And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob:
And so all Israel shall be saved - not 'all the spiritual Israel,' Jew and Gentile (as one or two of the fathers, and Luther, Calvin, etc.), for throughout all this chapter, the apostle by "Israel" means exclusively the natural seed of Abraham, whom he sharply distinguishes from the Gentiles; nor the whole believing remnant of the natural Israel, (as Bengel, Olshausen, etc.) Clearly the meaning here is, The Israelite nation at large. To understand this great statement, as some still do, merely of such a gradual inbringing of individual Jews, that there shall at length remain none in unbelief, is to do manifest violence both to it and to the whole context. If can only mean the ultimate, ingathering of Israel as a nation, in contrast with the present "remnant." (So most of the fathers-Beza, Fritzsche, Tholuck, Reiche, Meyer, DeWette, Alford, Philippi, Hodge, Lange.) Some of these critics would seem to advocate the inbringing of every individual Israelite; others, only of 'the mass' or 'majority;' but if they mean simply, 'the nation at large,' as opposed to 'a remnant,' they have brought out, as it appears to us, the precise idea of the apostle. Three Confirmations of this Cheering Announcement Now Follow: Two from the Prophets, and a Third from the Abrahamic Covenant Itself
First Confirmation-from the Prophets
As it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away - `He shall turn away' (without the "and") is the true reading,
Ungodliness from Jacob. The apostle, having drawn his illustrations of man's sinfulness chiefly from Psalms 14:1-7 and Isaiah 59:1-21, now seems (as Bengel observes) to combine the language of the same two places regarding Israel's salvation from it. In the one place the psalmist longs to see "the salvation of Israel coming out of Zion" (Psalms 14:7); in the other, the prophet announces that "the Redeemer (or, "Deliverer") shall come to (or, for) Zion" (Isaiah 59:20). But as all the glorious manifestations of Israel's God were regarded as issuing out of Zion, as the seat of His manifested glory (Psalms 20:2; Psalms 110:2; Isaiah 31:9), the turn which the apostle gives to the words merely adds to them that familiar idea. And whereas the prophet announces that He "shall come to (or, 'for') them that turn from transgression in Jacob," while the apostle makes him say that He shall come "to turn away ungodliness from Jacob," this is taken from the Septuagint version, and seems to indicate a different reading of the original text. The sense, however, is substantially the same in both. Second confirmation-from the prophets.