JOHN PIPER-TO THE JEW FIRST AND ALSO TO THE GREEK

The major problem with this sermon is you can't properly interpret this phrase in Romans 1 16 if you don't know who the Jews and Greeks (Gentiles) were.

The word Jew here means "of the tribe of Judah." The word Greek denotes the Gentiles. Gentiles means "nations", or the ten lost tribes of Israel to whom Paul wrote this epistle.

The verse quoted by Piper referring to being grafted into the olive tree can thus be explained in the following way. In Isaiah 5 God refers to the children of Israel who had gone astray as "wild grapes." Thus, letting the Bible interpret itself, we can infer that the wild olives spoken of later on in Romans refers to the members of the ten lost tribes of Israel. These people were cut off many centuries before Christ, but were then grafted into the olive tree of the tribe of Judah and were once again fed by the root of the Abrahamic covenant.

"Any Jew-haters in this room, you are in big trouble."

Except for the fact the people we call Jews today aren't the Jews spoken of in the passage we're studying.

"Whenever we go into a new area we should have our flags up seeking "Are there any Jews here?"

See my above point.

Question 2, Point 3: The verse that talks about the Gentiles being separated from the Messiah refers to the ten tribes of Israel. They were cut off and taken away from the land of Israel, thus missing out on the coming of the Messiah to that land. The rest of the passage should be interpreted with this in mind.

Of course, to a certain extent these verses also speak of Jesus making all the peoples of the world one in His salvation.