When the apostle reaches the “heritage” conferred upon us in Christ (ver. 11), he is on the boundary between the present and the future. Into that future he now presses forward, gathering from it his crowning tribute “to the praise of God’s glory.” We shall find, however, that this heritage assumes a twofold character, as did the conception of the inheritance of the Lord in the Old Testament. If the saints have their heritage in Christ, partly possessed and partly to be possessed, God has likewise, and antecedently, His inheritance in them, of which He too has still to take full possession.[47] Opening upon this final prospect, St Paul touches on a subject of supreme interest to himself and that could not fail to find a place in his great Act of Praise--viz., _the admission of the Gentiles_ to the spiritual property of Israel. The thought of the heirship of believers and of God’s previous counsel respecting it (ver. 11), brought before his mind the distinction between Jew and Gentile and the part assigned to each in the Divine plan. Hence he varies the general refrain in verse 12 by saying significantly, “that _we_ might be to the praise of His glory.” This emphatic _we_ is explained in the opening phrase of the last strophe: “that have beforehand fixed our hope on the Christ,”--the heirs of Israel’s hope in “Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write.” With this “we” of Paul’s Jewish consciousness the “ye also” of verse 13 is set in contrast by his vocation as Gentile apostle. This second pronoun, by one of Paul’s abrupt turns of thought, is deprived of its predicating verb; but that is given already by the “hoped” of the last clause. “The Messianic hope, Israel’s ancient heirloom, in its fulfilment is _yours_ as much as ours.” This hope of Israel pointed Israelite and Gentile believer alike to the completion of the Messianic era, when the mystery of God should be finished and His universe redeemed from the bondage of corruption (vv. 10, 14). By the “one hope” of the Christian calling the Church is now made one. From this point of view the apostle in chapter ii. 12 describes the condition in which the gospel found his Gentile readers as that of men cut off from Christ, strangers to the covenants of promise,--in a word, “having no hope”; while he and his Jewish fellow-believers held the priority that belonged to those whose are the promises. The apostle stands precisely at the juncture where the wild shoot of nature is grafted into the good olive tree. A generation later no one would have thought of writing of “the Christ in whom _you_ (Gentiles) _also_ have found hope”; for then Christ was the established possession of the Gentile Church.