Riffin' on Romans 9 "Not all of Israel ARE Isarel"

Paul’s Anguish Over Israel

9 I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit— 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5 Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised![a] Amen.

God’s Sovereign Choice

6 It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. 7 Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”[b] 8 In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.

Paul’s words here are deliberate and sharp, and the curriculum he is imparting is that of the society/social tribe as a transcendental-spiritual framework. He is regarding some sort of “anguish” over a modern plight of Israel at the time, a situation entirely familiar throughout history. “Israel” regards a tribe of people moreso than a nation-state ascribed to a certain territory in its use here, and what has established (not differentiated!) the Israelites throughout the narrative of the Bible is that they were grouped together by God/his chosen people, and that they have been promised that their social structures, their society, is of a nature that it brings salvation into one’s life…it brings the presence of the almighty into one’s life in a favorable way…that it makes you genuinely good and puts you in accord with the universe…that they’re a holy people and that the origins of their cultural forms truly is Spirit.

        Some problematic readings of the Bible see Isreal as special because of their origins…more special than peoples/social collectives who weren’t started by divine intervention in the world. However…all tribes were. It’s important to realize what the Bible has to say about those who aren’t made equal in a society…they can be plucked away violently from Egypt by way of plague…they can, in time, become an entire separate nation that then wars with you several hundred years later…it’s absurd. When societies are not unto their own…there’s a period of a mass proliferation of tribes trying to appease their conceptions of God hungry to become the alpha country/tribe which will finally succeed in doing as much….it’s one of histories most brutal cycles, and it’s been a march both towards the very possibility of peace, as well as to the very world that is at our doors today…

                In today’s passage Paul is regarding some sort of pervasive sense of Israel’s having fallen wayward as a failure at the level of individuals moreso than cultural systems. It’s a cruel move. Truly, for this situation to have arisen, leadership failed along the way…the religion bled out/failed for extended periods of time… and that things are as they are when this sort of moment arrives isn’t so much the fault of individuals as it is that only can individuals really fix what’s going awry and restore a meaningfully spiritual culture to the social sphere. I digress.

                Paul, in a hissyfit, clearly offended by our stupidity, a stupidity he himself probably was lousy with until he took this very pulpit to deliver these words, is here to show us, clearly, that the world is perfect and God is perfect and the disconnect is entirely within the territory of the stupid…of the sinners…of us. You see… “not all who descended from Israel”…are “Israel” if ya know what I meannnn. Which is to say, it’s the people who screwed this up, and mother Israel is eternal and blemishless, and will be here waiting for us to get it right.

                Which, the method of which, is uncannily simple, and is precisely what Oriental religions do. Paul is insinuating that “Israel”, being a creation of God, is just a new emanation of God, with it’s traditions and specific cultural forms…and if one “becomes” “Israel” at the very level of identity…then it will be as if “God’s word” had not “failed”…which it didn’t according to Paul…unless you expected reliable spiritual-religious services within the society…the society as a whole will reliably provide that but the services within it can at best be a microcosm and at most junctures in the new testament, in most social contexts which Jesus goes into, these services are failing, and are at ends with science/other areas of the society…for no particular reason….causing a lot of chaos…

                To return once again to our intro, Paul literally “wishes” that he can be “cursed and cut off from Christ” for the “sake of his people”. He is paralleling what he sees in those who are not there…who are “not Israel”. That is it, in a single sentence, the entirety of what’s wrong…but how many times have we heard a priest, stoked, say something as grand as “Yes if you just turn to Jesus you will be saved” and the damn sentence fell flat and didn’t fill our hearts with fire/our brains with wicked lucid insight and millions of words on the spot? The mechanics of it are Buddhism/Hinduism. The path to enlightenment is a grind. You must equate your identity with All (God)…create a reliable system for doing as much in live time… and then work the kinks of it out usually for years as you do devotional practices. Methodically, like a brat child, you daisy chain yourself to Christ in such a way that you never ever ever ever could be separate… and it’s over.

                These Israelites failed, or are failing, or are suffering, according to Paul, because they don’t realize they are communed with Christ and the Father in all things at all moments. Paul can’t even revert back into such a state to try to show people that’s what’s up…so he’s using words…we can presume he exudes an aura…

                He goes on to ramble a bit about Esau and Jacob through this insane lens of…well it doesn’t matter whether you are socially validated or scorned, life brings out the best in you nonetheless… he doesn’t focus nearly enough on how by some miracle those scorned are kept largely safe/within the vicinity of grace and have great lives in the midst of hate nonetheless, by some miracle… and he doesn’t circle back around, unfortunately, to stress that if the society was adoring all unilaterally, this cycle of spiritual abandonment that is ravaging the Israelites would be less likely to occur…because people would have greater faith that the culture is transcendental/imparts God’s love reliably…

Then Paul drops this bomb:

Israel’s Unbelief

30 What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; 31 but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. 32 Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. 33 As it is written:

“See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble    and a rock that makes them fall,    and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.”[m]

                One of the most common teachings I find in Romans is that when religion is made a normative behavior in the society, and is a law based thing done for the sake of righteousness…people get into it for social reasons…even if they are shepherded directly into it as children. This is good. It can’t be avoided, and it’s not the worst thing to be tempted with…but it isn’t the real thing, necessarily, albeit it puts them in the vicinity of tools which absolutely are. For whatever reason, and perhaps its as simple as the centralized authority of the religion being horrifically wrong in a few well documented ways that the Eastern world traditions aren’t, people who pursue religion in such a way “have not attained their goal”. The goal is oneness with God…and this, cruelly, ironically, seems to be forbidden by church dogma…the church is to be transcended.

                Furthermore, if the church fizzled out across years, or if people kept giving them a shot and weren’t impressed, or weren’t as impressed as the work of other traditions… I’d ask if people have been having personal spiritual experiences which overtly challenge church authority/dogman so as to construe if there’s a universal process by which the church is tending to itself by way of Spirit/the laypeople…

                Experience, something akin to “the stumbling stone”….shamanism… this is what steps in when the authorities are wrong, and here we have Paul, one of the great Apostles…who never met the living Christ. Paul was struck blind by a vision of Christ for three days…which in the modern era is to say, Paul was a weirdo who had some sort of mental breakdown and he arrived at the city gates blind as a bat hollering something about a Jesus of Nazareth. His local orientation would’ve taken place in some secure corridor in the hospital, or at a mental health facility…

                That’s why people govern/create effective social frameworks. So that the universe doesn’t have to do that to people. It was nothing but a stumbling stick of sorts…became Paul’s entire life…

Don’t misconstrue my tone, Paul is a gangster, I just find amusing that a man stricken mad by a vision of Christ would be staunchly arguing that social normative behaviors within the culture will reliably take you “there”, I feel like the invisible hand has executed some sort of eloquent joke…

Given his proclivity for transcendental communion/weirdness we can certainly understand his platform of “there can be no” “shame”…