The Wild Olive Grafted In

So the apostle states this truth in order to keep us from rejecting the grafting in of the Spirit while we pamper the flesh. “But you,” he says, “being a wild olive, were grafted into the good olive tree and came to share in its richness.” Now when a wild olive has been grafted in, if it stays what it was before — a wild olive — it is “cut down and thrown into the fire”; but if it takes to the graft and is changed into the good olive tree, it becomes a fruit-bearing olive, planted, as it were, in a king’s park. It is the same with people. If they really do go forward by faith toward better things, and receive the Spirit of God and bring out his fruit, they will be spiritual, planted as they are in the paradise of God. But if they throw the Spirit out and stay what they were before, wanting to belong to the flesh rather than to the Spirit, then it is quite rightly said of people like that, “Flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” — just as if someone were to say that the wild olive is not taken into the paradise of God. [a]

The apostle sets out our nature, and God’s arrangement for us all, admirably well in what he says about flesh and blood and the wild olive. For the good olive, if it is neglected for a time and left to grow wild and run to wood, turns into a wild olive itself; and the wild olive, if it is carefully tended and grafted, goes back by its own nature to bearing fruit as it did before. So it is with people. When they grow careless and put out the cravings of the flesh for fruit, like so much woody growth, they are made barren of righteousness by their own fault. For when people are asleep, the enemy sows the makings of weeds, and that is why the Lord commanded his disciples to keep watch. And again, those who are not bringing out the fruits of righteousness, and are, as it were, buried and lost among brambles, if they take pains and receive the word of God as a graft, come back to the original nature of man — the nature that was created after the image and likeness of God.

But the grafted wild olive does not lose the substance of its wood. It changes the quality of its fruit and receives another name, since it is now not a wild olive but a fruit-bearing olive, and is called one. In the same way, when a man is grafted in by faith and receives the Spirit of God, he certainly does not lose the substance of his flesh; he changes the quality of the fruit — that is, of his works — and receives another name, which shows that he has been changed for the better. He is now not merely flesh and blood but a spiritual man, and he is called one. And again: as the wild olive, if it is not grafted in, stays useless to its owner because of its woodiness, and is cut down as a tree bearing no fruit and thrown into the fire, so a man too, if he does not receive the grafting in of the Spirit through faith, stays what he was; and being merely flesh and blood, he cannot inherit the kingdom of God.

The apostle is right, then, to declare, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” and, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” By these words he is not throwing out the substance of the flesh. He is showing that the Spirit must be poured into it. This is why he says, “This mortal must put on immortality, and what decays must put on what is beyond decay.” And again he declares, “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.” He puts it still more plainly where he says, “The body indeed is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also make your mortal bodies alive, because of his Spirit living in you.” And again he says in the letter to the Romans, “For if you live according to the flesh, you will die.” He is not forbidding them to live out their lives in the flesh — he was himself in the flesh when he wrote to them. He is cutting away the cravings of the flesh, the ones that bring death on a man. That is why he goes straight on to say, “But if by the Spirit you put to death the works of the flesh, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.”

The apostle saw beforehand the wicked things unbelievers would say, and so he singled out the works he calls works of the flesh. He explains himself, so as to leave no room for doubt to people who twist his meaning dishonestly. This is what he says in the letter to the Galatians: “Now the works of the flesh are plain. They are adulteries, sexual immorality, uncleanness, shameless living, idolatries, potions and spells, hatreds, quarrels, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, animosities, angry words, dissensions, party divisions, envyings, drunkenness, wild parties, and things like these. I warn you about them, as I have warned you before, that people who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” In this way he points out to his hearers, more explicitly, what he means when he declares, “Flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God.” For people who do these things are indeed walking after the flesh, and they have no power to live to God. [h]

And then he goes on to tell us the actions of the Spirit that give a man life — that is, the grafting in of the Spirit. He says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faith, gentleness, self-control, purity. Against these there is no law.” So the man who has gone forward to the better things and has brought out the fruit of the Spirit is saved completely, because of his fellowship with the Spirit; while the man who has stayed in the works of the flesh just listed is truly reckoned to belong to the flesh, since he did not receive the Spirit of God, and he will have no power to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

The same apostle bears witness to this again when he says to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who take the woman’s part with other men, nor men who lie with males, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor slanderers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what you were; but you were washed, you were made holy, you were counted righteous in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” He shows in the clearest possible way what it is that brings a man to destruction, if he has gone on living after the flesh, and then, on the other side, what it is that saves him. And he says that the things that save are the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God.

So then, since in that passage he counts up the works of the flesh, which are without the Spirit and bring death on the people who do them, he cried out at the end of his letter, in keeping with what he had already declared: “And as we have borne the image of the man of earth, we shall also bear the image of the man from heaven. This I say, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Now what he says here — “as we have borne the image of the man of earth” — matches what was said before: “And such indeed you were; but you were washed, you were made holy, you were counted righteous in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

When, then, did we bear the image of the man of earth? Plainly it was when the actions he speaks of as “works of the flesh” used to be at work in us. And when do we bear the image of the man from heaven? Plainly when he says, “You were washed” — when we believed in the name of the Lord and received his Spirit. And what we washed away was not the substance of our body, nor the image of the way we were first formed, but our former empty way of life. So in the very same parts of us in which we were going toward destruction by doing the works of decay, in those very same parts we are made alive by doing the works of the Spirit.

For just as the flesh can decay, so it can also be beyond decay; and as it can die, so it can also live. These two give way to each other, and both cannot stay in the same place: one is driven out by the other, and the presence of the one destroys the presence of the other. So if death, when it takes hold of a man, drives life away from him and shows him to be dead, how much more does life, when it has gained power over the man, drive death out and give him back alive to God. If death brings on dying, why should life, when it comes, not make a man alive? As the prophet Isaiah says, “Death swallowed up when it had prevailed.” And again, “God has wiped away every tear from every face.” That is how the former life is driven out — because it was not given by the Spirit but by the breath. [o]

For the breath of life, which also makes a man a creature of the soul, is one thing, and the life-giving Spirit, which makes him spiritual, is another. This is why Isaiah said, “Thus says the Lord, who made heaven and set it firm, who founded the earth and everything in it, and gave breath to the people on it, and Spirit to those who walk on it.” In this way he tells us that breath is given in common to all the people on the earth, but that the Spirit belongs to those alone who trample down earthly cravings. And so Isaiah, marking off the two things he has just mentioned, cries out again, “For the Spirit will go out from me, and I have made every breath.” In this way he assigns the Spirit to God as God’s own, the Spirit whom in the last times he pours out on the human race in adoption as sons; but he shows that breath was common throughout creation, and he points to it as something made. Now what has been made is a different thing from the one who makes it. The breath, then, is for a time, but the Spirit is forever. The breath grows stronger for a short while and lasts a certain time, and then it takes its leave, and the place where it used to live is left without breath. But when the Spirit runs all through the man, inside and out, it stays there, and it never leaves him.

“It is not the spiritual that comes first,” says the apostle — speaking this way with us human beings in view — “but what belongs to the soul, and afterward the spiritual.” That stands to reason. For there had to be, first, a man formed; and what was formed had to receive the soul; and afterward it had to receive fellowship with the Spirit. That is why “the first Adam was made” by the Lord “a living soul, and the second Adam a life-giving spirit.” So then, as the man who was made a living soul forfeited life when he turned aside to what is evil, in the same way that same man, when he turns back to what is good and receives the life-giving Spirit, will find life.

For it is not one thing that dies and another that is made alive, any more than it is one thing that is lost and another that is found; the Lord came looking for the very same sheep that had been lost. What was it, then, that was dead? Beyond any doubt it was the substance of the flesh — the very thing that had lost the breath of life and had become breathless and dead. So this is what the Lord came to make alive, so that as in Adam we all die, being creatures of the soul, in Christ we may all live, being spiritual; and we do this by laying aside not God’s handiwork but the cravings of the flesh, and by receiving the Holy Spirit. This is what the apostle says in the letter to the Colossians: “Put to death, then, your members that are on the earth.” And he explains himself what these are: “Sexual immorality, uncleanness, disordered passion, evil craving, and greed, which is idolatry.”

The apostle preaches the laying aside of these things, and he declares that people who do them, being merely flesh and blood, cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. For their soul, leaning toward what is worse and going down to earthly cravings, has come to share the very name that belongs to those cravings — “earthly.” And when the apostle commands us to lay these aside, he says in the same letter, “Throw off the old man with his deeds.” But in saying this he is not doing away with the ancient formation of man. If he were, we would have to rid ourselves of its company by killing ourselves.

The apostle himself, though — a man who had been formed in a womb and had come out of it — wrote to us and acknowledged, in his letter to the Philippians, that “to live in the flesh was the fruit of his work.” That is how he put it. Now the final outcome of the Spirit’s work is the salvation of the flesh. For what other visible fruit of the invisible Spirit is there than the making of the flesh ripe and capable of a life beyond decay? So if he says, “To live in the flesh — this is the result of my labor,” then he was certainly not despising the substance of the flesh in the passage where he said, “Put off the old man with his works.” He is showing rather that we should lay aside our former way of life, the one that grows old and rots. That is why he goes on to say, “And put on the new man, who is being made new in knowledge, after the image of the one who created him.” Now when he says “who is being made new in knowledge,” he shows that it is the very same man who in times past was in ignorance — ignorance of God — who is made new by the knowledge that has to do with God. For the knowledge of God makes a man new. And when he says “after the image of the Creator,” he is setting out the summing up again of that same man who at the beginning was made after God’s likeness.

And that he, the apostle, was the very same person who had been born from a womb — that is, of the ancient substance of the flesh — he declares himself in the letter to the Galatians: “But when it pleased God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach him among the nations.” As I have already said, it was not one person who was born from the womb and another who preached the good news of the Son of God. It was the same individual who had once been ignorant and used to persecute the church; and when the revelation was made to him from heaven and the Lord spoke with him, as I pointed out in the third book, he preached the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate — his former ignorance driven out by the knowledge that came afterward.

It is like the blind men whom the Lord healed. They certainly lost their blindness, but they received the substance of their eyes whole, and they got the power of sight in the very same eyes with which they had not been able to see before. The darkness was simply driven away while the substance of the eyes stayed as it was; and so, with those very eyes through which they had not seen, they used the power of sight again and could give thanks to the one who had given them their sight back. It was the same with the man whose withered hand was healed, and with everyone else who was healed. They did not exchange the parts of their bodies that had come out of the womb at their birth; they simply received those same parts back in good health.

For the Maker of all things, the Word of God, who also formed man in the beginning — when he found his own handiwork damaged by wickedness, he worked every kind of healing upon it. Sometimes he did it one part at a time, as each part is found in his own handiwork; and at another time he restored the whole man at once, sound and whole in every part, making him ready and complete for himself for the resurrection. For what was his purpose in healing portions of the flesh and bringing them back to the condition they were made in, if the parts he had healed were in no position to obtain salvation? If the good he did them was only for a time, then he granted nothing of any importance to the people he healed. Or how can they claim that the flesh cannot receive the life that flows from him, when it received healing from him? For life comes about through healing, and freedom from decay through life. So the one who gives healing gives life as well; and the one who gives life also wraps his own handiwork in freedom from decay.