Now you will find the texts this morning in Romans 11. I choose two texts Romans 11 and the verses 12 and 15. Romans chapter 11 verses 12 and 15. Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them, the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness. And verse 15. For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, that life from the dead. I'm deeply grateful to my excellent friend Mr. Malcolm Watts for his gracious words of welcome to my wife and to myself. It is a very great honor and privilege which he has given to me to invite me to address you at this missionary weekend. I do bring to you most sincere Christian greetings from the Free Church of Scotland continuing congregations up in the north and we greatly value our fellowship with you dear people and we very much covet your prayers. You will know that the subject which is set before us this weekend is the subject of the future conversion of the Jewish people to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The lecture which I endeavored to give you yesterday was the theme, the place of Israel in the purposes of God. You will understand that we are still with the same subject today and you will understand also that inevitably some of what I said yesterday will need to be said again today in the same or similar expression. Let me then take these two texts as the basis of our meditation on the subject of the restoration of Israel and their in-gathering to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are four things that I wish to bring before you. Let me announce what they are. First of all, I want to show you when God cast away the Jews and why he did so and I noticed this in the text if the fall of them verse 12 be the riches of the world and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles how much more their fullness so there we have in verse 12 two phrases referring to the casting off of the Jews the word fall and the word diminishing and then in verse 15 we have other words if the casting away of them but the reconciling of the world what shall the receiving of the people live from the dead so Paul makes it very clear and this will be our first heading when God cast away the Jews and why then my second heading will be this the benefits which have come to the Gentile world as a consequence of their rejection, the rejection of the Jews. And you have this very clearly in the text, if the fall of them be the riches of the world, meaning the Gentile world, and if the diminishing of them be the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness. And verse 15, if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, and so on, So it's very clear the Apostle Paul writing here is telling us that as a result of the casting away of the Jewish nation for a time, great blessing has come to us Gentile peoples throughout the world. And that benefit will be my second heading. Then the third heading is prophetic. It is the prophecy given here of the future restoration of the Jews to faith in their Messiah, whom we refer to as the blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In verse 12 he says this, if the fall of them were the riches of the world and the diminishing of the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness. And the word fullness there is prophetic. He is looking into the future and he is saying that one day God will bring them in again to faith in Christ and the same thing is stated in verse 15 in other words if the casting away of them the Jews be the reconciling of the world the Gentiles what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead and the receiving of them is this prophecy that at some point in God's secret plan in the future the Jews will be restored they have now fallen they have now been cast away but not forever there is a date in God's diaries if I may be permitted an expression in God's purposes perhaps is better there is a date fixed in God's decree in which the Jews will come back and they will be in a high position of favor with God through Christ as they were in Old Testament times. And then fourthly, I want to say a little at the end about the blessing which this will mean to the entire world of Gentiles when they come in. And this is referred to, you see, at the end of verse 12, how much more their fullness, indicating that when they do come in again, Gentiles will be richly, abundantly, bountifully blessed. And verse 15, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead. Now I'm mindful that we have a clock in front of us and I do not want to abuse my privilege so I should try to handle these four points of teaching from my text expeditiously. And the first heading I give you is this. when did God cast away the Jews and why did he cast them away? The answer is he cast away the Jews after Pentecost. The day of Pentecost was that day when the Holy Spirit came down at Jerusalem upon the apostles and the other Christians and they began to speak with other tongues, other languages. And the purpose of that miracle was to indicate, by signs, that now all languages were going to hear the gospel. Previously, only Israel, the Jews, had had the privileges of the gospel and the covenant, the knowledge of God, the true God, knowledge of salvation, hope of glory as we said yesterday there were a few Gentiles in the Old Testament who were saved obvious cases are Rahab the harlot in the book of Joshua and Ruth the Moabites in the book named after her in the Old Testament some who were converted like Naaman the Syrian and you can think of others but they were very few Nobody in Britain was being converted at that time. My friends, our grandparents, all those many centuries ago, lived in darkness and died in darkness, and I say it with tears, they went to hell, and there they are today. Because there was no Christ available to them, no way of faith, no knowledge of the gospel, no blood of Jesus to cleanse them. They lived and died without hope. They have perished without any light or prospect of deliverance. But now the Jews were the exception. They had the light in Old Testament times. But after Pentecost they steadily were cast off by God. We see that as we read the Acts of the Apostles. Let me just give you a little bit of an idea as to how it happened. When the apostles preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, the official leaders of the Jewish church, the Jewish nation, Pharisees, Sadducees, high priests, and all the others, these hierarchical dignitaries within the Jewish community, they rejected the gospel for the most part. There were exceptions, like Nicodemus, who was born again and Joseph of Arimathea who assisted in the burying of the body of our Lord in the tomb. But for the most part, the Jewish hierarchy resisted the gospel. They persecuted the preachers in the early church who brought Christ to them. And they did their very best to destroy the gospel. Even the Apostle Paul, you remember, before his conversion, spent all his energies arresting Christians and hailing them off to prison and to death. that was the attitude of the Jewish leaders of that time so after Pentecost God was slowly casting them off I must qualify what I say however by saying that he first of all gathered a Christian church in Jerusalem and from that Christian church in Jerusalem men and women went out everywhere preaching the gospel in Judea, Samaria and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. That's how we in this country got the gospel. We should be deeply thankful to God for those Roman soldiers who had been converted in their own countries and came to subdue this nation after the days of Julius Caesar. And they brought with them the knowledge of Jesus our Lord. And the gospel went all over our country at that time. Historians tell us that Christ was conquering people in the north of Scotland before the Romans got there. The word of truth was flying about, the Druids heard it, and these people who were British inhabitants of our countries heard of a saviour, someone who had died for sinners, and when they heard it they clung to the message. Many were blessed, of course some gave their lives for the faith of Jesus and were persecuted to the death. These were our excellent forefathers in this country. To be more specific, let me say that God's casting away of the Jews occurred between the death of Christ and the day of Pentecost, which is really roughly the same period of time, and A.D. 70. A.D. 70. That's 40 years after the death of Christ. Christ died about the year A.D. 30. and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman armies in A.D. 70. So God gave a kind of 40-year period of overlapping in which he allowed the church in Jerusalem to grow and grow and grow and grow. Then when the Roman armies came in A.D. 70, they surrounded Jerusalem and it's very touching to read about it in the writer Josephus. I recommend you to read Josephus and take a handkerchief with you because it's unspeakably terrible to read of the sufferings of these Jewish people at the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 but what happened was eventually the Roman soldiers got into the city and they slaughtered about a million and a half Jewish people and one of the soldiers did something quite accidentally as far as he was concerned or at least I mean his intention was not as serious as the event was he took a flaming torch and went to the Temple of Jerusalem and threw the torch in through a window, and he was not commanded to do that. His commanding officer had not told him to destroy this magnificent temple in Jerusalem, but he did this, he threw it in, and in next to no time the whole temple was ablaze. And when the Jews saw this, they despaired. This was a symbol of their great theocracy and their knowledge of God. But that AD 70 was, if you like, the terminal point of God's patience with Israel. And at that date, he reprobated them. He closed the door upon the Jewish nation as a whole. Now, of course, we must also say that all through history, there have been a tiny trickle of Jewish converts, like the great Alfred Adersheim, who wrote many wonderful books on the Gospels and on the Scriptures, and others like that who loved the truth. Adolf Safir, great Jewish Christians were, by and large, the whole bulk of the Jewish nation was now reprobated, cast off. God shut them out. And that's the language Paul uses here. The fall of them, he says, and the diminishing of them. And verse 15, the casting away of these people. So this is what is referred to here. The Jewish people as a whole were cast off. at the date A.D. 70. Why did God do this? In a word, my beloved friends, it was because they would not receive the Lord Jesus Christ as their Messiah, their God-sent Savior. They would not accept Him. They said, we will not have this man to rule over us. You remember the parable Jesus gave them? God sent various servants to preach to them representing the prophets of the Old Testament, and the Jews wouldn't listen to them. Then says God, I will send my own son. They will respect him. But they didn't, did they? They said, this is the heir. Come, let's kill him and the inheritance will be ours. That's exactly what they did. They crucified the Lord of glory and they brought upon themselves this terrible judgment. There are many passages of scripture which substantiate what I have said. Let me just mention one. And that is, Jesus said, of himself, the stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. And he threatened them that if they didn't believe in him, this stone would fall upon them and grind them to powder. And that's what happened to the Jewish nation. But two thousand years they have been cast off. The bulk of them have lived and died in unbelief. and other the judgment of God. Now that's what Paul means in my texts. The fall of them, the diminishing of them, the casting away of them, meaning the Jews. My dear friends, as I move on, before I come to my second heading, let me say this to you very quickly. We in this country had better listen to God's voice here. Because if we in this country have the same attitude to Jesus Christ as these people had of the Jews all these centuries ago, we might find ourselves in a similar condition. Oh, let us plead with God for mercy for our beloved Britain and for our Western world. Let us plead with God not to take away His Holy Spirit from us, lest we too taste of the same reprobation as these people alas did all those centuries ago. My second heading is this, the fall of the Jews has led to immense blessing to the entire Gentile world. Where do we have that? Verse 12, the fall of them is the riches of the world, the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles. Verse 15, the casting away of them, the reconciling of the world. What is being said here is this, that Whereas in the Old Testament days, we non-Jews, or Gentiles if you like, did not know God, did not have a gospel, did not have the Bible, did not have even a codified moral law, the Ten Commandments, and certainly had no promises from God to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. No missionaries were sent to us. No scriptures were in our hands. No light from heaven shone upon the Gentile world. The light of heaven shone upon Israel. That sole beam from heaven shone all the way from the throne of God to the little nation of Israel. All the rest of the world was in total darkness, more or less. That's not to say that we were guiltless, because our consciences told us that we should live differently from the way we lived. But we had no gospel light, we had no Bible light, we had no divine revelation, we had no missionaries to come to us, and God didn't send them. But when the Lord Jesus Christ was lifted up on high and the Jews were cast off, wonderful light came to us Gentiles. Now we see this beginning to happen in the Gospels in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me quote you Matthew chapter 8. where we have the centurion. Do you remember him? After Jesus had preached his sermon on the mount, Matthew 8, this centurion comes to Jesus and he says, Lord, I've got a servant who's ill and I want you to heal him. But he says, don't trouble yourself traveling all that way, Lord. Just you speak the word. You've no need to travel there, Lord. You have all authority in heaven and earth, he meant. You're like me, I'm commanding these soldiers. I just have to say, come, and he comes, and go, and he goes. And you're the same, Lord. You just have as God to say, let it be done, and it'll be done, Lord. There's no need to travel all that distance to my friend's house. Jesus marveled at him. He said, I've not seen such faith as this, not in all Israel. The faith of this man in my authority, my godhood, my divinity, he sees it all. How did he get that light from? And then says Christ turning to the crowds of Jews, they shall come from the north and the south and the east and the west and sit down in the kingdom of heaven and the children of the kingdom shall be cast out. You see how our Lord put it all together. The Gentiles are going to come. We have another account of this similarly in John's Gospel in chapter 12 where some of the disciples were talking and Jesus was preaching and who came along? but certain Greeks. Greeks, that's Gentiles, non-Jews. Greeks. And they came very humbly to the apostles and said, excuse me sir, we would love to see Jesus. Where is this Jesus? Where is he? Show us Jesus. And the disciples brought them to Jesus. And when Jesus saw it, he said, now is the hour, the hour is come. He saw in the coming of the Greeks the purposes of God were ripened to the point in which the Gentile world was going to come to himself and he will be lifted up to draw all men to salvation throughout the whole world. You get the same thing in that wonderful passage in Acts chapter 10 where the Apostle Peter sees the sheet let down. Do you remember in the vision with all sorts of unclean birds and beasts. And the Lord says to him, arise Peter, kill and eat from these beasts and birds. Oh no, says Peter, as a devout Jew. No, no, Lord, I've never eaten any unclean bird or beast in my life, he says, because some beasts were clean and some beasts were unclean, as the early books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers tell us. You will know that passage. And the Lord replied to Peter, what I have cleansed, Peter, do not thou call unclean. And this was a vision teaching him that now, after Pentecost, God's attitude to the Gentile nations was totally different from what it had been in the Old Testament. In other words, God was now prepared to receive unclean nations, Greeks, Romans, Britons, and Gauls, and all these heathen nations who before were like the rotten beasts of the field in the sight of God, they were now being welcomed. Christ was going to be preached to them, and all the nations of the world in all the languages were going to hear that the grace of God was abounding to all mankind, that all are welcome to come to Jesus and trust in Him. A new day was dawning, you see, and Peter was staggered by this. When he heard this, And when he saw the early converts of the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke with tongues as a testimony and a sign that God had sanctified them, God was now accepting them and bringing them in, Peter was amazed. But some of his fellow Jewish companions and fellow laborers in the Jewish church, they said to Peter, Tut, tut, Peter, we're hearing you're eating with the Gentiles, what you're thinking about, Peter? Have you lost all sense of proportion, Peter? Eating with the Gentiles. What are you doing? Give an account of yourself, Peter. This is a matter of a church authority and even discipline. Eating with the Gentiles, they said. And Peter then told his vision. And when they heard this, these church authorities and leaders, they said, amazing. Then God has even to the Gentiles given repentance and to life. And they received this as a new dispensation in the purposes of God. And that's what's being referred to here in my text. Most wonderful and astonishing change that occurred in the purposes of God. Notice how it is in my text. If the fall of the Jews be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of the Jews the riches of the Gentiles, it goes on like that. If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, and so on. The word reconciling means being brought into the family of God. That's what this word reconciled means. Not simply reconciled to Jews, that's not what it means. It means reconciled to God. And oh my dearly beloved friends, here is the wonderful truth and love and goodness of God. We vile ignorant Gentiles who once wallowed in squalor and idolatry, filthiness of life. Not only were we brutal, but many of our Gentile world was cannibalistic. They would not only kill one another, but then proceed to eat one another. And this is the way people lived. It didn't just simply have a nice wedding and live happily ever after as man and wife. No, no. If you liked some other woman, take her. Take this one. Take that one. And so on. vile, vile practices which were abomination in the sight of God. It's a sad thing to have to say that they're all coming back, these things, into our modern society, but it's sheer paganism to behave like that. God requires holiness of life and purity of life. So this word reconcile means that the Gentile world, once so ignorant of God, is being now, from this day onward, being brought back to salvation. That's the second thing. And I want to say, my very dear friends, how grateful you and I should be, as Gentiles, to live in New Testament times. If you and I were now living in Old Testament times, we'd be living in total darkness, we'd be worshipping the sun, moon, and stars, full of fear, of the spirits of evil round about us, without any knowledge of God, living in darkness, dying in ignorance, and descending into hell fire, where we know we all deserve to be. It's only the sheer mercy of God in Christ that has brought us these wonderful gospel privileges to know the way of salvation, peace, and reconciliation with God. Now, thirdly, I say to you, here in these two verses, and in this chapter, we have a prophecy, a prophecy of the coming back of the Jews one day to faith in Jesus Christ. Where do we have this? Verse 12, if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and if the diminishing of them be the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness And then verse 15, if the casting away of them is the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead. So we have that teaching there and we understand it in terms of the whole of this passage here which amplifies, expounds and illuminates the purposes of God. Now just take one verse, verse 23 is our key to understanding these verses. And they also, the Jews, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again." Now that is extremely important for us to recognize what Paul is saying there. He is saying that after AD 70 and the day of Pentecost, God drove the Jews out of his presence and he has scattered them all over the world. There are Jews in all countries. And they have been for centuries. And they've been extremely badly treated, as I'm sure you know. We have special words dealing with the way Jews have been discriminated against. The word pogrom is used in Russia for getting rid of Jews, killing them off, destroying them, pogrom. We have the word Holocaust. Those of us who are over 70 years of age remember what happened in Germany. Adolf Hitler and the German nation in the 1939 to 1945 period during the Second World War. I'm sure most of you realize that special trains were sent quietly all over European countries that were occupied by the Germans and the Nazis to round up the Jews, to put them in these trains like cattle. and took them off to Belsen and Auschwitz. When they were there, I couldn't begin to tell you the things that happened. It's just too dreadful. Little, beautiful little children with bright blue eyes would get out of the train not knowing where they were. And they'd be snatched by angry soldiers and thrown into fires, killed, and their eyes plucked out. And these children thought they were in hell. It was so terrible. Put into gas chambers. Oh, my beloved friends, the cruelties which have been shown to the Jewish nation over the 2,000 years of their expulsion from privilege defy all parallel, I think, in the history of the world. There never have been anything like it. Why did these terrible things come upon the Jewish nation? And the answer is, it is a divine judgment upon them. Mr. Watts is reading in that amazing chapter 30 of Deuteronomy. If you weren't just noticing some of the detail there, go back to it later and see what Moses is saying in that amazing chapter. He's saying what Paul is saying. He says, the day will come when because of your stiff pride hearts and your irreligious behavior, God will scatter you throughout the nation and you will dwell in all the nations under the sun. You get the same thing in Deuteronomy 28, that huge chapter of judgment upon the Jews. And God tells them what he will do to them, to punish them. And the very last of all the indignities is that you'll be sold by your enemies to the hands of others, and nobody will buy you. That was the supreme, ultimate indignity. They'll be sold as slaves, and no one would want to buy them. And all these troubles would come upon them. And God was behind it, of course. Of course, it doesn't excuse Hitler. He'll pay his penalty for what he did. It doesn't excuse the people who have been unkind to the Jews for what they did to the Jews, but God's secret hand allowed it to happen. God permitted it to happen because he was fulfilling the judgment upon which Jesus Christ and the prophets had foretold. But now, thirdly, we see here there's going to be a change in the future. There's going to be a gathering in again of the Jews to Christ. And that's what verse 23 says. God is able to graft them in again. I hope you'll bear with me those who were here yesterday if I repeat the illustration, but I think for the benefit of those who didn't hear it, it's as well for me to do so. Please bear patiently with me. Paul here compares the Jewish nation to a tree, an olive tree. First of all, he said there are the branches Just as there are with this microphone, it has its little feet at the bottom. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and so on, the patriarchs, they are the roots of the tree. And then there is the trunk of the tree, which is narrow, like the microphone, like the trunk of a tree, narrow, until you come to the top of the tree. And at the top of the tree you have the branches coming out, don't you? Pretty well all trees are built in the same pattern. now that is what is being talked about here by the Apostle Paul in this illustration in this chapter of the olive tree the patriarchs are the root the state of Israel in the Old Testament is the narrow trunk and then we come to Pentecost and at Pentecost the branches all branch out don't they from Jerusalem the gospel goes worldwide and all the nations more or less are now affected in such a way that they branch out. Now to make room for them Paul says God takes a knife and he chops out some of the natural branches and he grafts in the unnatural branches from the Gentile tree which is a wild olive tree. He cuts out the natural branches of the Jewish people and he grafts the Gentile nations in. Now that of course is an illustration to say that God is going to cut out some Jews so that we Gentiles can come into the privileges of Abraham and the covenant and the gospel and the beautiful influence of Jesus Christ in our life to save us and sanctify us and cleanse our heart and circumcise our filthy natures and make us a holy, sanctified, God-glorying and God-honoring people. That's what he means. Now, Paul goes on with that illustration and he says If God could take unnatural branches and graft them into the tree, how much more can God one day graft back the natural branches, the Jews, back into their own tree? By which he means, how much more easily can God bring the Jews back into their own privileged condition of being his covenant people again? Not exclusively so anymore, but together with the Gentiles. And the best way to understand this is to consider the history of the purposes of God as being threefold. I hope it helps you to put it like this. It certainly helps my way of thinking. The history of God's purposes with the people of this world are threefold. In the Old Testament, God was saving the Jews. Not the Gentiles, just the Jews. Since Pentecost and onwards, God has been saving the Gentiles, but not the Jews, apart from a tiny trickle of them. But there's going to be a date sometime in the future in which the Holy Spirit will be poured down upon the Jewish people and they will be brought into faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And there will be a final period of history from that date to the end of the world in which both Jews and Gentiles together will be in the church, and the church will be at its highest peak in all history. It will be at its high watermark. I believe that's irrefutably what Paul is teaching here in this passage of the Word of God. The Old Testament, Jews are saved. Since Pentecost and onwards, Gentiles are saved, but not Jews, except a tiny trickle. But there's going to be a day in the future when God will graft them in again. A day when God will bring in their fullness. A day when God will receive them back to himself. Now that means to say that that day is on its way. And it may be nearer than we know. We don't of course know exactly when that day will come. But allow me just to tell you one or two interesting facts. These are facts. In the Victorian age, a hundred years ago, something began in Britain and in the world called the Zionist movement. That is to say, the Jews worldwide began to feel, by a sort of instinct, we must get back to Palestine, we must get back to our homeland. That was a new thing. At the same time, the Hebrew language was being revived. Great scholars amongst the Hebrew people taught Hebrew now, and the language of Hebrew, having died out for centuries, was effectively revived. It's a spoken language today in Israel and elsewhere. In the year 1917, during the First World War, Great Britain was given the mandate for Palestine. And because we were a Bible-loving nation, we sympathized with the Jews, and we wanted the Jews to have a homeland. When the war was finished in the year 1948, as many of you know, the State of Israel was created and the Jews were brought back and they've been there ever since. 1948, 61 years I think it is. They have been successful in war ever since. It's a miracle that the Jews survived, because the very next day, after the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the Arab nations came and tried to destroy them, to wipe them out. But they didn't succeed. And they haven't succeeded at any point since. And in the last few months, as you know, there was the war in Gaza, the Gaza Strip. And it was not successful for the enemies of Israel, was it? I must quote again what I quoted yesterday, a quotation from a conservative American Jewish rabbi called Rabbi Singer. Not a Christian, but a Jewish rabbi, a conservative Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Tobia Singer. And this is what he said. He asked a question. How is it, he said, that in the last 20 years more Jews have become Christians than in the previous 2,000 years? Now, that's an amazing thing. I got that from Mr. Mike Moore of the CWI. Christian witness to Israel. My friends, let those words sink into your mind. If it means anything at all, surely it means God is beginning to turn a face of favor again toward his ancient people. He's turned his back on them for 2,000 years, but these are evidences our Lord is turning his face toward them again. Mike Moore tells me also that there probably are more Jewish Christians in the world today than there have ever been since the world began. Converted Jews in Israel, in America of course, elsewhere too. I'm very touched by this, that in the Victorian period apparently too, something began to happen which hadn't happened for centuries. No rain had fallen on the promised land of Palestine, the Jewish country. But in the Victorian era, as I've been reading various books and trying to study these things, The former rains in October or November and the latter rains in April have begun to fall every year since then, more and more. And Palestine, which used to be a desert, since the Jews have taken it over in 1948, it's a land truly flowing with milk and honey, fruit, flowers, and the amount of money available from chemicals in the Dead Sea is absolutely astronomical. Billions upon billions of dollars of wealth from chemicals which are locked up in the waters of the Dead Sea. Why am I saying these things? Well, I'm certainly not trying to say that Israel is absolutely perfect in all its politics. I'm not interested in that. All I'm trying to say, my dear friends, is these are evidences surely that God is saying to us, the day is drawing near, the days drawing near in which I will pour out my spirit upon the Jews again, and bring them to myself again, and I will reconcile them to myself again through Christ. I don't, of course, mean that they'll be saved by being Jewish. Perish the thought. I mean their eyes will be opened to see who Jesus is, and that they've rejected him for 2,000 years, and it'll break their hearts to realize how blind they were that they never realized that Jesus of Nazareth was the God-sent incarnate Savior, the Lord of glory, who came to die for their sins and for ours. So that's what Paul is arguing. Verse 12, if the fall of them but the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness, meaning when God brings them in again. Verse 15, if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead? And this is now my fourth and final heading briefly. When this Jewish revival takes place one day, it will bring wonderful blessing, not only to Israel, but to all the world and all the churches of Christ. throughout the world. What shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead? Now, there are two things there. It means, surely, that before this revival takes place among the Jews, we may expect terrible deadness amongst the Gentile churches. And that's exactly what we see. Terrible deadness. Were the churches of Britain ever so dead as they are today? Look at the continent. France, Spain, Italy, Germany, where's the power of the gospel in any of these countries? A little bit in Holland, but where else? Go to America, good churches there, but are we seeing powerful revival movements anymore, anywhere in the world? Perhaps a bit in Africa, perhaps in China, but my dear friends, there's a terrible deadness in this country. And yet, you see, here it is. It'll be life, from the dead to all the world. I can imagine somebody might say, who cares about Israel? They're thousands of miles away from Britain. My interest is in England and in Wales and in Scotland. But my dear friends, even supposing our motivation was no more noble and generous than that, supposing we didn't care two hoots about the Jews, although we should, but supposing we didn't Our very selfish interest in our own country shouldn't make us concerned about this subject, because when the Jews come in again and God opens the door of reconciliation, I say again, He will pour out the spirit of grace and supplications upon them, and then in great numbers they will come to faith in their blessed Saviour and ours, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory. Well, it's time for me to wind up. Let me very quickly bring a practical point or two before you, my dear friends. Thank you for your generous patience in listening to what some of you have heard twice almost in the last two days. I want to say this, if I may. Love the Jewish people and feel heartbroken about their condition. Oh, let it touch your soul with sympathy to think Their sad condition, the pogroms, the holocausts, the ghettos, the inhuman treatment that they've had, all of course came as a judgment upon them from God. But let us, in our heart of hearts, grieve that they were so blind for so long. And let us plead night and day that God in his mercy may hasten the day when he will bring them in again. Listen to Jesus' words, and with this I will end. Jesus said, Jerusalem shall be trodden underfoot of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. And of course he implies that when that happens, then God will visit them again. So does Paul say in Romans chapter 11 at the end. He says this very thing. He says at verse 25, I would not have you ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest it should be wise in your own conceits that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel should be saved. God will send a deliverer from Zion, that is the Holy Spirit, to open their eyes and bring them to faith in Christ. And what will the effect be upon us in Britain and the world? Life from the dead. Oh, my beloved friends, may God hasten that day.