Why the Church Needs Jewish People: Staff Teaching with Nic Lesmeister

*This transcript was generated by AI, and may contain transcription errors. Please refer to the video, or contact us with any questions or discrepancies.*

What does David say when he goes out to kill Goliath? He says, Goliath. Basically you defame the name of the armies of the living God, and today the world will know that there is a God in Israel. When I take you down, David understood that this isn’t just about Israel having this great status of chosenness with the Jewish people. It’s that what comes with that is a commandment that God gave to Abraham to be a blessing to the nations. So David understood as a servant king, my job here is to take out Goliath so that every other nation knows there’s only one God and they need to come into relationship with him. They don’t become us, the tribes of Israel, but they put their faith and trust in the God of Israel.
Lemme tell you one thing that is so amazing about being connected to the Jewish world, it’s this, that this is a Bible it. And if you’re Gentile like me, largely the first real instance where you and I come onto the scene in this book in a meaningful way where we’re kind of like actors in the story is I’m actually going to specifically turn to it. There’s no large concordance in the back here. It’s right here in Acts 10. There’s Gentiles in and out of the Hebrew scriptures in the TaNaK, the Old Testament. But this is where we come in, where there’s a pivot that happens in God’s promises and Peter has this vision, right? And on Simon, the Tanner’s house on a port city in Israel, and a lot of people misinterpret this and some of what we want to help you with in this cohort is to actually re-understand scripture in the way that it was actually originally meant that there’s been sort of some layering over of scripture through some false understanding.
And a lot of that has to do with a disconnection between the Christian Church and the Jewish world. That wasn’t God’s design. And so what we do is we end up with this bunch of the Bible. This is kind of where the Gentiles come on the scene. So you can see how much of this book is about us. Now, I’m not saying that to minimize us, actually, I’m actually saying that to say, guys, look at what has been given to us. God gifted all this to us. We didn’t earn it, we didn’t do anything about it. He literally said, this wasn’t your story and I added you into it, but I still have a story to a specific group of people. And so for us as Gentiles, and this is what we’re going to drive to, is having a spirit of humility and saying, wow, God, I’m added into something that’s so rich.
It’s ancient, it’s durable, it has outlived historical events. It’s outlived literal acts of God. I mean, when you read the pages of scripture, it’s God making a promise early on in the book and then literally saying, I will be faithfully zealous to watch over these promises all the way until the end of the book. So I think about the last three months that we’ve all been through, and for me, this is just me personally when everything was so unclear, and I don’t know if you guys felt like this, but there were times where I would just either throughout the day or wake up in the morning and I’m like, this table is a table. This is really here, or this is a real wall because things happen, things shake in our world and we can just start to feel like what is real? This is what I thought was real, and all of a sudden now it’s changed what is real.
And I just keep coming back to the fact that one, the Bible’s real. Number two, the promises that God makes in this book are real, which means that there’s a place that God planted, a people that can be visited, that can be touched, that can be smelled, that can be felt, and it’s Israel. There’s a place that God put a people with a purpose and all of us who aren’t Jewish, we’ve been invited into walk with God into that. And so as I’ve just been looking at all these things changing here at Gateway and in the kingdom of God at large and in the world, it’s like the world is a stable place. I mean, you guys, I kept telling people with stuff’s going crazy here, just stick your head out the door. I mean, there’s a lot going on out there too, okay? It’s not like be comforted. This isn’t the only place where things are crazy right now and that makes me feel better sometimes, right? I’m like, okay, I’m not crazy. All of us are crazy.
So I just hope my legitimate prayer for all of us is I was just driving here, I was listening to this song about just counting up my blessings. And I have been so blessed Tab and I have been so blessed. Our team has been so blessed to be connected to the Jewish world because it’s ancient, it’s present and its future and it’s something you can hold onto with certainty that God is going to perform what his word says. So part of what we want to do in this cohort is just help you begin to piece together some things that I think have been unnaturally broken apart. And that’s what I kind of want to talk about today. Just as we sort of set the big narrative for what is a church and Jewish relations cohort or whatever. Or maybe you came for the free pizza, maybe you came because you love Israel, maybe because you’re like, I just want to learn more about the Bible.
We just want to help you guys with all of that. We are not experts. We know people that are and we cheat off of them all the time and we listen to what they say and we say, we’re just going to take that like I do with my wife, and I’m going to manipulate it a little bit in a good way and just say it differently. And so anything that we’re telling you, it’s really been because this church and a lot of people at this church have walked faithfully with Jewish believers in Jesus for decades. And we can tell the story of how all this Jewish value a priority for Israel to the Jew first. All this came about at some point, but at every point along the way there was a significant interaction, a significant revelation, a significant event. Not every part of Gateway’s history, but as it relates to Israel with a Messianic Jewish leader, with a person in the Jewish world that opened our eyes to something that maybe we hadn’t seen before.
And as I’m going to show you today from scripture, this I believe is truly the calling of the church. The church is the called out ones, the ones who have said, we’re coming out of the world and we’re going into a new world, a world that exists in this world but not in this world. And it’s a fellowship of Jews and Gentiles and we’re united around the common purpose of a couple of things. One, that God is a faithful God, that he is the one and true only God hero, Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one that we’re uniting around that and then we’re uniting around the fact that too, he sent us a messiah and a savior and a king named Jesus. And Jesus added us as gentiles into this fellowship of his covenantal promises. So that’s ultimately what we’re hoping to give to you, and we’re hoping to make it really relevant so that it answers some actual practical questions.
Because when we started the Gateway Center for Israel in 2020, I think some of the experience of our team was that we would talk to our staff and everybody was amazing. They’re like, we love Israel. We’re to the Jew first. It kind of became this slogan because going way back before gateway, that was the revelation was that in Romans one 16, Paul says that gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. And every pastor with a pulse knows that verse, but for some reason they just conveniently overlooked the fact that it says to the Jew first and then to the Gentile.
A lot of people don’t know that that that’s even there, or they just kind of read over it. When you don’t know what to do sometimes with the scripture, you just cognitively skip over it. But then when you start to pull on that string what is to the Jew first, and then you begin to see, wow, Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles went to the synagogue in the Book of Acts nine times. In fact, the ending chapter of the book of Acts, acts 28, Paul’s literally arguing with Jewish people about Jesus. This is the most missional book in the whole Bible. Here’s Paul saying, listen, Jewish community, Jesus is the Messiah. And I’m telling you right now, if you don’t want to buy in on this, God’s going to offer it to the Gentiles. It’s like his last effort saying, this is our thing, please, let’s take a hold of it before he gives it away.
So what is to the Jew first? So we started asking people and they were like, we love Israel. And we were like, yeah, but what does that mean? And they’re like, it means we love Israel, man. Why are you asking me these questions go on, I’m like production. Why are you asking me these things? So for us, it wasn’t a judgment thing. It was literally just saying, yeah, we want to help you understand that because all of us have been like the heart is there, but the head is catching up. And so really this cohort was formed because we realized that sure, we can have a Jewish team at Gateway. We’ve got Pastor Greg and Mel and many, many other people that do amazing things. But the reality is that every single one of you is probably going to interact with collectively more Jewish people on a weekly basis than us.
So for us, we want to help you understand what we believe at this church about this so that you can be someone that relates to the Jewish community in a way that is helpful for them to see who God is clearly and to see ultimately in that who Jesus is. So that’s the heart of this cohort is we just want to give you guys some real practical tools. So today I want to just sort of talk about the meta narrative of scripture, which is Jews and Gentiles, and a lot of people don’t really realize it, but this book, I already pointed it out, this is where we come into the picture. I mean, this really is a book about Jews and gentiles and how they relate to each other. At the end of the day, this is the fundamental distinction of scripture. In the Bible, there are men and women, and there are Jews and Gentiles, and yes, there are sinners and saints and so forth, but on an ethnic identity level, the two main identities in the Bible are men and women and Jews and Gentiles or Israel in the nations.
And you see it throughout all of scripture. This is why when we get to Revelation, you’re reading about this Jewish king named Jesus coming back to Jerusalem, a Jewish city to do Jewish things. Most of us sort of universalize all that, and we allegorize it. They’re like, well, Jerusalem is probably, I don’t know, Kansas City, I don’t know. But that’s not the reality. And it ties into what we see God doing in our life with the nation state of Israel as well. So this is a book about Jews and Gentiles. So then if it is, and we’re mostly Gentile, then how do we relate to Jewish people? And the question I want to help you answer today is why do we need Israel? Why does the Christian Church, why does gateway church, why do Gentiles need Jewish people? Because really what we’ve been told is that we’re kind of the new thing that God did after Jesus came that Jewish people are kind of the old thing.
God got wiser and the Jewish people rejected him. And so God was like, I think I’m going to start something new. I’m going to call it the church. I’m going to bring Gentiles in. I’m going to give ’em all this Holy Spirit power. And I think for a lot of Christians, they really do think, why do I need any of this? Why do I need to care about Israel? Not the actual nation state, but the Jewish people collectively? So I want to help you answer that question because my proposition to you is we really need Israel, and Israel really needs us. They might not realize how much they need us, but they do need us. And we might not realize how much we need them, but they do need them. So I want to start in Genesis. This is the beginning of the book. First of all, we know looking at the Bible, right, Genesis one, God creates man and says, it’s not good for man to live alone.
So what’s in God’s heart, what’s in God’s heart is he wants to create a family on earth. He wants people to be in relationship with him. He wants a family. And what does he do with Adam and Eve? He tells ’em to be fruitful and multiply. Now, this is a scripture that you will see over and over and over again in the first 12 to 11 to 12 chapters in Genesis is be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. It’s really a command that God gave to Adam and Eve fill the earth. That’s what I want you to do. Be fruitful, be multiply, and fill the earth. And you see this repeated over and over in scripture. So Genesis one, and then sin falls into the world. So then in Genesis three, you kind of see what’s in God’s heart. He gives us this little glimmer.
The really academic word for this, for those of you from Tku, is the proto Evangelian. And it’s essentially God putting an anchor in time right after the fall in Genesis three 15 and say, look, there’s going to come from the woman in offspring and he’s going to strike the head of the serpent. And so it’s the first real messianic prophecy to say God has a plan that the enemy hasn’t thought of. The devil thought he was outwitting God. And God is like, I play 10 dimensional chess, bro, okay, you do not have anything on me, and I’ve got moves that you haven’t even thought of. So then what happens though is you see this command repeated. So we get to Genesis six. You guys know this, that then Noah comes on the scene and God decides to flood the earth. So it’s one of the sad scriptures verses in scripture, Genesis six, I think six, where he says, and the Lord God was regretted that he had made man.
And I just feel like, man, the heart of God, how would he have? I must if he felt like, like, Hey, be fruitful, multiply, be in my family, do the things that I’ve given you to do. And then five, six chapters in, he is like, what have I done? And the sadness he felt. But then Noah comes on the scene. We have this remnant of people that get into a boat. The first thing God tells Noah when he gets off the boat, be fruitful and multiply. This is what he tells him. So then he says it again in Genesis nine, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. So I think what we miss sometimes is that God always wanted the earth not to just be full of people, but to be full of a diversity of people. What’s really in God’s heart is to have people all over the earth, because think about this.
If God wants people all over the earth, just like we do today, you’re going to have people that have to live in rainforests. You’re going to have people that live in deserts. You’re going to have people that live in mountainous regions. You’re going to have people that live in furnaces that don’t have anything to do outside like Dallas and with lots of food. And it will shape who you become as a people. People will adapt to a tribal, familial ethnic way of living in those places. And I believe this is really part of God’s plan. He wanted people of every tribe, nation, and tongue to worship him in diversity, to be different, not the same. So we get to Genesis 11, and there’s some additional ways of thinking about what happens at the tall or Babel. A lot of people say, well, God sees everybody so powerful because uniting, so he crushes their plans.
If you really look closely at the text and some of the Hebrew words that are used, actually Moses uses some of these words later in the book of Deuteronomy. And what you start to see actually is a picture of forced uniformity. So we’ve got a city that has a high wall around it, and there’s a bunch of people that are building a tower. And you start to see there is an inflicted power struggle happening here. People are being kept in when God said, don’t keep the people in, let ’em be scattered. So you’ve got one group of people and minority that are enforcing a set of uniformity on another group of people. And I think when God looked at it, he said, this is not good. So what does he say to them when he comes down to deal with Babel? It says he scattered them all over the world because that was what was going on.
In fact, I think in Genesis 10 it talks about that all the sons of noise moved all over the world and lived, and then all of a sudden Genesis 11 happens and wait, now we’re in a walled city. Everybody’s congregating together. So Genesis 11 is kind of where the universal plan of God basically expires. So at first God’s like, I’m going to create man, and I’m going to have a universal relationship with all of them, all people over all the world. This is my family. I want them to fill the earth, and all nations, tribes and tongues are going to be in my family. And so what you see shifting in Genesis 12 is it says, and then there was a man named Abram. Now all of a sudden we go from Yes, Noah, but God says, you know what? Of all the families on the earth, I’m going to just pick a family.
I’m going to create a family, and I’m going to bring my name and myself through that family. And what does he tell Abraham? I’m going to bless you so that you can be a blessing to the nations. So God starts with Abraham, this Jewish family, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jacob being renamed Israel. As you all know, this is where the line of Israel and the Jewish people come from. So what’s in God’s heart is he says, I want to reach everybody. But the way I’ve realized I need to do that I’ve tried this universal sort of way, is through particular people in a particular family. So you start to see in scripture this same thing repeated. God reaches the universal through the particular, what does David say when he goes out to kill Goliath? He says, Goliath. Basically you defame the name of the armies of the living God, and today the world will know that there is a God in Israel.
When I take you down, David understood that this isn’t just about Israel having this great status of chosenness with the Jewish people. It’s that what comes with that is a commandment that God gave to Abraham to be a blessing to the nations. So David understood as a servant king, my job here is to take out Goliath so that every other nation knows there’s only one God and they need to come into relationship with him. They don’t become us, the tribes of Israel, but they put their faith and trust in the God of Israel. So you see this repeated all over the place. Actually, there’s a lot of instances in scripture, and what you start to see with God is that he’s not this just, I think in Christianity what happens is, and this really fast tracked when the church and Israel separated in the first century, when the gospel started going to the Jewish people like wildfire, at some point the Gentiles realized, they started to think, why do we need you guys anymore?
We’ve got Jesus in the Holy Spirit. We’re good. And there were literal decisions that were made along the way to not just believe that, but to enshrine it into Christian thinking, we don’t need the Jewish people anymore. We got Jesus, God’s done with you guys. You rejected Jesus. So why do we need you anymore? And we’ve been missing out on something. And really it’s this universalization of the scripture. So that’s a Greek worldview. In a Greek world, something is truer when it is more widely believed by more people. It’s called platonic universalism, which is that this is a table because you and I all agree on it’s a table that the sky is blue because we all believe that the sky is blue and the sky can be purple. What do we know? We’re bunch you humans, right? This is not a Hebraic worldview. A Hebraic worldview would say the sky is blue because God made the sky and God made the sky blue that God gets to choose whatever God wants.
And it’s not our job to rationalize how true that is or how logical it’s this is the world of the Jewish people. Even says to the Jewish people, I didn’t chose you because you’re the greatest and the best. I chose you. I love you, and it doesn’t make any sense. So some of what we come into with the Jewish people is a lot of us get this offense in our heart of like, oh, so you’re chosen. Sure aren’t acting like it. And I would present to you that almost every single person that God chose besides Jesus didn’t meet everybody’s expectations. Even Jesus didn’t meet everybody’s expectations doesn’t make him. I’m not saying he was sinful, I’m just saying that when God chose Isaac, guess what happened? Ismail didn’t like it. So God makes a covenant choice. It usually leads to controversy which ends in conflict.
You want to explain the Israel Palestinian conflict? That’s it right there. God chose a piece of land, he chose a group of people. There’s another group of people that were like, God didn’t choose you, and how dare God choose you? So there comes this controversy that ends in conflict. Same thing happens with Jacob and Esau, right? Jacob doesn’t act in a way that’s deserving of being chosen. In fact, he literally almost, he stealed it, but God chose him. And then he reiterates that in Malachi one, in Romans nine, Hey, Paul says, God chooses what he chooses. Who are we to tell the potter as clay what he’s doing? So this is a particular world. The Bible is a particular book. And the beautiful thing about it’s for us all is that God is a particular God. He loves each one of us with a particular love.
He doesn’t love us with a generic love. It is literally tailored to us. He has a particular plan for every single one of us. It’s not a universalized plan. And we’ve gotten this a little bit backwards where we kind of think God is loving because he’s universally loving. And I would present to you that God is actually loving and trustworthy because he is particularly loving. He loves particular people who didn’t earn his love, who don’t deserve his love, and he loves them in a particular way that is well fit for them. And for those of you that have been married or will get married, you’ll realize that this is the bedrock of a truly covenantal relationship. I love my mom, but if push comes to shove, I’m choosing my wife over my mom and a little bit of a marriage advice, please do that. Okay?
If you’re a man, don’t put yourself in that predicament, all right? You’ll learn the hard way or the easy way. Okay? I have a particular love for Tabitha. It means I’m committed to her and her alone. She gets the best of me and the most focused part of me, which means that I don’t get to give that away to anybody else. And this it was in God’s heart when he chose the Jewish people. I said, I have a particular love for Israel and this is what I want to do, but God’s kingdom doesn’t divide. It multiplies. That’s the beauty of us. Like I said, we believe in addition theology, we got added into these promises. It’s not that the traditional replacement theology is that God replaced Israel with us. That’s not how God works. His kingdom multiplies all the time, doesn’t divide. So this is some of what you see of this controversy with covenant choice, Abel over kain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob, over Esau, Moses over Pharaoh.
I mean, God could have just arrested Pharaoh’s heart, right? David oversaw, and Jesus, God chose Jesus. It got controversial and Jesus died for that. Now, Jesus put Jesus on the cross. We know that. But he came to save Israel. He says that very clearly. It says in Matthew 1 21 that when the angel announces his coming, he says to Mary, his name will be Yeshua, Joshua Yeshua. The Lord saves. And because he will save his people from their sins. And even Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 15, I did not come. I came from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I’m coming from my family guys. I want you to understand this is my primary mission. I want my family to come into relationship with God. And we get added into that. So it was controversial with Jesus. So there’s an element in our hearts here that we have to just kind of grapple with. Alright? I’m going to kind of draw this to a close here. If can, if you’ve got a Bible turn to Ephesians two. I want to kind of zero in on some of these things at the very end here.
Ephesians two, verse two. Paul just got done talking about in Ephesians two, this idea of one new man, and I don’t have time to go totally into that. There’ll probably be a topic in this cohort. It’s the idea of Jews and Gentiles being united in Jesus remaining distinct in their ethnic identities, that if you’re Jewish and you put your faith in Jesus, you remain Jewish, that if you’re Gentile and you put your faith in Jesus, you remain gentile. And that that’s God’s design, is that he wanted us to be mutually interdependent. Like Jews need gentiles and Gentiles need Jews. I don’t understand it. It’s just all over this. And so I position myself to say, God, just show me who you are, not what I want you to be, but who you really are. So in Ephesians two, Paul is kind of coming out of that.
And here’s what he says. I’m reading from, it’s called the Complete Jewish Bible. You can read it in your translation. It says, I assume that you’ve heard of the work God in His grace has given me to do in your benefit. And that is that it was by revelation that a secret plan was made down to me. Now, I’ve already written about it briefly, and if you read what I’ve written, you’ll grasp how I understand this secret plan concerning the Messiah. I think traditionally most of us look at that and we say the secret plan was Jesus, saving people by faith, by grace through faith. That’s what it says earlier in Rome, in Ephesians two, right? If you’re saved by faith, by grace through faith. So I want to point out like yes, what’s the secret plan? Let’s read, and you’ll see it in past generations, it was not made known to mankind.
The secret plan as the spirit is now revealing it to his emissaries or missionaries and prophets. Here it is that in union with the Messiah and through the good news, the gospel of grace through faith, the Gentiles were to be joint heirs, a joint body and joint sharers with the Jews in what God has promised. This is the secret plan that Paul is really understanding. He’s saying this has been a secret. It’s been revealed to me, and I’m watching it play out in real time. The secret plan was that all along God wanted to unite Israel with the nations through Jesus, by grace, through faith, so that we can be joint sharers, a joint body and joint heirs. Not that the church can replace Israel, we don’t need them, and we’re better now.
So I’m going to skip to Ephesians four 14. For this reason, Paul says, I fall on my knees for what reason? For the secret plan that he’s starting to really like, whoa, God, you’re pulling back the curtain. I fall to my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven on earth receives its character or name, goes back to what God wanting. Diversity. Every family on earth has a name. It has a character. Every tribal family, every ethnic family. I pray that from the treasures of his glory, he’ll empower you with inner strength by His spirit so that the Messiah may live in your hearts through your trusting. And I also pray that you will be rooted and founded in love so that you, with all God’s people who is Israel, will be given strength to grasp the breadth, length, height and depth of the Messiah love.
Yes. To know it even though it is beyond all knowing so that you will be filled with the fullness or Paloma of God. Now, I kind of alluded to this. We come on here. What is Paul praying here? He’s saying, guys, you didn’t live through any of this. We did. This is our family history. But by the spirit of God, he’s going to adopt you in and he is going to root you down. You don’t have to be a part of the family for 6,000 years. You can be a part of the family for six hours. And you are rooted and grounded and established just as much as we are through the power of the Holy Spirit. You don’t need to be Jewish, you don’t need to try to do Jewish things. You don’t need to try to claim that you’re part of the family history when you’re not through the power of the Holy Spirit.
He’s going to root you and ground you and fill you as adopted sons and daughters to have this covenantal family history. So I want to end with this knowing that Paul, I got to get my dates right. Paul writes Romans, I can’t remember if it was later than Ephesians or not, I think it was before Ephesians, in Romans 11. He says this, I asked then have they the Jewish people stumbled so as to fall. And he goes, absolutely not. This is the second time he says this in Romans 11, have they made by rejecting Jesus? Are they gone for good? No. On the contrary, by their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles. Why? To make Israel jealous. So for me, I think about my family members who maybe don’t know the Lord. And I think I read into this that Paul’s a part of the family of Israel and he is jealous for his family.
And I think what Paul started seeing happening with the Gentiles was he was like, man, I’ve got a partner now to reach my family from the outside in because I’m trying to go to them and they won’t listen to me. And some of you who have family members that are not walking with the Lord, you’ve had hard conversations and they’re like, listen dude, I’ve seen where the sausage is made with you and thanks, but no thanks. And it’s hard. And so I know I always pray, especially for one of my brothers, like Lord, since someone in his life that he respects that he honors and let them have the courage to tell him about you. And I think this is what Paul is saying. He’s saying, Gentiles, help me reach my family. I need you guys to relate to them in a way that makes them hungry for what we have together Jesus.
So that’s part of this whole cohort is we want to teach you guys how to relate to the Jewish people in a way that goes, what are you smoking? What do you have? This is good. I want it. And a lot of the ways the church relates to the Jewish people, it’s like they’re like, we don’t want whatever it is you’re smoking. Like stay away from us. We’re good. We’re Jewish. We don’t need all that stuff. So then he says, now, if they’re transgression, the Jewish people’s transgression brings riches to the world and their failure brings riches to the Gentiles. How much more were their fullness bring? It’s the same word to uses in Ephesians three, OMA, now I’m speaking to you, Gentiles, dah, dah, dah, dah. He goes, I might somehow make my own people jealous to save some of them for if their rejection brings reconciliation to the world, what will their acceptance mean?
But life from the dead, Paul’s realizing that once, as David mentioned this in Matthew 23, Jesus said, Jerusalem, you’re not going to see me again until you cry out to me. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Until you acknowledge that I am the anointed one and you want me to come back. He came one time, they rejected him and he said, you know what? I’m not going to come back until you want me to come back. You need to cry out for me. And that’s part of what’s neat about having the Jewish people back in the land and even what they’ve had to go through horrifically after October 7th is we’re starting to see something changing them where they’re like, all of our solutions don’t work. And it looks like God is pressing them through the trouble they’re going through into a place we have been as a church where we’re like, you know what, Lord?
Nothing works but you so come Lord Jesus. Come. And we believe that that’s actually happening. Now, last point. Romans 1125, this is what Paul says, brothers, he’s speaking to the Gentile Roman church. I don’t want you to be ignorant of this mystery. The whole thing about the fullness of the Gentiles, the fullness of Israel, so that you’ll not become conceited or arrogant. A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Now, a lot of people have looked at that quantitatively. What is the fullness of the Gentiles? Is it a number? How many Gentiles does it take to make God change his mind? Right? Sounds like a weird joke. This is the same word in Greek that Paul used previously in I think verse 13, and that he used also in Ephesians. There’s intentionality here, and it literally means it’s qualitative, that there’s a fullness to the Gentiles that has to happen before all Israel will be saved, is what it says in Romans 1126.
So I think part of our fullness is we have to begin to understand who God is and that he has a family, a covenantal family, and that we need them and they need us, and we want to work with God to reach his family because that’s the fullness of God’s family is Jews and Gentiles united together in Jesus. So he says, then as it is written, all his Israel will be saved. The deliverer will come from Southlake. Oh Zion. He’ll turn away Godlessness from Jacob Israel. And this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins. So he says there, don’t be ignorant and don’t be conceited or don’t be arrogant. This word conceited says the dictionary definition of it. I didn’t look it up in Greek. I thought I wrote it down here somewhere. I think it’s having an excessively favorable opinion of one’s abilities.
What is Paul saying to the Gentiles? Y’all are experiencing some revival. Do not get conceded. Don’t you think you can do this without them? Don’t overestimate your own abilities to bring about the redemption of the world. Israel’s mandate through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I’ve added you into it, but you cannot do it without them. And they can’t do it without you. And that’s why we want to help you guys understand this. So one, we take away the ignorance, just the naive and innocent lack of understanding. And then we put in a heart of love and compassion and understanding, and we remove the arrogance that the Christian Church has so long had against the Jewish people. We want to help you guys with that.