Kindness & Severity of God

February 28th, 2025
by Dr. Lance Waldie

Romans 11:22-24 Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off. 23 And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. 24 For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree?

The olive tree is quite common in Israel. Turning a wild olive tree into a cultivated tree is done through grafting healthy branches from wild olive trees. Note that Paul reversed this process, however, in order to illustrate how the Gentiles (wild olive shoots) had been grafted into the healthy tree trunk of Israel (the olive root). Many skeptics have seized this passage as evidence of Paul’s ignorance in order to stain his credibility. But Paul was simply using his literary freedom to illustrate a relevant point. His words do not betray a shortage of horticultural data; rather, they show how he knew exactly what he was saying! After all, in v. 24 he even says that grafting wild shoots into the cultivated tree was “contrary to nature.”
Paul is simply warning the Gentile Christians to respect the Jewish people among them. For it was the Jewish religion that brought them to faith in Jesus, the promised Jewish Messiah. Furthermore, since it was easier to graft broken-off branches back into their original tree than to graft wild shoots into a foreign tree, so too would it be easier for God to graft the broken off branches of Jewish unbelievers back into the true Jewish faith than for ex-idol-worshipping pagans to understand the faith they now accepted. The point is, if God can take a wild olive shoot and graft it into a cultivated olive tree (i.e., Gentiles), how much easier is it for Him to graft the natural branches (Israel) back into their original tree? Answer: a piece of cake!

Paul is admonishing the Gentile Christians to consider both sides of God—His kindness and sternness. He does not seem to regard any one person’s salvation as assured from the human side. They must, after all, persevere to the end. Doing so would prove them to be true servants of Christ. Although liberal theology tends to focus merely on God’s kindness and love toward all people, including those who merely acknowledge Jesus as a great man, any orthodox theology worth its salt will stress both God’s love and His wrath. Fixating on one over the other is a false balance, and Paul’s warning here is meant to keep all believers humble and obedient to the end.

The end-times scenario regarding Israel and Gentiles is clear in the Bible, though complex. The Gentile Church in large measure, having been cut off from its wild root and grafted into the root of Israel, will fall away from the truth and be broken off just prior to the Great Tribulation, as Israel was (cf. 2 Thess. 2:1-12; 1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:1-5). Soon thereafter, Israel—the natural branches that were broken off—will be grafted back into the holy root. These natural descendants of Abraham will then join the rest of Abraham’s spiritual descendants—the elect remnant that includes the Gentile believers (cf. Eph. 2:11-22)—and ultimately fulfill the promises God gave to Abraham and his seed through Christ in Genesis 12:2-3 (cf. Gal. 3:16).

Food For Thought
Unfortunately, many professed Christians today deny that the destiny of Israel can and will be reversed. But her return to the Lord is not only is doable, it is certain. God cannot allow His chosen and special people, Israel, to continue forever in unbelief. Paul, quoting from Isaiah, said with absolute certainty that “all Israel will be saved… ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins’ ” (11:26-27; cf. Isa. 59:20-21). To believe otherwise is, well, you fill in the blank!