Accordingly all is strongly confirmed by that which Deuteronomy 30 reveals. Jehovah takes them up where they are. He supposes them driven out of every land under heaven; yet that in their low estate their heart, no longer haughty but circumcised, turns before Himself. “Thou shalt return and obey the voice of Jehovah, and do all His commandments which I command thee this day. And Jehovah thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand,” and so forth....”if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of Jehovah thy God to keep His commandments and His statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto Jehovah thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul. For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it.”
Now these words, it is notorious, are applied by the Apostle Paul in Romans 10; and we never can overlook the applications of the New Testament without losing a deeply interesting and weighty key for understanding the Old. For what does the apostle use them? For the very purpose which has been already hinted in the close of the last chapter. The children of Israel had completely ruined themselves under the law. They had failed before God. The righteousness which the law claimed had only proved their actual unrighteousness. What was to become of them? Christ is brought in – “the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”
Hence therefore the Apostle by the Spirit gives the passage of Deuteronomy this admirable turn, that it is no question of going up to heaven to find the Saviour, nor of going down into the bowels of the earth to bring Him from the dead – that the gospel brings the word of salvation near to the very door, “in thy mouth and in thy heart.” It is only to believe and confess the risen Lord Jesus. Therefore, in virtue of the gospel of God, let them take the full everlasting blessing of His grace, once wicked, deified, lost, but now “washed, sanctified, justified, in the name of our Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God,” if I may quote another scripture.
On this principle will God surely bless His ancient people Israel, scattered and broken among the Gentiles, when it becomes impossible therefore, as far as their state is concerned, to carry on their Jewish ritual. What will become of them? Their heart bows to the word of God; they look up to the Messiah, and God will work in grace. Powerless, sensible of past wickedness, full of darkness (for I have no doubt that they are those described in the end of Isaiah 1 as the servants of Jehovah who walk in darkness, and see no light), nevertheless their heart turns to Jehovah, and they stay on their God – a condition that may not suit the Christian’ now, but which grace will open to a Jew then. Such is precisely the happy turn furnished by the Apostle in Romans, only, of course, with a fuller application to the Christian; but it is on the same principle that God will deal with the remnant of the Jews by and by.