See the Kindness and Severity of God

When a cultivated olive branch that the farmer has tended with care fails to bear fruit, he cuts it off, reluctant as he is to lose it, and grafts a wild olive branch in its place. When Israel treated God’s repeated love and every opportunity to repent as rubbish, God stripped away the grace they had enjoyed, and their life along with it.

This did not happen because God had failed; it came about within his greater plan. Like a mother who, when her elder child will not eat, ends up feeding the younger one instead, God saw the Jews reject the gospel, and the Gentiles were grafted into their place and received salvation. Yet a grafted branch that boasts about the root may be cut off just as unsparingly as the natural branches were.

Whether a branch is broken off or spared rests with each person. Those who remain in his kindness enjoy that kindness; those who grow proud meet his severe face. Not through striving but through love, with humility and gratitude, God’s people must bear the fruit of the cultivated olive tree.