Is God Through with the Jews?

By Pastor Justin Cooper  |  Gospel Light Baptist Church  |  Israel Series, Part 2  |  Romans 11

Something is happening in the broader culture — and inside the church — that needs a direct, biblical response.

Anti-Semitic rhetoric is no longer confined to the radical fringes of the internet. It has moved into mainstream platforms, onto the shows and podcasts that millions of conservatives listen to daily, and into the language of commentators and politicians that many Bible-believing Christians follow and trust. And a generation of young people who are loosely connected to the church — hit and miss on Sunday morning, rarely in Sunday school, never on Sunday night — is building its theology on what it hears from these voices.

The result is predictable, and it is dangerous.

"Bad doctrine leads to bad behavior. Bad eschatology leads to anti-Semitism."

What we believe about prophecy shapes how we treat people. And when Christians absorb a theology that has quietly written Israel out of God's future, the result isn't just theological error — it's an open door to contempt for a people God has never stopped loving.

So the question has to be asked and answered from Scripture: Is God through with the Jews?

Two words. God forbid. Paul doesn't deliberate. He doesn't offer a nuanced "it's complicated." He shuts the question down before it can gain any theological traction — and then he spends the rest of Romans 11 explaining why.

The Covenant That Rests on God Alone

To understand why God has not cast away Israel, you have to go back to Genesis 15 and watch one of the most significant scenes in all of Scripture.

Abraham comes to God with a question: How do I know you'll keep your word? God tells him to gather animals — a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, a pigeon — and divide them. Abraham cuts them in half and lays the pieces across from each other. In the ancient world, this was how covenants were made. Two parties would walk through the divided animals together, and the act meant: if either of us breaks this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to us. Both parties. Both accountable. The covenant held as long as both held.

But before anything else happened, God put Abraham into a deep sleep.

"God put Abraham to sleep so that none of this depends on Abraham. None of it. God walks through those cut pieces on his own. And he's saying, 'This covenant depends upon my word and my faithfulness and me alone.'"

Abraham never walked through. The smoking furnace and burning lamp — representing God himself — passed between the pieces while Abraham lay unconscious on the ground. God signed this covenant alone. Which means the covenant's endurance rests entirely on his faithfulness — not Abraham's, not Israel's, and not ours.

And that is why Israel's repeated failures never voided the contract. They went astray. They rebelled. They were judged and sent into captivity. They crucified their own Messiah and cried out for his blood to be on them and their children. And through all of it — God never forsook his wife. He chastised. He judged. He allowed consequences. But he never cast them away. Because the covenant never depended on them.

Blindness with a Timer on It

So what happened? Why do the Jewish people, as a whole, not recognize Jesus as the Messiah? Why did the nation that walked with their king, heard him speak, witnessed his miracles, and watched him fulfill their own prophetic Scripture reject him?

Romans 11:25 gives the answer plainly: blindness in part has happened to Israel. And it happened progressively. Every time the Pharisees called Jesus Beelzebub, every time they said he cast out demons by the devil, every time they refused to see what was standing in front of them — the blindness deepened. They rejected their Messiah not because they couldn't see, but because they refused to. They wanted a king who would topple Caesar and establish a throne, not a meek carpenter's son born of a virgin in a manger. And so the stone the builders rejected became a stumbling block, and spiritual blindness set in over the nation.

"God didn't turn away from the Jew. The Jews turned away from their God."

But here is the crucial word in Romans 11:25 that changes everything: until. Blindness has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. There is a timer on this blindness. It has a beginning and an end. Which means what we are living in right now — the church age, this dispensation of grace — is a parenthesis in God's prophetic program.

Daniel foresaw it — 70 weeks of years, 490 years total, from the rebuilding of Jerusalem to the crowning of the King. The timeline runs with precision to Palm Sunday, when Christ rode into Jerusalem. But then it paused. We are in the 69th week. There is one more seven-year period to come. And it will not resume until the church age ends.

Grafted In — Not a Replacement

That's us. Before the gospel came to us, we were aliens. Strangers from the covenants. Without hope. Without God. We didn't build this covenant, this Bible, this promise. We were wild branches — and God grafted us onto an olive tree that was already standing.

Which is exactly why Paul's warning to the Romans carries such weight. When you see the natural branches broken off, do not boast. You are not the root. The root bears you. You stand by faith — not by merit, not by ethnicity, not by theological clarity. By grace. And a branch that forgets it was grafted in has lost something essential about what grace actually means.

"I have a Jewish Bible and a Jewish Savior, and I get a Jewish eternity. The church is not plan B."

We have not superseded Israel. We have not inherited their covenant promises as though they were transferred to us when they failed. We are the spiritual seed of Abraham by faith — heirs of an inheritance that is incorruptible and laid up in heaven. But we are not Israel. The church is a body, a house, a temple, a pillar and ground of truth. But it is not a kingdom. And Israel's kingdom promises — the land, the throne, the physical reign of the Messiah — remain on God's calendar, waiting for a day that is coming.

What Happens Next

The church is not waiting for a kingdom. The church is waiting for Christ.

Right now, God is calling out a people for his name from every kindred, nation, tongue, and tribe. The last Gentile to be saved in this church age has not yet believed. But when they do — when that final person bows their head in faith, trusts the gospel, and is born again — the trumpet will sound, the clouds will roll back, the dead in Christ will rise, and the church will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. The church is not appointed to wrath. We are waiting on the Rapture.

And then God's prophetic clock resumes for Israel. The Tribulation period — those final seven years of Daniel's vision — will come. It will be the most difficult time in human history. But through it, like silver refined in fire, God will purify his people. One day, Israel will look on him whom they pierced. They will recognize their Messiah. They will be born again as a nation, saved by grace through faith, just as every Gentile believer before them.

God has set them aside. He has not cast them away.