We are considering at the moment, as probably most of you realize and remember, verses

4 and 5 in the 9th chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, who are Israelites, to whom

pertaineth the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the service of God and the promises,

whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God

blessed forever. Amen. Now, we are looking at these two verses because, of course, they're

absolutely pivotal and central in an understanding of the Apostle's argument in this and the two

following chapters. He's told us in the first three verses of his great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart

because of the state and condition of his kinsman according to the flesh, his fellow Jews,

who had rejected the Lord Jesus Christ, had been responsible for his crucifixion and who still persisted in the rejection of him

and the great salvation which he had come to bring.

Now, these two verses are important in that they enable us

to understand why the apostle felt this matter so deeply.

I was saying last Friday, it isn't merely and only that he was animated by very strong

national or nationalistic feelings. He was undoubtedly. The apostle before his conversion

was a man who was a typical nationalist.

You can't read Philippians 3 without drawing that conclusion, and up to a point that remained

in him.

But that's not the cause of his deep feeling.

The cause of this deep feeling is what he tells us in these two verses. They have been raised as such an extraordinary

position of privilege, so that their failure and their fall is correspondingly great. You measure

the depth of the fall by the height to which they had been raised. It's the same sort of thing

that our Lord says in Matthew 11 about the cities of the plain,

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