Pride and Presumption (Rom. 11:16-22)
An olive tree grove at sunset. Image from Pixabay. There is a danger lurking in all our hearts. It is the danger of thinking that God favors us because of who we are. This had been a problem among the Jews, which is why Paul asks the question in 3:9, after listing the privileges the Jews enjoyed as the people of God, “What then? are we better than they?” He asks this question because that was precisely the stance many of them took. However, this is not a particularly Jewish problem: it is a problem endemic to human nature and thus a problem for every person under the sun, Jew or Gentile. As a result, this very attitude apparently began to manifest itself among the Gentile Christians in Rome, and there was this tendency to begin to look down upon their Jewish brethren. Paul is going to deal with this problem in its more particular manifestations in the Roman congregation later in chapters 14 and 15, but he is here laying the theological foundatio...
