‘All’ refers only to Israel?

Originally posted on April 15, 2007 – by Andre Piet

From a site visitor I received the following message:

“For a few months now, I’ve been studying the teaching of universal reconciliation, which has answered all my lingering questions about faith. I was raised in an evangelical setting but never fully resonated with it. I recently started reading the archive material on your site. I was taught that the text in Romans 11:32 doesn’t refer to all of humanity, but only to the people of Israel — see the context. How does that work?”
– Kind regards, …

This is a very familiar picture. People searching for honest answers often run into dead ends within traditional church or evangelical frameworks. What a privilege it is, then, when someone — often via-via — hears real answers straight from the Word!

As for the question:
The section leading up to Romans 11:32 (“For God has shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all”) unmistakably speaks about Israel. However, the conclusion Paul draws in verse 32 — and the hymn of praise that follows — clearly place the subject in a universal perspective. It’s a perspective Paul had already laid out much earlier in the letter. In chapter 3, he wrote:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
and are justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
(Romans 3:23–24)

Later, in chapter 5 starting at verse 12, Paul lays out in a fundamental way that Adam is a “type of the One to come” (verse 14). Through one man, sin entered the world, and death passed through to all men (verse 12). Well then, Christ, as the “last Adam,” is much more (verse 15)! That’s why Paul writes in verse 18:

“Therefore, just as through one trespass there came condemnation for all people, SO also through one act of righteousness there comes justification of life for all people.”

As universal as the first statement is, so universal is the second. In verse 19, the apostle emphasizes this again:

“For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many (i.e., all, as in verse 18) were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the One, the many will be made righteous.”

That all people (i.e., “the many”) are sinners is not a matter of free, individual choice. No — all people were appointed as such (see the wording ‘gesteld: placed’ in the Dutch Statenvertaling). It is a divine appointment. And it is the same divine appointment that determines that all people will be appointed as righteous.

In other words, when Paul states in Romans 11:32 that God has “shut up all in disobedience,” he is not introducing a new idea. It is, in fact, the same truth he had already explained in earlier chapters. In chapter 5, he said that the descendants of Adam were appointed as sinners, and here in chapter 11 he notes that “the all” are shut up in disobedience. The word “shut up” (Gr. sunkleiō) is the same word used in Luke 5:6 for fish caught in a net — it implies inescapability. And why has God shut up “the all” in disobedience? So that He may have mercy on “the all.” Just as inescapable as the first reality is, so is the second.

Moreover, the translation “them all” (as in the Dutch Statenvertaling and NBG) is quite suggestive — it implies that Paul refers exclusively to the previously mentioned group (i.e., Israel). But Paul does not use a demonstrative pronoun here, only the definite article. Not them all, but “the all.” The Dutch NBV may paraphrase Romans 11:32 rather freely — “God has delivered every human being to disobedience, so that he can have mercy on each one” — but at least it communicates that Paul is speaking of all humanity, not just Israel.

Anyone who reads only Israel into “the all” of Romans 11:32 has evidently lost the thread of Paul’s argument much earlier in the Romans-letter. Because the group God has “shut up in disobedience” had already been clearly defined in previous chapters: it is all those who, through one man’s disobedience, were appointed as sinners.

That is inclusive, and not exclusive of Israel.

Delen: