The Kindness and Sternness of God

I was in the bathroom. I thought, of course I'm never in there when I'm talking, so I don't know what goes on. I thought, there wasn't anybody in here when I came in. I didn't hear the door open or close. A little disconcerting. You got that on? Okay. Romans chapter 11, I want to start with verse 22. Of course, this is a complicated, all the letter Paul writes is like you'd write any letter. You start, you build your subjects you want to talk about until you finish them, and paragraph after paragraph, they're connected. Because our thoughts build on each other when we're talking about things that we're trying to get across. And what Paul is dealing with, with this Roman church, is the relationship that Gentiles and Jews have with each other. Because it's a congregation in Rome where the government, the emperor, drove the Jews out of town. And when he did that, there were no Jews in the city of Rome. And then as the emperor changed, circumstances changed, and Jewish people began to move back. So you have a church, a Roman church, that started with Gentiles. And the Jewish people are now coming back, and some of them are Jewish Christians. And so the church ends up finding itself in a situation with a mixture of Jews and Gentiles in the same congregation. Paul is getting ready to visit the church, and he's trying to address common issues that would be of concern to a church that had half of people Jews, or most of them Gentiles, and maybe a quarter of them Jewish. How does all this work together, that we're drawn into the same part of the kingdom of God? And he's talked about, through the beginning of this, the Gentiles' integration into the community of faith. And now he's trying to address the idea of what happened. He started in the first part of this chapter 11 by talking about Israel like it was a... No, he's talking about the kingdom of God, I suppose to say it that way. The kingdom of God, which was primarily, in the Old Testament, the patriarchs were the roots of the tree and the trunk. Then limbs of that were the Jewish people. Now he's talking about how God has pruned this tree, because the Jewish people have been unfaithful to him, and he cut the limbs off, and it left a remnant. The faithful Jewish people who were faithful to God, and were open to God's leadership, and living as God wanted them to. Now he's addressing the Gentiles by saying, now what God has done, is he's taken your life, and he's grafted you onto this tree. You are wild olives, and he's grafted you onto this olive tree that's been cultivated. So that you have a part now in what used to be there, and he's cut off the limbs of those who are not a part of the remnant. The tree really represents what the Old Testament calls the remnant, or the faithful ones of God. Those who had not turned away from him. Now, as he talks about this, he's saying, you have to be careful the arrogance that you might have, because you now are Gentiles grafted onto this tree, and the Jewish people have been cut off. Don't make the mistake of thinking too much of yourself, as if you are now the tree. Now, if you were to walk around the community, and you were to talk about the kingdom of God, and you were to say to people, who are the people who make up the kingdom of God? What racial group would make up the kingdom of God? You might have Anglos, you might have Hispanics, you might have Chinese, or Orientals. And if people, you kept asking them, way down at the bottom, they might mention Jewish people. We've gotten used to the idea that the Christian faith is primarily Gentiles. Paul never accepted the idea that that was true. He sees the Gentiles as being grafted onto the tree, and a vital part of the kingdom of God. But he also sees that the roots of all of this is tied to the promise that God made. So he says to the Gentiles, don't you ever get the idea, that you can be connected to this great stream of God's work in the world, and ignore the debt that you owe to the Jewish community. For it's through them that all of this came. He says, cut off those who are unfaithful, and left connected still those who are faithful. Verse 22, consider therefore the kindness of God, and the sternness of God. Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God. Sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in His kindness. Paul has been talking about the cutting off of the limbs, and grafting on. And he says, now you must think about this in two ways. One is, God has been very stern. And God does say, you know, there's only one way to do this, and it's my way. God is not negotiating the Ten Commandments, so we can redo those. He's not negotiating the things that he says are right and wrong. And Jesus never negotiated, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I mean, those things that he said were clear and plain, and the consequences for rejecting or disobeying them are clear, powerful, and plain. The wages of sin is always death. There is no way the rejection of God's authority will ever allow you to be able to find life that God wants you to have. So there is a sternness that people just ignore. They don't see God in this way. I did a couple of weeks ago in the service, when I asked people, who do you think of as Jesus? In words of kind, and good, and pleasant. But that's not necessarily the only picture we have of Jesus. We have Jesus as a kind of person who says to people, here is what you have to do, and if you're not willing to do it, you can't follow me. So there is a sternness to God. Because holiness cannot be compromised, just like integrity can't be compromised. If you're telling the truth, it has to be the truth. If you change a little part of it so it's no longer the truth, it's not the truth. Even though 99% of it is the truth, it's not the truth unless it's all truth. So the Bible has this demanding sternness to it. And he says, I want you to notice this. The Jewish people turned their back on what God was doing. He whacked their limbs off. Know that the judgment of God comes, and this should warn you. Do not think of yourself as outside of this realm of judgment. God is stern. But he said, I also want you to notice this kindness that God has. The patience that God has to work. How many years was God working with the Jewish people before he opened the door to the Gentiles? God was planning all along for this to happen. Paul talked about this earlier saying, what if God and all the things that have been going on, he was doing this to further his purpose so that the Gentiles now are accepted into the kingdom, and God has a purpose greater than that. It's that the Jewish people would be jealous and want to be able to come and find Christ. He looks at this picture of how God works with great long vision. He's patient, and he's kind, and he works steadily toward the goal that he has. When you look at the story, when you take the whole stream of the biblical history, you'll see what they talk about in terms of the bigger picture. That is what God is planning above. And how each of these stories fit into that, and we fit into it too. What's happened in America fits into this. God's great plan is on the long term. And he is patient, and he is kind. But the kindness of God comes to the place where he says, that's it. Now the time of correction comes. So Paul is warning the Gentiles, don't you think of this as if you can do anything you want to do. There is a kindness on God's part to open the door for you. But there is also a sternness on God's part that says there's a limit to what you can do. And the limit, then when you get to that, it's over. And the kindness that you have from God is based on the fact that you continue in his kindness. Now he uses the word kindness here to describe how a person enters the kingdom of heaven. And it's the faith he talked about with Abraham. So he's really talking about if you continue in your faithfulness, then God will not lop you off. Now as he's talking about this, he's not talking about individual believers necessarily. He's talking about the whole group of Jewish people. He's talking about the whole community of Gentiles. And so if you have Gentiles who no longer are responsive and obedient to God, he cuts them off. One of the difficult things about God's judgment is it's not always immediate. You know, when you have a small child and you're trying to discipline them, you can't say to a three-year-old when they do something wrong, now the day after tomorrow I'm going to punish you. If you want to teach a three-year-old, you have to make the punishment immediately following the infraction. But as we get a little more mature, we can understand that the things we did two weeks ago are bringing the consequences to our lives now. What he wants us to see is in God's great stream of history, his maturity, if we could say it that way, looks in terms of years and decades and centuries. God does not have to do today what he has to rush things up. He's willing to work through this long period of time. Now I'll tell you why I think that's true. A lot of people think of God as a God who lives in heaven and has planned the whole world out. So everything is detailed and planned out all in advance. I think God is at work in the world like all of us are at work in our own lives. You start trying to do something and someone messes it up. Then you have to stop and change your circumstance. If you want to get something done, and you start your day, and you have planned the details of what you want to do, I want to do this, this, this, this, and this, and you start, and the first thing you're trying to do doesn't work out right. You plan to do 15 or 30 minutes of this, and all of a sudden someone comes to telephone call. It doesn't work right. The person who comes doesn't understand, and it takes two hours to do that 15-minute job. You have to recalculate for yourself how you're going to do the rest of these things. It doesn't mean you throw them away, but you say, OK, now I've got to change my strategy. Or you'll be talking to someone, trying to get them to do something you want them to do, and you explain it to them, and they're resistant to you. Then you have to step back and you have to work to get this to work just like you want it to. Every minute of every day, God listens to every person in the universe's mind. What they're thinking, what they're planning, and He's responding to every single human being. He's responding to their resistance. He's responding to their obedience. Now, when you look at the magnitude of what God is doing in all of the universe, He has a plan out here, and there are all kinds of people who are doing things that would keep that plan from coming to fruit. He's dealing with every one of them. All of the countries, all of the nations, all of the people in the world. His plan is clear as to what He wants to have happen in the end. But to get there, He has to deal with everybody's free choices. And it's staggering to imagine how big our God is. So that to accomplish what He wants, He has to deal with every human being in the world every second of every day. And so it takes God some time to make things work like we want to. It's 400 years His people were in Egypt before He got to the place to bring them out. He had to wait until they were ready. He had to wait until the right Pharaoh was in place. All these things He had to wait for. But when the time came, it worked. We don't know how long He planned for the Messiah to come, but when the time was right, the Scripture says, then He came. All of the things that God is doing are the result of His kindness, His patience, His waiting. But God has very strict demands and standards. So that when you step over the line, after all the patience of God is used, He says, that's enough. So He reminds the Gentiles, don't ever think because you have been received into the kingdom, that you will take the place of God's great plan. His plan is still in effect. He made a promise to Abraham, and He is going to keep that promise, even though you might not see any way that He could do that. I don't know of anyone in the world that can imagine a way in which the Jewish community would turn to God in overwhelming numbers. But God says, that is still My plan. Now, consider, He says to you Gentiles, the kindness and the sternness of God to those who fell, He was stern. And kindness to you as the Gentiles, He's opened it. But notice, provided that you continue in your faith. It's conditioned. Now, otherwise, if you don't do that, you will be cut off. And what He talks about in chapter 4, verse 17, He's referenced to that, 4, verse 17, where He says, He is our Father in the sight of God, in whom He believed. The God who gives life to the dead, and calls things that are not as though they were. Now, God, He says, will cut off the people who fail to live by faith. And in verse 23, referencing that chapter 4, verse 17, And if they do not persist in unbelief, now He's addressing the Jews, they will be grafted in. He's not closed the door on the Jewish community. If they change their unbelief, their lack of faith, to belief, He will take those limbs that He cut off, and graft them back in. Now, He's not talking good horticulture here. It's not necessarily the way you do it. You cut a limb off, it lays on the ground, it rots. You can't graft it back on. But what He's talking about is the power of God to keep doing this. He's not dealing with ordinary life. God has the power to bring life to the dead. So even though the limb has been chopped off, God can take that dead limb and bring it back to life. Alan was talking tonight about some of the corn in his field out there, that it had gotten dry and shriveled up, and it looked like it was dead, and then all the rain came, and it came back to life. He said he never saw, and never had seen that before. God has the ability to bring life where there was death. That's what our resurrection hope is about. So if God can bring you, as a Gentile group, and connect you to His kingdom, He can certainly take these people who have lived without faith and trust in God and graft them back into that kingdom. God is not through with them. And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted back in, for God is able to graft them again. He didn't say that the plant was able to do it, but God has the ability and the power to do what no one else can do. After all, verse 24, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? Now he gives an insight here that he knows a little bit more about horticulture than he's described before. He realizes that if you have an olive tree that is cultivated and it makes good olives, and you take a wild olive tree that does not produce olives well, and you graft it on, the limb of the wild olive tree will still produce the same kind of olives it did before. It doesn't transform it. But, he's saying, in his scheme, what he wants to say to us is the grafted wild olive tree will produce, because what God is doing, olives that come from a cultivated olive tree. God does the impossible. He takes us, he grafts us onto this Jewish branch or trunk, and we begin to produce the same fruit that Abraham, David, and all the other followers of God were producing, because we are connected to the source of that power that gives us fruit. So he's saying, what you should understand is, the miracle that came when you, a Gentile, were connected to this great stream of God's people, and it made you a part of the family of God, even though it was contrary to your nature, he can still take those people who were of the Jewish tradition and graft them back in, and they can become a part of the kingdom of God too. God has not closed the door to anyone. His intention all along was to bring the message that he had for the Jewish community to the whole world. He's taken the opportunity to use the rejection by the Jewish people to open the door to the Gentile world, which was his plan all along, and he intends to use this openness by the Gentiles to make the Jewish people jealous, and them to return to the Christian community. Now, he's not wanting them to become Gentiles, but he's wanting them to see in the Christian community that it is the authentic nature of the same message he was giving to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David, that they will recognize in the New Testament time, the Jewish community did not see Christ as the fulfillment of this great stream of history. He is saying, what's going to happen in the future, is that the people of the Jewish community will look at Christianity and say, yes, Jesus was the answer that we were looking for, and because they see that, then they will turn to him. So his plan has not changed. From the beginning of Abraham to make a great nation of people, as numerous as the sands of the sea, influencing the whole world, except that it's now become not simply one community of people, the Jewish community, but now all nations, all races, all people will be a part of this stream. It's not that he stopped one and started another. He's still doing exactly what he intended to do when he called Abraham, thousands of years ago. We don't know how long it's going to take him to do this or to complete it, but that's what he's done. God can use both Gentiles and Jews. Now, in verse 25, Paul introduces another subject that is sort of a complementary part of this. How is this all going to take place? I don't want you to be ignorant, verse 25, of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of Gentiles has come in. This sentence is filled with important words. One of them is the word mystery. In the Bible, the word mystery is a little bit different than what we use, that word mystery. Mystery for us is if someone says they watched a mystery or read a mystery, they mean it's a story in which you don't really know the outcome or the end of it. But in the world in which Paul was writing, mystery religions were very prominent. And mystery religions were religions that said you can be a part of here, but you can never really know what's going on until we tell you the mysteries. And the mystery was something that you couldn't get by your own mind or your own thinking. It had to be revealed by the one of the mystery of someone in the know inside the religion. So Paul uses this word to describe the things that God has revealed to him that you couldn't get if you didn't have this information or insight. Now, to kind of draw an illustration to you about what this means, I like maybe the greatest one that I've found. Have you ever seen one of these signs that says Jesus on it? You know, it has a thing, and when you look at it, you can't see the word Jesus. Sometimes I've seen them cut out. Sometimes I've seen them made out of cloth. And the first time I ever saw one of those, a lady said, Can you tell me what this is? And I looked at it, and I don't see anything in there. And I kept looking, and she said, You can't tell that. And I said, No, I don't see any words at all. It's just stuff there. And she went up, and she traced the J and the E, and all of a sudden, it jumped out at me and was really clear. In the Bible, a mystery is something that's clear and plain, but until God points it out, you can never recognize it. I'm going to tell you a mystery, he said, something that God is doing, but you will never know this unless he tells you and shows you. Here's the mystery. This mystery that he wants to show is that Israel has experienced a hardening until the number of Gentiles come, and then all of this is done so that the Jewish community, all of Israel, will be saved. He's showing us that God's great plan has focused on redemption not only of Gentiles, but also of Jewish people. Paul uses this word, mystery, in several different places in his writings. He thinks that this is something God has revealed to him that he's doing, that he's passing on to us, so we will know when we read this story what is the higher picture of what God is doing. He is at work doing this all the way through history. And even though there are little events that are taking place, you don't see this big picture until you listen to what God is telling you that he's doing. I don't want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. I don't want you to think that you as Gentiles are the center of all of this. And I think that maybe that's happened in our country. If you go around and you survey people and ask them if they're going to heaven, if they're followers of Christ, in this country so many people will say they are. When you ask them why, well, I'm a good person. I'm an American. I believe in the Bible. I believe in God. But they lack the reverence for God. They oftentimes don't read the Bible. They oftentimes don't attend church. They oftentimes don't pray. They oftentimes live lives that are not really very moral lives. And yet they assume, because they consider themselves good, that they are going to be one of these branches connected to the tree. The arrogance of, I am an American. I believe in God. So everything's going to be okay. The arrogance of paying no attention whatsoever to the instructions. See, God has made it clear how you enter the kingdom of heaven. It is by faith. By grace you are saved through faith. But many people think it's by being a good person, a good American. And they're going to get in because of that. Their own effort, their own efforts, their own work. Instead of the grace of God. They don't think that it has a requirement that a lifestyle should reflect the character and nature of Christ. What Paul is attacking is this kind of arrogance that makes us think that because of something we have done or some circumstance of our life, we're entering the kingdom of heaven. This was the very same problem that all the way through the early part of the book of Romans he accused the Jews of doing. He accused the Israelites of being arrogant, thinking we are born in Israel. We're born of Jewish parents. Therefore, we're going to be God's chosen people and be in heaven with Him. So many Americans think this way. We've adopted that same kind of arrogance that causes us to think that God is nice and kind and good and gentle and we're all going to be ushered in because of where we're born, because the Bible is around us, because we've been to church, because we've joined a church. Something that we've done. Not the lifestyle that says, Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life. He guides my lifestyle. He guides my choices. He guides the things that I do and the things that I don't do. The personal submission to the authority of Christ is missing for many people who, in Paul's book where he talks about this here, is the life of kindness or faith, the faith of Abraham. Now, he's helping us to understand that this arrogance that is a part of our failure to see God's great picture causes the Gentiles to think we're saved because we're Gentiles. We're saved because God has been good to us. Instead, which are the same mistakes that the Jews had made. I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced a hardening, in part, until the full number of Gentiles has come in. You are only a part of this picture. God has opened the doors to you and He's made the Jewish nation hard-hearted and hard-headed. He has done this because He's working at two levels. One, He's led them into this hardship and the second side of it is they've chosen this hardship. But they're going through it and God has a purpose in it. He is working in their resistance and their rejection. And He's working in it so that they might be able to come back into the community of faith. And God has opened the doors to you because He wants you to have the same opportunity that He's given to them. Now, when He talks about the fullness of the Gentiles, some people think that that means He says, well, there are going to be 7,234,000 people who are saved and when that's over. I don't think that's what He means. I think He's talking about fullness here in the same way He talks about fullness with the Jewish people. As being complete. Until all of the work is done with the Gentiles, it won't be finished. Until all the work is done with the Jews, it won't be finished. When everything God wants to accomplish, both with the Jews and the Gentiles, then it is finished. The hardening experience is in part done so that God can complete a part of His work in the world with the Gentiles. And when they come to know Him, then the other part of His work to restore the Jewish community will be done too. What He's showing us is, God's great plan from Abraham's day till that day and even this one is still in operation. But what He has been shown is why the Jewish nation's rejection is not the end, but it is still just a part of that great plan. Now, here's what's important for us to understand. When God makes a promise in the Scriptures to you, you read a Scripture where it says this is what I promise to my followers. When you get started trying to claim that promise, sometimes it doesn't come to pass. Sometimes things may happen in your life that keep it from coming to pass. It doesn't mean that God's given up on you, nor that promise. What it means is, sometimes other things have to be done, other circumstances have to come to pass before God can complete it. We sometimes look around us and we see that the things we think God has promised to us in Scripture are not coming to pass. We get frustrated and many people quit their walk with God because they don't see the things that God promised He would do for them coming to pass. What God shows us is, once He makes that promise, if you give your life to Me, I will make your life full and complete. So you start down that road, one problem after another comes up. Ten years down the road, nothing good has come to you. And you stop and say, well, that promise didn't work. What He shows us in this story is that God doesn't look at our lives in terms of two weeks, two months, ten years. But He looks all the way to the end. God's promise will come true. Every promise in Scripture will come true. I've told this story before when I was in seminary. There was a guy in California that came to seminary and he was a real, kind of a Class A type personality. You know, he talked to everybody and went everywhere and did, you know, really active and aggressive. I met him in the hall one day and he said, I've read in the Bible, it says you ask and God will provide. He'll give to you. And seeking you'll find and knocking will be given to you. And so I said, okay God, you've got to the end of the semester. Here's what I want. I want a new car and I want a good girlfriend. And I don't want an ugly girlfriend. And I don't want a crippled girlfriend. I want a really nice looking girlfriend. And I've given God until the end of this semester. And if He doesn't, I'm dropping out of the seminary and I'm giving up on being a preacher. Last I heard, he was an insurance salesman. God does not deal with us that way. When He says, I will provide what you need, first you say, what does God think I need? That was his first mistake. The second, he says I will provide it in my time. That's his second mistake. What God is being shown here to be by Paul is a God who does keep His promises and when we get short sighted, we think He doesn't and we give up so the promise never comes to pass because we've quit. God looks at things in the long term and He never gives up working. What can cause Him to give up working? Provided that you continue in His kindness or in your faith. That's what stops God's work in our lives. Let's pray. It is hard sometimes to believe the promises you've given us when they don't seem to come true as you said they would in the time frame that we expect. In fact, sometimes it seems like things get worse when we try to follow you. Give us the faith that Abraham had to believe that you can do things that no one else in the world can do and that in spite of waiting for years and years for a son, you still produce what you say you're going to do. Help us to continue in our faith without fail that you might be able to do in our lives all that you want. Help us in our church, Father, never to give up on you but to always believe that what you intend to do through us and in us will be done. Give us that faith and faithfulness. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.