25 For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
25 For
The “for” here explains verse 24. The mystery of God now revealed shows that God only temporarily set aside Israel as a nation. This was for the purpose that Jews and Gentiles would be incorporated into the church.
I do not desire,
Paul provided a motivation for Gentile believers to understand what God has done and will do with the nation Israel. If Gentiles understood this, they would not be proud.
brethren,
Paul might have been primarily addressing Gentile believers but might also have been including Jewish believers in Rome. All are in the bonds of Christ together.
that you should be ignorant of this mystery,
The idea of Israel’s corporate stumbling for a time is a “mystery.” Why God would allow this and then restore her as a nation at some future point is difficult to understand.
A “mystery” in the biblical usage is nothing spooky. The word is not something we cannot comprehend. It is not mysterious but a truth not hitherto revealed or known. A “mystery,” then, is something previously unknown but now presently known. In this case the mystery is the union of Jews and Gentiles into the body of Christ called the church. God gave this special revelation to the apostle Paul.
Eph 3:9, and to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ;
Co 1:26, the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints.
The “mystery” involved not only putting Israel aside but also demonstrating God’s grace to the Gentiles. This is a new dimension of God’s manifesting His glory in time.
The focus of the mystery in this verse is that Israel will be delivered as a nation after the time of Gentile salvation. Some Gentiles believed that there was no future for the nation Israel. They thought that the entire future of God’s people had to do with Gentiles. This passage refutes that idea.
lest you should be wise in your own opinion,
Paul’s readers were Gentile believers in Rome as well as Jews. He particularly wanted his Gentile readers to not be haughty about what would happen to the nation Israel during the times of the Gentiles.
that blindness [literally hardening] in part has happened to Israel
The nation of Israel’s hardening was only “in part.” God did not fully reject Israel because some believed in Jesus the Messiah when He came. We call these Jews the “remnant.”
The word “blindness” means hardening, insensibility, or obstinacy. This is a different word than used for Pharaoh’s hardening (9:18). It is also different from the word “stubbornness” (2:5). The word in this phrase refers to dullness. Continued rejection of the Word of God leads to hardening of the heart toward God.
PRINCIPLE:
Continued hardening of our hearts toward the Word will lead us to a state of negativity to God.
APPLICATION:
The more a believer goes negative toward what God reveals in His Word, the more negative he will be to God Himself. This happened to Israel. God revealed the Messiah to them, but they have been out of phase with God for two thousand years.
, good luck and left to monitor from above To anceint humans, maybe they felt like they had done something wrong and had to take the blame for be kicked out of their home And we now have the beginnings for Genesis. People were created, they were relocated, and as most humans do, they blamed themselves for being abandoned on Earth Maybe the story of surviving in the whale was just a way of saying no matter what he did to avoid doing what he was supposed to, he ended up having to do it anyways.. How many times have we felt swallowed by a whale in life and had no choice but to do what we’ve sworn we’d never do? I swore I’d never do public speaking I now teach in a bachelors program part time and in person LOL.So many people take the bible literal. Yes, many of you are right, it is written by humans by human influence. Divinely inspired or not, it contains anectdotal and metaphorical ways of life. I asked a Catholic sister once Do you think Job ever existed? Her response was: I don’t know. Does it matter? In all reality does it matter that the stories happened exactly, word for word as stated? Some things maybe it does, the story of Christ matters significantly. However, even there I had a baptist minister tell me, hey, each of the gospels was written from a different point of view.Each person notices different things that the other doesn’t notice or pick up on at all. Yes, it could be contradiction, at the same time, it could be simply how they perceived things based on their point of view. Maybe Noah’s ark was a small merchant boat, that survived a large overland flood in a small remote area of Turkey. Remembering these people don’t know how big the whole world is Mayb they meant, their bubble of the world was flooded My bubble of Fargo is pretty small. I can’t possibly perceive things across the globe Maybe Noah’s statement of the whole world was more of the few hundred miles I travel annually to sell my goods flooded. We want concrete facts. And I hate to say this, but, there’s a saying The victorious are the writers and creators of history. How many documents from fallen civilizations do we have? We can’t even determine what happened to civilizations that just seemingly vanished Atlantians (if they existed), Aztecs, Incas, etc. History is cruel, and forgetful of those absorbed by other societies and cultures. We have little facts about much of our world Science can prove very little about much of our existence. Heck we don’t even know what half our brains are used for or do We’re still uncovering our own genetics Why do we demand such scientific fact from a 2000 year old document, when, we can’t even cure the common cold? If we applied our standards for the bible to live up to, to our scientists, our research endeavors, and our societies, we’d have a much better world! For now we have to accept that much of life, our world, and the bible is uncertain, unprovable, and maybe even, unknowable If someone can scientifically prove to me exactly what is at the edge of the universe, or how do we know where the universe ends? Or is there an end to the universe? And that there is nothing out there in the entire universe showing affection to Humanity. Maybe we’re just God’s pets, but, I’d rather be his pet than an animal that he shoos away because we keep biting him.
Ricky, your writing rambles through many subjects that could be easily answered. You need to study, for example, the doctrine of inspiration of Scripture. You can do that by studying the book General Introduction to the Bible by Geisler and Nix. Read the section that deals with Inspiration. If you are serious about what you say, that section will answer many of your questions.
Secondly, your agnosticism about truth can be answered by reading my book Certainty, a Place to Stand. This book deals with the subject of epistemology.
Knowing much about the anti-Christ by now, how many ways is the world being prepped for his arrival?