The Story of Israel is “the story of the world’s redemption”

The story of Israel’s “fall’ might, after all, seem remote and scarcely interesting to gentile Christians in Rome. I sometimes wonder whether such imagined uncomprehending listeners are rally the coded presence of modern western scholars and preachers who are hoping that Paul will, in his every sentence, say something readily accessible to the deeply non-Jewish concerns of our own day. But what is of most concern to Paul, speaking as he says ‘to those who know the law’ (Rom 7:1), is to tell the story of Israel because it is the story of the world’s redemption. ‘Those who know the law’ might mean Jewish Christians, but might well mean gentile Christians who had been proselytes or God-fearers; Paul, in any case, is articulating a narrative which far outstrips any small-scale concerns of this or that group. To tell the story of Israel is not to focus attention back on a matter that interested another group at another time. Paul might have put it like this: if you want to know how you will arrive at ‘eternal life’, the promised inheritance, you have to learn that ‘salvation is of the Jews’, and you have  to understand how the story of Israel actually works, even though to begin with it may appear (to gentiles!) remote or irrelevant.

– N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1015, emphasis his

HT: Jameson Ross