To The Jew First

This title phrase appears one time in the Bible, in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

Rom. 1:16

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. (my emphasis)

It is interpreted by a majority of the Christian Evangelical community to mean, “those in the world who are of Jewish descent come first.”

Further defense of the “Jews come first” position is that the Jews are “God’s chosen people,” and “the seed” of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants of Genesis 12:2,3; 17:7,8; and Exodus 19:5,6; Deut. 7:6:

Gen 12:2-3

And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

Gen 17:7-8

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

Ex 19:5-6

Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

Deut 7:6

For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

These verses leave no doubt as to who became the “seed” of the Abrahamic covenant. That seed was the children of Israel, or Jacob’s twelve sons and their descendants. And there is no doubt that the “nations” (Gentiles) would be blessed or cursed in accordance with how they treated them. According to Genesis 12, if they “blessed” them, they would, in turn, be blessed, and cursed if they didn’t.

The First Advent

The Lord Jesus Christ, in his first advent on earth, made no bones about the people he came to save from their sins: “And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.”(Matt. 1:21). To a Gentile woman who desired him to heal her daughter he responded: …I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. 15:24); and, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs (Mark 7:27).

The Ministry of the 12

Likewise, to his disciples he commanded, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ( Matt 10:5-6); which they obediently did, starting their ministry in Jerusalem in Acts 2, to ...Jews (verse 5),…men of Judea (verse 14), .. men of Israel (verse 22); proclaiming in verse 39 that,…the promise (to Abraham) is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off (those Israelites scattered among the nations – Ref Ps. 44:10; Ezek 11:16,17).

The Apostle Paul

These verses make it clear that Israel is still in the forefront as God’s chosen people. But then came the apostle Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus), who claimed to be the apostle of the Gentiles (Rom. 11:13), and the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles (Rom. 15:15). If this is the case, how can his clear and unequivocal declaration in Romans 1:16, to the Jew first, be explained? Is this a contradiction? If, as he says, he is the apostle to and of the Gentiles, why does he say to the Jew first? The answer to this is simple: because the children must first be filled. (Mark 7:27) The question remaining is this; did this order extend beyond the Acts period?

The Acts of the Apostles

While the Acts chronicles the miraculous “acts” of the apostles, this is by no means its primary purpose. The primary purpose of the Acts is to show a transition from the ministry of the 12 disciples to Israel, given to them by the Lord Jesus Christ during his first advent, to the ministry of the apostle Paul, given to him by revelation from the Lord from glory (Gal. 1:11,12). Even a cursory reading of the book of Acts should reveal this, as the apostle Peter’s name (who is the chief “actor” in the first ten chapters), from the 15^th chapter on, completely disappears from the pages; while the Apostle Paul’s name, from the thirteenth chapter on, appears 126 times.

Four times  during his Acts ministry Paul says his ministry  is to Gentiles. (Acts 9:15; Acts 13:46; 18:6; 22:21) Yet throughout this period he goes to “the Jew First,” and does this is right up to the end of it, where from his house prison in Rome, in chapter 28, the first thing he does is call a meeting of the Jewish elders. Following this meeting, where it says, “when they agreed not among themselves,” Paul quotes Isaiah 6:9,

“Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive:  For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” (Acts 28:26,27)

He then declares “these people” (the Jews) to, in effect, be blind and deaf to his message, and says: “that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and they will hear it.” (verse 28)

But hold on here! Didn’t Paul start preaching to Gentiles in Acts 13, in Antioch? And didn’t Gentiles continue to hear his gospel and receive it throughout the rest of the Acts? The answer is, yes, but only after it had been presented to the Jews first. This can only mean that the Jews (Israel), during the Acts, were still considered God’s chosen people, otherwise there would have been no reason for Paul’s deference towards them.

Now, consider this; In the metaphor of Hosea 1, in verse 9, Hosea’s third offspring, which is symbolic of Israel, is called “Loammi,” meaning in the Hebrew, “not my people.” In verse ten it says, “in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, ye are the sons of the living God.”

If Paul is going to the Jew first, it can only be because they are still God’s people, and therefore the children must “first be filled.” If he says in Acts 28 that he is ceasing his ministry to them, and going straight to the “far hence” Gentiles, this has to be the place where they became Loammi. No doubt they stumbled at the Cross, and again with their rejection of the Lord’s disciples in the first part of the Acts, but if Paul is going to them first throughout his Acts ministry, they cannot be declared “castaways” during that time (as mid-Acts doctrine proposes).

The Dispensation of Grace

There are two basic treatments of the Jews and Israel by mainstream Christian theology. The first, the orthodox school, which would include Roman Catholic and Reformed theology, teaches that the New Testament church, claimed to have begun in Matthew 16, where Peter got “the keys of the kingdom,” replaced Israel as the chosen people of God. This is known as “replacement” theology. The other, the dispensational school, teaches a dualistic theology, claiming that the NT church and Israel are both the chosen people of God.¹

Both of these schools of thought completely miss the relevance of something in Paul’s revelation; something he called “the dispensation of the grace of God.”(Ephesians 3:2), which he referred to as “the mystery…which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men; but now is revealed…..” (verse 5). Similar language is found in the letters to the Colossians and the Romans, where it says it “was hid from ages and generations…kept secret since the world began.”(Rom. 16:25; Col. 1:26) This mystery involved a “church,” wherein Gentiles are saved, apart from and outside of Israel’s covenants, into a spiritual entity Paul referred to as “the body of Christ.”² More importantly, it says members of this Gentile church are “fellowhiers.”(Eph. 3:6)

It is presumed by both the orthodox and the classical dispensational  ((Ref. the article, “Rightly Dividing Paul’s Epistles on this site))  schools, that the folks the writer of Hebrews (whose authorship they attribute to Paul), Peter, James and John wrote to were part of this body. But there is no mention of it anywhere in these letters (or, for that matter, “the gospels”). There is a very simple explanation for this; the folks they were writing to were the recipients of the prophesied “kingdom,” and therefore all Jews. They are the fulfillment of Exodus 19:6, which refers to them as “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Peter calls them “..a royal priesthood, an holy nation..” (1 Peter 2:9) There will be Gentiles in this kingdom (Matt. 25:31-34; 1 Peter 2:12), but they are by no means “fellowheirs” in it.³

Conclusion

The New Testament is a fulfillment of prophecy, and thus is the inheritance and possession of the prophesied twelve tribes of Israel (James 1:1), not the mystery Gentile church of Paul’s thirteen epistles. Moreover, since Israel became “loammi” with Paul’s declaration in Acts 28, there is no more reason to go “to the Jew first.” And there is certainly no scriptural reason to give a nation calling itself Israel, or anyone claiming to be a descendant of one of Jacob’s twelve sons, any special treatment or privilege, as Evangelicals of the classical dispensational persuasion tend to give them.

On the other hand, it is equally wrong to claim that the “the body of Christ” has replaced Israel as the New Testament “church,” and attempt to justify this error by referring to it as “spiritual Israel.” The New Testament (covenant) is promised to, and thus belongs to, prophetic Israel, and is yet in the future. We are not now in the New Testament, but rather in a parenthesis between the Old and New Testaments referred to by Paul as “the dispensation of the Grace of God,” wherein everyone, whatever their physical lineage, is on equal ground and has direct access to God through “the gospel of Christ” (1 Cor. 15:1-4), by which they can be saved, sealed and made “fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ.”

Mike Schroeder

Please feel free to publish this article as you see fit. All Scripture references are from the King James Bible.

Related articles:

“What Price Israel?”

“Ekklesia”

“Why Paul?”

Post Script

Are you saved? Will you be in the number who are caught up on that day that the Lord descends from heaven with a shout? Only the saved, those who have believed on Jesus Christ—“who knew no sin”—and his sacrificial death on the Cross having paid for all their sins, will be going on that ride. History has shown that whatever peace man has achieved in the world can only be temporary. The Bible says that individual men and women can know, beyond a doubt, that they are saved and bound for heaven, and therefore have absolute and permanent peace, regardless of what is going on in the world, by trusting Jesus Christ and his death on the cross for their eternal salvation. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved…Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” Have you done this? If not, why not now?