NOTES for Rom 9:1-5
The Jewish people, like every people on earth, have their own history, conditioned in part by the same social laws that generally govern the history of all peoples. But besides this history common to everyone, the Jewish people, as God's people, are part of another history as well: the history of the Covenant, the history of those relationships between God and His people and humanity as a whole that constitute an internally unified spiritual process. In this process the Jewish people prove to be the very axis on which everything rests and around which everything turns. And in this capacity they will remain for ever, until the Second Coming.
But not everyone born Jewish automatically becomes a person of God. The history of Israel itself shows that the boundaries of God's people and of the Jewish nation by no means always coincided. Strictly speaking, only after the Babylonian exile, when Jewry became an ethno-confessional community, did it become possible to speak of God's people at least formally: before the exile many Jews were essentially, and sometimes formally, pagans. Moreover, at that time they were the majority, which made the exile itself inevitable. In exile there emerged the remnant of which the pre-exilic prophets had already spoken, and it was this remnant that became the foundation of a new, post-exilic Jewry, which now existed as an ethno-confessional community where, by definition, there could be no pagans.
But then the Messiah came, and it turned out that religiosity alone was not enough: one had to live a full spiritual life in order to recognise Him and follow Him. And in every religious community there are always more religious people than people living a spiritual life or seeking such a life. Once again a remnant begins to emerge, now no longer according to a religious principle but a spiritual one: those who value their own religiosity more highly are not fit for the Kingdom.
Yet the Covenant remains in force. God does not renounce an alliance once concluded. The Jews have advanced farther along the road to the Kingdom than any other people, and no one will take that from them. In practice, however, such an advantage changes nothing for them: what matters here is not to go farther than others, but to reach the goal. This is what Paul hopes for and what he prays about. He wants his people to complete the road they have travelled only in part. All the way to the Kingdom.