GOD’S BLINDING OF ISRAEL

ROMANS 11:7–10

What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened

(Romans 11:7)

Paul has been discussing God’s remnant, and here he makes the point that it was only the elect who truly heard God’s Word and obeyed it. The rest, he says, were hardened. He quotes Deuteronomy 29:4 and Isaiah 29:10, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes so that they could not see and ears so that they could not hear, to this very day” (Romans 11:8).

Every time we hear the Word of God and refuse to respond, something happens to our hearing. A kind of deafness sets in, and we become progressively unable to hear it at all. Every time we stiff-arm the truth, we build up calcium on our hearts and they grow harder and harder. This is the ability of fallen humanity to escape the truth of God’s Word. This frightens me, not only because it describes the pagan, but also because it is true of believers. When we are converted and God gives us ears to hear and hearts to embrace, the problem of deafness is still not eliminated. It is something we struggle with all our lives. As Christians, we have to cultivate a keen sense of hearing, so that we don’t just tune out the things we don’t want to hear.

The Punishment Fits the Crime

Verse 8 says that it is God who makes Israel deaf. We have to remember that this deafness is visited on them because they had previously refused to hear. It is a judgment in kind. God says, “You don’t want to see Me? All right, I’ll make you spiritually blind. You don’t want to hear Me? All right, I’ll make you spiritually deaf.” In this way, God judges them by giving them what they want.

In verse 9, Paul quotes Psalm 69:22, “May their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them.” We see in this that it was precisely the religious observances of the Jews (their “table”) that God used against them. They had perverted His feasts, so He used these warped feasts to reinforce them in their blindness.

CORAM DEO

It is a frightening thing to realize that even elements of our worship can become a way of blocking out God’s Word. Do not neglect your worship of God. Today would be a good day to evaluate the meaningfulness of yesterday’s worship. What can you do this week to further enhance your worship experience?

For further study: Matthew 13:10–17; John 9:35–41; Ephesians 1:18–21

tuesday

september