A Preterist Supersessionism Part 3 (The Romans 11 Case)

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INTRODUCTION

There are verses in the Bible that people use like escape hatches. When their system starts collapsing under the weight of Scripture, they flee to those verses, clutch them with white knuckles, and insist they’re untouchable. Romans 11 is the biggest of those hiding places. It is the bunker of every futurist, the last trench of every dispensationalist, the final foxhole where every Zionist scurries when the rest of the New Testament has already undone their theology.

But here’s the problem: Romans 11 is not a refuge. It is not a safe room. It is not a theological panic button. Romans 11 is the very chapter that exposes every one of those systems as untenable, unbiblical, and historically impossible. The irony is sharp: the text Zionism depends on is the text that destroys it. The chapter futurism claims as its foundation is the chapter that buries it.

Paul was not confused. Paul did not contradict himself. Paul did not spend ten chapters tearing down Old Covenant categories only to build them back up in one paragraph. He did not smuggle genealogy into the back door after crucifying it in chapters 2 and 9. Paul was explaining what was happening in his own generation — the hardening, the pruning, the ingathering, the union of Jew and Gentile into one Israel of God, and the covenantal end that Jesus said would land on that first-century world.

Romans 11 is not a riddle. It is not a code. It is not a puzzle waiting for a modern prophecy chart. Romans 11 is clarity. It is precision. It is covenant theology on fire.

And today, we are going to let Paul speak for himself — no Zionist goggles, no futurist assumptions, no sentimental commitments to systems that collapse under their own contradictions. By the time we’re done, Romans 11 will not be the chapter that saves Zionism; it will be the grave it never climbs out of.

Now, with that said… let’s get to work.

PART 1: DEFINING ISRAEL THE WAY PAUL DOES

If you want Romans 11 to speak clearly, you must begin where Paul begins—not where modern theologians begin, not where nostalgic evangelicalism begins, and certainly not where dispensationalism begins. Romans 11 is not Paul’s first word on Israel; it is his last. He has already defined Israel twice before reaching this chapter, and he expects his readers to carry those definitions with them. The tragedy of futurist readings is that they ignore Paul’s definitions, smuggle in their own, and then force the apostle to contradict both his theology and his argument. If we are to honor what Paul actually says, we must begin by burying the old assumptions and letting the apostle define Israel on his own terms.

Paul’s first definition arrives in Romans 2, and it is nothing short of revolutionary. He tells us plainly that “he is not a Jew who is one outwardly,” that circumcision is not about the flesh, and that true covenant identity is a matter of the heart, wrought by the Spirit. With one Spirit-inspired paragraph, Paul severs the connection between covenant membership and bloodline. Israel, as he understands it, is not constituted by biology but by regeneration. The dividing wall is not race but renewal. The marker of the people of God is not circumcision in the body but circumcision of the heart. And once Paul makes that declaration, any attempt to resurrect “ethnic Israel” as a covenant category is an attempt to roll the stone back over a tomb Christ Himself emptied.

But the apostle is not finished. In Romans 9, he sharpens his definition and presses it even further: “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel,” and “It is not the children of the flesh who are children of God.” If Romans 2 amputates ethnicity from covenant identity, Romans 9 removes any illusion that national or genealogical Israel possesses automatic standing with God. The true Israel, according to Paul, is the Israel of promise—the elect, the remnant, the called, those whose identity rests not in their lineage but in God’s sovereign mercy. This is Paul’s theology. This is his framework. This is the interpretive lens he demands we use.

And that means something unavoidable: when we come to Romans 11, we cannot suddenly smuggle Old Covenant categories back into the text. We cannot pretend Paul spent nine chapters redefining Israel only to abandon that definition at the climax of his argument. We cannot force Paul to contradict Paul. Yet this is precisely what futurist interpreters do. They march into Romans 11 carrying ethnic assumptions Paul has already crucified. They resurrect a genealogical category Paul has already buried. They insist Paul must be speaking of a future return of national Israel, even though Paul has demolished that idea twice over. It is not careful exegesis; it is theological nostalgia. It is not submission to Scripture; it is conformity to a system.

But once Paul’s own definitions are allowed to stand, the fog clears instantly. Israel, for Paul, is the regenerate community—those transformed by the Spirit. Israel, for Paul, is the elect remnant, the children of promise, the heart-circumcised people drawn to Christ. Israel, for Paul, consists of believing Jews and believing Gentiles, united in the Messiah who is Himself the true Israel. That is the Israel he defines in Romans 2. That is the Israel he identifies in Romans 9. And that is the Israel he continues discussing in Romans 11.

There is no category shift. There is no ethnic return. There is no biological revival. There is no future national destiny. There is only one Israel—and it is the people who belong to Christ. 

Now, with Israel defined on Paul’s terms—and every counterfeit definition exposed as theological dead weight—we are finally ready to take our next step. Because once you see who Israel actually is, the entire structure of Romans 11 begins to glow with coherence. The metaphors clarify. The imagery sharpens. The logic crystallizes. And you realize that Paul is not toggling between two peoples, two covenant tracks, or two redemptive futures. He is describing one tree, one root, one people, one covenant, one Messiah, one unfolding plan. The only way futurism survives is by dragging a foreign definition of Israel into the text. But once Paul’s definition is allowed to stand, Romans 11 becomes a cathedral of unity rather than a battlefield of categories. It becomes a celebration of what God was doing in Christ—not a hint at some far-off revival. It becomes the theological skeleton beneath the historical flesh of AD 70. And with the foundation now laid, we must take up Paul’s central image: the olive tree itself. Because in that tree, Paul shows us the true story of Israel—its continuity, its pruning, its expansion, and its reconstitution in the Messiah who is the root and the life of it all.

PART 2: THE OLIVE TREE IS ISRAEL NOT “THE JEWS”

If Part 1 dismantled the false definitions of Israel, Part 2 unveils Paul’s living alternative—the olive tree. And once this tree is allowed to stand on its own covenantal legs, Zionism, dispensationalism, and every modern ethnic-centered reading collapse beneath it. Because when Paul says, “if some of the branches were broken off” (Rom. 11:17), he is not describing nations but individuals—actual people whose covenant standing depends entirely on their union with Christ. This image is not decoration; it is the theological skeleton of Romans 11. And it leaves no room for Zionism’s cherished dream of a revived, geopolitical, genealogical Israel running parallel to the church.

Paul gives us one tree—not two. “You, being a wild olive branch, were grafted in among them” (Rom. 11:17) is not the language of dual-covenant theology. It is the language of covenantal unity. There is no “Israel tree” and “church tree,” no earthly people versus heavenly people, no future national revival distinct from the body of Christ. One root. One trunk. One people. Zionism requires a bifurcated system; Paul gives a singular organism. Zionism requires two destinies; Paul describes one hope for all who believe. Zionism requires an ongoing ethnic covenant; Paul declares that unbelieving Jews “were broken off for their unbelief” (Rom. 11:20). The olive tree is not merely incompatible with Zionism—it is its divine refutation.

The root of the tree exposes this further. The root is not Moses, not Sinai, not land, not Levi, and not the modern Israeli state. The root is the Abrahamic promise fulfilled in the Messiah. Paul assumes this when he warns the Gentiles, “It is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you” (Rom. 11:18). And who is the root? The Seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ, as Paul already declared in Galatians 3:16. The life of the tree is not ethnic or territorial; it is Christological. And if Christ is the root, then the tree is the community of all who belong to Christ—Jew and Gentile alike. Zionism wants to route covenant life through ethnicity; Paul routes it through the crucified and risen Lord.

This becomes even clearer when Paul speaks of the branches. If the branches were nations, then Gentiles could not be “grafted in” individually. But Paul addresses the Gentile believer directly: “You stand only by your faith” (Rom. 11:20). That is not national language—it is personal, spiritual, and covenantal. Likewise, when Paul says that unbelieving Jews were “broken off,” he is not describing the removal of a nation but the pruning of individuals who rejected their own Messiah. Zionism insists that Jewish identity confers ongoing covenant privilege; Paul annihilates that assumption by stating that the only thing preserving a branch is faith in Christ. Zionism cannot survive that sentence. The entire system of ethnic entitlement evaporates with those five words: you stand only by your faith.

And then Paul delivers the death blow. He tells Gentile believers, “Do not be arrogant, but fear” (Rom. 11:20). Why? Because covenant standing is grounded in Christ, not genealogy. Zionism builds its theology on the assumption that Jews, by blood, remain the covenant people. Paul says covenant identity is grounded in mercy extended to the obedient believer—Jew or Gentile. Zionism needs categories Paul does not grant; it requires distinctions Paul does not make; it relies on assumptions Paul already buried in Romans 2 and Romans 9.

The olive tree, therefore, is nothing less than the one covenant people of God in Christ—the true Israel made up of the believing remnant of the Jews and the believing multitude of the Gentiles. It is not a national entity but a Messianic organism. It is not a geopolitical project but a covenantal community. It is not an ethnic continuation but a Christ-centered fulfillment. And once the olive tree is understood on Paul’s terms, the entire Zionist program disintegrates like a clay idol in the presence of the living God.

But Paul is not done. Having revealed the identity of the tree and the nature of the branches, he turns next to the cutting itself—to the moment the unbelieving Jewish branches were removed. And when he does, he anchors that cutting not in our future, but squarely in his own present moment.

PART 3: WHEN THE “CUTTING OFF” OCCURED

The most decisive question in Romans 11 is not merely, “Who is Israel?” or “What is the olive tree?” but “When did the breaking occur?” Paul does not leave this to speculation or distant futurism. He describes the breaking of unbelieving Israel in the past tense, as a present reality unfolding in his own day. “Some of the branches were broken off” (Rom. 11:17), he writes—not will be. “They were broken off for their unbelief” (Rom. 11:20)—not might be someday. And “God did not spare the natural branches” (Rom. 11:21)—not will eventually refuse to spare them. These are not prophetic formulas; they are apostolic interpretations of first-century covenantal judgment already in motion. Paul is describing an event that is actively happening as he writes, accelerating toward an unavoidable, catastrophic moment that Jesus Himself predicted.

That moment, of course, is Israel’s national desolation in AD 70. It is the “days of vengeance” when “all things which are written will be fulfilled” (Luke 21:22). It is the moment when Jesus warned that “your house is left to you desolate” (Matt. 23:38). It is the moment He declared would fall upon “this generation” (Matt. 24:34). Paul stands inside this prophetic timeframe, watching the Jewish leadership reject the Messiah, persecute His apostles, drive believing Jews out of synagogues, and align themselves with the very unbelief that Jesus warned would bring destruction. When Paul says that Israel “stumbled” (Rom. 11:11) and that “the elect obtained it, the rest were hardened” (Rom. 11:7), he is describing the spiritual condition of first-century Israel—not a distant people thousands of years later. Zionism wants to place Israel’s hardening in the modern era. Paul locates it in the apostolic age.

This is why Zionism collapses under the weight of Romans 11. Zionism insists that unbelieving Israel remains God’s covenant people. Paul says unbelieving Israel “was broken off.” Zionism insists that Jewish ethnicity guarantees ongoing covenant privilege. Paul says covenant standing is “by faith” alone (Rom. 11:20). Zionism claims that Jewish rejection of Christ is irrelevant to covenant identity. Paul says their “rejection is the reconciliation of the world” (Rom. 11:15). Zionism teaches that Israel will someday be restored as an unbelieving nation. Paul says restoration is possible only “if they do not continue in unbelief” (Rom. 11:23). Zionism dreams of a covenantal destiny based on bloodline, land, and geopolitics. Paul roots covenant life in Christ, the Root, so that only those united to Him belong to the tree.

This pruning, therefore, cannot be relocated to the future without dismantling Paul’s entire argument. The breaking was already underway. As the gospel surged into the Gentile world, the Jewish branch was withering. As Gentiles were being grafted in, unbelieving Israel was being hardened. As the nations streamed into Christ, the covenant standing of Christ-rejecting Israel evaporated. Paul knows this is not a metaphor or abstraction. It is the covenantal realignment of history as the Old Covenant world was passing away. Hebrews confirms this horizon by calling the Old Covenant “obsolete” and “ready to disappear” (Heb. 8:13). Paul is living inside that disappearance. He is witnessing the sunset of Mosaic Israel and the sunrise of the global Messianic kingdom.

This is why he warns the Gentiles not to grow arrogant. They are witnessing a divine judgment so severe, so epoch-shifting, so historically massive, that it will end the entire Mosaic administration. They are watching the same Israel that crucified the Messiah now persecute His church and reap covenant consequences. They are seeing, with their own eyes, the living fulfillment of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 21—that “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruit of it” (Matt. 21:43). This is not future eschatology. This is covenantal transition. This is the removal of the old creation and the installation of the new. Paul is not speculating; he is interpreting the most explosive moment in redemptive history since the resurrection itself.

This is also why Zionism is impossible. Zionism requires the Old Covenant branch to remain attached to the tree even in unbelief. Paul says unbelief is the very reason the branch was severed. Zionism claims a future covenantal destiny for an ethnic nation apart from Christ. Paul says there is no restoration except through Christ, and only “if they do not continue in unbelief” (Rom. 11:23). Zionism claims modern Israel is still the people of God. Paul says the only people of God are those united to Christ, for “we are the circumcision” (Phil. 3:3) and “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring” (Gal. 3:29). Zionism insists that the covenant was never removed from the ethnic nation. Paul says their “rejection is the reconciliation of the world” (Rom. 11:15). Zionism teaches that covenant identity flows through biology. Paul teaches that covenant identity flows through Christ.

The pruning, therefore, is not waiting for a future prophetic clock to start ticking. It is not an eschatological spectacle reserved for the last days of the world. It is the first-century covenantal crisis that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem—the definitive sign that the Old Covenant order had ended and that the New Covenant people, composed of believing Jews and believing Gentiles, had emerged as the true Israel of God. Once this is understood, a question follows naturally and forcefully: if the breaking was a first-century reality, then what is the “fullness of the Gentiles,” and where does it fit within this same historical horizon? If the pruning is past, the fullness cannot be future. Paul is describing a singular, unified covenantal transition, not a two-thousand-year delay.

And now we are ready for the next movement in Paul’s argument—a movement that will reveal the true meaning of the fullness and expose the last remaining foothold of Zionism within the evangelical imagination.

PART 4: THE FIRST CENTURY “GRAFTING” 

If the breaking of Jewish branches was a present reality in Paul’s day, the obvious question every honest reader must ask is this: Were any Jews, in that same era, actually being grafted back in? Futurist systems insist that Romans 11 is still waiting on a future Jewish revival, a last-days surge of ethnic Israel into the kingdom. But Paul will not allow that reading. He does not push the ingrafting into some distant, apocalyptic future; he locates it squarely inside his own apostolic ministry. “I am speaking to you who are Gentiles,” he says, “inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them” (Rom. 11:13–14). That is not a prophecy; it is a mission. That is not a far-off prediction; it is a present burden. Paul is not daydreaming about a revival two thousand years away; he is laboring for one that is already unfolding around him.

Notice the language: “save some of them.” Paul does not describe a guaranteed, national, ethnic conversion. He does not say “all Israel after the flesh will be saved as a block, regardless of their response.” He speaks in the register of remnant theology—“some,” not all; repentant individuals, not a blanket national amnesty. And when he speaks of their restoration, he frames it as a live possibility conditioned on their response to Christ: “They also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again” (Rom. 11:23). That one sentence obliterates the Zionist reading. Paul does not promise a guaranteed national revival; he offers a conditional individual restoration. The “if” matters. The “they” are not an abstract, future nation; they are his contemporaries—his fellow Israelites—whom he longs to see provoked to jealousy and drawn to Christ through the visible blessing now resting on believing Gentiles.

But this is not mere wishful thinking. The New Testament records, in real history, that this very re-grafting of Jews back into the tree did happen—on a massive scale. The story begins at Pentecost, where the first great ingrafting occurs not among Gentiles but among Jews. Peter stands up in Jerusalem and addresses “men of Judea and all you who live in Jerusalem” (Acts 2:14), and Luke tells us that there were “Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). After Peter’s sermon, when he announces that the crucified Jesus is “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), the text tells us that “those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). Those three thousand were Jews. That is not a footnote; that is a revival. It is the first great wave of branches being grafted back into the tree.

And the tide does not stop there. In Acts 4, after Peter and John preach again, “many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand” (Acts 4:4). Again, these are Jews in Jerusalem, responding to the gospel and joining the church. Luke later records that “the word of God kept on spreading; and the number of the disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). Priests, the very men whose livelihood was tied to the temple system, are abandoning the shadows and clinging to the Substance. If that is not a first-century ingrafting, the word has no meaning. By the time Paul returns to Jerusalem in Acts 21, James and the elders tell him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed” (Acts 21:20). The phrase James uses is literally “many myriads”—tens of thousands. Luke wants you to feel the scale: this is not a trickle of Jewish converts; it is a flood.

Nor is this ingrafting limited to Jerusalem. From the very beginning, diaspora Jews are being swept into Christ across the Roman world. At Pentecost itself, the crowd includes Jews and proselytes from “Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia” and beyond (Acts 2:9–11). Those converted do not remain in Jerusalem; they return to their homelands as living branches now attached to the Messiah, carrying the life of the root into synagogues and communities across the empire. Paul’s entire missionary pattern—“to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16)—assumes an ongoing Jewish ingrafting. In city after city, he enters the synagogue, preaches Christ, sees some Jews believe, and watches others harden. The book of Acts is a travel-log of exactly what Romans 11 describes: some branches broken off for unbelief, other branches—Jewish and Gentile—grafted in by faith.

First-century history, therefore, does not leave us with a puzzle; it gives us a pattern. Paul longed to “save some of them” (Rom. 11:14), and God answered that longing in the countless Jews who believed in Jerusalem, Judea, and throughout the diaspora. Many of the very men who once opposed Christ were brought into Christ. Many who once clung to the temple came to worship the true Temple. Many who once trusted in bloodline came to trust in blood—Christ’s blood. That is the ingrafting Romans 11 anticipates, and the New Testament documents. A massive first-century Jewish revival did occur. Paul saw it. Paul participated in it. Paul rejoiced in it. The notion that Romans 11 is still waiting on a future, ethnic, national revival is not only unnecessary; it is an insult to what God already did in those days.

Once that reality is acknowledged, the futurist scaffolding collapses. Paul is not dangling a future carrot in front of the church; he is interpreting his own moment in redemptive history. The branches broken off were his contemporaries who persisted in unbelief. The branches grafted back in were his contemporaries who turned to Christ. The olive tree did not lie dormant for two thousand years, waiting on a modern Zionist project. It pulsed with life in the first century as tens of thousands of Jews and multitudes of Gentiles were joined to the same Messiah, in the same tree, by the same faith. With this first-century ingrafting established beyond dispute, we are ready to return to the phrase that has caused so much confusion and ask: in light of all this, what does Paul mean by “the fullness of the Gentiles,” and when did that fullness arrive?

PART 5: “THE FULLNESS OF THE GENTILES” 

Paul’s phrase “the fullness of the Gentiles” (τὸ πλήρωμα τῶν ἐθνῶν) in Romans 11:25 has been catastrophically misinterpreted by futurist Zionism and its dispensational kin. Instead of allowing Paul to define his own terms in his own context, they have imported a two-millennia-long gap into a text whose urgency, pace, and prophetic horizon are unmistakably first-century. Paul is not envisioning the entire Church Age. He is not forecasting twenty centuries of gospel advance before Israel gets another chance. And he is certainly not proposing that God is waiting until “every nation on earth” or “every Gentile who will ever be saved” comes streaming into the kingdom. That idea is foreign to Paul’s argument, foreign to his vocabulary, and foreign to the eschatological atmosphere of the New Testament. Instead, Paul is describing the same imminent, oikoumenical evangelization that Jesus promised in Matthew 24:14: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world (οἰκουμένη), as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” Not the end of the material cosmos, but the end of the Old Covenant age; not the global globe, but the Roman world. Paul is anticipating that specific event—the gospel saturating the Roman Empire as the precursor to the Lord’s covenantal return against apostate Israel—and he sees himself as one of the primary catalysts bringing that prophecy to the brink of fulfillment.

Paul’s letters confirm again and again that he believed he was living at the climax of the ages, not the prelude to an enormous prophetic hiatus. In 1 Corinthians 10:11 he writes, “The ends of the ages have come upon us,” showing that the Old Covenant era was collapsing and the New Covenant era was dawning in his own generation. In 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 he insists, “The time has been shortened… the form of this world (σχῆμα) is passing away,” referring not to the destruction of the physical universe but to the fading, obsolescing Old Covenant order which Hebrews 8:13 says was “ready to disappear.” This entire transitional moment was time-sensitive, historically located, and prophetically constrained to the first century. It is within this theological and eschatological frame that the phrase “fullness of the Gentiles” must be understood.

The language of imminence saturates Paul’s writings because he expected the gospel to engulf the Roman oikoumene in his own lifetime. Romans 15:19 declares that he had already preached “from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum,” and in verse 24 he reveals his longing to evangelize Rome and Spain—because he saw his mission as a divinely appointed accelerant to Christ’s covenantal appearing. In Romans 13:11–12 he writes, “The night is almost gone, and the day is near,” marking the nearness of the New Covenant dawn. In Philippians 4:5, he echoes this by affirming, “The Lord is near.” In Romans 16:20 he promises, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” tying the first gospel promise of Genesis 3:15 to a near-term Roman fulfillment, not a remote eschaton. Zionism’s futurism requires all these passages to be ripped out of their covenantal orbit. But Paul roots them firmly in the urgency of his apostolic mission: the gospel is going to sweep the Roman world, the covenantal Day of the Lord is approaching, and hardened Israel will be judged within the generation.

This reading is confirmed by the broader Pauline corpus. In 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 he declares that wrath “has come upon them to the uttermost,” showing that the judgments Jesus announced in Matthew 23–24 had already begun. In 1 Thessalonians 4–5 he says “we who are alive and remain” will witness the parousia, the covenantal coming of Christ in judgment. In 2 Thessalonians 1:6–10 he promises “relief to you who are afflicted” at the very moment God brings fiery vengeance on their persecutors—first-century Jews—making any futuristic reinterpretation impossible. In 2 Thessalonians 2:1–8 he teaches that the “man of lawlessness” was already present, already restrained, and would be destroyed by the imminent appearing of Christ. This is not a prophecy of some distant antichrist figure millennia in the future but the final convulsion of the Old Covenant order as its leaders resisted the gospel. All of this reinforces the same point: Paul's eschatology is first-century. His horizon is first-century. His imminence is first-century. And his “fullness of the Gentiles” is first-century.

When Paul speaks of “the fullness of the Gentiles,” he is describing the moment when the gospel had spread through the Roman world with such spiritual saturation that God’s judicial timetable reached its appointed hour. This fits perfectly with his citation of Isaiah in Romans 9:27–28, where he says God “will finish the work and cut it short… upon the land” (ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς), pointing directly to the land of Israel and the coming judgment. Likewise, in Romans 11:15 he proclaims, “If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world,” showing that Israel’s downfall was already in motion and was already yielding worldwide covenantal reconciliation. Paul is not describing the future fall of Israel; he is describing its present collapse. And the gospel explosion throughout the Gentile world was the very means by which that collapse was being brought to its consummation.

This interpretation is strengthened by Paul’s argument in Galatians. In Galatians 4:21–31, the two-covenant allegory climaxes with the warning that the “present Jerusalem” (the Old Covenant system) would soon be “cast out,” echoing the expulsion of Hagar and anticipating the AD 70 destruction. In Galatians 1:4 Paul says Christ was delivering them from “this present evil age”—the Old Covenant age, which Hebrews 9:26 says was ending at that time. In 2 Corinthians 3 he says repeatedly that the Old Covenant was “fading,” “being brought to an end,” and “ready to vanish.” This is the world Paul is living in. This is the eschatological moment he is interpreting. And it is into this fomenting covenantal upheaval that Paul situates the phrase “fullness of the Gentiles.”

The worldwide (oikoumenical) progress of the gospel, in Paul’s mind, was the necessary condition for the final judgment on Israel, just as Jesus had foretold. That is why Paul is consumed with reaching Rome. That is why he says to the Thessalonians that Christ’s revealing was near. That is why he tells the Corinthians that the form of the Old Covenant world was passing away. And that is why he assures the Roman Christians that God would “soon” crush Satan under their feet—because the entire Roman world was about to undergo the most seismic covenantal transformation since Sinai. Paul saw his evangelism not merely as church-building but as eschatological warfare. Every Gentile convert, every planted church, every apostolic proclamation was pushing the gospel deeper into the Roman oikoumene, hastening the fall of the old world and ushering in the blaze of the new.

Thus “the fullness of the Gentiles” is not futurist. It is not Zionist. It is not a two-thousand-year waiting period. It is the Spirit-drenched surge of the gospel through the Roman Empire in the decades between Pentecost and the destruction of Jerusalem—a surge that Paul himself advanced, anticipated, and believed would culminate in Christ’s covenantal return. And it did. By the time the Roman world had been evangelized, by the time the nations of the oikoumene had received the apostolic proclamation, the cup of Old Covenant Israel’s hardness was full. Judgment fell in AD 70. And with that judgment, the age-long mystery was unveiled, the New Covenant kingdom was enthroned, and the fullness of the Gentiles stood complete—both as a historical reality and as the divine prelude to the salvation of the remnant.

PART 6:  “ALL ISRAEL WILL BE SAVED” 

When Paul declares, “and so all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26), he is not suddenly abandoning the contextual meaning of the term “Israel” that he has meticulously maintained throughout the chapter. The “partial hardening” (πώρωσις) fell upon ethnic Israel, not upon the church, not upon Gentile believers, and not upon a symbolic abstraction. Paul is speaking about the historical people descended from Abraham according to the flesh—the very people he mourned for “with great sorrow and unceasing grief” (Rom. 9:2–3). To wrench “Israel” away from its referent in verse 25 and redefine it in verse 26 is to commit the interpretive equivalent of amputation: lopping off the limb you are trying to heal. Context forces us to say what Paul himself is saying: Israel in Romans 11 is ethnic Israel, hardened, resistant, stumbling, and yet still possessing within her the elect remnant God promised from the beginning.

And that hardening is no mystery. It is one of the most thoroughly attested realities in all of Scripture. Jesus Himself explained it: “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom… but to them it has not been granted” (Matt. 13:11). Mark preserves the same judgment: “So that while seeing, they may see and not perceive… lest they return and be forgiven” (Mark 4:12). In Luke, Jesus tells His disciples, “To you it has been granted to know… but to the rest it is in parables” (Luke 8:10). John says explicitly that “though He had performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing in Him,” fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy that “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts” (John 12:37–40). Acts continues this theme without interruption: Stephen indicts Israel as “always resisting the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:51); Paul warns synagogue hearers, “Beware… lest what is said in the Prophets come upon you” (Acts 13:40–41); and at the end of Acts, the apostolic verdict falls, as Paul says, “this people’s heart has become dull” (Acts 28:27). Paul rehearses the same reality in his letters: Israel became “futile in their thoughts” (Rom. 1:21), they “stumbled over the stumbling stone” (Rom. 9:32), they “did not submit to the righteousness of God” (Rom. 10:3), their “eyes were darkened” (Rom. 11:10), their “mind was hardened” (2 Cor. 3:14), and the wrath of God “has come upon them to the utmost” (1 Thess. 2:16). Anyone who denies Israel’s hardening either has never read the New Testament or refuses to believe what it plainly says.

But here is the critical point: Israel’s hardening was partial, not total (Rom. 11:25). And if the hardening was partial, then the salvation is also partial—not in quality, but in scope. “All Israel” does not mean every last Jew without exception. It means the totality of the elect Jews, the complete remnant, the full number of Israelites whom God chose before the foundation of the world, whom the Father gave to the Son, and whom the Spirit brought into Christ in the first century. Paul has already defined “Israel” in these terms in Romans 9:6: “They are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” That verse is the interpretive key. Within ethnic Israel lies true Israel, and true Israel consists of the believing remnant whom God preserves by grace. Paul reinforces this in Romans 11:5: “There has come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice.” If “all Israel” in verse 26 were meant to include hardened, unbelieving, unrepentant Jews, Paul’s argument would collapse under its own weight. But Paul is not erasing everything he has just argued; he is bringing it to its covenantal crescendo.

The phrase “and so all Israel will be saved” (καὶ οὕτως) does not mean “afterward” or “later on.” It means “in this manner,” “in this way,” or “thus.” Paul is explaining how the salvation of Israel unfolds—not when. Israel will be saved in this way—through the pattern he has just described: (1) a partial hardening upon ethnic Israel, (2) the ingathering of the Gentiles into the covenant community, and (3) the jealousy-provoked salvation of the Jewish elect in that generation. That sequence happened. It is documented in Acts, expounded in the epistles, and confirmed by history. The elect Jews were saved. The hardened Jews were judged. And the remnant—saved in the very manner Paul described—became the foundation of the New Covenant Israel.

This interpretation is reinforced by the texts Paul cites in Romans 11:26–27. When he quotes Isaiah, “The Deliverer will come from Zion,” he is not predicting a future descent of Christ at the end of world history. Christ had already come. Christ was already removing ungodliness from Jacob. Christ was already saving the remnant through the gospel. The Deliverer did not come to remove ungodliness from a future national Israel; He came to save the elect of Israel in the first century and judge the hardened nation in AD 70. Isaiah’s promise is fulfilled not by the conversion of a modern political state but by the salvation of the remnant in Paul’s day. That is why Paul can say, in the present tense, “He is removing ungodliness from Jacob.” It is happening. It is unfolding in real time. It is the lived experience of the apostolic age.

And when he adds, “This is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins” (Rom. 11:27), Paul is not describing a future mass conversion of ethnic Israel. He is describing the New Covenant blessings already pouring upon the remnant. Their sins are being taken away. Their hearts are being circumcised. They are being grafted into Christ. The hardened branches are being cut off; the believing branches are being restored. This is the salvation of Israel—the Israel within Israel—the elect Jews of the first century who embraced their Messiah and became the nucleus of the Israel of God.

This is why the preterist reading is not merely plausible but inevitable. It is not an interpretive option; it is the only reading that honors the context, the covenantal theology, the prophetic background, the lexical precision, the historical fulfillment, and Paul’s own testimony. “All Israel” means all elect Israel, saved in the way Paul just described—through the softening of a remnant amidst a hardened nation, through the ingrafting of Gentiles that provoked the Jews to jealousy, and through the formation of a single covenant people composed of Jew and Gentile together in Christ. This Israel—this remnant-expanded, Gentile-enriched, Messiah-centered Israel—is the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16). Not a modern nation-state. Not an ethnic collective. Not a geopolitical project. But God’s redeemed people in Christ.

Zionism collapses here. Futurism dissolves here. Dispensationalism disintegrates here. The sovereign grace of God in electing a remnant, saving them in the first century, and grafting them together with believing Gentiles creates the one true Israel Paul envisioned. “All Israel” has been saved—not postponed, not deferred, not waiting for a flag, a parliament, or a state, but fulfilled in the Messiah’s remnant and manifested in the church that is His body.

PART 7: THE REAL END OF THE WORLD

Romans 11 is not an appendix to Paul’s theology, nor an outlier lodged awkwardly in the middle of his letter, nor a cryptic hint about a distant future millennium. Romans 11 is the theological fuse running beneath the entire New Testament canon, the hidden architecture that explains Matthew 24, the doctrinal engine powering the destruction of Jerusalem, and the covenantal logic that binds together every apostolic proclamation of imminence. Paul is not constructing an argument that will lie dormant for two thousand years; he is interpreting the very events Jesus said would unfold before that generation passed away. When Jesus prophesied the fall of Jerusalem, the desolation of the temple, the judgment on the covenant breakers, and the vindication of His people, He was describing the same redemptive-historical moment that Paul is exegeting in Romans 11. One is prophecy; the other is theology. One is the prediction; the other is the explanation. And both converge inexorably at AD 70.

The key is covenant, not ethnicity. Jesus pronounced the end of the Old Covenant order—its temple, its sacrifices, its priesthood, its genealogical privileges—and located that end squarely within the lifetime of His contemporaries. Paul provides the theological scaffolding that makes that end not merely possible but necessary. For Paul, the Old Covenant could not survive the arrival of the Messiah, the outpouring of the Spirit, and the salvation of the remnant. A covenant built on shadows cannot coexist with the One who is the substance. A covenant built on promise cannot remain after the Promise has come. A covenant built around genealogical descent cannot stand once the true Seed has arrived. And a covenant built around the distinction between Jew and Gentile cannot continue once Christ has created one new man. The end of the Old World was not optional; it was demanded by the logic of redemption. Jesus pronounced it as judgment. Paul explains it as covenant.

This is why Romans 11 is the theological death sentence of futurism. Futurism must posit a still-living Old Covenant world, a still-binding Mosaic arrangement, a still-privileged genealogical Israel, and a still-future hinge in redemptive history. But Paul sees the Old Covenant as already unraveling—“fading” (2 Cor. 3:11), “growing old” (Heb. 8:13), “passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31), “condemned” (2 Cor. 3:9), and “ready to disappear” (Heb. 8:13). Futurism insists the hardening of Israel continues indefinitely; Paul says that hardening had already fallen, already defined his generation, already provoked the remnant’s salvation, and was already leading to the imminent cutting away of the unbelieving nation. Futurism imagines a future conversion of ethnic Israel; Paul locates the conversion of “all Israel”—the elect remnant—in his own generation. Futurism imagines the Deliverer “coming from Zion” at the end of history; Paul quotes Isaiah because Christ was already removing ungodliness from Jacob through the preaching of the gospel. Futurism imagines that the fullness of the Gentiles requires the whole world to be evangelized; Paul ties it directly to the evangelization of the Roman world (οἰκουμένη), the very mission that defined his apostolic calling and that Jesus said must be completed before His covenantal coming in judgment. Futurism collapses not because of one verse, but because Romans 11 is the theological impossibility of futurism.

At the same time, Romans 11 is the rebuke of crude supersessionism, because it refuses to sever the remnant from their covenantal roots. Paul does not say that God has cast away His people; he says the opposite. God preserved His people in the remnant. The remnant is Israel. The remnant are the heirs. The remnant carries forward the promises, the covenants, and the glory. What was pruned in AD 70 was not Israel but unbelief. The tree survived. The remnant survived. The covenant survived. And Gentiles were grafted into a living Israel—not replacing it, not discarding it, but joining it, expanding it, and glorifying it. The church is not a parenthesis; the church is the flowering of Israel. The New Covenant is not a detour; it is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise. And AD 70 was not God discarding Israel; it was God discarding the husk of an unbelieving nation so that Israel—the true Israel, the Israel of God—could inherit the world.

This synthesis—Jesus’ prophecy and Paul’s theology—explodes modern Zionism at its foundation. Zionism assumes that the nation that was hardened, judged, and cut off retains covenantal title. Romans 11 says the opposite. Zionism imagines the Old Covenant nation will be restored. Romans 11 says that nation has been pruned. Zionism imagines a future covenant with earthly Israel. Romans 11 says the New Covenant is God’s covenant with the remnant. Zionism imagines that genealogical Israel remains God’s chosen people. Romans 11 says only the remnant—believing Jews joined to Christ—is Israel. Zionism imagines the promises belong to the modern state. Romans 11 says the promises belong to Christ, the true Seed, and all who are in Him. Zionism imagines that history must wait for Israel. Romans 11 says Israel has already come—the Israel of God, the remnant-expanded, Christ-exalted, Spirit-indwelt people who fill the world with the knowledge of the Lord. Zionism is not merely a theological error; it is a covenantal impossibility. AD 70 was God’s own rejection of Zionism before Zionism existed.

And when all of this is seen together—Jesus’ covenantal prophecy, Paul’s covenantal theology, the remnant’s first-century salvation, the Gentiles’ incorporation, the hardening and pruning of unbelieving Israel, and the enthronement of the New Covenant kingdom—the picture becomes unmistakably clear. Romans 11 is not pointing us forward to a future revival. Romans 11 is pointing us backward to the first-century climax of redemptive history. It is explaining why AD 70 had to happen, why the Old Covenant had to die, why the New Covenant had to rise, why the remnant had to be saved, why Gentiles had to be included, and why Jesus’ prophecy and Paul’s theology are two sides of the same covenantal coin. Romans 11 is the moment the entire Bible snaps into focus. It is the unifying lens through which the transition from Old to New becomes not just intelligible but inevitable. Jesus declared the end. Paul explains the end. AD 70 accomplishes the end. And the church—Jew and Gentile together, grafted into one living tree—emerges on the other side as the one and only Israel that will fill the nations with the glory of God.

PART 8— THE WORLD AFTER THE WORLD ENDED

When the Old World ended in AD 70, God did not leave a vacuum. He did not simply demolish the temple, scatter the nation, and walk off the stage of history. The end of the age was simultaneously the beginning of a new world—a world in which Romans 11, Ephesians 2–3, and Galatians 3–4 all converge into a single, radiant reality. Jesus had promised that the “end of the age” would fall on His contemporaries (Matt. 24:3, 34). Paul proclaimed that “the ends of the ages have come upon us” (1 Cor. 10:11). The author of Hebrews declared that the Old Covenant was “growing old and ready to disappear” (Heb. 8:13), and that God was shaking “not only the earth, but also the heaven,” removing “things which can be shaken” in order that “those things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Heb. 12:26–27). When Jesus spoke of “heaven and earth passing away” (Matt. 24:35), He was not prophesying the annihilation of the physical cosmos; He was announcing the dissolution of the Old Covenant cosmos—its temple, its priesthood, its sacrificial world. Hebrews tells us that shaking and removal were already underway. AD 70 was the visible, historical moment when that shaking reached its appointed end and the Old Covenant world finally collapsed.

In that collapse, the olive tree you have been tracing is the same reality Paul describes in Ephesians 2–3. The one tree of Romans 11 is the one new man of Ephesians 2. The branches—Jew and Gentile—grafted into Christ are the stones—Jew and Gentile—built together into “one new man,” “one body,” and “one temple” (Eph. 2:14–22). The mystery that Paul celebrates in Ephesians 3—that “the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:6)—is simply the olive tree seen from another angle. In Romans 11, Gentiles are grafted into the root. In Ephesians 2, Gentiles are brought near and built into the same holy temple. In Galatians 3–4, those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise (Gal. 3:16, 29), and the present Jerusalem, enslaved and doomed to be cast out, gives way to the free Jerusalem above (Gal. 4:21–31). It is one reality: one covenant people, one new humanity, one temple, one tree, one Israel of God, rising from the ashes of the old world.

History itself bears witness that something world-ending and world-beginning happened in that generation. Josephus, no friend of Christ, describes the Jewish War and the fall of Jerusalem as a devastation unlike anything that had ever happened to a city or a people, a catastrophe in which, in his words, “no other city ever suffered such things” and “no generation from the beginning of the world” endured such miseries. He thought in terms of politics and tragedy; Jesus had already given the theological frame: these were “the days of vengeance, so that all things which are written will be fulfilled” (Luke 21:22). The branches that had persecuted the prophets, crucified the Lord, hunted the apostles, and filled up the measure of their fathers were finally cut off. The old heaven and earth of Israel’s covenant world passed away. And standing on the other side was not a vacuum, not an intermission, but a kingdom.

That kingdom does not wait for some future dispensation. Once the Old Covenant world was judged and removed, the New Covenant kingdom was free to expand without hindrance. The stone cut without hands that struck the old statue in Daniel 2 did not pause; it began to grow and fill the earth. The mustard seed in Jesus’ parables did not remain a seed; it began to become the largest of the garden plants, giving shade to the nations. The leaven did not sit idle in the lump; it began to work its way through the whole. The point of Romans 11 is not that God would someday return to a retired covenant; it is that the covenant people, reconstituted in Christ, would inherit the world. Once the Old Covenant heavens and earth were shaken down, the unshakeable kingdom remained (Heb. 12:28)—a kingdom designed not to flicker at the margins of history, but to advance, disciple, and transform the nations.

This is where the postmillennial horizon becomes unavoidable. If AD 70 was the real end of the world—the end of the Old Covenant world—then the age you and I inhabit is not a holding pattern, not a cosmic waiting room, but the long, rising day of Christ’s reign. The Israel of God that emerged from that judgment—Jew and Gentile together, grafted into one tree, built into one temple, formed into one new man—is the very instrument Christ uses to disciple the nations. The fullness of the Gentiles that signaled the end of the old age is the down payment on a much larger story: the gospel advancing, the nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, the earth filling with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. Romans 11, rightly read, does not send us looking over our shoulder for a resurrected Old Covenant. It sends us forward into history, confident that the kingdom which survived the end of the world is the kingdom that will outlive every rival and stand when every other order has crumbled to dust.

CONCLUSION

When Paul finished Romans 11, he was not sketching the faint outline of a future hope; he was announcing the end of an age. The old world—the world of genealogical privilege, priestly shadows, temple smoke, territorial borders, and inherited hierarchy—was dying under the weight of the Messiah’s arrival. It groaned beneath the footsteps of the One who fulfilled every promise its symbols could only whisper. And when Christ rose, the New World rose with Him. Romans 11 is the obituary of the Old World, AD 70 is its funeral, and Pentecost is the birth certificate of the New. This is not poetry; it is Pauline theology. The branches that were cut off were the unbelieving Israelites of the first century, the branches grafted in were the elect Jews and the believing Gentiles of that same generation, the tree that survived the pruning was the Israel of God, and the world that emerged from that great transition is the world we now inhabit—a world where Christ reigns without rival, without competition, without a second chosen people, without a parallel covenant, and without a future genealogical revival.

Futurism died the moment the temple fell; Zionism died the moment the Olive Tree was reconstituted in Christ; dispensationalism died the moment the Old Covenant was declared “obsolete and ready to vanish,” and Romans 11 is the apostolic declaration that all of this was not an accident but the sovereign design of God. The end of the world has already happened, and the world that stands now is the world Christ rules. This is why Zionism cannot be accepted with a shrug. It is not a harmless detour or an alternative interpretive preference; it is an assault on the very structure of the New Covenant. It seeks to resurrect the world that God buried and attempts to breathe life into the corpse of a system Christ fulfilled, judged, and replaced with Himself. Zionism asks us to return to the shadows, but Paul commands us to stand in the light. Zionism asks us to rebuild the wall Christ tore down, but Paul declares the wall demolished. Zionism asks us to exalt the flesh, but Paul glories in the Spirit. Zionism asks us to split the people of God into two groups, but Paul announces one new man, one temple, one tree, one root, one body, one Israel of God.

This is why Romans 11 does not merely refute futurism—it shatters it. It leaves no escape routes, no footholds, no cliffs to cling to. It exposes the whole Zionist project as the theological equivalent of grave-robbing—an attempt to drag the church back into a world God Himself pronounced dead. But Paul does not end in the graveyard; he ends in glory. Because when the Old World fell, the New World began to rise. This is why your eschatology determines your expectations, your expectations determine your obedience, your obedience determines your culture, and your culture determines your children’s world. If you believe the Old World still has a claim in history, you will build like an exile; but if you believe the New World has already begun, you will build like a conqueror.

Paul ends Romans 11 with worship because he has just described the greatest act of divine world-making since Genesis itself—the moment God ended an age, crowned His Son, saved His remnant, grafted in the nations, and unleashed the kingdom that will have no end. The real end of the world already happened; the real beginning of the world is unfolding right now; and the nations are Christ’s inheritance. Which means the future belongs to Him—and therefore it belongs to us. Join us next week as we talk about all the doctrines you will lose if you adopt the lie of Zionism. And what we will see is that you will lose your doctrine of God, your doctrine of Christ, your doctrine of covenant, your doctrine of the people of God, your doctrine of the kingdom, your doctrine of the church, your doctrine of baptism, your doctrine of mission, your doctrine of eschatology—and more. But until then, God richly bless you, and we will see you again next time on The PRODCAST. Now, get out of here.