Romans 9-11 has afforded an opportunity to reflect on the biblical doctrine of election. To prepare for what follows I would like to summarize how my own understanding now differs from the classical expression of that doctrine.

I think I would be accurate to state that expression in the following words. Election and predestination mean that God made a decision before the universe began to divide all human beings who would live on earth into two groups: the saved and the damned. He did this without respect of persons and without regard to anyone's moral achievements. (See Lorraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 83).

I do not believe that, and I do not teach that. I do not have an ax to grind about this issue, and I do not become aggressive about the differences. However, I am proposing an alternative understanding for your consideration and, I hope, your acceptance. I can summarize the difference by means of three constrasts.

The classic doctrine of election focuses on a decision that was made before the creation of the world. The alternative understanding I am proposing acknowledges that God made some decisions before the world began, but the biblical act of election refers to something God did within human history.

Second, the classic doctrine of election is concerned about who is destined to be saved and who is to be damned for all eternity. The alternative understanding I am proposing is concerned about a mission within human history.

Finally, the classic doctrine of election focuses on individuals. For those who believe it this doctrine elicits the highly individualistic question, "Am I one of the elect?" The alternative understanding I am proposing doees not focus on the individual. It says that God elects a community to carry forward a mission within human history.

With this in mind let's now look at Romans eleven and then move on toward the conclusion to which all this points.

God Did Not Reject Israel
The apostle built this chapter around two questions. Verse one raises the first question, I ask then: Did God reject his people? As so often in Romans Paul's short answer is, By no means! He offers himself as evidence of that. I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. "I believe Jesus is the long-expected Messiah of Israel, and I am a Jew." Then, he approaches the question from another angle in verses 2-6.

God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. This time, as evidence, he recalls a famous story from the life of Elijah. Don't you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah - how he appealed to God against Israel: "Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me"? "I am the only one left; woe is me!"

And what was God's answer to him? "I have reserved for myseflf seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal." In verse five Paul makes his point. So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace.

When the Old Testament talks about a remnant, it usually has in mind the catastrophic destruction of Israel by enemy armies. When the destruction has ended, only a small remnant of Israel survived. The Christian apostle saw a new application of this idea. The catastrophe he had in mind was not military but spiritual. Only a small remnant of Israel believed that Jesus was the Messiah. For the apostle that was reason for hope. God had not rejected Israel. As in Israel's past, there was a minority, a remnant, that stayed true to God's purpose for Israel. Verse six makes it clear that God's sheer generosity accounted for the existence of that remnant.

So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would be no longer be grace. If God did not reach down and tap a people to be His chosen people, He  might no have any people at all.

Verses 7-10 give Paul's sad conclusion. What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened, as it is written: "God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes so that they could not see and ears so that they could not hear, to this very day." And David says: "May their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them. May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever."

Israel Did Not Fall Beyond Recovery
That leads to Paul's second question in verse eleven. Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? As so often in Romans Paul's short answer is, Not at all! The rest of verse eleven begins the first part of his longer answer. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. Their transgression refers to their rejection of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Because of this salvation has come to the Gentiles.

It is a fact that on Paul's missionary journeys, the events that turned him more and more to Gentiles was the hostile treatment he received in the Jewish synagogues. Paul seems to be saying, "My people's rejection of Jesus does not mean that my people have fallen beyond recovery, because their rejection achieved God's prupose for Israel, which was to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. If their failure can accomplish God's purpose, then we'd better keep open the possibility that God may have an unexpected future for them within His purpose.

Paul proposes such a scenario in verse 12. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring! When he says their fullness, he can only mean a wholesale, Jewish acceptance of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. At the end of verse 14 he makes it clear that one reason he entertains such a hope is that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them.

Then, he expresses this seemingly far-fetched hope again in verse 15. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? After an extended word picture, which I will not deal with, the apostle expresses his hope again in verse 23. And if they (my Jewish kinsmen) do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted into the central purpose of God for humanity.

You can feel the apostle's intense hope, and it reaches its fullest expression in verses 25-26. 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 the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved.

Where does this far-fetched hope come from? Verses 28-29 lay bare the foundation of Paul's deepest convictions about his people Israel. As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable. Israel may have by and large missed their supreme moment in history, but even that has not separated them from the love of God who chose them.

In verses 30-32 Paul summarizes the driving point that dominates Romans 9-11. Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you. For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

Israel's failure has been a spiritual boon to all mankind. The apostle refused to give up hope for a massive change of Jewish mind about Jesus. And in the meantime, God's electing love has not changed toward Israel, even in her present refusal of Jesus. So, how are Christians and Jews to think of each other in the light of the realities?

The Jewish-Christian Axis in World History
By the rise of the Middle Ages the old Roman Empire had become the Holy Roman Empire. Europe had become Christian from Ireland to Istanbul and from the Arctic to the Sahara.

Interestingly, "the Jews were the only non-Christians tolerated in the Christian world," (Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 44). "The attitude toward them was ambivalent. Having perfidiously rejected the savior, Jews had to be punished for their obduracy. But because the second coming of the Christian savior was somehow though to be connected with the conversion of the Jews, Christendom generally also thought it necessary not to eradicate the Jewish presence completely but to tolerate it, though in an inferior position," (ibid.). They were tolerated for another, more earthy reason.

"To Jews money represented portable wealth in a society in which land was the most common source of wealth," (ibid.), and in the face of hostility Jews often found themselves on the move. It was hard to acquire land and keep it. Precious metals, jewels and money represented security in a most insecure society. Jews thus embodied something we take for granted today - a money economy. But there was a more far-reaching reality.

"Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authority fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business forbidden to Christians," (Tawney, 39-40).

The royal houses, the banks and the church of the late Middle Ages began to accumulate wealth, thanks in no small measure to Jewish moneylenders. With that walth they commissioned the likes of Christopher Columbus to find trade routes to the East in order to accumulate more wealth.

Along with the likes of Columbus went not only some unsavory characters and dreadful diseases, but also the Gospel of Christ. Columbus himself, secular historians to the contrary, saw a spiritual as well as commercial purpose to his travels. Commercy and Christianity began to make their peace.

No one married their faith to the newly emerging, commercial world more intentionally than the Puritans of England and New England. The Industrial Revolution began and made possible wealth on a scale never before possible for ordinary people. It also made possible misery on a vast scale. Within a relatively short time capitalism began to show its dark side. In the mid-1800s a powerful voice spoke to condemn its inhumane treatment of workers. It was a Jewish voice, and it belonged to Karl Marx.

"His anti-Semitic writings are well-known ... For Marx the Jew is the symbol of capitalism, because he identifies Jews with money," (Wyschogrod, 46). The journey from Marx in the British Museum to Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin in Russia is well-known, as was the journey further east to Mao Tse Tung, the Long March and Communist China.

But when Marx's doctrine reached Asia, the strange symbiosis between Church and Synagogue did something else in the providence of God that nothing else could have done. Communist atheism began to dislodge hundreds of millions of Chinese and other Asians from their ancestral faiths, thus opening the door just a crack to the seeds of the Gospel, which today are coming to fruition in great numbers in China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where Christian missionaries had painstakingly and often without much success preached the Gospel of Christ.

Meanwhile, back in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s the ambivalence toward Jews of the Christian Middle Ages gave way to the pagan, Nazi death camps. Six million Jews perished. Many others had been uprooted and had no home to return to.

Out of Jewish suffering a new hope began to take shape. Zionism, encouraged by dispensational Protestants in England and America, had long talked of Jews' returning to Israel's ancient home in Palestine. The trickle became a stream after World War II, and in April, 1948, after 2500 years of dispossession, the Christian nations of the West persuaded the UN to recognize Israel as a nation and to establish them in that fateful wedge of real estate called Palestine.

That in itself has huge prophetic significance, but it also has a significance that perhaps we are only beginning to see in the light of September 11. God has placed Israel as an irritant in the Islamic world, and for half a century the Arab world has been scratching to get rid of the irritant and has succeeded only in inflaming the entire world.

Then, the God of Jesus Christ whistled, and His servant, Osama bin Laden, brought terror home to the heart of the United States. By all accounts he intended to drive U.S. military forces off the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia and Israel out of Palestine. He has acutally succeeded in drawing the rest of the world to the Middle East and South Asia with their liquor and rock-and-roll and Christian Bibles. Two Islamic regimes have been removed from power, and the operations of Al Qaeda have been hampered.

Why should we be surprised, if the past two years form God's answer to the prayers of millions of the elect, who for the past decade have been praying for the 10-40 Window and saying, "Now it is the turn of Muslims to hear the Gospel"?

It is wrong to restrict the doctrine of election to academic debate. It works relentlessly on the world stage. God promised Abraham that he would be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Why should we be surprised that the blessing would include no only the Christian gospel, but also the Jewish role in both the creation of Capitalism and the Communist effort to destroy it, and that both its creation and destruction would further the Christian gospel?

Why should we be surprised that the blessing would reinsert Israel into Palestine as an irritant to the Muslim would that is least interested in the Christian Gospel and open that world up to the good tidings of Jesus Christ?

Why should we be hesitant to hope with the Apostle Paul for the day when Jews, without losing any of their Jewishness, will acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel?

The divine election embraces Israel and the Church, and in both God has ordained that His name will be planted irrevocably in the earth, until every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

    Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
        How unsearchable his judgments,
        and his paths beyond tracing out!
    "Who has known the mind of the Lord?
        Or who has been his counselor?"
    "Who has ever given to God,
        that God should repay him?"
    For from him and through him and to him are all things.
        To him be the glory forever! Amen.