Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God

3. God afterwards rejected the Jews, gave them up to the hardness of their hearts, and spread the Gospel among the Gentiles. He hath cast off the Children of the Kingdom, those that had been enrolled for his subjects for many ages, who seemed by their descent from Abraham, to have a right to the privileges of Abraham, and called men from the East and from the West, from the darkest corners of the World, to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven. i. e. To partake with them of the promises of the Gospel. Math. 8.11. The people that were accounted accursed by the Jews, enjoy the means of ⟨p. 736⟩Grace, which have been hid from those, that were once dignified, this 1600 years; that they have neither Ephod, nor Teraphim, nor sacrifice, nor any true Worship of God among them. Hos. 3.4. Why he should not give them Grace, to acknowledge, and own the person of the Messiah, to whom he had made the promises of him for so many successive ages, but let their heart be fat, and their Ears heavy. Isaiah 6.10. Why the Gospel at length after the Resurrection of Christ should be presented to the Gentiles, not by chance, but pursuant to the resolution, and prediction of God declared by the Prophets, that it should be so in time? Why he should let so many hundreds of years pass over, after the World was peopled, and let the Nations all that while soak in their Idolatrous Customs? Why he should not call the Gentiles without rejecting the Jews, and bind them both up together in the bundle of Life? Why he should acquaint some people with it, a little after the publishing it in Jerusalem, by the descent of the Spirit, and others not a long time after? Some in the first ages of Christianity enjoyed it, others have it not, as those in America, till the last age of the World; can be referred to nothing but his Sovereign pleasure.

3. God afterwards rejected the Jews, gave them up to the hardness of their hearts, and spread the Gospel among the Gentiles. He hath cast off the Children of the Kingdom, those that had been enrol'd for his subjects for many ages, who seemed by their descent from Abraham, to have a right to the priviledges of Abraham, and called men from the East and from the West, from the darkest corners of the World, to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven. i. e. To partake with them of the promises of the Gospel.