The future and present hope of ingrafting

Paul’s stress on the root, and on the rationale of election, is a sign that he presses to explain how Israel came to be, and in that explanation desires to understand its present crisis, its future hope, and the extraordinary supplementation to the stock of God’s “inheritance” in the form of believing Gentiles. If its source of life (its “root”) is the creative call that “raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17), one can readily explain both the ingrafting of Gentiles and the hope that, by the power of God (11:23), Israel will be reconstituted and complete again.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 552