the latter verse is referred by the apostle particularly to Israel’s salvation. He therefore gives to his text its full scope:
‘This prophecy is, out of question, a most rich description of the kingdom of Christ under the Gospel. And in this sense, this invitation to arise and shine is mainly addressed to the mystical Jerusalem, yet not without some privilege to the literal Jerusalem beyond other people. They are first invited to arise and shine, because this Sun arose first in their horizon. Christ came of the Jews, and came first to them. . . . Undoubtedly, that people of the Jews shall once more be commanded to arise and shine, and their return shall be the riches of the Gentiles (Rom. 11.12), and that shall be a more glorious time than ever the Church of God did yet behold. Nor is there any inconvenience if we think that the high expressions of this prophecy have some spiritual reference to that time, since the great doctor of the Gentiles applies some words of the former chapter to that purpose, Rom. 11.26. They forget a main point of the Church’s glory, who pray not daily for the conversion of the Jews.’ George Hutcheson, in his valuable Brief Exposition on the Small Prophets, uses this same broad principle of interpretation. Expounding Hosea 2.23, ‘And I will sow her unto me in the earth, and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy. . .‘ he writes: ‘The Apostle doth apply this also, Rom. 9.25, to Israel in the spirit of Jew and Gentile, who were brought in to Christ even in his time, because the Covenant is the same with all the confederates, and there was then some accomplishment in part of this prediction. But the full accomplishment thereof is reserved for Israel (of whom this chapter speaks most expressly) at their Conversion as a Nation. And if we take it up as comprehending Jew and Gentile ; yet the full accomplishment thereof reserved for that time wherein the Conversion of Israel shall be accompanied with the coming in of the fulness of the Gentiles, and be as a life from the dead to the world, Rom.11.15, 25, 26.’

* * *

Concluding, then, this short survey of the Puritan treatment of Israel in Romans11, the following points summarize the views which came to prevail:

I. The salvation now possessed by a remnant of believing Jews is yet to be enjoyed by far larger numbers of that race.

2. At the time when Paul wrote, this was not to be expected until a considerable number of the Gentiles had been evangelized and their evangelization would thus hasten the day of Israel’s calling: ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in’.

3. In the economy of salvation there is an interaction appointed by God between Jew and Gentile; gospel blessing came to the world by Israel’s fall, a yet greater blessing will result from her conversion.

4. Nothing is told us in Romans 11 of the duration of time between the calling of the Jews and the end of history. ‘The end of this world shall not be till the Jews are called, and how long after that none yet can tell’ (Parr).

5. The quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah, confirming Paul’s teaching, indicate that the full extent of gospel blessing predicted by the Prophets is yet to be realized. ‘As Isaiah, and other of the prophets, do put over this great flourishing of the church to the days of the gospel, the apostle, Rom.11 doth point at a more precise time wherein this in a larger measure shall be made out’ (Robert Fleming).

In modern times the acceptance of three beliefs has probably contributed largely to the assumption that the convictions just stated are merely of historic interest and not tenable for Christians today.

First, in the last hundred years the belief has held sway in English-speaking Protestantism that Christ’s advent must precede Israel’s conversion and the subsequent blessing of the world. Because main-stream Puritan thought did not accept this pre-millennial view of the advent, their position has been represented as encouraging the expectation of ‘a Christless and kingless millennium’, and, not surprisingly, where this charge has been believed, disinterest in Puritan teaching has been the result. To this subject we shall return in a subsequent chapter.

Second, another influential school of prophetic thought has maintained that any general or national conversion of Israel in the future would be inconsistent with the overriding message of the New Testament. This school of thought stresses that Israel, geographically and physically considered, could have distinct spiritual significance only in the period prior to the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. Now, in respect of the privileges of the gospel, there is no longer Jew or Gentile — the perspective is no longer national, but spiritual and universal. Jerusalem is no more to be the centre of worship as it once was (John 4.21). Pursuing this same line of thought in reference to Romans 11 William Hendriksen, writes:

‘If here in Romans 11.26a Paul is speaking about a still-future mass-conversion of Jews, then he is overthrowing the entire carefully built up argument of chapters 9-11 for the one important point which he is trying to establish constantly is exactly this, that God’s promises attain fulfilment not in the nation as such but in the remnant according to the election of grace.’

Such statements as these are important and valid against any view of Israel’s future which supposes she will receive salvation on terms other than those proclaimed in the Gospel, or that she will obtain spiritual privileges distinct from and above those possessed by Gentile Christians. But as we have already seen, this was not the Puritan view: Puritans did not believe that there are any special and unfulfilled spiritual promises made to Israel apart from the Christian Church. All that they asserted was that it was in no way inconsistent with the New Testament economy that there should be a great revival in the future, bringing Israel as a mass into the Church and thereby fulfilling, in John Murray’s words, a ‘particular design in the realization of God’s worldwide saving purpose’. Hendriksen’s assertion is not accurate enough: the burden of Paul’s teaching in Romans 9-11is that salvation is of grace alone, but it is surely no necessary consequence of grace that it be confined to a remnant. Divine sovereignty may indeed justly so confine it, as Israel’s long-continued judicial blindness bears solemn witness, yet the same sovereignty may be displayed in a nation being born in a day and when converts are multiplied as the dew of the morning! There is no conflict between Paul’s gospel and the belief that in the ‘latter day glory’ vast numbers of the natural descendants of Abraham will own and serve their Redeemer, and that Israel will then show forth the glory of that gospel as, to a lesser extent, the English—speaking nations visited with revival have done in times past. Certainly, as the late J. Marcellus Kik wrote in 1948, the idea must be repudiated that Israel is to have some unique place in a future kingdom of God, but this does not leave us without belief in their future blessing:

‘Even in the present time there are some within the Church who simply cannot believe that the old dispensation has been terminated. They still look for a temporal Jewish kingdom whose capital, Jerusalem, will hold sway over all the earth. This was the carnal conception of this kingdom which Christ fought and the apostles opposed, and against which his Church must still fight. It is true that we look forward to the conversion of the Jewish nation, and that the whole world will be blessed by this conversion. But that is something entirely different from the idea of a temporal Jewish kingdom holding sway over all the nations of the world.’

In this connection it needs to be added that though a number of the Puritans believed that the Jews would be restored to their own country none supposed that the land of Israel would ever again have the theocratic and symbolic significance which it possessed during the Old Testament era. They would have agreed with the nineteenth-century Reformed author who, after stating the case for Israel’s restoration, wrote: ‘As to the question, then, what will the Jews do in the Holy Land? we reply that they will do just what the English do in England, or the Americans in America. They will traffic, will cultivate the soil, will fill professional and mechanical pursuits, and be a Christian people, in an interesting and important country.’

A third commonly-accepted belief which militates against a consideration of the Puritan view is that Scripture witnesses to a steadily worsening world and thus demands from us a very different expectation with regard to the whole period which lies between us and the coming of Christ. ‘Scripture certainly does not sustain the notion’, writes Herman Hoeksema, ‘that the Church will experience a period of great prosperity, antecedent to the coming of the Lord. The very opposite is true.’ If this assertion is correct then the exposition given of Romans 11 must ipso facto be erroneous.

There can be no doubt that both by alleged Scripture evidence and by appeal to the dark character of contemporary history, evangelical Christians have been long acclimatized to regard the opinion stated by Hoeksema as proven. We think, however, that it may be honestly questioned whether the Scripture passages appealed to can bear all that is deduced from them. Foremost among these passages is the Olivet discourse of Christ, recorded in Matthew 24, Luke 21 and Mark 13. This prophetic discourse followed Christ’s announcement concerning the temple, ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’ — clearly a reference to the destruction of the city which came about at the hands of the Romans in A.D. 70. In the discourse itself there is much that applies specifically to the ‘breaking off’ (Rom.11.19) of the Jewish nation in the first century A.D. The convulsion of the Roman Empire, earthquakes, ‘Jerusalem compassed with armies’, ‘the abomination of desolation... in the holy place’, the exhortation to pray that flight from the city would not be necessary on the Sabbath day, the appearance of false Messiahs - all these things point to events which were shortly to take place and which are now past history. The great tribulation predicted for the Jews on account of their apostasy has been fulfilled. As Paul writes, ‘the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost’ (1 Thess. 2. 16). And yet these texts and others in the Olivet discourse are often quoted as though they have had no fulfilment!

Nevertheless it is certainly true that the Olivet discourse looks forward to the second advent and it may well be that some of the ‘signs’ which preceded the overthrow of Jerusalem will recur on a grander scale as the world draws near its end; to accept this, however, is by no means the same as saying that the Olivet discourse comprehensively describes the whole course of world history between the first and second advents. The claim that what is in view is ‘the course of This Age down to the time of the end’, and that, therefore, ‘until the very end, evil will characterize this Age’, is one which, we think, goes beyond the evidence of our Lord’s own words.

Probably the next most frequently referred to passage in support of the view that the world will progressively darken is 2 Timothy, chapter 3, which commences, ‘This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come’. The popular citation of this text without a consideration of its precise import and context is an unhappy illustration of how debate on prophetic issues is too often conducted. The peril of which Paul speaks is the contagion liable to be received from the prevalence of such men as those described in the verses which follow. In particular, they are ‘evil men and seducers’ (v. I3), who were alive at the time when Paul wrote, hence the exhortation to Timothy in verse 5, ‘from such turn away’. And while in their personal character they would go from bad to worse (v. I3), their public influence according to Paul was soon to pass. They resemble Jannes and Jambres who deceived Pharaoh and the Egyptians long ago, and like those two deceivers they were to have their day: ‘Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was’ (v. 8—9).

Paul was thinking primarily of his own time! The only wider bearing which we may legitimately give to the passage rests on verse one, where Paul says that during the whole period which he calls ‘the last days’ there would be a recurrence of perilous seasons or times. One such time had arrived even as Paul wrote this last letter to Timothy in the days of Nero; others were to follow — Paul does not say how many nor how often. All he does assert is that in the present dispensation (which is what the New Testament means by ‘the last days’), there were to be some periods of grievous conflict for the Church. This is far different from the claim that Paul expected nothing but such seasons and anticipated nothing but ever-increasing wickedness! In fact the New Testament gives us other features of ‘the last days’. It tells us that the full Pentecostal endowment of the Spirit belongs to ‘the last days’ (Acts 2.17), and that the ‘last days’ is the new era in which God has spoken by his Son (Heb. 1.2). The last days are the gospel age, ushered in by Christ’s incarnation and death, and they are the last because no further earthly dispensation is to follow. The last has come!

Such is, we believe, the correct interpretation of 2 Timothy 3.1. In the words of Thomas Boston, in a sermon on ‘Perilous Times in the Last Days’, he says: ‘Even in the days of the gospel, in which sometimes there are sweet and glorious times, yet at other times there come difficult and perilous times.’ Similarly B. B. Warfield, after referring to the same passage, writes: ‘It would be manifestly illegitimate to understand these descriptions as necessarily covering the life of the whole dispensation on the earliest verge of which the prophet was standing . . . we must remember that all the indications are that Paul had the first stages of ‘the latter times’ in mind, and actually says nothing to imply either that the evil should long predominate over the good, or that the whole period should be marked by such disorders.’ It only remains to be said that while the Scriptures seem to indicate a time of serious declension immediately preceding the advent, this provides no proof that a great era of revival cannot intervene between now and Christ’s coming. One can [not argue logically from the evidence for a final apostasy —evidence sometimes overstated — that a downward tendency must mark all future history

But the objection may be raised, ‘If there is to be a great extension of Christ’s kingdom in the future, with attendant spiritual prosperity, how can a state of declension immediately preceding Christ’s appearing be harmonized with it?’ This question only has force if the calling of the Jews is envisaged as being so close to the end that time would scarcely allow for such progress and such a reversal. No proof however, is forthcoming to show that the period of time involved must be so limited in duration. As we have observed, Romans 11 says nothing on the length of the period between Israel’s salvation and the second advent. Peter Martyr’s answer to this same objection, written four hundred years ago, can therefore still stand:

‘What shall we say unto the words of Christ wherein he sayth, Doost thou thinke that when the sonne of man commeth he shall find faith upon the earth? Verely if the Jewes be in such great plenty converted unto Christ, and that with the commodity of the Gentiles, (Footnote: ‘With the commodity of the Gentiles’ is the translator’s rendering of Martyr’s ‘et cum utilitate Gentium’, literally, ‘with the benefit (or advantage) of the Gentiles’. Martyr’s Latin Romans was published the same year as the English version, 1568.) as we have before declared, then shall there remain much faith, which Christ when he returneth unto us shall find. But we may answere, that here is no contrariety…. peradventure the Jewes shall return again and shall acknowledge their Messias, and shall confirm the Gentiles being wavering and seduced. It is possible also, that when the Jewes shall believe, and the Gentiles shall after a certayne tyme put to their help, then, as the nature of the fleshe is, may arise some security, and licentiousness, especially if Antichrist follow, by means whereof an infinite number both of the Jewes and of the Gentiles may be alienated from Christ: so that that shall be true, that Christ when he commeth shall find very few which purely and sincerely shall confess him.’