make this sense our own.

[1] Three times--1 Sam. xii. 22, Ps. xciv. 14, xcv. 3 (in the
Greek)--the promise occurs 'The Lord will not cast away His people.'

[2] The vocation and election which made Israel the chosen people were
absolutely of God. What distinguished the faithful remnant from the
bulk of the nation was simply that they had not altogether failed in
faith, so that the unchanging election was not in their cases
practically suspended, but God 'reserved them for Himself.'

[3] St. Paul refers chiefly to Isa. xxix. 10--the description of a
besotted people whose prophets are eyes that cannot see, and their
seers ears that cannot hear; so that the word of God has become as a
sealed book; cf. also Isa. vi. 9. But there is a similar passage in
Deut. xxix. 4, which partly moulds his language, and supplies the words
'unto this day.'

[4] Rather, as margin, in Elijah, i.e. the passage of Scripture about
Elijah.

[5] This--to recognize or mark out beforehand--is the meaning of divine
'foreknowing' in St. Paul. See vol. i. pp. 317 f.

[6] Both in this passage and in Acts i. 20.

{68}

DIVISION IV. Sec. 5[1]. CHAPTER XI. 13-36.

_God's present purpose for the Jews through the Gentiles: and so for
all humanity._

St. Paul would not have it supposed that, in his zeal for the recovery
of Israel, he was proving faithless to his vocation as the apostle of
the Gentiles. On the contrary, he explains (assuming the Roman
Christians to be Gentiles in the mass) that he is, by this very zeal,
fulfilling that vocation. The conversion of the Gentiles was meant to
react as a stimulus on the Jews. When St. Paul magnifies his Gentile
ministry, he does so always with the motive of stinging the jealousy of
his own people, and so bringing some of them to salvation. How can
such a consummation be too eagerly desired? For if even so pitiable an
event as their rejection has yet, in God's providence, been overruled
for {69} a good end--the bringing back of the outside world into the
fellowship of God[2]: can we doubt that so happy an event as their
recovery would be indeed (what Ezekiel saw in vision in the valley of
the dry bones) a veritable resurrection? For the consecration of God
is still upon them. The holy (i.e. consecrated) people they still
remain. As the 'heave offering' of the 'first of the dough'[3]
consecrates the whole lump, so the first of the nation offered to
God--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-