How amazingly different Paul’s method of “provoking the Jews to jealousy” (Rom 11:11), from that pursued by many Jewish mission workers today! From them the Jew must have a “special” place as a Jew. In some quarters they are even organizing “Messianic assemblies” (the Lord Jesus will not be returning as the Messiah again—NC).
All this, we cannot but feel, is kowtowing to Jewish flesh, and hinders their salvation. Jews now are common sinners, who have for the present been set aside nationally (but will bring them back as always—NC), and must come to rely, as individual sinners, hopelessly guilty and helpless, upon the shed Blood of Christ, and upon Him risen from the dead. It is an awful thing to make present day “Jewish” claims, when God says Jews are, during this present dispensation, no different from Gentiles, before Him: but are just sinners!
There are those who insist that the Jew has a special place right through this dispensation; that he must always be “first,” that there is a difference, although Goad says plainly in Romans 3 that there is no difference as to the Lordship of Christ and the availability of salvation to the “whosevers,” Jew or Gentile. If Paul were among us today, he would abhor and decry the special, esoteric methods of approach to the Jew in vogue in some pretentious quarters today. Become all things” (1Co 9:22) to the Jew, to win him, certainly. Paul did. But tell him the truth that he is just a whosoever.
What the poor, Jewish exiles need this hour is a Paul to go right in among them with a “whosoever” message for sinners, “provoking them to jealousy” (Rom 11:11) by boasting in a Savior whom their nation has lost—a nation to whom God is not now offering a Messiah, but instead salvation, as common “whosoever” no—distinction people, ordinary guilty lost sinners. In Acts 28 God through Paul officially closed the door to the national offer of the Gospel to the Jews; therefor to treat the Jew as having a special place with God, is to deny Scripture.
In Acts 28:25, 28 Paul officially shuts the door to national Israel: “Well spoke the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers . . . Be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it” (Rom 2:14, 15).
Since this awful use of Isaiah 6, the Gospel has no Jewish bounds or bonds whatever, and it is presumption and danger now, to give the Jews any other place than that of common sinners! “No distinction between Jew and Greek,” says God (Rom 10:12). Those who preach thus have God’s blessing. Those that would give any special place whatever to Jews, since that day, do so contrary to the Gospel; and, we fear, for private advantage.
Tell Jews the truth! Their Messiah was offered to their nation, and rejected. God is not offering a Messiah to Israel now, but has Himself rejected them: all except a “remnant,” who leave Jewish earthly hopes, break down into sinners only, and receive a sinners Savior—not a Jewish one! Then they become “partakers of the heavenly calling” (Heb 3:1).
—Wm R Newell (1868-1956)
MJS daily devotional excerpt for December 16
“Self-disappointment is a very different thing from self-judgment. Indeed, if there were true self-judgment there would never have to be self-disappointment. If in honesty and sobriety of heart I have judged ‘that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing,’ I shall certainly not expect anything from myself, and it has been well said that where there is no expectation there can be no disappointment.
“But I feel sure that many young believers, and I dare say some old ones too, are very familiar with the wretched and depressing experience of self-disappointment. They have made many fresh starts; they have often been stirred up, and have made up their minds to be more for Christ; they have thought, ‘I shall do better now; I am more earnest about it than I was before’; but it has all ended in disappointment.
“They have no idea that they are trying to improve themselves; they would repudiate such a thought; they suppose that they know better than to look for good in themselves. And yet their disappointment is the plain proof that, in spite of all their knowledge of Scripture, they have expected to make themselves different, for they are disappointed because they have not succeeded in doing so.”
Charles Andrew Coates (1862-1945)
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