The Privileges Which Belong to the Jewish People (Part Two)

who are Israelites, to whom (belongs) the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises, who (are) the forefathers and from whom (is) Christ according to the flesh, who (is) over all God blessed for eternity, amen.

The fourth privilege of being an Israelite is “the law.” The history of the law and the Jewish people is well-established from the time of Mount Sinai, beginning in Exodus 19, and therefore should be considered an obvious privilege of the Jewish people.  Israel was able to have God be their personal “instructor”¹ and even though the Jewish people at the time of Paul had placed the law above the prophecies of the Messiah found within the law,² this giving of the law was a blessing bestowed that was unparalleled in nature.³

The fifth privilege of the Jewish people is the ability to “worship” of God.  Many Biblical versions have translated the word as “temple service” or “service;”⁴ however, this paper prefers the connotation engendered by the idea of worship.⁵  Richard Bell and William Sanday maintain the concept of “service” and specifically that “service” related to the sacrificial system of the Old Testament.⁶  However, this translation creates a fundamentally flawed scenario for how could all the other privileges have both a past and forward perspective (i.e., the permanence of being adopted by God, the glory of the Lord shall return, the covenant is eternal, and the eternality of the purpose of the law) while the sacrificial system was foundationally in the past and fulfilled with the coming of Messiah Jesus?  C. E. B. Cranfield, while acknowledging the importance of the sacrificial system in Jewish history, suggests the concept of “worship” should also be considered to include the concepts of prayer, Bible reading, and other personal, intimate aspects of worship.⁷

The sixth privilege enumerated by Paul as it relates to ethnic Israel is “the promises.”  Paul does not specify the type or extent of “the promises” but there are two primary views to this issue.  Many believe that “the promises” mentioned in Rom. 9:4 is primarily, even strictly, Messianic in nature.⁸  Other commentators prefer to view the promises as primarily dealing with the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob)⁹ but with the intimation of the promises fulfilled in Jesus.¹⁰  The latter view is probably the more correct interpretation of “the promises,” specifically in the sense of the plural usage form of the word.  John Piper, therefore, probably expressed the all-encompassing sense of the fulfillment of the promises of God when he wrote, “So we can see that for Paul the promises of God flow together into a summation of all the good that God can possibly offer his people.”¹¹