God’s Righteousness Toward Israel
Romans 9:1-6
Open your Bibles with me to Romans, chapter 9. We’re
going to move into the next section, which hangs by itself.
We often speak of the Church Age as “the great parentheses”. Now we’re going to
be talking about God’s plan for Israel in these chapters and I learned
something new on this trip to Israel. In many churches when they do a series on
Romans they call Romans 9-11 “the great parentheses.” The exposition of Romans
in those churches jumps from Romans 8 to Romans 12. Romans
9-11 is ignored in a number of churches so that was sort of a new
insight that I picked up on this trip, along with many others.
That tells us something of the importance of Romans
9-11, especially in light of today with the rise of Israel, the Jews coming
back to the Land starting in the early to mid-19th century and then
just exploding in the first, second, third Aliyahs around the turn of the 20th
century. Then came the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 when something
that has never, ever happened in history has now happened. That is the
resurrection of a people in their historic homeland based on the plan of God.
And that hasn’t happened to any other ethnic group where they have been
restored once they have lost their historic homeland. You can think through history,
going back into ancient history with the Assyrians, with the Parthians, with
the Romans later on, the Celts, the Picks, and the Saxons. History moves on.
The Jewish people were expelled from their land in A.D. 70 and have returned, almost to the point where we’re
within a very short time of an equilibrium where there will be as many Jews
living in the land as outside of the land. That has not happened since 586 B.C. In fact, it might not have been that true at that
point because you’d already had the ten northern tribes expelled in 722 B.C. So it has been an extremely long time since there has
been a major Jewish presence, a dominant Jewish presence, in the land since the
first group was expelled by God in 722 B.C. So this is significant and that’s why there’s been
so much last days chatter and excitement and stimulation and everything. We’ll
talk about some of those things as we go through this chapter.
We need to understand a little bit about its context
before we go much further. At the end of Romans 8, Paul has been talking about
the faithful love of God and God’s faithfulness and the fact that His promises
can be counted on. Paul concludes that great chapter with the final statement
in verses 38 and 39, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels
nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” So the focal point of
those last nine verses has been on the faithfulness of God.
What can separate us from God? Who can bring a charge
against God’s elect? Verse 35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
and yet remember at this time the population of the church still had a large
Jewish segment to it, even in Rome. There was a large Jewish component in Rome
and those from a Jewish background would be raising the question, “Well, wait a
minute. How can we count on God’s faithfulness? It seems like He has turned His
back on the Jews? It’s like He’s turned His back on Israel and Israel is no
longer significant.”
Paul is going to shift gears in the beginning of
chapter 9 to talk about God’s continued plan and purpose for Israel. That even
though Israel, as Paul says in the beginning of chapter 11 that many in Israel
have hardened their hearts and turned away from God and rejected His Messiah,
nevertheless, God has not turned His back permanently on Israel, has not
forgotten them. God is still going to be faithful to His promises in the Mosaic
Covenant to restore Israel to the land.
Now an important question someone might ask is that if
the Abrahamic Covenant was temporary, if it wasn't permanent, and that was no
longer in effect, then Christ’s death, as Paul says in Romans 14, if Christ’s
death is the end of the law, if that’s true, then these promises for a return
that are in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 30, then those would be thrown out as
well. And the answer to that is that those promises that God gave, that He
embedded in the Mosaic Law that He would return them permanently to the land,
is simply an addendum at the end of the Mosaic Law to affirm the fact that He
is still true to the promise that He made to Abraham, that this land would
belong to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants in perpetuity
forever.
That even though God would implement disciplinary
action of removing ethnic Israel from the land that God had promised them
according to the judgment stipulations in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, God
would still remain faithful to His promise to Abraham and would bring them back
so that’s kind of how that fits together. But I just want to wrap up one thing
very briefly. There was a little point of confusion at the end of the last
class before we go forward. If you just look at Romans 8:36 for a minute
there’s a quotation there from the Psalms. Psalm 44:22, actually. Last week the
only thing I had up on the screen and when I dealt with this it was in light of
42:23 and that confused everyone, as well it should. I was doing my studying in
reference to the Hebrew text and there are some verses in some Psalms that are
numbered differently in the Masoretic text than in the English Bible.
Frequently in the Psalms Hebrew verses are one verse off from the English but
in this case it’s two chapters and one verse off so that Psalm 42:23 in the
Masoretic text is Psalm 44:22 and I was going through that at the end of class
last time. Afterwards about five people mobbed me and wanted to know what was
going on. It’s just numbered differently and I had unwittingly typed in the
verse from the Hebrew text I was using instead of the English text so you can
correct your notes on that.
Okay, as we come to Romans, chapter 9, we see it is an
introduction to this section on God’s continued plan for Israel. In Romans 9
Paul is going to establish the justice of God in relation to Israel’s rejection
of the Messiah. There are several things we’re going to have to deal with in
this that are very important and germane to some trends that are going on in
Bible study and theology that you may or may not run into but you ought to be
aware of these things that are going on. One of these trends that have cropped
up is that there has been a trend among some evangelicals to deny the reality of
Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. In fact in the last couple of days I
have a great video of a lecture that Doctor Michael Rydelnik gave at Liberty
University about a month ago at the invitation of Randy Price who’s the head of
the Jewish Studies Department at Liberty. Dr. Rydelnik is the head of the
Jewish Studies Department at Moody Bible Institute and graduated from Dallas
Seminary three or four years after I was there. I think we overlapped a year.
He points out in this lecture that when he first was
interviewing the faculty members at Dallas Seminary in 1979 at that time there
was only one professor that held to the fact that the Old Testament was filled
with Messianic prophecies. I had not realized when I was there that most of the
Old Testament faculty did not believe that. At most they believed there was one
clear Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament and that was Psalm 110:1, “The
Lord said to My Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a
footstool for your feet.” That in the opinion of some evangelicals is the only
genuine Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament.
That is not true at all. That shows the influence of a
pernicious error that had invaded, as early as the Protestant Reformation, from
a string of anti-Messianic interpretations that came out of the development of
rabbinic Judaism but it took a thousand years for rabbinic Judaism to really
come up with answers to Christians’ use of Messianic prophecies from the Old
Testament. A lot of Jews were getting converted as they read Isaiah 53, as they
read Isaiah 7:14, and as they read Isaiah 9:6. These passages resonated with
Messianic implications, including Psalm 22. But if you listen to some Old
Testament scholars today, even among evangelicals, they do not believe these
are Messianic at all. They believe they were fulfilled historically but they
just had sort of an application in some general sense to the Messiah and that
the disciples just used that and sort of re-shaped these things.
I pointed out Tuesday night that when the scribes
known as the Masoretes solidified the current text that we use called the
Masoretic text which was solidified and formalized between 300 and 900 A.D.
they added vowel “points” to a consonantal script which was all that the Hebrew
text was. In some ways they changed words. We had a great example in our text
on Tuesday night of Amos 9:12 where he talked about the “remnant of Edom” which
would have made that prophecy to be fulfilled historically with Edom but the
consonants in Edom are the same as the consonants in Adam so if you just change
the vowels you change the phrase “from the remnant of Edom” to “from the
remnant of mankind” which throws the significance of that whole prophecy into a
kingdom or Millennial or Messianic Kingdom fulfillment, indicating that’s a
Messianic prophecy. Interesting things like that happen and have really
disrupted things.
In the Protestant Reformation a lot of pastors,
scholars, and theologians went to rabbis to learn Hebrew. That was the only
place they could learn Hebrew. In
the course of that some of them were influenced by the thinking of an 11th
century rabbi named Rashi who originated a lot of these alternate
interpretations and so they filtered into the evangelical church and they’ve
been there all along. We’re going to see that in a number of ways this is not
true; there are genuine Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. Michael
Rydelnik has spearheaded the scholarship on this with his book, “The Messianic
Hope” which is very technical. If you don’t know Hebrew you’ll have difficulty
but you’ll catch some of the things. He’s done a good work. He’s working now on
a Messianic commentary on the Old Testament and I’m really looking forward to
what he’s going to do.
Anyway, we’ll get into some of those issues because
the Old Testament clearly predicted a Messiah, that He would be the son of
Jesse, the son of David and that he would be of the tribe of Judah and numerous
other things, such as being born in Bethlehem, that he would be crucified
between two thieves and that He would be betrayed and the price of his betrayal
would be thirty pieces of silver and on and on. These were very, very clear
prophecies from the Old Testament. So that’s part of what we’ll look at but
some other things we’ve got to look at are the trend toward the “repopularity”
of replacement theology today. It goes by some other names. We’re also going to
have to look at some things related to interpretation, literal versus
allegorical interpretation, and we’ll going to look at the rise of
anti-Semitism.
Romans 9-11 is really at the core of understanding
those types of things that are going on. They’re as much present with us today
as they’ve ever been and while anti-Semitism sort of went underground for a
while after the holocaust, it’s rearing its ugly head currently. It’s not only
through the influence of Islam but through the influence of a lot of Christians
who have never really understood the significance of these issues and how it’s
related to the interpretation factor and some other things. We’ll be hitting on
all of these as we go through our study of Romans, chapter 9.
So let’s just look at the introduction here. The first five verses provide us with
an introduction to these three chapters. It’s going to begin with a very personal
statement by the Apostle Paul related to his deep care and concern and his
emotional distress over the fact that his people, his countrymen, his family
perhaps, his loved ones perhaps, his kinsmen, have rejected the claims of the Yeshua of
Nazareth to be the Messiah. So he begins by expressing a very personal
statement, “I tell the truth in Christ. I’m not lying. My conscience testifies
with me in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing [continual]
grief in my heart for I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from
Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh who are
Israelites to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the
covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the [temple] service of God and the
promises.” Six important things that lock down Israel as still having a
relationship to all of those. “Whose are the fathers and from whom is the
Christ according to the flesh who is overall, God blessed forever. Amen.”
He starts off saying, “I tell the truth in Christ.”
He’s not just making an assertion that he is telling the truth but that he is
telling the truth in Christ, that he is using the phrase “in Christ” here in
more than simply a positional sense. He is in Christ postionally but just
because we are in Christ positionally doesn’t mean we can’t be out of
fellowship at the same time that we are positionally in Christ. So here is one
of the rare time that Paul uses the phrase “en Christo” when
it’s not alluding to being in Christ positionally but is talking more of a
fellowship type aspect. In context, it’s a parallel to the phrase “en pneumateo”, the
Holy Spirit in the next line. I think both here should be understood
instrumentally, a rare usage of that. I think it makes sense in the context.
“I tell the truth in Christ” is parallel to “bearing
witness by the Holy Spirit” so both of these “ins” in English should probably
be understood to be an instrumental “by” so it would better understood as “I
tell the truth by means of Christ. I do not lie. My conscience bearing joint
witness with me by means of the Holy Spirit”. We know that the Holy Spirit is
the agent of inspiration, according to 1 Peter 1:19-20. The Holy Spirit is the
One who moves the writers of Scripture along. God breathes out His Word through
the writers of Scripture, according to 2 Timothy 3:16-17. “All Scripture is
God-breathed…” God is the active sense there. He’s the one breathing out
through the writers of Scripture but the Holy Spirit is the active agent in overseeing
the writing of Scripture. So this isn’t an inspiration in the way we think of
Shakespeare being inspired or we may think of some other writer being inspired
or Michelangelo being inspired or that sense. This is the sense of someone who
is being breathed through, in a sense, by God so that God is guaranteeing that
the result of what He is doing is without error. So Paul is affirming that what
he is saying here is not his opinion but it is the revelation of Christ. Then
he reflects upon his own state of mind, “That I have great sorrow and unceasing
grief in my heart.”
Here’s another one of those uses of heart, in fact the
vast majority of times it refers to the thinking portion of the brain. Here it
refers to the innermost part of man, the core of his being. In this case, heart
would be a synonym for his soul and that when he thinks about the rejection of
Jesus as Messiah by the Jewish people, by his people, he has great sorrow and
grief. This is important to understand because somehow along the line, some
Christians get the idea that having any kind of emotion is somehow wrong and
having some sort of negative emotion is sin. That’s not true.
Jesus is described as having gone through great
emotional distress in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He went to the
cross. He was in turmoil, under such pressure that He sweated blood, the
Scripture says. This is not an unknown phenomenon. It’s not something unique to
Jesus. It happens to people who are under extreme distress that the tiny
capillaries just under the skin expel blood through the pores of the skin so it
appears they are sweating blood because they’re under such emotional distress.
Having certain emotions is not necessarily sinful. It is acting wrongly upon
that emotional pressure that it becomes a sin. So we may have certain emotions
present but acting wrongly upon them is what makes that a sin. So we can have
sorrow and grief and we can operate on that and we can choose to have a great
little pity party. We can just go out and cry and moan and feel sorry for
ourselves and get all worked up and depressed and get negative because we had
sorrow over things. But Christ Himself sorrows in the garden. And Paul says in
1 Thessalonians 4 that when someone close to us dies we sorrow or we grieve but
not like those who have no hope. He doesn’t say you don’t grieve because you
have hope. He says you don’t grieve like those who have no hope. We grieve,
we’re sorrowful, we miss those individuals that have departed from this life
and have gone to be with the Lord. We know that we will be gathered together
with them in the clouds to be with the Lord forever. We will be reunited but
nevertheless we miss those people. It’s okay to miss people and it’s okay to
feel a little sad and sorrowful at times because they’re not here and we
enjoyed them and now they’re gone.
It’s the same way if you have a close friend who moves
across the country and you don’t get to see them or spend time with them, as
you would like. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s not something that leads us
into a pity party and a guilt trip or great sorrow or anything like that. It is
simply a legitimate reality that because we live in a fallen world we’re going
to experience certain of these kinds of emotions. So Paul expresses this and
it’s a very honorable and righteous reason for his sorrow. It’s the recognition
that his loved ones, his kindred, his people, have rejected Christ as Savior.
So it brings him great sorrow, continual and ongoing, which is the word there, adialeiptos. It’s
the same word that is used in 1 Thessalonians 5 when it talks about praying
without ceasing. It means continuously. It’s like a hacking cough. It’s not
something that’s there every second of every minute, every minute of every day.
It’s something there on an ongoing basis.
So he has this sense of grief and sorrow because his
people have rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Then he says in verse 3, “For I
could wish that I myself were cursed from Christ for my brethren, my
countrymen, according to the flesh.” Here we have the word anathema, which is the word usually translated “accursed.” We
get this word cursed and automatically we think of some kind of shaman, witch
doctor, some kind of black magic, casting a black, evil spell on somebody.
That’s as far from the Biblical concept as it can possibly be. The word
indicates something that comes under Divine judgment. So Paul is saying he
wishes that he were judged, accursed, judged apart from Christ. So he is
basically saying I would rather lose my salvation and give that up so that all
of my countrymen could be saved than to go on and be saved with them lost. It’s
a hyperbolic statement and he doesn’t literally mean he would give up his
salvation but it expresses the deep pangs of sorrow he feels and his genuine
concern for the salvation of his kinsmen.
So he says that he wishes that he were judged or come
under judgment or a curse or was separated from Christ on behalf of his
brethren, his countrymen according to the flesh. He’s not referring to the sin nature
here which is how flesh is often used but here he means in terms of their
genetic relationship, their ethnic relationship. So he recognizes an ethnic
unity with a group of people identified as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob whom he describes in this passage as Israelites.
In verse 4 he says, “Who are Israelites…” These are
the descendants of Jacob. Jacob was given the name Israel by God Himself when
Jacob wrestled with the angel at a place called Peniel on the Jabbok River
across the Jordan in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon and the angel
slapped him on his thigh, rendered him weak in his leg so there was that
constant reminder there. Jacob was given that new name indicating his new
identity. Paul continues, “Of whom the Israelites attain the adoption as the
firstborn of God.” They are identified as such in Exodus 19. They are adopted.
They receive therefore the glory of God by virtue of their position in
relationship to God in the Old Testament, the Covenant. That’s a reference to
all of the covenants from Genesis 12 on: the Abrahamic Covenant, the Land
Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the Mosaic Covenant.
Those all pertain to Israel. I think in the context, looking at Romans 9 to 11,
he has in mind primarily the permanent covenants, not the Mosaic Covenant; “the
giving of the law [Mosaic], the service…” They were adopted to be a kingdom of
priests, not just the Levites but also the whole nation serving as a kingdom of
priests in relation to all of the other nations. This was a position of high
honor and promises.
So all those promises that God made to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob related to the eternal possession of the land, the promise in the
land covenant that the land would belong to Israel in perpetuity, the promises
of the New Covenant, all these promises still belong to Israel. They are not
lost or abrogated by Israel’s rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. So this gives
us one of the strongest Biblical texts against the view that is known as
replacement theology which is the idea that the church completely replaces
Israel in God’s plan and God has no future use for Israel: that there’s nothing
significant anymore about Israel or the Jewish people or the land over there in
the Middle East. So that is the view.
This goes back to an understanding of Genesis 12:1-3.
Let’s turn there and review the foundational summary of the Abrahamic Covenant.
The covenant itself is not clearly stated until Genesis 15 and then it is
activated and actually cut or formalized in Genesis 17. In Genesis 12:1, “The
Lord says to Abraham get out, go, move out [halak] of your country, from your relatives,
from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” So Abraham has no
idea what the land is going to be yet, which way he’s going to go other than
he’s told to leave his home in the Ur of the Chaldees in what is now in the
southern part of Iraq. He heads up the Euphrates River north to a place called
Bethel which is now in the northern part of modern Syria. He’s going to remain
there for a while until his father dies before God takes him the rest of the
way to the land that He will show him.
Then in verse 2 God says, “I will make you a great
nation. I will bless you and make your name great.” Those are personal promises
to Abram himself. “And so you shall be a blessing.” He’s not making a
declarative statement there that he would be a blessing. He’s making an
imperatival statement that you are going to be a blessing. It is a mandate that
Abram would be a blessing to those around him. This is one of those really
remarkable things that we see in the modern state of Israel. This principle
that the Jewish people are to be a blessing to the world is played out in
modern rabbinic Judaism under a principle that has under Kabala some really
weird Pantheistic ideas and there are a lot of notions attached to it that we
certainly wouldn’t affirm but the core idea is called lekh lekhah meaning to repair the world.
It’s the idea that it’s the role of Jewish people to do what they can to serve
others in the world, to improve their lot, to make things better for everyone.
I believe this is an application or an outgrowth that they are to be a blessing
to the world.
As the Jews have returned to Israel, they have been a
remarkable blessing to the world. They have received numerous Nobel prizes in
fields of medicine, chemistry, economics, physics, and literature. They have
developed biological pacemakers, they’ve developed a DNA nanocomputers which detect cancer cells, they’ve had
these little camera pills invented in Israel that you can swallow and your
gastroenterologist can take pictures all the way down through your system from
your esophagus until it exits and we get all kinds of wonderful pictures and
see what’s going on inside of you. That’s all a result of Jewish technology.
They’ve developed a number of different things in
terms of pharmaceutical research, new drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, and
Parkinson’s disease. They’ve done remarkable work with stem cell research in
treating multiple sclerosis. I have a friend here whose business’s corporate
headquarters is about four miles down the freeway from here. He and I were in
first grade through high school together. He is on international boards for I
don’t know how many Jewish organizations. His wife, when I first met her about
five or six years ago, at an AIPAC
conference could barely walk. She was either in a wheelchair or on a cane
because of MS. Lately, though, I’ve seen her run. You’d think she ran “into
Jesus”. They bought a home in Israel and he divides up his time half way
between here and Israel. She’s been going through stem cell treatment at
Hadassah Hospital for her MS. It
took about two years and you would not have a clue that there was a time when
this woman didn’t walk or could barely walk. There’s almost no sign of the
disease whatsoever.
None of that is available in the US because our lovely FDA won’t allow that but in Israel they have made
remarkable advances in the treatment of diseases. In terms of technology,
Microsoft and Cisco have their only research and development facilities outside
of the US in
Israel. Intel has their largest factory in Israel. On Wednesday of last week, I
drove down to the Negev, the Hebrew word for south which is that southern
desert area. We drove down towards Beersheba and went past the Intel plant.
It’s just absolutely enormous. It’s developed many things. The use of voice
mail technology originated in Israel. Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chips developed
in Israel. There’s a great book out if you want to read about this called “The
Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor. It’s absolutely fabulous to read and if you’re
at all interested in business or technology and leadership and innovation,
that’s the book for you to read.
It shows the connection between their military culture
and the way they develop leaders in the military. They have universal military
service in Israel and the book explains how this plays a role in the corporate
world. Because when you go get a job in Israel after you get out of the Army or
college the first question they ask you is what unit you were in in the IDF. “Oh yeah, my Uncle Joe was in that unit or cousin
so-and-so was in that unit.” They know everybody and they know exactly what you
did and what your background is, what your capabilities are, what your training
was. When you go into the IDF when
you’re 18 years of age until you come out of the reserve when you’re 44, you’re
with the same group the whole time. You develop a bond and a care and concern
for one another.
It’s just remarkable and the leadership style that
developed in the military culture comes over into the corporate world. And it’s
not the same kind of military culture here. Here you have a commanding officer
come back and the company commander will come back and tell the first
lieutenant that this is their mission and this is what they’re going to do.
He’s going to call in his platoon leaders and tell them what their different
assignments will be. They’re going to go back to the platoons and divide their
squads up and tell them what they’re going to do and everybody’s going to say,
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, three bags full”. They’re then going to go out and do the
mission.
But in Israeli army they’re going to say, “Wait a
minute. That’s nuts! You’ve got a screw loose. This is why this isn’t going to
work.” Then they will have a rousing debate back and forth and in the process
of that give-and-take they’re going to come up with a much better plan and
they’re going to demonstrate ingenuity and innovation and creativity in the
whole process. Then they’re going to come up with probably a better plan and go
execute it. That doesn’t play well in the American corporate world or the
military. They don’t know how to handle that but it’s very much a part of the
Israeli culture. It blows away the American corporate world when they start
interacting with Israeli counterparts.
Read the book. I recommend it. It’s got great ideas in
there for some ways we could do some things a little differently and a little
better by learning from the Jewish people. So they’ve also done a lot of
development in the medical field. For example, ninety percent of American
battlefield deaths have occurred before the wounded ever get to a field
hospital. Half of those are due to “bleeding out”. An Israeli company called
First Care addressed this by developing what is called “a life-saving bandage”
which is now carried by every US
soldier in the field. This was used to stem the blood loss of Congresswoman
Gabby Giffords when she was shot in the head. Somebody had this life care
bandage in the ambulance that the EMT’s had.
That stemmed the loss of blood so that has saved an untold number of lives.
They’re also doing a lot with robotics now. You can
find some video on this. They’ve developed basically an exo-skeleton that fits
on the legs of a paralyzed person and enables them to walk again. It’s just
incredible technology. We also had a briefing when we were there with a retired
IDF colonel who was a spokesperson for the IDF for a number of years. She’s with an organization
called Natal, which has developed the foremost treatment in the world for
treating PTSD
because if you live in about thirty percent of Israel you have to deal with PTSD. If you live in some of those places where they get
regular rocket fire, you’re under a lot of stress. In Gaza there’s a high level
of PTSD. You go to some
place like we did at Kfar Aza kibbutz about a hundred yards off of the border
with Gaza. Seventy-five percent of the residents there have been directly
affected by rocket fire from terrorists from Gaza. So this is a reality there.
They’re doing remarkable things. Some Americans have taken notice of what Natal
is doing. They’re starting to do some test projects with the U.S.in
Jacksonville, Florida starting this year. The Israelis have also developed a
medical tool called endopat, which is a cuff, which measures blood pressure
from your fingers and can perform a complete heart analysis in five minutes and
predict whether someone will have a heart attack within the next seven years.
So they are at the cutting edge. This technology works its way out to the rest
of the world. It’s blessing the rest of the world.
When it comes to agriculture we saw so many things I
can’t even remember them all. We went to the Bakanie Institute which is one of
the development centers for their Department of Agriculture. They showed us
many of the things they’re developing. They developed a hybrid seedless
mandarin orange that is exported all over the world. They’re trying to grow it
in other places, right now in South America and some other places. They share
the wealth voluntarily; it is not socialism. They share this with other
countries.
Last year when I was over there we had some people talking
to us from the Department of Agriculture on how the Israelis help agriculture
in many of the countries in Africa. They’re dealing with desert climate so
they’re introducing them to drip irrigation. They do things better than
Americans do. Americans just think, “Oh, I’m going to help you out so I’ll
throw a wad of cash at you. I’ll send over a lot of equipment and that’s going
to solve your agricultural problems.” So the Africans get their John Deere and
Caterpillar tractors and everything else and they drive them for a couple of
weeks. When they develop a problem they just sit in the fields because they
can’t read the manuals. They don’t know how to fix what broke because they
can’t read a manual. What the Jews do, they send teams in. Some of these countries
are Muslim so they don’t like Jews. They won’t let Israelis come in so the
Israelis come in as a non-governmental organization, not as an Israeli
organization, and they provide the same aid. They teach them how to read. They
don’t throw gobs of money at them and give them equipment. They start off by
teaching them how to read. So now they can read the manual to this equipment
that U.S. and Europe give them that would otherwise just sit in the field and
rust. How practical that is. How wise that approach is. So they do a lot of
different things like that. They’re quite helpful.
They develop things for potatoes in storage. You know
how they start sprouting. The Jews discovered that if you bathe them in mint
oil, the potatoes don’t sprout any more. Most apples are stored a year before
they ever make it to the store. If you take a Granny Smith apple and if you
store it at a degree or two above freezing it’ll keep for well over a year but
the skin will start to oxidize and turn brown. So they discovered that if you
put Granny Smith apples in a low-oxygen environment for two or three hours then
the skin will not turn brown any more. You don’t have to keep it in that
low-oxygen environment for long, just two or three hours, and that takes care
of it. Lots of little things like that they’ve developed.
They put little sensors into plants and measure the
water intake of the plant, when it’s had enough, when it’s at the bottom of the
cycle so the sensor then sends out a signal when it needs water or when it’s
had too much water. That’s measured in the desert environment where water is
very precious. You have drip irrigation which targets water to each plant and
you’re not just wasting any water. The Israelis have developed desalination
plants and they’ve also developed plants for cleaning up the water so that
eighty percent of the irrigation water they use comes from sewage water that
has been treated and completely purified. So they’re doing remarkable things
like that. This technology is then used in the rest of the world.
That’s just some of the ways that Israel is a blessing
to other nations. The other part of Romans 12 that we see is that there’s a
promise from God that He will bless those who bless Israel and then He will
curse those who curse Israel. In the Hebrew there are two different words for
curse in verse 3. The first word is a strong word for judgment. “I will harshly
judge…” Then the second word for curse, if we wanted to put it in the
vernacular, we would say I would strongly judge those who “dis” you. It means
just a slight disrespect. It means treating the Jews lightly and with
disrespect. So it’s not just a matter of judging those who treat you badly but
it’s a matter of judging anyone who treats the Jews with disrespect. It has serious implications so this is
foundation for understanding why anti-Semitism is wrong. Anti-Semitism is a
scourge that has entered into Western civilization via the church. That is a
great shame for the body of Christ to bear is the way that we shifted away from
a devotion to the literal meaning of the text in order to go with an
allegorical interpretation, which has led to a complete rejection of Israel.