Biblion Bible Commentary
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Grafted into the Olive Tree
Romans 11:16-21
16 If the first fruit is holy, so is the lump. If the root is holy, so are the branches. · WEB
One tree, some branches out, wild shoots in — and the grafted are warned off the exact boasting the image was built to kill.
If the first fruit is holy, so is the lump. If the root is holy, so are the branches.
Two images of consecrated continuity — the dough offering sanctifying the batch, the root sanctifying the tree — and both say the same thing about Israel: the holiness of the patriarchal root still runs in the wood Romans 11:28. Then the letter's most famous horticulture: but if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root and of the richness of the olive tree Romans 11:17.
The image repays exactness. One tree — not a Gentile tree replacing a Jewish one; the cultivated olive of God's people stands where it stood, root intact. Some branches broken off — the unbelieving, and only they; the remnant never left the tree Romans 11:5. And the Gentile believer is a wild olive shoot — uncultivated stock, grafted contrary to nature as the passage will say Romans 11:24 — now drawing sap from a root that was never his: Abraham's root, the promises' root Romans 4:16. Gentile Christianity, in this image, is not a new tree. It is wild wood living on Israel's root.
Hence the warning, aimed at the exact boast history would make routine: don't boast over the branches. But if you boast, remember that it is not you who support the root, but the root supports you Romans 11:18.
The imagined boast is quoted: branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in — the church congratulating itself on Israel's fall. Paul grants the fact and corrects the accounting: true; by their unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by your faith Romans 11:20. Unbelief severed them; faith — not merit, not superiority, nothing in the wild wood itself — holds you. And the conclusion is a command with a shudder in it: don't be conceited, but fear; for if God didn't spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you Romans 11:21.
The didn't spare is the verb of 8:32 — the Father who didn't spare his own Son didn't spare the natural branches either; sentiment governs nothing here. A grafted branch that grows proud of its position has begun the exact posture that emptied the position it fills.
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