The Church — Grafted Into the Abrahamic Covenant

From Lesson 206 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charlie Clough

[ Question asked: Clough replies:] The question is about Rom. 10-11, that talks about the Church being grafted in, completed. The grafting in, and Paul clarifies that to which the Church is grafted not as the nation Israel but as the Abrahamic Covenant, the redemptive work in the Abrahamic Covenant. What he’s saying there is that whatever blessings the Church has come because of the covenants with Israel, the work of God that starts with the Abrahamic Covenant. Here are some examples. Let’s take mundane things that he also refers to in Rom. 3. Where did we get the Scriptures from? Israel. Where do we get our Messiah from? Christ is a Jew. Where is the world going to get peace from? When Israel says “Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord.” So the Scriptures, the finished work of Christ, world peace all come through God’s work in Israel.

Moreover he says that we’re grafted in and when the fullness of the Gentiles be come in, then God’s program reverts to the Jew; the Jew will be grafted in. When that happens you have the New Covenant. One of the things about Rom. 10-11, this New Covenant idea, when we have communion and one of the thing the pastors always say, they quote Jesus saying “This cup is the cup of the New Covenant written in My blood.” But the New Covenant hasn’t fully come into being because one of the promises in Jeremiah of the New Covenant… first of all it’s given to Israel, secondly, the sign of the fulfillment of the New Covenant is that every Jew will be a believer. That’s not true today. So that Covenant has not happened yet. But Jesus is in a communion and He’s saying “This is the cup of the New Covenant in My blood which is shed for you.” What does He mean? He means that the basis of that Covenant has already formed. Israel’s rejected and there’s got to be a little drama here to play out the ebb and the flow of what’s going to happen, but the Covenant will be fulfilled. The point is that our salvation, our blessings are there only because we share in the finished work of Christ and the basis of that New Covenant.

So what Paul’s trying to get at in Rom. 10-11, he’s trying to cut of anti-Semitism, which he had to deal with. It’s pretty apparent and more modern scholars have really basically said that one of the reasons behind the epistle to the Romans is that they had a real racial, genetic, Gentile thing going on in the congregation, and the Gentiles had certain prideful things and Paul had to deal with that in Rom. 10-11 and the Jews had very prideful things and he had to deal with that in Rom. 2-3. He puts down both sides in that epistle. It’s a neat way of watching how the apostles dealt with what we would call a social problem in the Church. What I always love about it is, like I always say, is that the guy couldn’t brush his teeth without getting the Trinity involved. That’s the way Paul thought about life. He didn’t disconnect the problems from the great doctrines. I wish I had the ability to do that consistently but I don’t. That’s an example of what the Church was doing in Acts 4. They took that whole issue of the Messiah, the promises of the Son of God, and they applied it to Herod and Pontius Pilate, and you saw what they did there. So that issue in Rom. 10, which we’ll get to, on the position of the Church, it’s dependent upon Israel and the work that God did through Israel. We can’t ever severe the Church away from that. That’s what that cautionary is, but the Church is not Israel.