“The Olive Tree Graft” by Pastor Ricky Kurth, Part 1, pages 5-12, Berean Searchlight, for January, 2015.
If you’ve ever wondered why “extending an olive branch” is an expression that signifies an offer of peace, many think that this figure of speech is a reference to the olive leaf that the dove brought back to Noah (Gen. 8:10,11). Noah rightly interpreted the extension of this olive branch as evidence that the waters of the great flood were receding, and that God’s “war” on mankind was coming to an end. Here we see yet another reminder that many of the familiar figures of speech that pepper our language find their roots in the Word of God.
But while the olive branch is a symbol of peace in our culture, the olive tree is a familiar symbol of Israel in the Scriptures. Speaking to the people of Israel, the prophet said,
“The Lord called thy name, A green olive tree…” (Jer. 11:16).
However, in speaking to the members of the Body of Christ in Rome, the Apostle Paul said, “I speak to you Gentiles” (Rom. 11:13), then went on to tell them that “thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them” (Rom. 11:17), speaking of a symbolic graft that spliced these new Gentile believers into this symbolic tree that previously symbolized only Israel.
It is absolutely crucial that we understand what the apostle is talking about in this passage, for only a proper interpretation of the olive tree analogy will eliminate three very damaging misunderstandings that are taught from these verses.
First, the doctrine known as “replacement theology” points to this text to prove that God replaced the people of Israel with the Gentiles, and that we are now “spiritual Israel.” As we shall see, this view cannot be supported by a correct understanding of the olive tree graft.
Second, those who teach that a believer can lose his salvation also look to this passage to support their erroneous view. However, as we shall also see, this cannot be what Paul had in mind when he warned of God’s “severity” and spoke in threatening tones of being “cut off” (v. 22).
Finally, understanding Paul’s analogy will eliminate the temptation to deny that it is the Gentiles that have been grafted into the olive tree, a mistake that leads to the erroneous Acts 28 position that teaches that we have nothing to do with the people of Israel.
The Firstfruit
Now that we’ve cleared the brush away from the base of the olive tree, let’s begin to delve into a study of this analogy by considering the details, which begin with Paul’s words in Romans 11:16:
“For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches.”
It is not difficult to interpret what the “firstfruit” of Israel’s olive tree represents in this analogy if we compare Scripture with Scripture, the only safe way to interpret the Bible. Speaking through the prophet Hosea, God said to the Jews of his day:
“I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time…” (Hos. 9:10).
The fig tree is yet another symbol of Israel (Luke 13:6-9), and so the “fathers” mentioned here were unquestionably Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, men to whom the prophet refers to as “the firstripe.” The first ripe fruit would naturally be the first fruit of a crop, and so we can easily determine that the firstfruit of our text verse is a reference to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs of Israel.
Now that we’ve identified the firstfruit of the olive tree, we can turn our attention to the “lump.”
“...it is this position of nearness to God that the olive tree represents.”
The dictionary defines a lump as “an aggregation of things massed together.”1 We usually use this word as a verb when we speak of lumping things together. We believe that this identifies the lump, in this context, as the aggregate members of the twelve tribes that descended from the three patriarchs; that is, the lump represents all the natural descendants of these fathers, saved and unsaved.
Paul is contending that if the patriarchs were holy, then the lump of their natural descendants, this lumped-together multitude of saved and unsaved people were holy as well.
But what kind of holiness did Paul have in mind? What kind of holiness could (both) saved and unsaved Jews experience together? We must answer this question here at the very outset of this discussion if we hope to draw the right conclusions from the olive tree analogy. Paul is not speaking here of the kind of holiness that the patriarchs received when they got saved, for they could not pass this kind of holiness on to the lump of their natural offspring. He is rather speaking of the kind of holiness that the entire nation of Israel had, believers and unbelievers, a holiness that separated them from all the other peoples of the earth.
God told the entire nation that they were “an holy people...a special people...above all people” (Deut. 7:6). This kind of holiness, the holiness that rendered all of the natural seed of the patriarchs “so nigh” to God (Deut. 4:7), is the only holiness that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could pass on to the lump of all their natural descendants. Remember, spiritually speaking, God has many children, but He has no grandchildren.
That is, you can’t pass the holiness of salvation on to your children by any natural means, and neither could the patriarchs.
But all of the branches in Jacob’s family tree, saved and unsaved, were holy unto God, in a general sense, above the rest of the people of the earth who were “afar off” from Him (Eph. 2:17).
We might compare this to how Paul says that children who have at least one believing parent are “holy” (I Cor. 7:14) in that they are more nigh to God and His Word through that redeemed parent than children of unbelieving parents. Unsaved children in such marriages are more likely to be saved than other children because of the influence of the believing parent, and so Paul says that they are “holy” in that respect. In the same way, unsaved natural descendants of the lump of the patriarchs were more likely to be saved, due to the influence of their saved brethren, than the other peoples of the earth who were not set apart as nigh unto Him.
The Root and the Branches
The “root” of the olive tree of Israel has to be Abraham himself.
If you are wondering why, we might compare this to how the Lord Jesus is said to be “the Root of David” (Rev. 5:5). If you are not sure what that means, remember that the Lord was called “the root and the offspring of David” (Rev. 22:16). We know that the Lord was the offspring of David because He was a natural descendant of David (Matt.1:1; 22:41-45). But if natural descendancy is the issue here, then we know that the Lord was also the root of David (Rev. 5:5) because David was His natural descendant.
Remember, David was a son of Adam, “which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38). But if the Lord is called the root of David because He was David’s earliest progenitor, then the root of the olive tree of Israel must be Abraham. When you trace the family tree of the people of Israel back as far as you can go, you find that the great root of the Jewish race is their great father, Abraham, the rock from which they as a people were hewn (Isa. 51:1,2).
Of course, if Abraham be the natural root of the olive tree of Israel, the “branches” must symbolize the natural descendants of Abraham, the Jews, just as the branches in the diagram of any family tree symbolize the descendants of the root of an ancient progenitor. We know this because it was said of Jesse, “a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isa. 11:1), speaking of how the “Branch” of Christ would grow up out of the “roots” of Jesse, the father of David (Jer. 23:5).
If the “branches” of the olive tree in our text grow out of the “root” of Abraham, then the branches must speak of Abraham’s natural descendants, the way the “lump” spoke of the natural descendants of the firstfruit of the patriarchs.
Later, we’ll see that Paul uses both of these analogies because we Gentiles are grafted into the root of Abraham, but not into “the stock of Israel” (Phil. 3:5).
The Holiness
Now when Paul says, “if the root be holy, so are the branches,” we have to remember the kind of holiness that Paul is talking about in this passage. He wasn’t saying that since Abraham was saved that all the natural branches of Israel’s family tree must be saved as well, something about which the Jews were confused, and had to be set straight (Matt. 3:8,9). He is rather saying that since God set Abraham apart as nigh unto Himself, apart from the other peoples of the earth (Gen. 12:1; Josh. 24:3), so all of the branches of his descendants were likewise set apart unto God. They were “holy” in the sense that they were set apart as nigh unto Him, and thus much more likely to be saved than the Gentiles who were not set apart unto God.
Here we have to pause and examine what it was that made Israel so nigh to God. In a discussion of the Jews who “were nigh,” and the Gentiles who were “made nigh” when they were grafted in among them (Eph. 2:13, 17), Paul reminds us Gentiles that before we were made nigh, we were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (2:12). Being a part of the commonwealth of Israel was what made the Jews nigh to God, and the commonwealth of Israel was the wealth that the people of Israel shared in common, saved and unsaved.
If you’re wondering what that wealth might be, when Samuel spoke of “all the wealth which God shall give Israel,” he spoke of how God’s “habitation” was with Israel (I Sam. 2:32). You see, God dwelt in Israel’s temple, between the two cherubim that stood atop the mercy seat (I Sam. 4:4; II Sam. 6:2, etc.) amid all the people of Israel, saved and unsaved alike. This presence of God in their midst (Joel 2:27; Zeph. 3:17) is what made the Jews “nigh” to God, both geographically and spiritually, and it is this position of nearness to God that the olive tree represents.
The Broken Off Branches
Now that we understand what the Bible means when it says that the olive tree of all Jews in Israel were nigh to God, we are in a better position to understand what Paul means when he goes on to say that some of the branches of this olive tree were “broken off”:
“And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree” (Rom. 11:17).
The breaking off of some of the branches from Israel’s olive tree (the branches that we’ve already defined as all the natural descendants of Abraham) is not a reference to how any of the believers in Israel lost their salvation. We know this because Paul is drawing from an analogy that God Himself used in Jeremiah 11:16, where the prophet said to his nation:
“The LORD called thy name, A green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit: with the noise of a great tumult He hath kindled fire upon it, and the branches of it are broken.”
When the next verse begins with the word “for,” that tells us that Jeremiah is about to explain what God meant by the breaking off of these branches in Israel:
“For the LORD of hosts, that planted thee, hath pronounced evil against thee…” (v. 17).
The “evil” that God pronounced against Israel was the coming of the Babylonian captivity. In that captivity, believers like Daniel and his three Hebrew friends did not lose their salvation, but the “branches” of the nation as a whole were separated from being as near to the God that dwelt in Israel as they were before they were carried away from Jerusalem into Babylon.
Since Paul is drawing from this analogy for his own analogy, we have to conclude that he has the same idea in mind. The natural branches of the nation as a whole have been separated from their position of being nigh to God.
Remember, the olive tree spoke only of a position of being nigh to Him. It is from this position of nearness to God that the unbelieving Jews were broken off in Acts 7 when they stoned Stephen. As a result, unsaved Jews are no closer to God than unsaved Gentiles in the present dispensation.
Now, when Paul says that “some of the branches be broken off,” don’t let that word “some” throw you. This word usually means “not the majority,” but sometimes it means “not all,” as it does when the Bible speaks of Israel in the wilderness and says that “some…did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt” (Heb. 3:16). If you know the story, you know that most of the nation did provoke God, with Joshua and Caleb being the only exceptions.
In another example of this use of the word some, Paul says that “some of them” were idolaters (I Cor. 10:7), even though we know that most of the Jews in the wilderness were idolaters.
In yet another example, Paul said of the Jews in his own day that “some did not believe” (Rom. 3:3), when in reality we know that most of them didn’t believe. So when he says here in our text that “some of the branches be broken off,” he is referring to the unbelievers in the nation, the majority that rejected Christ and stoned Stephen, the ones outside of the remnant in Israel that believed on Christ, who remained nigh to God, of course.
We know that the “some” refers to unsaved Jews because in the context the “some” that were broken off must be the same “some” that Paul just finished saying he hoped would get saved through his ministry (v. 14), the ones that he says were cast away in the next verse (v. 15). The nation of Israel as a whole may have rejected Christ and stoned Stephen, but individual Jews could get saved through the ministry of the apostle of the Gentiles, just as individual Jews can be saved in our own day. The word “for” that introduces the analogy (v. 16) shows that the analogy is an illustration of the breaking off of the unbelieving branches of Israel, the casting away of which he’d just finished speaking about.
Now that we know who the branches were, and what they were broken off from, let’s find out who was grafted in among them.
The Wild Olive Tree
In context, the “wild olive tree” represents the Gentiles, saved and unsaved alike. Remember, Paul introduced this analogy by saying, “I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles” (v. 13),2 and—still speaking to the Gentiles here—Paul says, “and thou, being a wild olive tree...” In this analogy, of course, the plural “you” of “I speak to you Gentiles” (v. 13), that refers to individuals among the Gentiles, becomes a singular “thou” in “thou, being a wild olive tree” (v. 17) because those individuals are now being viewed as a people, and so are represented by a single olive tree.3
If you are wondering in what sense Gentiles could be considered an olive tree, we might as well ask in what sense Israel could be considered an olive tree. That is, the only reason Israel is represented by an olive tree is because God says that it is so. In the same sense, if God here says that the Gentiles are a wild olive tree, we can’t tell God what He can and can’t represent in His analogies.
The Jews were the cultured olive tree that God carefully planted and cultivated in the Promised Land (Isa. 5:1-7). The Gentiles, on the other hand, were a wild olive tree in that they were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (Eph. 2:12), having grown up outside of the commonwealth in lands outside of the promised land. Because of this, the Gentiles did not have God in their midst, as saved and unsaved Jews did in Israel.
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we are in a much better position to understand what Paul means when he tells the wild olive tree of the Gentiles that they had been “graffed in” to Israel’s olive tree. Paul was not saying that the Gentiles were saved by this graft, for the olive tree didn’t refer to saved Israel. He was rather saying that saved and unsaved Gentiles alike had been set apart unto God as holy unto Him, with God in our midst, just as saved and unsaved Jews once were.
In what sense is God in the midst of saved and unsaved Gentiles? In the same sense in which God was in the midst of saved and unsaved Jews. They were His base of operations on the earth. Remember that when the Lord told a Gentile woman that “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22), He wasn’t saying that every individual Jew was saved. He was rather telling her that the salvation of God resided with Israel, and Gentiles who wanted to be saved had to come to God through the people who had His salvation, the Jews, and be saved the Jewish way, through circumcision and the Law. But today, in the dispensation of grace, “the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles” (Acts 28:28), and it now dwells with us. This doesn’t mean that every individual Gentile is saved; it just means that if a person wants to get saved today, whether Jew or Gentile, he has to come to God through the people who now have His salvation, the Gentiles, and be saved the Gentile way, by grace through faith alone.
The Graft
When Paul says that the Gentiles were grafted in “among them,” this cannot be a reference to how we were grafted in among the unbelievers in Israel, for the unbelieving branches of Israel’s olive tree were broken off from their position of nearness to God.
We were rather grafted in among the believing branches, the only branches that were left near to God in Israel’s olive tree after the unbelieving branches were broken off. Remember, the olive tree represented the aggregate members of the descendants of the root of Abraham, saved and unsaved, who were “nigh” to God. Once the unbelieving branches were broken off, the only branches left nigh to God and His blessings were believing branches, and it is among them that Paul says we Gentiles were grafted in.
That makes what Paul goes on to say easier to understand when he says of these believing branches that the Gentiles as a people now “partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree.” Let’s examine our relationship to these two things, the root and the fatness, one at a time.
First, when Paul says that the Gentiles partake of the root of the olive tree, we have already identified the root of the olive tree as Abraham. The Gentiles as a whole, saved and unsaved, now partake of the root of Abraham in the olive tree in the same way that saved and unsaved Jews once partook of the root of Abraham in the olive tree, in the nearness to God that this root afforded them.
But just because the Gentiles are now part of the olive tree, that doesn’t mean that all Gentiles are saved, any more than all Jews were saved because of their position in the olive tree in time past. All Jews were a part of the olive tree and were all nigh to Abraham, but believing Jews were nigh to him spiritually. In the same way, all Gentiles today are a part of the olive tree, but believing Gentiles are nigh to him spiritually.
That is, the entire physical seed of Abraham were nigh to him, but “neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children” (Rom. 9:7). “They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed” (Rom. 9:8). Simply put, all Jews in the olive tree of Israel were nigh to him, but believing Jews were saved. In the same way, all Gentiles are now nigh to the root of Abraham, but believing Gentiles are saved, for “they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham” (Gal. 3:7).
To Be Continued!
Endnotes
1. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged
2. Paul is the apostle of saved and unsaved Gentiles alike. He tells unsaved Gentiles how to be saved (by grace through faith alone) and he tells saved Gentiles how to live.
3. In Greek, and in many other languages, there are different words for “you” when speaking to an individual than when speaking to a group. Modern English cannot reflect this difference in the Greek text, but in the King James Version the words “you,” “your” and “ye” reflect the plural in the Greek text, while the words “thee,” “thou” and “thy” express the singular.
