What is the cultivated olive tree in the Bible?

So a few weeks ago, we went to a garden centre, and there were all the lovely flowers out and the beautiful colours. I obviously know quite a lot about the small plants. So it’s nice to see, “Oh, we’ve now got a red flower in that species. That’s unusual. You know, they don’t normally have red flowers with them.” and all that sort of thing.
It was really quite nice looking in the garden centre. And then I thought, ‘Oh, there’s an olive tree, I think.’ But my plant identification of trees is not very good. So I looked just to make sure it was an olive tree, and yeah, the price was hundreds of pounds. Phew!

So I don’t know whether you noticed, but the main part of that reading was about an olive tree. It mentions branches and shoots. It mentions a cultivated olive tree, and it mentions a wild olive shoot.
So the first question I will ask is, what are these shoots from a wild olive tree? Where it says in the sentence; “You, though a wild olive shoot.” So who is the you?
Well, it was the letter to the Romans, so that would involve mainly Gentiles, mainly non-Jews. So we’re talking about the wild olive tree being non-Jews or Gentiles.

Okay, so what is the cultivated olive tree? Some say, well, it’s obviously the nation of Israel, but we non-Jews don’t get grafted into the nation of Israel, because that would mean circumcision and the law and that sort of thing.

Now, we are told that the root of this cultivated olive tree is holy. Romans 11.16, “If the root is holy, so are the branches.”
Well, the root is Abraham.
In Romans 4.9, it says, “We have been saying that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness.”
Now, we’ve got to remember that was before he was circumcised, because circumcision is a sign of the seal of righteousness that he had by faith. So then in verse 11, Paul says, “Abraham is the father of all who believe, but have not been circumcised, in order that the righteousness might be credited to them.”

So Abraham is our father. I don’t know whether we take that on board as a concept. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and others believe the cultivated olive tree is not the nation of Israel.
All these branches from this cultivated olive tree should have the faith of their father Abraham, the root. But it’s because of their unbelief that they were cut off. Our reading says, “God did not spare the natural branches.”
And those natural branches should have had the faith of their father Abraham. But because they were unbelieving Jews, those branches were cut off, broken off.

We know that the Jews can be traced back to Abraham’s natural descendants, but there are two lines. There’s a spiritual line, and that is of God’s choosing.

Ishmael and all the offspring from Abraham’s concubines, they were not chosen. They were not in the spiritual line.

Whereas Isaac was a child of promise. It was naturally impossible for him to be born because Abraham and Sarah, well, Abraham was over 100, 101, and Sarah was 91. That was impossible.
So he is a child of promise.

And then think of the next line down. Jacob was also a child of promise. His mum, Rebecca, was childless, and it was a miracle that she had twins.
Genesis 25:23, the Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated. One people will be stronger than the other, and the elder will serve the younger.”

Esau was not chosen by God, but Jacob was. He was chosen, even though he was quite a deceitful sort of guy, and God had to work on his character.
And then eventually he had that vision, didn’t he, of Jacob’s ladder, of the angels descending and ascending that ladder from heaven to earth.

So Abraham’s spiritual line is of God’s choosing, and that comes all the way down.
Whereas Abraham’s natural line is everyone who is not in the spiritual line.

Now we know the Jews are special to God. The Jews were chosen as his people, his nation. In Deuteronomy 7.6 it says, “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”
And they were special because, well, it tells us why in Romans 9.4, Paul tells us that “Theirs is the adoption to sonship, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised.”

But even though the Jews were special, that does not put them in the spiritual line, because faith is required, both in the New Testament and the Old Testament. And we quite often sort of think, oh, the Old Testament is law. But faith was just as important in the Old Testament as it is in the New.
And Hebrews 11 remembers many of those Old Testament people for their faith. There’s a huge list there in Hebrews 11. If you remember when the Jews came out of Egypt, but before they got to the Promised Land, Hebrews 3.19 says, “So we see that they were not able to enter because of their unbelief.”

While they were in the desert, they were not in faith, so they were unable to enter the promised land. So we must remember, to be saved in the Old Testament requires faith.

And an important verse is here in Romans 9:6, it says, “For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. The Lord knows the ones who are his.”
The Jews are special, and they will be grafted back in because Paul has this prophecy in Romans 11, and he prophesies that they will have a revival, they will come back to God.

In Romans 11:25, “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.” And that will mean that there’ll be believing natural branches alongside believing wild olive branches. So believing Jews alongside believing Gentiles. Now there’ll be no difference. Both will receive the same nourishing sap from the olive root.

So we go back to the question again. So, what is the cultivated olive tree in our reading?
Remember that not all Israel are Israel and God knows the ones that are his.
So the cultivated olive tree is the true people of God. They are the redeemed of the Lord, the spiritual nation from Abraham, a remnant chosen by grace, the Israel of God. All these terms are really talking about the cultivated olive tree, the true people of God.
Galatians 3:29 “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.”
Again, do we see that we are Abraham’s seed? It’s quite an interesting thing to think about. Abraham’s seed is the spiritual seed, the chosen people like Isaac, but not Ishmael.
Those in the cultivated olive tree are all chosen by God, not because they were outstanding spiritual people.
Think about it, whether we like it or not, this is a fact.
Before God chose us, we were spiritually dead. Ephesians 2, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.”
How can a dead person be saved? We’ve got nothing. We rely totally upon God to raise us.
Verse 8 of Ephesians 2, which should really be impacted on our brains. “For it is by grace you’ve been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast.”

We cannot claim that we have moved towards God, because a corpse cannot move.
I suppose in my own life, I could say that when I first started work, I was living like a mole, and I was thinking, “What is life all about? It must be God.”
I could sort of think, well, that was me. But according to the Bible, according to the scriptures, that must have been God saying, “Hello, this is God here, seek for me.” He must have initiated that because I was dead in my transgressions and sin.
I could not have lifted my eyes and head towards him. We cannot claim that we move towards God because a corpse cannot move.

Well, we believed in God. Well, a corpse cannot believe.
We need God to give us faith to turn back, to turn to Jesus.
We cannot say we’ve got good breeding, a church background.

This is the thing that really tripped up the Pharisees, wasn’t it?
They thought they were really good Jews. In John 8, they said, the Pharisees themselves said, “Abraham is our father.”
They totally misunderstood it. Jesus replied, “If you were Abraham’s children, then you would do what Abraham did. As it is, you’re looking for a way to kill me.”

The Pharisees were Abraham’s offspring, yes, but they were not Abraham’s spiritual seed. They were not in the cultivated olive tree. They were not chosen. They didn’t have faith.

When Jesus spoke about himself being the true vine in John 15, we believers are the branches. And then even then, after Jesus said that, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
We cannot be arrogant in our thinking. We chose Jesus.
No, Jesus chose us. We were dead, unable to move. Jesus did not choose us because we looked good, or we did good things, or we were just a great, great guy.

In our reading, it says, “Do not be arrogant but tremble.” And perhaps trembling before God is something that’s not in our thinking.
And that made me think of my dad. He was not an angry man, but if I did something wrong as a child and he was upset, he never used to beat me or anything like that. But I was, I trembled, you could say.
Not because I was scared that he was going to hit me, but because I’d upset him. I trembled because I had upset my dad.
God is serious in this situation about Him choosing us. It’s a big thing that he chose us.

And the thing is that the mass of humanity is hostile towards God. And because they are hostile, they are totally responsible for their rebellion against God.

A judge cannot ignore the law. He has to make a hard, stern decision.
And the Lord God is a righteous judge, and he cannot ignore the law. So that is the sternness of God.

But God chose a huge number of God-hating individuals and enabled them to accept the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so God is totally responsible for our salvation, and that is the kindness of God which we need to continue in.

We need to know that he has grafted us into God’s cultivated olive tree, not because of any good qualities within us, just purely because of his mercy.
And our response ought to be, ‘Why on earth did he choose me? I’m so weak, I keep failing.’

That makes us tremble at your mercy, O God.
We just rely totally upon your grace and your mercy. Even though I was not worthy, you chose us. Let’s pray.