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The Acts of the Apostles
manifest unto them that asked not after Me. But to Israel He saith,
All day long I have stretched forth My hands unto a disobedient and
gainsaying people.”
Even though Israel rejected His Son, God did not reject them.
Listen to Paul as he continues the argument: “I say then, Hath God
cast away His people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the
seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away
His people which He foreknew. Wot ye not what the Scripture saith of
Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying, Lord,
they have killed Thy prophets, and digged down Thine altars; and I
am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God
unto him? I have reserved to Myself seven thousand men, who have
not bowed the knee to the image of Baal. Even so then at this present
time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.”
Israel had stumbled and fallen, but this did not make it impossible
for them to rise again. In answer to the question, “Have they stumbled
that they should fall?” the apostle replies: “God forbid: but rather
through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke
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them to jealousy. Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world,
and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much
more their fullness? For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am
the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office: if by any means I
may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save
some of them. For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of
the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?”
It was God’s purpose that His grace should be revealed among
the Gentiles as well as among the Israelites. This had been plainly
outlined in Old Testament prophecies. The apostle uses some of these
prophecies in his argument. “Hath not the potter power over the clay,”
he inquires, “of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and
another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to show His wrath, and
to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the
vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that He might make known
the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore
prepared unto glory, even us, whom He hath called, not of the Jews
only, but also of the Gentiles? As He saith also in Osee, I will call
them My people, which were not My people; and her beloved, which
was not beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it