1) What is the fulness of the gentiles?

The Frisians.

2) Does this mean that they will be taken out again and then the rest of the Jews brought in?

Once the Frisians are in, it's difficult to get them to change to anything else.

3) Must God remove one group to bring in the other?

The Frisians do that themselves.

Just kidding, Joshua. I'm Frisian myself, and as such you hear all kinds of these things. It's almost worse than being Scottish.

Seriously, though, the fullness of the gentiles is a matter for God to know. We can only conjecture, and if we do it would be a dangerous thing.

The last question, I think, is the one that concerns us theologically. I think it is a misunderstanding of the text to take it to mean that one people is dislodged from the Covenant and that another is found to take their place. I think the idea is that once your place is lost to you then it is not yours to reclaim anymore. It is like the flower of the field, which after it dies and is gone, its place "knows it no more". That piece of ground no longer remembers nor recognizes the flower that once was there.

That's the idea I have of the meaning of that text.

__________________
JohnV

John Vandervliet
Ontario, Canada
member of: Canadian Reformed Church
"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are" C.S Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism