🇬🇧 Glory be to Jesus Christ! 🌞
Romans 11:13 – ‘ειμι’ – ‘eimi’ – (I) ‘am’. It is used for emphasis.
Comparison of different communities of faithful and unfaithful people to a fruitful olive tree or to other trees.
This is quite eloquent and expressive, but there is something to be said about some of the details.
By nature
– here nature
means physical origin
, i.e., tribe,
nation. The Gentiles were not Israelites (Israelites who became Gentiles
are not mentioned here) by physical origin, by nature.
But now they
have become the New Israel
– not by fleshly origin, not as nations,
but by grace, through the gift of power to become children of God
according to God’s promise to all who believe in Christ. The root
is
Christ Himself. And Christ will remain Himself without the converted
Gentiles, but the converted Gentiles will not remain such without
Christ.
Hence the need to fear,
which is here synonymous with being
cautious and having a modest opinion of oneself to the extent of one’s
faith. It must be said that modesty in God is greater than praise among
people, for no one without God can boast
of deification, but the
faithful, even if they were not glorified, if they achieve deification,
it is incomparably higher than human praise.
God is compared to a human being in the dimension of virtue – being a
demanding leader and being kind at the same time. This is called
anthropomorphism and is a means of conveying something high in the form
of something understandable and ordinary. The word strict
here should
be replaced with demanding
. God is not actually strict
, but
demanding
(like any good leader).
What is clear here is that for God, people are both those who are called to be His children by the gift of grace, but are also His creation.
I wrote earlier because this reading is often
read on different days:
16052023.html
Glory be to Thee, our God, glory be to Thee!