The Fall of the Jews was ensured when the legitimate royal dynasty through King David lost ruling power in Judah in 586 B.C, and they therefore lost any real chance of their own national adherence to the First Commandment. This monumental shift in the march of human history happened along with the destruction of their First Temple, which should be celebrated by Christians for its relation to the universalization of God's active attention, as revealed by Jesus in John 4 when He spiritually decommissioned Jerusalem and all such temples (Jn. 4:21-24). When Paul was in Greece writing his Epistle to the Romans, it was only fourteen to twelve years before the Jews' Second Temple would be physically destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. (Josephus War 6.4-5). Josephus wrote in postmortem, "the number of those that perished during the whole siege [was] eleven hundred thousand" (War 6.9). At the time of Paul's composition in about 58 A.D., our Apostle to the Gentiles already had a deep understanding of the perilous condition of his "kinsmen according to the flesh," and he chose to write about the impending damnation of their souls. He begins Romans 9 by theoretically offering a noble wish to be "cursed and cut off from Christ" for them if he can, and then proceeds to show what will happen next to a hundred generations of future non-believing Jews, because it 'does not work that way' and because they must suffer the punishment for nonbelief themselves. Paul is here not so much of a prophet as a philosopher, a realist who analyzes the Jews' tragedy for what it is, what it most likely will be, and what it has now been for two thousand years. He does certainly hope for an alternative ending but, as we will see in Romans 9 to 11, never deviates for a moment from his position that a Jew can only be a saved child of God if he or she accepts Jesus Christ.
In Romans 9 verse 2, Paul says that he has "great heaviness and continual sorrow" in his heart, and why? He was the preeminent man who had just penned beautiful words about the boundless joy of Christianity and who had been living that Christianity better than any other. His holy enterprise of world conversion had been successful in every foreign land he had visited across Asia and Europe, and he was now in the far west of his third missionary journey. To answer more profoundly why, we can recall Christ's own lamentations, reading from Luke 13: "Nevertheless I must walk today, and tomorrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate" (Lk. 13:33-35). Both felt sorry for Jerusalem but also inner torment that they personally were going to go to Jerusalem where the Jews would either kill or try to kill them.
The Luke 13 passage was the parallel recorded thought of Christ, and the curse for cutting off Christ that Paul implies in Romans 9:3 is the same that Christ delivered by the analogy of the fig tree in Matthew 21 and Mark 11 (Mt. 21:18-21, Mk. 11:11-23). Jesus Christ was then cursing Jerusalem, Mount Zion, Israel, and the Jewish people for their rejection of His frequent attempts to make them purely His children for the first time. No B.C.-era covenant attempts had been close in terms of the quality of opportunity when compared with the New Covenant attempts through Jesus Christ, whom the prophets attested to, but that God had made those Old Testament attempts to the Jews specifically made it all the more shameful that they rejected the one universally true way when it came around. This is what Paul is getting at when he identifies his heartache for, "my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever." (Rm. 9:3-5). The preceding things were those that they had invalidated by missing more than a racial association with the incarnated latter, a spiritual miss that was all-important.
After this enumeration of and concession to their place in history, Paul explains in detail how much more tragic is their present condition as former Old-Testament-caliber adoptees who are not accepted by God as children in a salvatory way at all because of the sword which Jesus brought, not to mention their litany of crimes besides. Yet as Paul will express in Romans 11, God has not given up on the Jews in the sense that they can still be part of what will be a small subsection of their race, a "remnant" of the voluntarily departed whole, which does not reject but accepts the world's singular method of salvation which is faith in Christ and which will be accepted by exponentially more Gentiles. He says as much in Romans 9 beginning with and continuing from verse 6: "Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed." (Rm. 9:6-8 KJV). From the context of the earlier parts of the letter alone, particularly that which we now have chapterized as Romans 4 and Romans 8, we know exactly what Paul is saying here or rather repeating here in different language. That all who accept Jesus Christ are children of Abraham, children of God, and heirs of the promise, and that all who do not accept Christ are none of those things regardless of their racial descent or legal works. Even if we had no other passage of Paul extant, the Gospels would allow us to interpret that much. The main question concerning Romans 9 to 11 should not be what he is saying about such sonship and salvation because 1) It is already better established in the Gospels; 2) It has been reestablished well in the earlier part of Paul's Roman Epistle; and 3) By all decent logic, nothing he writes in this latter part of his Roman Epistle conflicts with either Jesus, the earlier part of his same Epistle, or any of his other epistles. The main questions should be as to how linguistically he is choosing to express again the same critical principles, and how is he recommending that Christians think of the Jews, the vast majority of whom have been and will continue to be torn down by those principles of God's choosing.
Therefore when Paul writes what the KJV translates as "they are not all Israel, which are of Israel" (Rm. 9:6), any intelligent person who has not read the prior New Testament might calculate this to be as nonsensical as "They are not all this, which are of this." In isolation, it is indeed nonsensical and a logical impossibility, similar to the statement, "Britishness is not even exclusively British," which appears on the back cover of a 1997 popular history book. Yet anyone who has read even just his earlier letter and is intelligent knows that he is in this verse speaking inexactly and incompletely, and counts on the reader to fill in the meaning to instead arrive at the logically viable "They are not all this, which are of that." In other words, he is speaking of two different things although he only uses the word "Israel" for both, and a single word can only have non-equal meanings if modified by adjectives or other context. The question then becomes, in Romans 9 verse 6, what is the "this" Israel and what is the "that" Israel. It helps to examine how he originally wrote in Greek, and interlinear Bibles have translated this line word-for-word(s) as "not for all the from Israel these Israel" and "Not for all who [are] of Israel [are] these Israel". This seems to indicate that the KJV might have reversed the original order of the "this" and the "that" but arrived at the same meaning. Before we take a guess at how and in what order he is saying what we know he is saying, consider also the preceding half of verse 6 which is "Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect." Paul is here going to tell us that despite the word of God taking very little effect on what follows, that he can prove to us that it has taken some effect on what follows in that the part affected has become logically separate from the rest. Keeping in mind the meaning of verses 7 and 8 also helps, which the KJV has as "Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed." It is the interlinear again of course that by definition has the original structure, and let us focus on the order of how it word-for-word(s) translates the first parts of verse 7 as "neither that they are seed of Abraham all children", and verse 8 as "this it is not the children of the 'of flesh' these children of the 'of God'." When comparing these two verses to verse 6's "not for all the from Israel these Israel," it seems that in all three Paul is structuring as not all *that* larger group...are part of *this* limited and special group. He is saying in each that not all "that" Jews are "this" Christians. So the that's in the three verses are: "the from Israel" meaning those physically living in or descended from Israel (9:6), "seed of Abraham" racially-defined (9:7), and "the children of the 'of flesh'" (9:8) meaning again corporeal Jews. The contrasted this's in the three verses are "these Israel" (9:6) which is spiritual Israel, "children" meaning the spiritual children of Abraham (9:7), and "these children of the 'of God'" which is the highest level manner of restating who are the binding heirs to what can be framed as the promise to Abraham (9:8). Romans 4 and 8 already settled the heirs as exclusively Christians of faith in Jesus Christ, and verse 9:6 is just a different literary approach to saying the same as will be all that follows. Although the KJV and all translations require context, the NIV seems to have helped us a little more by maintaining the original order with "For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel." The ESV seems to have done the same with "For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel," and additionally helped us with the word "belong." All the New Testament should still be held ready against heretical interpretations, although the interlinear Bibles along with the more clearly-composed verses 7 and 8 are more than strong enough, and how can there be any remaining uncertainty for those who have read the earlier part of the Roman Epistle?
Before moving on, we should note that Romans 9:7 reconfirms Paul's answer to any Genesis 12:3 related inquiries, as he writes yet again — "Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children." It is not as in depth as his Galatians 3, which is highlighted by "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law...That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ...For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Gal. 3:13-14,27-29). Nor does he feel the need to re-expand on what he has already expanded on in Romans 4, where he wrote "For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect: Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression. Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all" (Rm. 4:13-16). He does, however, in Romans 9:8 succinctly restate and cojoin what being a true child of Abraham, spiritually by faith, ultimately means, when he says "That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed." Remember that as of the start of Romans 9 he has been pursuing the thematic approach of how Christian principles relate to those who are situationally-obstructed Jews in terms of the flesh, and therefore he states this one quite "negatively." They which are children of Abraham by race, by birth, and corporeally, these are explicitly redeclared to not be children of God. "The Jews" per se are thus not the binding and hereafter applicable "chosen people of God," per Paul's clearest language in 9:8 of this same Romans 9 to 11 extended passage, and when he will soon after say that God has not "rejected" them, we should remember that this is only by virtue of God's giving them the same opportunity as everyone else of becoming binding New Covenant "children of God." On balance, it seems that God has not extraordinarily rejected the Jews beyond any practical chance of individual redemption through Jesus Christ, but the rest of Romans 9 will certainly make one wonder.
Pushes toward woefully bad misinterpretations, when made by heretics through misuse of the works of Paul like other parts of the Bible, often consist of only quoting ideas that he offers up briefly for the purposes of his own quick correction. We have already seen this at the start of Romans Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, where the heretically-intentioned slicers can quote the beginnings and then in intellectual dishonesty omit the subsequent correction passages to deceive. Philippians Chapter 3 is another example, where Paul says that if anyone should have confidence in the flesh that it is him, but then quickly follows that he has no confidence in the flesh and counts all his former Jewish identity as worthless as dung. Here in Romans 9 he lists the historical accomplishments of the Jews' ancestors in verses 4 to 5 to demonstrate why he as he already mentioned is so distraught that the current generation and future generations of Jews will reject Christianity. Yet he also sets up verses 4 and 5 to show that while the Jews are in that sense "the fathers" and in that past sense accomplished, they are still not in the present and future sense Spiritual Israel, children of Abraham, or children of God — now out of the family entirely! He presents this correction immediately after in the three consecutive verses 6 to 8 which use closely-related concepts to express the same truth — that Jews are not accepted on those salvatory levels by God on the basis of their Jewishness, not even the historically best aspects of their Jewishness. It is crystal clear by verse 8 that he is speaking of the Jews in terms of the group which will be left out. There he calls them "children of the flesh," but just a few verses earlier in our Romans 9 he identified them as unquestionably by the use of "my kinsmen according to the flesh who are the Israelites" (Rm. 9:3-4). Therefore we should never let anyone tell us that Romans 9 verses 9 to 13 specifically refers to anyone other than the non-believing Jews as "the elder" that "shall serve the younger" (9:12) and ironically even "the Esau I have hated" (9:13). As if the preceding context was not enough to be certain of this, the Abraham-Isaac family analogy of the 9 to 13 passage links itself directly to verses 6 to 8 where, as our essay logically demonstrated in the two preceding paragraphs, we know for a surety that Paul is speaking of the non-believing Jews' detrimental exclusion.
Now there is also no doubt based on Scripture whole that the principles of these passages and following can be applied to all non-believers who are fated to be hated, and to live in God-weighted inferiority (Mt. 11:11) to believing Christians due to that nonbelief. However the principles are analogously expressed here (Rm. 9:12-13) solely in terms of Jews being hated and Christians being loved, and Jews being as if slaves to their Christian masters, and that obviously because so few of the Jews are Christians. When Paul at the end of Acts speaks of the Jews being blinded for the Christians' benefit, the wide disparity and the ambiguity of language leads him to simply call them "this people" ("laos" Greek forms as translated from Isaiah's prophecy) as opposed to specifying that it is only "the non-believing among this people" who are blinded. Furthermore, it does certainly appear that "this people" aka "the Jews" were handed an especially nasty destiny, and, if anyone ever was "predestined" for hell, Romans 9 like other New Testament passages makes it seem to be the Jews — not every single Jew but "the Jews."
One of the dumbest and most disrespectful comments made by heretics on Romans 9 to 11 is frequently along the lines of, "God cannot be expected to keep His promises to the Gentiles unless we can show that He has kept His promises to the Jews." This is fallacious on many levels because: (1) The beneficial "good" side of all promises that God has made are fulfilled to all Christians universally and exclusively through Jesus Christ alone, including the Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic covenant. The Mosaic covenant is shown by Paul in earlier Romans to be neither practically good nor still binding. (2) Even if all that were not the case, which we know by Holy Scripture that it is, a human's finite mind should not be telling God's infinite mind what It can or cannot do. The whole idea invokes an attempt to place limitations on God's glorious New Covenant Christianity based on Old Covenant reasonings by those who are being unreasonable and illogical even by human standards. (3) Romans demonstrates just the opposite — that God can indeed hate and punish some, and love and reward others, for no other reason than because He wants to — and nowhere is this written more transparently than Romans 9! One must think that because this concept is explained profusely in Romans 9 to 11, therein comes the desire of Satan and his heretics to speak this lie whenever the same passage is spoken of, as they try to place in the mind of Christians a 180-degree wrong idea instead of the divinely-revealed truth. They cannot confuse by misusing Romans 11 unless they first wipe out what Christians otherwise might understand as its very relevant context in Romans 9.
Whether in Romans 11 God is using Paul to tell us that a small remnant of Israel will one day be saved as is apparent, or that a great many of them will one day be saved as is possible, we know from Romans, the same "Romans 11" letter-snippet, and Scripture whole that He is telling us that only those who accept Jesus Christ will be saved. In the same token, we should also know that he does not mean that those who do not accept Christ will be among those who avoid hell, and clearly millions of Jews have already died without accepting Jesus Christ and are therefore in hell. Is this acceptable by a "loving God"? Was this even — gasp! — intended or preordained by the same one true God? That is what Romans 9 especially answers. We have already seen in 9 verses 1 to 13 that Paul is doubtlessly speaking of "the Jews," clarified 6-8 to be the "non-believing Jews," when he writes in 12-13 that they shall serve as if unrewarded slaves to Christians and that God has chosen to hate them. Concerning this most lamentable destiny he then immediately after in verse 14 asks two questions, the first being rhetorically, "What shall we say then?" The second question is translated variously as "Is there unrighteousness with God?" (KJV) or "Is God unjust?" (NIV) or "Is there injustice on God's part?" (ESV). He strongly answers "No!" — respectively in the translations as "God forbid.", "Not at all!", and "By no means!" This answer goes against common human intuition, especially that of the unread, so he explains in the rest of Romans 9 why God is indeed acting fairly by loving some and hating others. Specifically, in the context of earlier Romans 9 and his entire Epistle, Paul explains in the latter part of Romans 9 why God Himself has "chosen," as it were, a large majority of his saved people to be Gentiles, while allowing the large majority of the Jewish people to suffer his wrath by way of destruction in hell.
As he just showed that the Jews have ultimately found themselves in the role of Esau rather than Jacob, in verses 9:15-18 Paul assigns to them the New Covenant role of the hardened Pharaoh of Exodus (Ex. 7-8). He also references the same conditional-covenant times of Moses to bring out the eternal principle that God can have mercy on whom He wants to, as He spake unto him in Exodus 33:19. Then comes the rebuke of those who think that God has to make all promises unconditional, to stay with the "elder" instead of the "younger," or to not take vengeance on the Jews (Rm. 3:5-6) and by implication on all other non-believers for their perhaps predestined rejection of Jesus Christ. In Romans 9 verses 19 to 21: "Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" It is a Cartesian argument if there ever was one in the Bible, and as Descartes said in Meditations, his own Method was "not novel, since there is nothing more ancient than the truth." He there described his innate idea of God as "a substance that is infinite [eternal, immutable], independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, have been created." That a finite man, a very fault-ridden being who proceeded into that much lesser state from the Perfect Being, would look up and tell God: "The Jews are here, and you can't just let them go to hell because they were once your chosen people. They might have not accepted Jesus Christ, but you have to be loyal and save them anyway." — by logic alone, for anyone who has a similar idea of God, this can be evaluated to be an incredibly stupid position to take. It is a beyond outrageous request when coupled with the divine revelation of God's New Testament which has shown that all must either believe in Jesus Christ or be damned to hell (Mark 16:16), and Romans 9 reiterates for any human to question that perfect truth above all truths is arrogant and completely wrong.
Holding squarely in mind what we have established, that Romans 9 verses 1 to 20 are speaking specifically of the non-believing Jews as those accursed, not children of God, excluded from salvation, and even hated, let us add in that verse 21 has established the Jews as the vessels made unto dishonor (KJV) or made for dishonorable use (ESV). Verse 21 begins the brutal comparison of those dishonorable vessels, the non-believing Jews, vs. the honorable vessels, the Christians. If any single verse in the Bible describes the fate of most Jews, it must be what follows in Romans 9 verse 22, which states: "What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." A common boast among the Jews today is their supposed racial longevity, which itself is a very complicated proposition with the historical dispersions, but for the sake of argument they can be granted to be the fullest-blooded descendants imaginable, for all that is worth because it is worth nothing but increased hardship. If that much more difficult road to Christianity is not traversed, as it usually will not be, as God knew it usually would not be, then comes the eternally-lasting "destruction." The Greek word in verse 22 is apōleian, which is the same word used Revelation 17:8 and 17:11 for the final place of the Beast, and there so will non-believing Jews end up with their acting Father. And why, for what purpose would God allow such a horrific fate...why did God make the Jews his "chosen" people in the Old-Testament sense in the first place? Romans 9 verse 23 answers, "that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory." The Jews are an entire race of people that in effect were designated since antiquity to — much more often than not — suffer eternally for the benefit of Christians, and we now see the slavery-of-the-elder analogy of verse 12 come into light. It is not something that any good Christian should wish on anyone, but who are we to question the ways of God per verse 20?
That the fallen Jews are still here in order to serve the function of suffering for Christians is Romans 9 in a nutshell, but it does not stop there, and what follows is very pertinent to understanding the world as it practically is and always will be, as opposed to how we in our human minds might want it to be. As of Romans 9, Paul as we have said has switched over to looking at the reality more from the Jewish angle, which has been beyond horrific since they have generally placed themselves apart from Jesus Christ. God "endured with much longsuffering" ("patience") the non-believing Jews so as to allow them to continue to exist as such, just as He has allowed Satan, so that God's power can be demonstrated in their contrast with Christians, before they are destroyed in the End Times. This is all for the benefit of these gloriously-predestined Christians, described as "whom he has called" in verse 9:24, and further re-illuminated as "not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles." This is a verse similar to verses 6 to 8, from that different angle given the Romans-Chapters-9-to-11 literary switch, and if anyone had any doubt as to the proportions in Paul's mind, whether in those verses or in Romans 11, then Romans 9 verses 25 to 33 seems to settle that entirely. That is, of the two racial groups who will join in the raceless "Christian" group (entirely synonymous with the "Church", God's one and only people now and forevermore!), Paul demonstrates that the Gentiles will be heavily represented to the point of crowding out all of the Jews except for "only the remnant." That Christianity is a universally-defined religion based on faith, that the Jews are a limited racial group and the Gentiles are in effect the rest of the universe, these facts alone lead one to expect as much. However when God's intentional blinding or even predestination-to-destruction of nearly all of that comparably small unlucky group is considered, how could any saved Christians expect to see many Jews in heaven?
Paul is everywhere in his works expressing that the Jews will be a small minority in heaven, even less than one might expect based on population proportions, and much less than one might expect if very fallaciously considering their B.C. past to be a facilitator to Christ, because it is most certainly instead an impediment. Human intuition might have led us to think such a people would be used in harmony with Christ, but they were instead "vessels made for dishonorable use" (9:21) when it mattered, which negates the occasional times before Christ when they got the First Commandment right as it then in the pre-incarnation sense applied. Yet the Christ-relative prophecies were already being inspired into the prophets, so that at least their extant words could be used honorably for Christianity, even if the lingering people of the Jews would be ever after defined by dishonorable enmity to our religion. Paul calls up four such prophecies in Roman 9 to demonstrate Hosea and Isaiah's honorable use, and to show more pertinently that this honorable use was vastly more for the purpose of God's destiny with Gentiles than with Jews.
The two prophecies from Hosea are referenced to prove the legitimacy of the Gentiles as the major part of God's "people", of God's "beloved", and of the "children of the living God." Notably he was a "prophet of doom" in the northern Kingdom of Israel after they had given up the legitimate rule of the Davidic dynasty. Hosea 2:23 is quoted by Romans 9:25, "As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved." Hosea 1:10 by Romans 9:26, "And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God." Hosea Chapter 1 is a particularly uncomfortable passage where "the Lord said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord" (Hos. 1:2). When his whore wife named Gomer, obviously representing the Jewish people, bore him a son, "Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God." (Hos. 1:9). In the following Hosea Chapter 2, we perhaps see how easily Paul found his Romans 11 comparison of non-believing Jews to Baal worshippers, which any religious non-Christian people for all intents and purposes are. Whether trying to worship a cow, the sun, or the true God without Jesus Christ, they have all not accepted Jesus Christ the One Way to the Father and they will be damned to hell all the same (Jn. 14:6).
Just how many of the billions in hell will be Jews, or rather what a large percentage of the Jews will be in hell, is what Paul is communicating in Romans 9 verses 27 to 29, where he references two prophecies of Isaiah. He does so out of order, and acknowledges this, with the earlier in the book of Isaiah being its verse 1:9 quoted by Romans 9:29, "And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha." Paul is extending Isaiah's commentary on B.C. Judah as a prophecy that, if not for the numerically small Jewish remnant which believes or will believe in Christ, the End Times destruction would be as complete as Sodom and Gomorrah and Jews would very-nearly cease to exist upon Christ's judgment and exercise of His wrath. Of course Paul felt this personally because he himself was one rarely chosen for preservation in heaven, and this was a near-miss that had required a miraculous intervention by God into a life that had been otherwise destined for great punishment. Most of his old friends did not make it out of the Sodom and Gomorrah of Judaism. Isaiah Chapter 1 is all about punishment for the Jews, and on the surface predicted their fall to Nebuchadnezzar about 150 years later, but by Paul's view also prophesied Christ's own day of destroying them in finality — if they do not repent, which they did not then, and almost certainly through Christ will not now. Yet let us also look at the more complicated reference to Isaiah 10:22-23 by Romans 9:27-28, which in the KJV is "Though the people of Israel are as numerous as the sand of the seashore, only a remnant will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth quickly and with finality." Reading through the Romans Epistle, one would have no doubt that the destruction here is aimed at Israel, but the Zionist might contend that Isaiah 10 itself involves the destruction of Assyria. This is true but Isaiah 10 also involves God's destruction of Israel, and most translations of this verse 10:22 are either ambiguous or indeed indicating Israel (CEV, EASY, NIRV, NLT decisively). But as for how Paul is using Isaiah 10:22, which is the matter at hand, consider that at least three-and-a-half of his four prophetic references are incontrovertibly against Israel. Whether or not Isaiah had Israel or Assyria's destruction in mind by the "sentence upon the earth," Paul was definitely using it relative to the destruction of most of the Jews. That is obvious from the context of the rest of his four references, by the non-believing Israel destruction theme that precedes in Romans 9, and perhaps most of all by the conclusion in Romans 9 that follows in its verses 30-33.
Allow Paul himself to speak in Romans 9:30-33, as to what the four prophecies mean to him now and going forward: "What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith. But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness, hath not attained to the law of righteousness. Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumblingstone; As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." This is another of Paul's expressions of the irony of the ages, that will forever reflect on humanity. It might be summarized casually as: "The Jews were God's chosen people in the Old Testament way, but now and going forward the Gentiles are much more often God's chosen people in the Christian way (which is entirely faith-based), because the Old Testament Law keeps the Jews from accepting Jesus." How he stated that in this instance was by marveling how the B.C. Gentiles by-and-large acted aimlessly without the moral direction of the Law, but how A.D. Gentiles have more frequently attained the righteous justification offered for the first time through Jesus Christ. Contrarily the B.C. Jews by-and-large sought righteousness through the Law but did not attain it because righteous justification was practically unattainable that way. Now the A.D. Jews are caused by their exclusive association with the Law to "stumble over the stumbling stone," which by his use of the additional Isaiah reference in verse 33, we know that Paul means to be Jesus Christ. Whether Isaiah had in his mind the Messiah when he wrote Isaiah 8:14 and Isaiah 28:16 is very debatable, but that God had Jesus Christ in mind we can be assured by Romans 9:33. That God had the Gentiles primarily in mind when Isaiah and the B.C. Jews were going through their struggles is beyond question if one believes Romans 9, or the implications of Jesus Christ's words in Luke 4:25-27. Elijah and Elisha in their ancient earthly times did not expect Jesus Christ to use their actions to declare to the Jews that Jesus Christ would overwhelmingly be the Savior of the Gentiles instead. Yet that is exactly what Jesus did in Luke 4 verses 25 to 27, and looking at the huge disparity between Gentiles and Jews that transpired after His ministry and that continues unabated today, there can be no doubt that God has had a Gentile-centric mindset throughout the days of Jewish history, since the very start with Abraham, and most exceedingly during and after Christ. He passionately finalized that Christians are the only children of Abraham, the only children of God, the only beloved, the only who receive mercy, the only prepared for glory, and the only righteous before God. That is Romans 9 and that is Christianity, the one true religion, made by and since time immemorial expected by the one true God to be overwhelmingly composed of Gentiles and mostly without Jews.
