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makes it abundantly clear that Israel will be preserved as a nation for ever under the
terms of the New Covenant of grace (Jer. 31: 31-37). God says:
"If those ordinances (the sun by day and the moon and stars by night) depart from
before Me, said the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation before
Me for ever. Thus said the Lord; if heaven above can be measured and the foundations
of the earth search out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they
have done, saith the Lord" (Jer. 31: 36, 37).
Israel then represent the olive tree of Rom. 11: and the branches that were broken off
were the unbelieving among Israel. The remaining branches were the faithful elect
remnant, and when the unbelieving Israel had been "broken off" the believing Gentile
had been "grafted in", although Paul describes this as "contrary to nature" for normally,
in grafting, the choice is grafted on to the wild and not vice versa. There are critics who
say that Paul's knowledge of gardening was minimal but Paul had a contemporary,
Columella, who wrote that when an olive tree ceases to bear well, a wild olive slip
grafted in gives new vigour to the tree (Columella, De re rustica, v.9). So perhaps he
was not so ignorant as these critics think. Sir William Ramsay states that it was
customary in Palestine 60 years ago to re-invigorate an olive tree which was ceasing to
bear fruit, by grafting it with a shoot of the wild olive, "so that the sap of the tree
ennobles this wild shoot, and the tree now again begins to bear fruit" (Pauline and Other
Studies, p.223). But what does the Apostle Paul mean by stating this was "contrary to
nature"?
We must remember that it was God's purpose that the Gentile should be blessed
through Israel, and not the other way round. This is clear in the first great promise to
Abraham, "in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed" (Gen. 12: 3). But when
we reach the period covered by the Acts of the Apostles, through Israel's repeated
failures and disobedience, this abnormal condition of things caused God to reverse the
process and bless the Gentile "before the time" as it were, and so seek to stimulate the
nation that was so rapidly declining into apostasy and darkness.
"The root and fatness of the olive tree" belonged to Israel and if Israel had repented
there would have been no need for Gentile grafting, but the nation could have gone on to
accomplish what had always been God's will for them and take the knowledge of
Himself to the ends of the earth. Gentile blessing would have followed the repentance of
Israel and not been a human factor in its accomplishment.
What does the "root and fatness of the olive tree" represent? It cannot be just
salvation or justification by faith for, as we have seen, no one is justified by his works or
by being joined with another nation, and cannot be "cut off" from this; for Rom. 8:
stresses that such separation is impossible (Rom. 8: 35-39). Paul has already described
in detail what the "root and fatness of the olive tree" represents. This he gives at the
opening of this section of the epistle in chapter 9: 3-5, listing the tremendous national
blessings that God had bestowed on Israel in His plan for the establishment of His
kingdom on earth. It gave them a unique position over the nations, so much so that
Psalm 147: 20 asserts that God had not dealt so with any nation in bestowing on them
such privileges and blessings relating to adoption (the position of the heir), the glory of