Firestarters Devotional  |  Gospel Light Baptist Church

Devotional — Day 2

A Wild Branch — and What That Means

There is a particular kind of pride that religious people are especially prone to — the kind that doesn't look like pride at all. It looks like conviction. It looks like clarity. It looks like finally seeing something everyone else has missed.

It is the pride of the branch that forgot it was grafted in.

Paul saw it coming in the Roman church. Gentile believers were watching Israel stumble, watching the natural branches be broken off, watching God's covenanted people go through a season of blindness — and somewhere in the watching, smugness was beginning to creep in. A sense that the Gentiles had been right all along. That maybe God was finished with the Jews after all.

Paul's response is worth sitting with for a long time.

The image Paul uses is an olive tree. Israel is the cultivated olive tree — the natural branches. And we, Gentile believers, are a wild olive branch that has been grafted in. Not planted there from the beginning. Not the original stock. Grafted in — joined to something that already existed, partaking of a root and a richness that was not ours.

Which means the appropriate posture for every Gentile Christian is not superiority. It's astonishment. It's gratitude. It's the quiet awe of someone who wandered into a banquet that wasn't prepared for them, sat down at a table that had their name on it only by grace, and found that the host was overjoyed they came.

"I have a Jewish Bible and a Jewish Savior, and I get a Jewish eternity. I am a wild branch grafted in. I entered into something that I had no business being part of."
— Pastor Justin Cooper

There's a kind of anti-Semitism that calls itself discernment. It reads one verse out of context, dismisses the weight of God's covenantal history, and declares that the church has superseded Israel and inherited every promise God made to Abraham. But that is not what the Bible says. The church is not Israel. We did not replace Israel. We were grafted into a covenant we had no part in building — and we are the richer for it.

And Israel? Set aside, yes. Cast away, no. There is a time on Israel's blindness. Romans 11:25 is explicit: blindness has happened in part to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. The day is coming when the last person in this church age is saved, and the trumpet sounds, and the church is caught up to meet the Lord. And then God's prophetic clock with Israel resumes. They will look on him whom they pierced. They will be born again as a nation. They will be saved through the Tribulation — saved by grace, through faith, just like every Gentile who ever believed the gospel.

"The church is not looking for a kingdom. The church is looking for Christ."
— Pastor Justin Cooper

That is our blessed hope. Not a political outcome. Not the right candidate in office. Not the right nation winning. A Person. The glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ — who is coming for his bride, who could come at any moment, and for whom we are watching like a wild branch that knows it doesn't deserve to be on this tree at all, and is grateful every single day that it is.

A Next Step for Today

Examine what you've been consuming. Whose voice has been shaping your view of Israel, of prophecy, of the end times? If the honest answer is podcasters, political commentators, or social media personalities — commit today to spending time in Romans 9–11 this week. Read it through in one sitting. Let the Scripture speak before any other voice does. And ask God to give you his posture toward his people: grace, not contempt; humility, not boasting; watchfulness, not complacency.

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Gospel Light Baptist Church  |  Walkertown, NC

Pastor Justin Cooper  |  glbcs.org

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