God Displays His Glory Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

ENGAGE

I suppose in the current day where we’re overly sensitive to making sure we don’t make anyone feel bad that this process is no longer used, but I remember growing up how we used to choose teams when playing some kind of game. Two people would be designated as captains and then they would pick their teams. And during that process, every kid just wanted to make sure that he or she wasn’t the last one picked.

And perhaps that is why some of us aren’t real comfortable with this whole idea of God choosing who He wants to choose that we’ve been talking about for the last several weeks. Maybe some of us are just afraid that God picks us the same way that we used to choose teams and that maybe we won’t just be the last one chosen, but we won’t be picked at all. But just because we don’t like the idea of God’s complete sovereignty or we don’t fully understand it, doesn’t mean that it is not true.

TENSION

If you’re struggling with some of these deep truths about God’s sovereignty that we’ve been learning about recently in Romans 8 and 9, you’re in good company. I can’t prove it for sure, but it sure seems likely that Peter had Romans 9 in mind when he wrote these words:

And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

(2 Peter 3:15–16 ESV)

Paul only writes about God’s patience in delaying His judgment in three places (Romans 2:4, Romans 9:22, 1 Timothy 1:15-16) and of the three, the section of Romans 9 that we’ll be looking at this morning seems to be the only one that could be considered to be “hard to understand”. And there is no doubt that over the nearly 2,000 years since Paul wrote these words, they have certainly been twisted.

Before we move on, I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out the letters that Paul wrote were clearly considered to be Scripture by Peter and that Peter recognized that Paul’s words were written according to the wisdom given Him, presumably by the Holy Spirit. That’s just one more reason for us to give the proper attention to the passage we’ll be studying today.

TRUTH

In Romans 9, Paul is answering the question that would have naturally arisen as a result of everything he had written in the first 8 chapters of his letter:

Since the Jews have largely rejected Jesus as the Messiah, does that mean that God’s purposes for the Jews had been defeated?

Paul began by revealing the heart he has for his fellow Jews, telling them that if it were possible, he would be willing to give up his own salvation so that they would put their faith in Jesus and be saved.

Then last week, we saw him begin his explanation of why God’s purposes for the Jews had not failed at all. We looked at the first three of five illustrations from the history of Israel that Paul is going to use to support his claim that God’s purposes had not failed at all. Each of those examples – Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and Moses and Pharaoh, served to reveal God’s complete sovereignty in deciding who to choose and who to reject and also reminded his fellow Jews that throughout history being a descendent of Abraham did not automatically insure that someone received God’s mercy.

This morning, we’ll look at the last two illustrations.

[Read Romans 9:19-29]

Once again this morning, I’ll begin with the big idea and then we’ll go through the passage and develop that idea further:

I think the best way for us to make sense of this passage is to just work through it rather methodically and identify the important truths that Paul reveals to us:

FIVE IMPORTANT TRUTHS

1. God has the absolute right to do what He wants with those He has created. (vv. 19-21)

We could paraphrase the question that Paul asks in verse 19 something like this: “If God has mercy on whom He desires and hardens whom He desires, doesn’t that make us all robots? And if we don’t have free will to either choose God or reject Him, how can God judge us since were just acting according to the way He programmed us?”