Chronicles of Muscular Christianity - Why are so few Jews Christians?

Informal thoughts on Romans 11:11-24

Now the Jewish people as a nation have stumbled, they have stumbled over Christ, who is the stumbling stone - they just can’t get past that rock to get to faith in God - they keep tripping over that same rock -

I took a tour of the Holy Land a number of years ago, and our tour guide was a Jewish fella, his name was Ygal - now he was a great tour guide, he was friendly and he took us to the sites that interested us as followers of Christ -

Ygal had fought in all five Jewish-Arab wars - his specialty was repairing tanks when the tracks had come off, get those tracks back on those tanks so they could get back into battle - so he was much more interested in showing us the different battle sites from those wars than showing us major sites in the life of Christ - so he was bored with the stuff about Jesus, but his eyes would light up when we were near a site where some battle in the Arab-Israeli wars was fought -

I talked with him about the gospel, and it was clear the subject had no interest for him - his eyes just kind of glazed over, and when I asked him why he had so little interest in the life and teachings of Jesus, he said, well, it’s because I’m Jewish - and of course, that’s not really an explanation at all - so I pressed him a little, what is about the fact of your Jewishness that keeps you from believing in Christ - he couldn’t really explain it, but it was a matter of stubborn truth with him, that because I’m Jewish I cannot become a Christian - 

So what I was encountering there was the hardness of heart that has settled over the entire Jewish people at this time in their history -

So then the question is, is that it for the Jews? Are they destined to resist the gospel until it is too late?

11 So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. 12 Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean!

So he says it was the hardness of Jewish hearts that deflected the gospel to the Gentiles - it bounced off of their hardness of heart and was deflected right to us - when my kids were younger, I used to take them to Chuck-E-Cheese for some really bad pizza and and some really good music by Fats, that big gorilla and his jungle band, and one of the games they liked to play was Ski-Ball - that’s the game where you roll these hard balls, kind of like croquet balls, up this ramp, and they would fly off the end of the ramp and your objective was to land the ball in one of these little round cups, and you got points depending upon which little cup, which pocket you landed in -

Now I always played it straight, I’d try to roll the ball straight up the ramp, and I never got very good at it - then one day, I watch one of the employees there, and I saw how he played the game - instead of rolling the ball straight up the ramp, he’d carom the ball off the side of the ramp, and it would deflect off the wall and head at an angle straight toward the pockets - and he never missed - every ball went into the high score cup -

Now that’s an illustration of what God has done with the Jews - the gospel has deflected off their hardness of heart, bounced off their hardness of heart and gone straight to the Gentiles -

He tells us later that this will be the case until the full number of the Gentiles comes in - doesn’t tell us what the full number is, doesn’t tell us how long that’s gonna take, doesn’t tell us when the full number of the Gentiles will come in - so our task now is to bring as many to faith in Christ as we can until we get to that number, and then God will release the Jews from their hardness of heart, and they will flood into the kingdom of Christ - so Paul says that’s what I’m working on now -

13 I magnify my ministry 14 in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them

If we are jealous of someone else, it’s because they have something that we don’t, they have something that we want - so our challenge is to live in such a way that others will want what we have -

A famous opponent of Christianity once said, “I’d be more inclined to believe in your Savior if you looked more saved” - so our job is to live in such a way that people around us will ask, how do I get a marriage like yours, how do I get a family like yours, you don’t seem to fall apart under pressure, how do you do that? You seem up, optimistic, positive - how do you pull that off? You seem to keep your cool under circumstances that would make me lose my mind - how do you do that?

Paul says that branches have broken off the olive tree, and we have been grafted in, to the tree of life - 20] They were  broken off because of their unbelief but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. 21] For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you - 22] continue in his kindness to you, otherwise you too will be cut off -

The warning here is that all of us must watch over our hearts, over our souls, over our spirits, in order that we do not drift away from God and become hardened in our own hearts - run the risk of being broken off from the tree of life, just as the Jews have been -

23] Even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again - in the prayer that you received today I included a graphic of how they graft new branches into an olive tree - that’s how we got in - we don’t belong to that tree, the tree of life, by nature - we belong by grace and grace alone -

So hardness of heart does not have to be permanent, doesn’t have to be anyone’s final destiny - people do not have to continue in unbelief -

12 Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean!

That’s a day to look forward to: 15 For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?