Today we’re going to focus on the first few words from Romans 11 “I ask then, has God rejected his people? By no means!”
The word reject struck me as the most intense and vigorous word in this reading, I will be hovering around that word quite a bit.
In Greek it is Aposato – to thrust away, to push back, to push off, to reject.
When the question comes “did God reject his people?” It seems there is an understanding there that perhaps he should have, but he didn’t. Perhaps rejection was deserved, but it didn’t come. While at the same time, the emphatic “By no means” stands to say, are you crazy? God is God, he is not a God of rejection. He is a God who welcomes, a God who accepts, a God who pardons.
Rejection, as I see it, is something that we tend to fear from our fellow human beings. We fear that our applications to grad school or a new job will be rejected. We fear that a paper we’ve written will be rejected and given back to us for more work. We fear our spouses and significant others will reject us for our callous, selfish behavior.
Anyone who has ever played basketball or volleyball can tell that being blocked or “rejected” is one of the worst feelings in any sport. It is being denied something that you thought was a sure bet. Something you were confident in, something perhaps that had worked before, but now has failed utterly and completely. Rejection is active. A person needs to go out of their way to reject something. A center in basketball in order to reject another player, must make great effort and have precise timing to successfully reject an opposing player.
However, very often we tend not to so much fear of God rejecting us, rather we fear the possibility of him forsaking us. We know we’re not capable of making it on our own and we need God, that is why it is so comforting that he tells us that he will never leave us, nor forsake us.
Forsaking something is passive. All one has to do is nothing. When aid is asked for it is not given. It is turning away from someone when they are most in need of help.
The text today deals with rejection, not forsaking, so for an example of Rejection today, we turn to a man who is known throughout the world as a rejecter. A man who can refuse any one at any time for any reason he chooses. Of course I’m talking about the Soup Nazi.
Clip…
3:27-4:19 – George and Jerry
7:43-8:50 – George and Elaine
The Soup Nazi accepts and rejects his customers based on how well they follow his ordering procedure. When you walk in, move immediately to the right, step to the counter, state the soup you want loudly and clearly, put the money on the counter, move to the left, receive, leave, no compliments, no questions, no other words.
Sound like God’s Law to anyone else? A set of rules that you must follow perfectly to attain your goal. In the case of the Soup Nazi, this is a mulligatawny, crab bisque or jambalaya, in the case of God it is heaven. Somehow people managed to actually get soup from time to time from the Soup Nazi. In the case of God’s Law, none of us are so fortunate and how terrifying when the stakes are so much higher than soup, even if it is the best soup in the world. We fail on a daily basis to keep God’s Law and deserve to be rejected by him for such errors, but God sends his only Son Jesus Christ into the world, to keep that Law that we so miserably fail to keep. Moreover, Jesus Christ offers himself up to be rejected by us undeservedly forsaken in our place, as he cries out to his Father from the cross, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
The people of earth rejected Jesus. We did not believe he was God and actively rejected him so aggressively that we killed him. And God stood by doing nothing to stop us from rejecting Jesus and he forsook his only Son.
How tragic that they only person of earth who deserved to be accepted by humankind was rejected and the same person, being the only one who deserved to be saved from death by God is the only one truly forsaken.
Indeed since Christ was forsaken by God, we no longer are under that sentence of being forsaken. Christ took that punishment of being forsaken away from us, on the cross and now when we face death, we know that it is not a permanent death, but rather a death that leads to the resurrection through our Savior Jesus.
