“Israel” Means Israel: What Romans 11 Says the Church Cannot Afford to Ignore

There is a wave sweeping through parts of the Church today, and it is not a revival. It is a theological retreat — a determined effort to strip the word “Israel” of its plain meaning and replace it with a spiritualized substitute: the Church. If Israel in the New Testament really means the Church, then God’s promises to the Jewish people have been quietly transferred, His covenants reassigned, his promises to Abraham’s descendants voided, and two thousand years of Christian antisemitism can be dressed up as sound exegesis. But is this really what Paul, who still identifies present tense as a Jew (Acts 22:3), an Israelite (Romans 11:1), a Benjamite (Philippians 3:5), and a Pharisee (Acts 23:6), teaches?

87 Times!

Let’s start with a simple fact. The term “Israel” appears 87 times in the New Testament (NIV). In all but one, it refers unmistakably to national, ethnic Israel — the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Scholars who argue that the Church has replaced Israel — covenant theologians and their supersessionist cousins — are left with slim pickings in order to make their case.

In fact, they base their theology on just one of those 87 verses: Galatians 6:16, where Paul blesses “the Israel of God.” I have written extensively on that passage elsewhere (https://drron.org/3QsaGeh). And even there, the best reading of the Greek — with the conjunction kai translated as “and” rather than “even” (see the article) — is that Paul is distinguishing Gentile believers from Jewish believers, not collapsing the two into one undifferentiated mass called “the Church.” But let us set Galatians 6:16 aside entirely. Because the primary place where Paul addresses ethnic Israel in the End Times is Romans 11, no amount of theological sleight of hand can make that chapter disappear or say what supersessionists need it to say.

Renowned Pauline scholar Douglas Moo, interestingly, a Calvinist, says that Israel in Romans 11 is “the nation of Israel.”[1] Thomas Schreiner, a Romans scholar, “agrees with the majority of commentators that ‘all Israel’ (in Romans 11:26) refers to ethnic Israel.^[2] Paul, a skilled writer, would have been offering something utterly confusing by changing the meaning of the word Israel from v. 25 to v. 26. If a mom texted her child at school saying "Dad’s picking you up" and a stranger’s father showed up instead, we wouldn’t call that a deeper meaning of the word "dad." She would have a hard time explaining that from the time she texted you that morning until the time the stranger showed up, she divorced and remarried! That’s what happens when "Israel" in verse 26 is quietly redefined from "Israel" in verse 25.

You Cannot Understand Romans Without This History

Before we open Romans 11, we need to open a history book.

No matter what you think of Israel, of the Jewish people, or of whatever conspiracy theory is currently making the rounds on social media — can we at least agree that Romans 11 is God’s Word to the Church regarding Israel? Good. Then we need to understand what was actually happening in Rome when Paul wrote it.

The earliest house churches in Rome would have been primarily Jewish and would have culturally felt Jewish, as the entire early church was Jewish until halfway through Acts. However, in 49 CE, the Roman Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome. Jewish Yeshua followers, of course, would have been expelled along with the rest of the Jews. During the five years between Claudius’s edict and his death in AD 54, when the edict lapsed and Jews started to return to Rome, the composition and self-understanding of the house churches in Rome shifted considerably.

No Teachers or Bibles!

Think about what that means.

• When the Jewish believers were expelled, they took their knowledge of Scripture with them.

• There was no New Testament yet — Paul’s letters were still being written.

• The only Bible was the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh.

• And the original teachers of the Roman church were Jewish. They were the ones who understood the context of the promises, the covenants, and the Messiah who fulfilled them.

• Suddenly, they were gone.

For approximately five years, the Gentile believers in Rome had no Jewish teachers and no Bible they could read. There were no iPhones with 26 translations of the Bible. Just scrolls, and they were now gone! In their absence, a teaching emerged which would become known as Replacement Theology — believing that God had rejected the Jews and turned instead to the Christian Church as His chosen people on earth.

Then Claudius died.

Nero came to power.

Nero noticed that business was lacking due to the lack of Jewish acumen and invited the Jews to return. But when they did, the Messianic Jews were not welcomed back into the Roman church. The Gentile believers had spent five years convincing themselves that God was finished forever with Israel, and now the Jewish people were back, expecting to resume their place in the community.

The Gentiles were arguing that the Jews were now rejected by God. The purpose of Paul’s letter was to address the exclusion of the Jews by the Gentiles, and Romans 9–11 in particular addresses this issue. This is precisely why Paul says things in Romans that he does not say in other books: the gospel is to the Jew first (1:16), circumcision has value to the Jew (3:1–4), Paul is willing to forfeit his own salvation for the sake of his people, Israel (9:1–5), God has not rejected Israel (11:1, 11), and in the end, she will experience national salvation (11:26).

Does the situation that Paul was addressing in Rome sound familiar? It should. This is precisely what is happening today. People are abandoning the biblical text in favor of popular opinion. Conspiracy theories fill the void. Many people who have no meaningful relationship with a single Jewish person have constructed in their minds a caricature — the manipulative, powerful, shadowy Jew pulling levers behind the curtain. It is not unlike pre-Nazi Germany: the Jews are our enemy; they want to keep us poor; they want to control us. But Paul does not feed that beast. He dismantles it, systematically, in the most theologically precise chapters he ever wrote.

What Romans 11 Actually Says

Paul opens by asking the question bluntly: “Has God rejected His people?” And he answers just as bluntly: “By no means!” (v. 1). He repeats it in verse 11: “Did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means!” The Greek in both of those verses, mē genoito, is more accurately translated, “no, may it never be.” It is essentially Paul’s way of saying “Absolutely not!” or “God forbid!” or “Of course not — the very idea is outrageous.”

At a time when many are saying that God has rejected Israel forever, Paul’s word still echoes out today. And maybe that is precisely why. God knew what the future held for the Jewish people, and in Romans 11, he is warning the future church not to turn against Israel because he himself has not rejected her.

He then explains the mechanics of what God is doing. Israel has been hardened — partially and temporarily — so that salvation could go to the Gentiles. Many scholars believe that a mass Jewish acceptance of Yeshua would have triggered the return of the Messiah, so God hardened the Jewish people to give time for the nations to come in. Listen to New Testament scholar Terrence Donaldson:

“If Israel’s acceptance of Christ will accompany—indeed, precipitate—the Parousia (Second Coming), and if the Parousia represents the termination of the Gentiles’ opportunity for salvation, then Israel’s immediate acceptance of the gospel would have meant the closing of the door to the Gentiles.” (Paul and the Gentiles, 222)

The Jewish people suffered so that the gospel could prosper among the Gentiles. And now it is those very Gentiles who are being tempted to judge the people through whose stumbling they received everything. That is why this present wave of antisemitism from those who claimed to be Christian is so shocking—it fails to understand that Israel’s hardening was the key to their salvation. That’s not what I’m saying; that is what the text says in Romans 11.

Paul names what this awakening will look like in verses 12 and 15. If Israel’s failure brought riches to the world, he says, how much more will their fullness bring? And if their rejection meant reconciliation for the world — what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? This is not the language of a people written off or who have been replaced; this is the language of a resurrection. God is confirming his faithfulness to his promises.

Then come the climactic verses, 25 and 26:

“I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.”

Let us lay this out plainly:

• There is a mystery.

• Paul is urgently concerned that the Gentile church would remain ignorant of this mystery.

• Ignorance of the mystery would lead to conceit.

• And conceit leads to judgment. (see vv. 21-22)

The mystery is that Israel’s hardening to the gospel is partial and temporary. It will only be lifted after the fullness of the Gentiles — which most scholars understand as the gospel reaching all the earth. And when that hardening is lifted, the result will be so dramatic that Paul can only describe it as all Israel being saved.

The majority of scholars believe that all Israel being saved refers to national revival in the End Times. Moo believes that salvation will come through mass repentance and confession of Yeshua as Messiah. This is consistent with Zechariah 12:10 and 13:1, which speak of mourning and repentance leading to forgiveness in restoration. Schreiner likewise believes this does not refer to every Jewish person on earth, but a majority in the End Times. 

So who is this “Israel”? The supersessionist must say it is the Church. But that is exegetical gymnastics. In context, Paul has been talking about ethnic, national Israel from verse one. He uses himself — a Jewish man, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin — as Exhibit A that God has not abandoned His people (v. 1). The “Israel” that will be saved in verse 26 is the same Israel that has been hardened in verse 25, which is the same Israel Paul has been addressing since chapter 9. To suddenly redefine the “Israel” in the climactic verse is not plausible.

42 Times in 36 Verses

Israel is referred to by name or pronoun 42 times in Romans 11’s 36 verses. And then suddenly, in the most consequential statement—“all Israel will be saved”—Paul changes his meaning? Read it again for yourself:

^“I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.”

Internationally renowned German New Testament scholar, Peter Stuhlmacher, writes:

“[Israel] will be redeemed from its unbelief by the Christ who appears from Zion and will be received anew into the covenant through the forgiveness of its sins. Not the salvation of the Gentiles alone but the deliverance of all Israel from the hardening of unbelief is the goal of God’s history with humanity.”^[3]

In other words, the thing that holds Israel’s salvation back is the hardening of unbelief that God himself initiated for the sake of the nations but will remove in the End Times. Should not the Church be praying for this hardness to be removed instead of promoting conspiracy theories and tropes against God’s ancient people?

A Warning the Church Ignored

Paul saw this coming. He warned the Gentile believers in verses 21 and 22 not to be arrogant toward the natural branches — because if God did not spare the natural branches when they fell in unbelief, He will not spare the Gentiles if they become arrogant either. And in verses 23 and 24, he holds out the hope of restoration: the natural branches can be grafted back in. God’s door to Israel is not closed.

The tragedy is that the Church largely ignored this warning for nearly two thousand years. For centuries, Christian teaching in Europe framed Jews through theological categories of rejection. Most notably, the charge of deicide accused Jews collectively of responsibility for Jesus’ death. Closely related, supersessionism — also known as Replacement Theology — taught that Christianity had supplanted Judaism in God’s covenantal plan. Over time, preaching, biblical interpretation, and liturgy reinforced these ideas, and Christian societies framed Jewish suffering as divinely ordained. The Roman Catholic Church, which became the dominant religious institution of the medieval world and the primary persecutor of the Jewish people for centuries, had drifted so far from Paul’s warning that it institutionalized the very arrogance he had condemned.

Catholicism Repudiates Replacement Theology

It was not until October 28, 1965, that Pope Paul VI, at the Second Vatican Council, decreed Nostra Aetate, that the Catholic Church formally confronted this legacy. Retrieving Paul’s own language from Romans 11, the declaration stated: “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues... the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” It took her nineteen centuries and the Holocaust to get back to what Paul had written in the first century.

The very idea of supersessionism is undercut by Paul’s closing argument in verse 29: “God’s gifts and His calling to Israel are irrevocable.” Paul knew there would be those who would declare God was finished with national Israel. So he chose the strongest word in his theological vocabulary — irrevocable. The Greek word is ametamelētos, and it has three parts. The prefix negates the meaning; it turns revocable into irrevocable. The second part means after. And the third part, melētos, means to think again. In a sense, it means that after the fact, you will not reconsider the decision. “If we insist on an etymological definition (a-meta-melomai), we will see this as meaning that God does not change his mind; once God has chosen his people, He will not go back on the decision; God never breaks His word after making a promise.”[4]

Not renegotiable. Not transferred. Not up for debate. Irrevocable. He echoes the prophet Jeremiah, who declared that God would only reject national Israel if the laws of nature themselves ceased to function (Jeremiah 31:35–37). The sun would have to stop rising. The stars would have to go dark. Only then would God be finished with Israel.

The Real Calling

None of this means the nation of Israel is above accountability. It means Israel is not beneath prayer.

Paul’s plea to the Gentile believers in Romans 11 is not a call to uncritical political support for every decision of the Israeli government. It is a call to contend for Israel’s salvation. “Salvation has come to the Gentiles to provoke Israel to jealousy” (v. 11). The Gentile church exists, in part, as a witness to the Jewish people — to make them hunger for what they are missing. That calling is undermined when believers adopt an antisemitic posture that has resulted in the deaths of untold thousands of Jews across the centuries.

Both my Twitter and Facebook feeds are full of some of the most hateful and vile antisemitic statements I have ever encountered. And many of the people posting these things claim to love Jesus. But you cannot love the Jewish Jesus and hate the Jewish people. Those two things cannot coexist. Paul makes the consequences of antisemitic arrogance crystal clear — and it is no joke. Watch your life and your doctrine closely.

[1] Derek R. Brown and E. Tod Twist, Romans, ed. Douglas Mangum, Logos Research Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2026), Ro 11:25–36.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

[4] Ceslas Spicq and James D. Ernest, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 92.