<p>11:14 <em>If by any means I may provoke to jealousy them that are my flesh, and may save some of them</em>- As noted above, Paul did indeed provoke the Jews to jealousy but there is no record of this policy actually being successful in eliciting Jewish conversion.</p><p>In Paul&rsquo;s case, being all things to all men meant that at times He sacrificed highest principle in order to get through to men; He didn&rsquo;t just baldly state doctrinal truth and leave his hearers with the problem of whether to accept it. He really sought to persuade men. He magnified his ministry of preaching to the Gentiles, he emphasized the possibility of Gentile salvation, &ldquo;If by any means I may provoke to emulation &lsquo;incite to rivalry&rsquo; them which are my flesh the Jews, and might save some of them&rdquo; (Rom. 11:13,14). This hardly seems a very appropriate method, under the spotlight of highest principle. But it was a method Paul used. Likewise he badgers the Corinthians into giving money for the poor saints in Jerusalem on the basis that he has boasted to others of how much they would give (2 Cor. 9:2), and these boasts had provoked others to be generous; so now, they had better live up to their promise and give the cash. If somebody promised to give money to charity and then didn&rsquo;t do so, we wouldn&rsquo;t pressurize them to give. And we wouldn&rsquo;t really encourage one ecclesia to give money on the basis of telling them that another ecclesia had promised to be very generous, so they ought to be too. Yet these apparently human methods were used by Paul. He spoke &ldquo;in human terms&rdquo; to the Romans, &ldquo;because of the infirmity of your flesh&rdquo; (Rom. 6:19 NIV); he so wanted to make his point understood. And when he told husbands to love their wives, he uses another rather human reason: that because your wife is &ldquo;one flesh&rdquo; with you, by loving her you are loving yourself. &lsquo;And&rsquo;, he reasons, &lsquo;you wouldn&rsquo;t hate yourself, would you, so &ndash; love your wife&rsquo;. The cynic could reasonably say that this is pure selfishness (Eph. 5:29); and Paul seems to recognize that the higher level of understanding is that a husband should love his wife purely because he is manifesting the love of Christ to an often indifferent and unappreciative ecclesia (5:32,33). And yet Paul plainly uses the lower level argument too.</p>