We live in a world where everyone is for himself. In our life the main thing is to become independent; we so love to speak about independence. In this world each of us is like a tiny particle going its own way. In this atomized society, the most important thing disappears, the thing that makes a person human: mercy, compassion, a sense of responsibility for those nearby. Somewhere something terrible is happening, people are dying, but our concern lasts exactly as long as a news broadcast. At best, another half hour; at the very best, a couple of days. After all, it is somewhere over there; it has no relation to us. More than that, the contemplation of someone else's misfortune, someone else's catastrophe, replaces compassion in us.

But however many walls we build to separate ourselves from other people, however much we try to shut ourselves up in our cozy little world, we will not cancel the fact that the Lord intended our world in a completely different way. In reality we are all connected with one another, and something terrible happening at the other end of the world still concerns us, because the death of each of us changes our world irreparably. More than that, the fact that our world presents such a sad sight is also our fault, our responsibility. This does not mean that we should tear our hair out or fall into depression, but it does mean that we must recognize the measure of our personal responsibility and try not to shift it onto others. And even in those moments when we can do nothing to help, we can always pray for others.

Speaking about the salvation of his people, Paul connects it with the end of time, with that triumph of the Kingdom which is impossible without the participation in it of the people of God in their fullness. The apostle understands perfectly well that the main meaning of the present age is the coming of the Kingdom, which is being revealed in the world more and more fully. Each person's attitude toward this process is determined only by that person's own choice, so Jews, like representatives of any other people, can turn out to be either its participants or its opponents, and Paul is forced to note with sorrow that most of his fellow countrymen chose the second (v. 28). Their own religion and tradition proved more important to them than the Kingdom.

But in an eschatological perspective, what matters is not only the choice of a particular person, which determines above all that person's own path, but also God's plan for His people, which can radically change the fate of everyone connected with them. God does not change promises once given and does not break covenants once made; therefore His covenant with the Jewish people continues to be in force, and the destiny of everyone who belongs to the Jewish people cannot be considered outside the context of this covenant, which has by no means been broken (vv. 28-29).

The apostle hopes that the Savior's return at the end of time will become for the Jewish people what God's visitation became for them during the Babylonian exile. There in Babylon, the history of pre-exilic Jewry truly ended; but precisely there, in Babylon, during the exile, a new Jewry was born in a miraculous way, simply because God had not abandoned the remnant of His people, and all Jewish history of the following centuries goes back to it. And just as everything that happened then happened only because God does not change His plans for His people, so at the Savior's return the history of the Jewish people will begin anew with their transformation, precisely because God is faithful to His promises and to the covenants He has made (vv. 25-27).

In the end, no person and no people has earned the Kingdom; all alike receive it by God's mercy (vv. 30-32). If that is so, then only at the end of time, when the Savior returns and the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness, will the destiny of every person and every people be determined.

In the context of the epistle to Romans, Apostle Paul answers by this sentence to the question to know how God could allow the Jews to refuse to accept Him. But everyone, who reads attentively the words of the apostle, the words knock out from under any foundation for the judgments of people. Suddenly it turns out that it is completely impossible to condemn whoever can be, because the one who condemns is also concluded in unbelief, just as the one he wants to condemn.

And there is another important aspect in the words of the apostle. We conceive instinctively the history of the world as being a certain process of natural selection, separating the good from the bad, sheep from the billy goats. That’s how our history schoolbooks are written.

That’s how we consider peoples and social groups. That’s how we consider ourselves and our neighbors. It seems to us that people live, trying to make a way somewhere, where only deserving particulars are admitted. There are sheep, and billy goats wish not to push through anywhere, but just burn the candle at both ends... But it is not like that at all.

All have gone out the way, each on his road. From the point of view of the growth to greatness, the history of the world from the beginning turned out to be unsuccessful. And that’s why, as a healing balm on the wound, mercy spreads at once on all humanity. That’s why it is impossible to measure, how much "you grow on yourself ", by looking, how low have fallen the neighbors.