Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church

in Lafayette, Louisiana.

For if they're being cast away as the reconciling of the world,

what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?

Now, notice there's a couple of words there in italics.

That means they're not there, remember? So there's an assumption being made there about the relationship of those clauses. But so the idea is what happened

related to them being separated is that the gospel has gone out to the nations, right? It's gone

out to everyone. And so now he's saying

if they now come back, right, that'll be life from the dead in the sense that now that they've been

cast off, right, they're dead. They don't have life because they're cut off. But his point being

because of the resurrection of Christ,

life from the dead is possible.

So again, God isn't done with them.

God isn't done with them.

And that means the church shouldn't be done with them.

We shouldn't be done with them.

Our goal should always be to bring them to Christ,

because that's what God wants, to bring them back and to restore them.

So verse 16, for if the first fruit is holy, the lump is also holy,

and if the root is holy, so are the branches.

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