100 - God's Righteousness Toward Israel [B]

God's Righteousness Toward Israel
Romans 9:1-6

Open your Bibles with me to Romans, chapter 9. We're going to move into the next section which hangs by itself. We often speak of the Church Age as "the great parentheses". Now we're going to be talking about God's plan for Israel in these chapters and I learned something new on this trip to Israel. In many churches when they do a series on Romans they call Romans 9-11 "the great parentheses." The exposition of Romans in those churches jumps from Romans 8 to Romans 12. Romans 9-11 is ignored in a number of churches so that was sort of a new insight that I picked up on this trip, along with many others.

That tells us something of the importance of Romans 9-11, especially in light of today with the rise of Israel, the Jews coming back to the Land starting in the early to mid-19^th century and then just exploding in the first, second, third Aliyahs around the turn of the 20^th century. Then came the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 when something that has never, ever happened in history has now happened. That is the resurrection of a people in their historic homeland based on the plan of God. And that hasn't happened to any other ethnic group where they have been restored once they have lost their historic homeland. You can think through history, going back into ancient history with the Assyrians, with the Parthians, with the Romans later on, the Celts, the Picks, and the Saxons. History moves on.

The Jewish people were expelled from their land in A.D. 70 and have returned, almost to the point where we're within a very short time of an equilibrium where there will be as many Jews living in the land as outside of the land. That has not happened since 586 B.C. In fact, it might not have been that true at that point because you'd already had the ten northern tribes expelled in 722 B.C. So it has been an extremely long time since there has been a major Jewish presence, a dominant Jewish presence in the land since the first group was expelled by God in 722 B.C. So this is significant and that's why there's been so much last days chatter and excitement and stimulation and everything. We'll talk about some of those things as we go through this chapter.

We need to understand a little bit about its context before we go much further. At the end of Romans 8, Paul has been talking about the faithful love of God and God's faithfulness and the fact that His promises can be counted on. Paul concludes that great chapter with the final statement in verses 38 and 39, "For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." So the focal point of those last nine verses has been on the faithfulness of God.

What can separate us from God? Who can bring a charge against God's elect? Verse 35, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" and yet remember at this time the population of the church still had a large Jewish segment to it, even in Rome. There was a large Jewish component in Rome and those from a Jewish background would be raising the question, "Well, wait a minute. How can we count on God's faithfulness? It seems like He has turned His back on the Jews? It's like He's turned His back on Israel and Israel is no longer significant."

Paul is going to shift gears in the beginning of chapter 9 to talk about God's continued plan and purpose for Israel. That even though Israel, as Paul says in the beginning of chapter 11 that many in Israel have hardened their hearts and turned away from God and rejected His Messiah, nevertheless, God has not turned His back permanently on Israel, has not forgotten them. God is still going to be faithful to His promises in the Mosaic Covenant to restore Israel to the land.

Now an important question someone might ask is that if the Abrahamic Covenant was temporary, if it wasn't permanent, and that was no longer in effect, then Christ's death, as Paul says in Romans 14, if Christ's death is the end of the law, if that's true, then these promises for a return that are in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 30, then those would be thrown out as well. And the answer to that is that those promises that God gave, that He embedded in the Mosaic Law that He would return them permanently to the land, is simply an addendum at the end of the Mosaic Law to affirm the fact that He is still true to the promise that He made to Abraham, that this land would belong to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants in perpetuity forever.

That even though God would implement disciplinary action of removing ethnic Israel from the land that God had promised them according to the judgment stipulations in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, God would still remain faithful to His promise to Abraham and would bring them back so that's kind of how that fits together. But I just want to wrap up one thing very briefly. There was a little point of confusion at the end of the last class before we go forward. If you just look at Romans 8:36 for a minute there's a quotation there from the Psalms. Psalm 44:22, actually. Last week the only thing I had up on the screen and when I dealt with this it was in light of 42:23 and that confused everyone, as well it should. I was doing my studying in reference to the Hebrew text and there are some verses in some Psalms that are numbered differently in the Masoretic text than in the English Bible. Frequently in the Psalms Hebrew verses are one verse off from the English but in this case it's two chapters and one verse off so that Psalm 42:23 in the Masoretic text is Psalm 44:22 and I was going through that at the end of class last time. Afterwards about five people mobbed me and wanted to know what was going on. It's just numbered differently and I had unwittingly typed in the verse from the Hebrew text I was using instead of the English text so you can correct your notes on that.

Okay, as we come to Romans, chapter 9, we see it is an introduction to this section on God's continued plan for Israel. In Romans 9 Paul is going to establish the justice of God in relation to Israel's rejection of the Messiah. There are several things we're going to have to deal with in this that are very important and germane to some trends that are going on in Bible study and theology that you may or may not run into but you ought to be aware of these things that are going on. One of these trends that has cropped up is that there has been a trend among some evangelicals to deny the reality of Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. In fact in the last couple of days I have a great video of a lecture that Doctor Michael Rydelnik gave at Liberty University about a month ago at the invitation of Randy Price who's the head of the Jewish Studies Department at Liberty. Dr. Rydelnik is the head of the Jewish Studies Department at Moody Bible Institute and graduated from Dallas Seminary three or four years after I was there. I think we overlapped a year.

He points out in this lecture that when he first was interviewing the faculty members at Dallas Seminary in 1979 at that time there was only one professor that held to the fact that the Old Testament was filled with Messianic prophecies. I had not realized when I was there that most of the Old Testament faculty did not believe that. At most they believed there was one clear Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament and that was Psalm 110:1, "The Lord said to My Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." That in the opinion of some evangelicals is the only genuine Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament.

That is not true at all. That shows the influence of a pernicious error that had invaded, as early as the Protestant Reformation, from a string of anti-Messianic interpretations that came out of the development of rabbinic Judaism but it took a thousand years for rabbinic Judaism to really come up with answers to Christians' use of Messianic prophecies from the Old Testament. A lot of Jews were getting converted as they read Isaiah 53, as they read Isaiah 7:14, and as they read Isaiah 9:6. These passages resonated with Messianic implications, including Psalm 22. But if you listen to some Old Testament scholars today, even among evangelicals, they do not believe these are Messianic at all. They believe they were fulfilled historically but they just had sort of an application in some general sense to the Messiah and that the disciples just used that and sort of re-shaped these things.

I pointed out Tuesday night that when the scribes known as the Masoretes solidified the current text that we use called the Masoretic text which was solidified and formalized between 300 and 900 A.D. they added vowel "points" to a consonantal script which was all that the Hebrew text was. In some ways they changed words. We had a great example in our text on Tuesday night of Amos 9:12 where he talked about the "remnant of Edom" which would have made that prophecy to be fulfilled historically with Edom but the consonants in Edom are the same as the consonants in Adam so if you just change the vowels you change the phrase "from the remnant of Edom" to "from the remnant of mankind" which throws the significance of that whole prophecy into a kingdom or Millennial or Messianic Kingdom fulfillment, indicating that's a Messianic prophecy. Interesting things like that happen and have really disrupted things.

In the Protestant Reformation a lot of pastors, scholars, and theologians went to rabbis to learn Hebrew. That was the only place they could learn Hebrew.  In the course of that some of them were influenced by the thinking of an 11^th century rabbi named Rashi who originated a lot of these alternate interpretations and so they filtered into the evangelical church and they've been there all along. We're going to see that in a number of ways this is not true; there are genuine Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. Michael Rydelnik has spearheaded the scholarship on this with his book, "The Messianic Hope" which is very technical. If you don't know Hebrew you'll have difficulty but you'll catch some of the things. He's done a good work. He's working now on a Messianic commentary on the Old Testament and I'm really looking forward to what he's going to do.

Anyway, we'll get into some of those issues because the Old Testament clearly predicted a Messiah, that He would be the son of Jesse, the son of David and that he would be of the tribe of Judah and numerous other things, such as being born in Bethlehem, that he would be crucified between two thieves and that He would be betrayed and the price of his betrayal would be thirty pieces of silver and on and on. These were very, very clear prophecies from the Old Testament. So that's part of what we'll look at but some other things we've got to look at are the trend toward the "repopularity" of replacement theology today. It goes by some other names. We're also going to have to look at some things related to interpretation, literal versus allegorical interpretation, and we'll going to look at the rise of anti-Semitism.

Romans 9-11 is really at the core of understanding those types of things that are going on. They're as much present with us today as they've ever been and while anti-Semitism sort of went underground for a while after the holocaust, it's rearing its ugly head currently. It's not only through the influence of Islam but through the influence of a lot of Christians who have never really understood the significance of these issues and how it's related to the interpretation factor and some other things. We'll be hitting on all of these as we go through our study of Romans, chapter 9.

So let's just look at the introduction here.  The first five verses provide us with an introduction to these three chapters. It's going to begin with a very personal statement by the Apostle Paul related to his deep care and concern and his emotional distress over the fact that his people, his countrymen, his family perhaps, his loved ones perhaps, his kinsmen, have rejected the claims of the Yeshua of Nazareth to be the Messiah. So he begins by expressing a very personal statement, "I tell the truth in Christ. I'm not lying. My conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing [continual] grief in my heart for I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh who are Israelites to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the [temple] service of God and the promises." Six important things that lockdown Israel as still having a relationship to all of those. "Whose are the fathers and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh who is overall, God blessed forever. Amen."

He starts off saying, "I tell the truth in Christ." He's not just making an assertion that he is telling the truth but that he is telling the truth in Christ, that he is using the phrase "in Christ" here in more than simply a positional sense. He is in Christ postionally but just because we are in Christ positionally doesn't mean we can't be out of fellowship at the same time that we are positionally in Christ. So here is one of the rare time that Paul uses the phrase "en Christo" when it's not alluding to being in Christ positionally but is talking more of a fellowship type aspect. In context, it's a parallel to the phrase "en pneumateo", the Holy Spirit in the next line. I think both here should be understood instrumentally, a rare usage of that. I think it makes sense in the context.

"I tell the truth in Christ" is parallel to "bearing witness by the Holy Spirit" so both of these "ins" in English should probably be understood to be an instrumental "by" so it would better understood as "I tell the truth by means of Christ. I do not lie. My conscience bearing joint witness with me by means of the Holy Spirit". We know that the Holy Spirit is the agent of inspiration, according to 1 Peter 1:19-20. The Holy Spirit is the One who moves the writers of Scripture along. God breathes out His Word through the writers of Scripture, according to 2 Timothy 3:16-17. "All Scripture is God-breathed…" God is the active sense there. He's the one breathing out through the writers of Scripture but the Holy Spirit is the active agent in overseeing the writing of Scripture. So this isn't an inspiration in the way we think of Shakespeare being inspired or we may think of some other writer being inspired or Michelangelo being inspired or that sense. This is the sense of someone who is being breathed through, in a sense, by God so that God is guaranteeing that the result of what He is doing is without error. So Paul is affirming that what he is saying here is not his opinion but it is the revelation of Christ. Then he reflects upon his own state of mind, "That I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart."

Here's another one of those uses of heart, in fact the vast majority of times it refers to the thinking portion of the brain. Here it refers to the innermost part of man, the core of his being. In this case, heart would be a synonym for his soul and that when he thinks about the rejection of Jesus as Messiah by the Jewish people, by his people, he has great sorrow and grief. This is important to understand because somehow along the line, some Christians get the idea that having any kind of emotion is somehow wrong and having some sort of negative emotion is sin. That's not true.

Jesus is described as having gone through great emotional distress in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He went to the cross. He was in turmoil, under such pressure that He sweated blood, the Scripture says. This is not an unknown phenomena. It's not something unique to Jesus. It happens to people who are under extreme distress that the tiny capillaries just under the skin expel blood through the pores of the skin so it appears they are sweating blood because they're under such emotional distress. Having certain emotions is not necessarily sinful. It is acting wrongly upon that emotional pressure that it becomes a sin. So we may have certain emotions present but acting wrongly upon them is what makes that a sin. So we can have sorrow and grief and we can operate on that and we can choose to have a great little pity party. We can just go out and cry and moan and feel sorry for ourselves and get all worked up and depressed and get negative because we had sorrow over things. But Christ Himself sorrows in the garden, and Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4 that when someone close to us dies we sorrow or we grieve but not like those who have no hope. He doesn't say you don't grieve because you have hope. He says you don't grieve like those who have no hope. We grieve, we're sorrowful, we miss those individuals that have departed from this life and have gone to be with the Lord. We know that we will be gathered together with them in the clouds to be with the Lord forever. We will be reunited but nevertheless we miss those people. It's okay to miss people and it's okay to feel a little sad and sorrowful at times because they're not here and we enjoyed them and now they're gone.

It's the same way if you have a close friend who moves across the country and you don't get to see them or spend time with them as you would like. It's the same kind of thing. It's not something that leads us into a pity party and a guilt trip or great sorrow or anything like that. It is simply a legitimate reality that because we live in a fallen world we're going to experience certain of these kinds of emotions. So Paul expresses this and it's a very honorable and righteous reason for his sorrow. It's the recognition that his loved ones, his kindred, his people, have rejected Christ as Savior. So it brings him great sorrow, continual and ongoing, which is the word there, adialeiptos. It's the same word that is used in 1 Thessalonians 5 when it talks about praying without ceasing. It means continuously. It's like a hacking cough. It's not something that's there every second of every minute, every minute of every day. It's something there on an ongoing basis.

So he has this sense of grief and sorrow because his people have rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Then he says in verse 3, "For I could wish that I myself were cursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen, according to the flesh." Here we have the word anathema, which is the word usually translated "accursed." We get this word cursed and automatically we think of some kind of shaman, witch doctor, some kind of black magic, casting a black, evil spell on somebody. That's as far from the Biblical concept as it can possibly be. The word indicates something that comes under Divine judgment. So Paul is saying he wishes that he were judged, accursed, judged apart from Christ. So he is basically saying I would rather lose my salvation and give that up so that all of my countrymen could be saved than to go on and be saved with them lost. It's a hyperbolic statement and he doesn't literally mean he would give up his salvation but it expresses the deep pangs of sorrow he feels and his genuine concern for the salvation of his kinsmen.

So he says that he wishes that he were judged or come under judgment or a curse or was separated from Christ on behalf of his brethren, his countrymen according to the flesh. He's not referring to the sin nature here which is how flesh is often used but here he means in terms of their genetic relationship, their ethnic relationship. So he recognizes an ethnic unity with a group of people identified as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob whom he describes in this passage as Israelites.

In verse 4 he says, "Who are Israelites…" These are the descendants of Jacob. Jacob was given the name Israel by God Himself when Jacob wrestled with the angel at a place called Peniel on the Jabbok River across the Jordan in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon and the angel slapped him on his thigh, rendered him weak in his leg so there was that constant reminder there. Jacob was given that new name indicating his new identity. Paul continues, "Of whom the Israelites attain the adoption as the firstborn of God." They are identified as such in Exodus 19. They are adopted. They receive therefore the glory of God by virtue of their position in relationship to God in the Old Testament, the Covenant. That's a reference to all of the covenants from Genesis 12 on: the Abrahamic Covenant, the Land Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the Mosaic Covenant. Those all pertain to Israel. I think in the context, looking at Romans 9 to 11, he has in mind primarily the permanent covenants, not the Mosaic Covenant; "the giving of the law [Mosaic], the service…" They were adopted to be a kingdom of priests, not just the Levites but the whole nation serving as a kingdom of priests in relation to all of the other nations. This was a position of high honor and promises. 

So all those promises that God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob related to the eternal possession of the land, the promise in the land covenant that the land would belong to Israel in perpetuity, the promises of the New Covenant, all these promises still belong to Israel. They are not lost or abrogated by Israel's rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. So this gives us one of the strongest Biblical texts against the view that is known as replacement theology which is the idea that the church completely replaces Israel in God's plan and God has no future use for Israel. That there's nothing significant anymore about Israel or the Jewish people or the land over there in the Middle East. So that is the view.

This goes back to an understanding of Genesis 12:1-3. Let's turn there and review the foundational summary of the Abrahamic Covenant. The covenant itself is not clearly stated until Genesis 15 and then it is activated and actually cut or formalized in Genesis 17. In Genesis 12:1, "The Lord says to Abraham get out, go, move out [halak] of your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land that I will show you." So Abraham has no idea what the land is going to be yet, which way he's going to go other than he's told to leave his home in the Ur of the Chaldees in what is now in the southern part of Iraq. He heads up the Euphrates River north to a place called Bethel which is now in the northern part of modern Syria. He's going to remain there for a while until his father dies before God takes him the rest of the way to the land that He will show him.

Then in verse 2 God says, "I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great." Those are personal promises to Abram himself. "And so you shall be a blessing." He's not making a declarative statement there that he would be a blessing. He's making a imperatival statement that you are going to be a blessing. It is a mandate that Abram would be a blessing to those around him. This is one of those really remarkable things that we see in the modern state of Israel. This principle that the Jewish people are to be a blessing to the world is played out in modern rabbinic Judaism under a principle that has under Kabala some really weird Pantheistic ideas and there are a lot of notions attached to it that we certainly wouldn't affirm but the core idea is called lekh lekhah meaning to repair the world. It's the idea that it's the role of Jewish people to do what they can to serve others in the world, to improve their lot, to make things better for everyone. I believe this is an application or an outgrowth that they are to be a blessing to the world.

As the Jews have returned to Israel, they have been a remarkable blessing to the world. They have received numerous Nobel prizes in fields of medicine, chemistry, economics, physics, and literature. They have developed biological pacemakers, they've developed a DNA nanocomputers which detect cancer cells, they've had these little camera pills invented in Israel that you can swallow and your gastroenterologist can take pictures all the way down through your system from your esophagus until it exits and we get all kinds of wonderful pictures and see what's going on inside of you. That's all a result of Jewish technology.

They've developed a number of different things in terms of pharmaceutical research, new drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease. They've done remarkable work with stem cell research in treating multiple sclerosis. I have a friend here whose business's corporate headquarters is about four miles down the freeway from here. He and I were in first grade through high school together. He is on international boards for I don't know how many Jewish organizations. His wife, when I first met her about five or six years ago, at an AIPAC conference could barely walk. She was either in a wheelchair or on a cane because of MS. Lately, though, I've seen her run. You'd think she ran "into Jesus". They bought a home in Israel and he divides up his time half way between here and Israel. She's been going through stem cell treatment at Hadassah Hospital for her MS. It took about two years and you would not have a clue that there was a time when this woman didn't walk or could barely walk. There's almost no sign of the disease whatsoever.

None of that is available in the US because our lovely FDA won't allow that but in Israel they have made remarkable advances in the treatment of diseases. In terms of technology, Microsoft and Cisco have their only research and development facilities outside of the US in Israel. Intel has their largest factory in Israel. On Wednesday of last week, I drove down to the Negev, the Hebrew word for south which is that southern desert area. We drove down towards Beersheba and went past the Intel plant. It's just absolutely enormous. It's developed many things. The use of voice mail technology originated in Israel. Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chips developed in Israel. There's a great book out if you want to read about this called "The Start-Up Nation" by Dan Senor. It's absolutely fabulous to read and if you're at all interested in business or technology and leadership and innovation, that's the book for you to read.

It shows the connection between their military culture and the way they develop leaders in the military. They have universal military service in Israel and the book explains how this plays a role in the corporate world. Because when you go get a job in Israel after you get out of the Army or college the first question they ask you is what unit you were in in the IDF. "Oh yeah, my Uncle Joe was in that unit or cousin so-and-so was in that unit." They know everybody and they know exactly what you did and what your background is, what your capabilities are, what your training was. When you go into the IDF when you're 18 years of age until you come out of the reserve when you're 44, you're with the same group the whole time. You develop a bond and a care and concern for one another.

It's just remarkable and the leadership style that developed in the military culture comes over into the corporate world. And it's not the same kind of military culture here. Here you have a commanding officer come back and the company commander will come back and tell the first lieutenant that this is their mission and this is what they're going to do. He's going to call in his platoon leaders and tell them what their different assignments will be. They're going to go back to the platoons and divide their squads up and tell them what they're going to do and everybody's going to say, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full". They're then going to go out and do the mission.

But in Israeli army they're going to say, "Wait a minute. That's nuts! You've got a screw loose. This is why this isn't going to work." Then they will have a rousing debate back and forth and in the process of that give-and-take they're going to come up with a much better plan and they're going to demonstrate ingenuity and innovation and creativity in the whole process. Then they're going to come up with probably a better plan and go execute it. That doesn't play well in the American corporate world or the military. They don't know how to handle that but it's very much a part of the Israeli culture. It blows away the American corporate world when they start interacting with Israeli counterparts.

Read the book. I recommend it. It's got great ideas in there for some ways we could do some things a little differently and a little better by learning from the Jewish people. So they've also done a lot of development in the medical field. For example, ninety percent of American battlefield deaths have occurred before the wounded ever get to a field hospital. Half of those are due to "bleeding out". An Israeli company called First Care addressed this by developing what is called "a life-saving bandage" which is now carried by every US soldier in the field. This was used to stem the blood loss of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords when she was shot in the head. Somebody had this life care bandage in the ambulance that the EMT's had. That stemmed the loss of blood so that has saved an untold number of lives.

They're also doing a lot with robotics now. You can find some video on this. They've developed basically an exo-skeleton that fits on the legs of a paralyzed person and enables them to walk again. It's just incredible technology. We also had a briefing when we were there with a retired IDF colonel who was a spokesperson for the IDF for a number of years. She's with an organization called Natal which has developed the foremost treatment in the world for treating PTSD because if you live in about thirty percent of Israel you're having to deal with PTSD. If you live in some of those places where they get regular rocket fire, you're under a lot of stress. In Gaza there's a high level of PTSD. You go to some place like we did at Kfar Aza kibbutz about a hundred yards off of the border with Gaza. Seventy-five percent of the residents there have been directly affected by rocket fire from terrorists from Gaza. So this is a reality there. They're doing remarkable things. Some Americans have taken notice of what Natal is doing. They're starting to do some test projects with the U.S.in Jacksonville, Florida starting this year. The Israelis have also developed a medical tool called endopat which is a cuff which measures blood pressure from your fingers and can perform a complete heart analysis in five minutes and predict whether someone will have a heart attack within the next seven years. So they are at the cutting edge. This technology works its way out to the rest of the world. It's blessing the rest of the world.

When it comes to agriculture we saw so many things I can't even remember them all. We went to the Bakanie Institute which is one of the development centers for their Department of Agriculture. They showed us many of the things they're developing. They developed a hybrid seedless mandarin orange that is exported all over the world. They're trying to grow it in other places, right now in South America and some other places. They share the wealth voluntarily; it is not socialism. They share this with other countries.

Last year when I was over there we had some people talking to us from the Department of Agriculture on how the Israelis help agriculture in many of the countries in Africa. They're dealing with desert climate so they're introducing them to drip irrigation. They do things better than Americans do. Americans just think, "Oh, I'm going to help you out so I'll throw a wad of cash at you. I'll send over a lot of equipment and that's going to solve your agricultural problems." So the Africans get their John Deere and Caterpillar tractors and everything else and they drive them for a couple of weeks. When they develop a problem they just sit in the fields because they can't read the manuals. They don't know how to fix what broke because they can't read a manual. What the Jews do, they send teams in. Some of these countries are Muslim so they don't like Jews. They won't let Israelis come in so the Israelis come in as a non-governmental organization, not as an Israeli organization, and they provide the same aid. They teach them how to read. They don't throw gobs of money at them and give them equipment. They start off by teaching them how to read. So now they can read the manual to this equipment that U.S. and Europe give them that would otherwise just sit in the field and rust. How practical that is. How wise that approach is. So they do a lot of different things like that. They're quite helpful.

They develop things for potatoes in storage. You know how they start sprouting. The Jews discovered that if you bathe them in a mint oil, the potatoes don't sprout any more. Most apples are stored a year before they ever make it to the store. If you take a Granny Smith apple and if you store it at a degree or two above freezing it'll keep for well over a year but the skin will start to oxidize and turn brown. So they discovered that if you put Granny Smith apples in a low-oxygen environment for two or three hours then the skin will not turn brown any more. You don't have to keep it in that low-oxygen environment for long, just two or three hours, and that takes care of it. Lots of little things like that they've developed.

They put little sensors into plants and measure the water intake of the plant, when it's had enough, when it's at the bottom of the cycle so the sensor then sends out a signal when it needs water or when it's had too much water. That's measured in the desert environment where water is very precious. You have drip irrigation which targets water to each plant and you're not just wasting any water. The Israelis have developed desalination plants and they've also developed plants for cleaning up the water so that eighty percent of the irrigation water they use comes from sewage water that has been treated and completely purified. So they're doing remarkable things like that. This technology is then used in the rest of the world. 

That's just some of the ways that Israel is a blessing to other nations. The other part of Romans 12 that we see is that there's a promise from God that He will bless those who bless Israel and then He will curse those who curse Israel. In the Hebrew there are two different words for curse in verse 3. The first word is a strong word for judgment. "I will harshly judge…" Then the second word for curse, if we wanted to put it in the vernacular, we would say I would strongly judge those who "dis" you. It means just a slight disrespect. It means treating the Jews lightly and with disrespect. So it's not just a matter of judging those who treat you badly but it's a matter of judging anyone who treats the Jews with disrespect.  It has serious implications so this is foundation for understanding why anti-Semitism is wrong. Anti-Semitism is a scourge that has entered into Western civilization via the church. That is a great shame for the body of Christ to bear is the way that we shifted away from a devotion to the literal meaning of the text in order to go with an allegorical interpretation which has led to a complete rejection of Israel.