THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

The Hope of Israel: What Is It? 205
is hereafter to be delivered from the bondage of corruption
into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Here is another Scripture which never could have
been written if there were to be a Jewish millennium
intervening between "the sufferings of this present
time" and "the glory which shall be revealed in (or
to) us" (v. 18).
HATH GOD CAST AWAY His PEOPLE?
If therefore, God had cast out the bondwoman and
her son (Israel after the flesh) and had decreed that
the son of the bondwoman was to have no share in the
inheritance promised to Abraham ("the world"), could
it be said that He had "cast away His people" ? Manifestly
if the natural descendants of Abraham were
"His people," the answer would be, Yes. But Paul's
answers to that question is an emphatic and indignant,
"God forbid." And he goes on to explain that the
natural Israelites were not His people; but that "His
people which He foreknew" was that very small "remnant
according to the election of grace" which believed
in Jesus Christ (Rom. 11 :l-7). The plain and decisive
answer given by the apostle in this passage is, that
God had not cast away His people, because the apostate
nation which He had cast was not His people. Those
were "the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction," which
for centuries past He had "endured with much longsuffering"
(Rom. 9:22), and to whom He had said
through Isaiah, "All day long I have stretched forth
My hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people"
(10:20-21).
Those were not His people, and they never were, for
when Elijah made intercession against "Israel," and in-