14 εἰ γὰρ οἱ ἐκ νόμου κληρονόμοι, κεκένωται ἡ πίστις καὶ κατήργηται ἡ ἐπαγγελία·
We continue walking through Paul's argument here. Basically, what Paul has told us is that circumcision is not what saves anyone. Works cannot save. It is through faith and faith alone that we are saved.
What does this mean? As a Gentile, I am thrilled that God would open up His kingdom to me. Frankly, I deserve nothing better than the Moabites got, for example. I would be, as David put it in 1 Samuel 17, an uncircumcised Philistine. Or at least I may as well be because I am not a Jew.
Yet in His grace God chose to save Gentiles as well as Jews. It is not those who adhere to the law, but those who have faith that are saved. The personal application is that we must know Christ. We'll keep building on this as we go through Romans.
On a more global scale, this tells us that we need to be careful about mixing up the current nation-state of Israel with the Israel spoken of in Scripture. Yes, God still has a plan for these people and they will be gathered in at the end of the age. But we don't have to get all worked up over the President's plea for them to retreat to their 1967 borders. I don't want to get too political on this blog, but I do ask that you think through the implications of this combining of Jew and Gentile as it pertains to politics. Things are not quite as simple as some would make them seem.
What does this mean? As a Gentile, I am thrilled that God would open up His kingdom to me. Frankly, I deserve nothing better than the Moabites got, for example. I would be, as David put it in 1 Samuel 17, an uncircumcised Philistine. Or at least I may as well be because I am not a Jew.
Yet in His grace God chose to save Gentiles as well as Jews. It is not those who adhere to the law, but those who have faith that are saved. The personal application is that we must know Christ. We'll keep building on this as we go through Romans.
On a more global scale, this tells us that we need to be careful about mixing up the current nation-state of Israel with the Israel spoken of in Scripture. Yes, God still has a plan for these people and they will be gathered in at the end of the age. But we don't have to get all worked up over the President's plea for them to retreat to their 1967 borders. I don't want to get too political on this blog, but I do ask that you think through the implications of this combining of Jew and Gentile as it pertains to politics. Things are not quite as simple as some would make them seem.
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