Proper 5: Epistle, Romans 4:13-25                                  

Romans 4:13-25

From the early chapters of Genesis God lets us know that His plan is that everyone would be a part of His family. It isn’t based on ethnicity, skin color, education or sheer good looks. Most of us have been taught, and rightly so, that the ethnic people coming from a man named Abraham through his son Isaac are God’s chosen people. But they were chosen not to be the exclusive recipients of God’s gifts, but to be the means of declaring the true God to the world in order that all may come and receive. “For the promise that he (Abraham) would be heir of the world,” (v. 13), and “so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law (ethnic Israel), but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is father of us all (as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations,’” (vv. 16-17), and “who, (Abraham) contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (v. 18). 

All of that to help us see that God, from the outset, has had a plan for those of all nations to become His people. Now granted, somewhere along the biblical timeline that plan was maligned and Israel’s “mission” became a myopic “mine.” And so the nation called to herald the plan of God missed the very center of that plan. God be praised that many from national Israel are responding to the Spirit’s call these days and receiving Jesus as their Messiah. And they are joining those grafted into the original planting (read Romans 11). Together in God’s holy Church they are bringing God’s original plan to its fullness.

“For God so loved the world,” says the apostle John. All of it. His plan is big. It always has been.