Accursed: “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Romans 9:3. Coming across this difficult verse, and hearing yet another poor exegesis of it, my mind wandered back to something I read about forty years ago, if I recall, in Jonathan Edwards, (though I no longer have his writings to confirm,) but yet, I distinctly remember in one place where he speaks of a believer’s absolute submission to God’s sovereignty, even if it should mean his own destruction. At the time, I remember thinking, “what? I’ve never heard of anything like this before, if this is what real piety looks like, then I’m finished!” Presumably it was just a way of saying that God’s glory should be prized above all else, even self-preservation. This certainly sounds like the very height of godliness, as if nothing could be more spiritual. Call it what you will, but it feels like the spiritual equivalent of volunteering for the gallows, just to make sure everyone knows how devoted and humble you are, and unless spoken in figurative or hypothetical sense it’s not real!
Whilst I truly enjoy reading the so-called puritans, and a few men like Edwards who attempted to follow in their wake, I think their spirituality, at least as they described it, isn’t above scrutiny. Ultimately, all such claims, and I’m thinking especially of the tendency to project a height of piety unobtainable by the ‘ordinary’ believer, must be weighed by the truth of Scripture and the test of lived reality, as life has a way of reminding us that we are but “dust and ashes.” Genesis 18:27. Mere words can make us appear very spiritual, but reality unmasks us as we truly are, sinful, weak, and utterly dependent upon Christ for everything. John 15:5.
Back then to the matter at hand, and to that staggering phrase in Romans 9:3, Paul’s declaration of being “accursed from Christ for his brethren’s sake.” What does such a statement mean, and how are we to understand it? I just read John Gill on that verse, as he has a large section in his commentary devoted to its exposition. After reading that, I’m more confused than ever! What in the world did he even just say? Gill’s long windedness drives me crazy! As best I can piece it together, he suggests that Paul’s words about being “accursed from Christ” are either hyperbolic or refer to something short of damnation, perhaps being cut off from the visible church, or even offering his life for Israel’s temporal good. In short, according to Gill, Paul is expressing deep love for his kinsmen according to the flesh, but not a literal desire to be eternally cut off from Christ. Okay, no wonder everybody’s so confused, we’re all too busy reading Gill, or more like trying to find our way out of his long paragraphs.
We know Paul’s words are no exaggeration when he says he bore “great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.” Romans 9:2. But who was the object of this grief? For whom, then, was Paul in such anguish of spirit? His words suggest a narrower focus than simply “every Israelite.” Whilst the apostle does indeed speak of his “kinsmen according to the flesh,” but the language he chooses indicates that his grief centers on a particular people within that larger body, and I would suggest, in the light of other scripture, that he is referring to the elect who had not yet been brought into the “fellowship” of the gospel. I John 1:3.
His sorrow was not a vague nationalistic sentiment, nor a romantic attachment to his heritage, but the deep anguish of one who understood that many of God’s elect were, for the present, still veiled in blindness, awaiting the hour when Christ Himself would open their eyes and bring them into His marvelous light. At first glance, it might appear too narrow to limit this to the elect, but consider the following. First, how he addresses them, “my brethren.” On the surface this might appear nothing more than a racial reference, Paul the Jew speaking of his Jewish brethren. But when Paul uses this word everywhere else, Romans 12:1, I Corinthians 15:1, Philippians 4:1, &c., the pattern is remarkably consistent. “Brethren” is his word for those who are in Christ, fellow believers, those joined to him in the fellowship of the gospel. To interpret this one occurrence differently, as though he were suddenly shifting its meaning to a merely racial category, stretches his language in a way that does not harmonize with the rest of scripture. It is far more consistent to see him speaking of the brethren who were elect, though not yet gathered in, rather than of the nation in a blanket sense.
Next, Paul uses the word “Israelites.” This term can apply broadly, both to the elect and to the reprobate. As he will clarify in verse 6, “not all Israel are of Israel.” So I believe there is some warrant to understand that when Paul calls them “Israelites,” he is not simply applying the name to all who descended from Jacob. Rather, his eye is fixed on those within that body who belong to the true Israel by promise, the elect, his kinsmen according to the flesh, yet distinguished by God’s eternal choice. In using this name, he is not speaking of the nation indiscriminately, but pointing to Israel as defined by God’s promise, the chosen remnant hidden among his brethren. These are the ones for whom his heart was most burdened, those elect according to promise, his true brethren in the spirit, for whom he travailed with unceasing grief until Christ should be formed in them.
Paul then goes further and calls them “the adoption.” Here his anguish is directed toward those who were marked out for sonship, those included in God’s plan of adoption. It is striking that this word is found nowhere else in Scripture except on Paul’s pen. He uses it only four times in the New Testament, and every instance ties it unmistakably to God’s electing grace. In Galatians 4:5 he writes that Christ came “to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” In Ephesians 1:5, he declares that God “predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” And in Romans 8:15, he reminds believers, “ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” In each case, adoption belongs to the chosen family of God, never to the reprobate or unbelieving.
It would be unthinkable, then, for Paul to turn suddenly in Romans 9 and wrench this incredibly important word into an entirely different meaning, as though it now applied broadly to all Israel after the flesh. That would not only cut across the flow of Paul’s thought from chapter 8, where adoption is bound to God’s electing grace and the Spirit’s witness, but it would drain the word of the gospel weight Paul has carefully laid upon it. Nor does the Old Testament ever use this term. Adoption is Paul’s distinctive word, always tied to the elect’s new standing as sons through Christ, it’s a believer’s sonship, a privilege flowing out of God’s election and Christ’s redeeming work. To stretch it here to include the unbelieving mass of Israel would be to make Paul contradict himself, and to empty the word of its gospel weight.
For those reasons, I suggest Paul’s anguish cannot be understood as a vague, national grief. His burden is not for “Israel” indiscriminately, but for those elect sons yet unborn of the Spirit, the children of promise not yet brought into the light of Christ. And yet, even as Paul fixes his eye on the elect within Israel, he cannot overlook the privileges that had been lavished upon the nation as a whole. This, I think, is why Paul does not stop at their election yet unseen; instead he presses further, setting before them the staggering advantages entrusted to Israel, advantages that render their unbelief all the more tragic. Romans 9:4-5. He lists the astonishing privileges they had been given, the law, the promises, the fathers, and supremely, Christ Himself according to the flesh. And yet, in the hour of their great visitation, they hardened themselves and rejected the very Messiah who had come through their own line. I think that this is the anguish that crushed Paul’s heart. Does not Paul’s lament here remind us of Christ Himself, who wept over Jerusalem and cried, “behold, your house is left unto you desolate.” Matthew 23:37-38. Paul’s lament is but an echo of Christ’s own grief, the sorrow of watching those most richly blessed turn away from the only fountain of life. Paul knew that within that blinded nation were elect souls, chosen of God, not yet brought into the light. For them he travailed, longing for the day when Christ would be formed in them. His grief was not empty, but bound to the certainty that God’s promises never fail. Galatians 4:19.
Verse 5 ties everything back to Christ. Of whom are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, “who is over all, God blessed for ever.” Every promise, every glory, every father pointed to Christ, and outside of Him there is no life, only death. To be without Christ is to be nothing, and to have nothing; no life, no hope, no future, only the emptiness of one cut off from its only source of life, light and hope itself. John 14:6. This is the grief that weighed on Paul’s heart, and with the solemnity of it, he can only end with a seal of certainty, Amen, so it is, and so it must be. Acts 4:12. MPJ