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
In a December 2011 article, Pastor and theologian R.C. Sproul shared this story:
My favorite illustration of how callous we have become with respect to the mercy, love, and grace of God comes from the second year of my teaching career, when I was given the assignment of teaching two hundred and fifty college freshman an introductory course on the Old Testament. On the first day of the class, I gave the students a syllabus and I said: “You have to write three short term papers, five pages each. The first one is due September 30 when you come to class, the second one October 30, and the third one November 30. Make sure that you have them done by the due date, because if you don’t, unless you are physically confined to the infirmary or in the hospital, or unless there is a death in the immediate family, you will get an F on that assignment. Does everybody understand that?” They all said, “Yes.”
On September 30, two hundred and twenty-five of my students came in with their term papers. There were twenty-five terrified freshmen who came in trembling. They said: “Oh, Professor Sproul, we didn’t budget our time properly. We haven’t made the transition from high school to college the way we should have. Please don’t flunk us. Please give us a few more days to get our papers finished.”
I said: “OK, this once I will give you a break. I will let you have three more days to get your papers in, but don’t you let that happen again.”
“Oh, no, we won’t let it happen again,” they said. “Thank you so, so, so much.”
Then came October 30. This time, two hundred students came with their term papers, but fifty students didn’t have them. I asked, “Where are your papers?”
They said: “Well, you know how it is, Prof. We’re having midterms, and we had all kinds of assignments for other classes. Plus, it’s homecoming week. We’re just running a little behind. Please give us just one more chance.”
I asked: “You don’t have your papers? Do you remember what I said the last time? I said, ‘Don’t even think about not having this one in on time.’ And now, fifty of you don’t have them done.”
“Oh, yes,” they said, “we know.”
I said: “OK. I will give you three days to turn in your papers. But this is the last time I extend the due date.”
Do you know what happened? They started singing spontaneously, “We love you, Prof Sproul, oh, yes, we do.” I was the most popular professor on that campus.
But then came November 30. This time one hundred of them came with their term papers, but a hundred and fifty of them did not. I watched them walk in as cool and as casual as they could be. So I said, “Johnson!”
“What?” he replied.
“Do you have your paper?”
“Don’t worry about it, Prof,” he responded. “I’ll have it for you in a couple of days.”
I picked up the most dreadful object in a freshman’s experience, my little black grade book. I opened it up and I asked, “Johnson, you don’t have your term paper?”
He said, “No”
I said, “F,” and I wrote that in the grade book. Then I asked, “Nicholson, do you have your term paper?” “No, I don’t have it.” “F. Jenkins, where is your term paper?”
“I don’t have it.”
“F.”
Then, out of the midst of this crowd, someone shouted, “That’s not fair.” I turned around and asked, “Fitzgerald, was that you who said that?”
He said, “Yeah, it’s not fair.”
I asked, “Weren’t you late with your paper last month?”
“Yeah,” he responded.
“OK, Fitzgerald, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. If it’s justice you want, it’s justice you will get.” So I changed his grade from October to an F. When I did that, there was a gasp in the room. I asked, “Who else wants justice?” I didn’t get any takers.
TENSION
Sproul went on to explain that the first time, the students were amazed by grace, the second time they just assumed it and by the third time they viewed it as an entitlement they deserved.
Unfortunately, I think we are prone to do that very same thing in our own lives. And one of the main reasons we do that is that we struggle with the idea of God’s sovereignty, especially when it comes to our salvation.
I am going to warn everyone right up front that the concepts of God’s sovereignty that we’ll be talking about this morning are likely to stretch your mind to the breaking point. That is because our finite human minds are incapable of fully understanding some of the ideas we’ll be talking about today. I sure know that even after spending two weeks on this passage I don’t understand it fully. But I’ll do my best to explain this in a way that we can apply it in our lives even if we don’t understand it fully.
TRUTH
Last week we said that in Romans 9, Paul is dealing with an important question that naturally arises from his teaching so far in his letter about salvation by grace through faith:
If the Jews have rejected and crucified Jesus, the Son of God, does that mean God's purposes were frustrated and His plan defeated?
That is an important question for both Jews and Gentiles because if God’s purposes for Israel have not been fulfilled, then how can anyone trust in the promises that we saw at the end of Romans 8 – promises that all things work together for good and that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ?
Last week, we saw that Paul begins this section by revealing his heart for his fellow Jews. This week we’ll pick up in verse 6 of Romans 9. Beginning in that verse Paul cites five examples from Israel’s history to show why God’s plan for the Jews has not been defeated. We’ll look at the first three this morning.
[Read Romans 9:6-18]
I’m going to begin with the main idea – one that may very well not make a lot of sense right off the bat. But if you’ll stay with me, I’ll do my best to develop that idea as we study our passage:
There are two ways to read this statement. We can read it from a man-centered perspective in which case the emphasis is on what man does in either choosing or rejecting God and assumes that God’s choice of choosing or rejecting is based on what man does. Or we can look at it from a God-centered perspective in which the emphasis is on how God acts regardless of what man does and which assumes that what man does merely reflects God’s decision to either choose or reject.
In our finite human minds, those ideas can’t exist together at the same time. And as a result, man has developed theological “camps” which tend to focus on one perspective to the exclusion of the other.
But even though it is difficult for us to wrap our minds around the idea that both perspectives can be true at the same time, we can clearly see both perspectives in the Bible. In fact, we’ll see them both in the passage that we’ll be studying this morning. Therefore, they must both be true even if we are incapable of reconciling them completely in our own mind.
Paul begins here with his conclusion – “But it is not as though the word of God has failed.” And then he jumps right into his first proof from the Old Testament Scriptures – the example of Isaac and Ishmael.
If you’re not familiar with the account of Isaac and Ishmael, here it is in a nutshell. God had promised Abraham that he would make him into a great nation and that through that nation all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12). As part of that promise, He told Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore (Genesis 22:7).
But as Abraham’s wife Sarah got well beyond her child-bearing years and still wasn’t pregnant, they just couldn’t see how God was going to fulfill His promise. So Sarah suggested that Abraham bear a child through her Egyptian maid, Hagar. And a son named Ishmael was born as a result of that union. But when Abraham was 99 and Sarah was 89, God miraculously allowed Sarah to get pregnant and another son was born – Isaac. And God told Abraham that it was through Isaac that His promises would be fulfilled.
The Jews has always assumed that just because they could trace their lineage back to Abraham that they were automatically God’s children and therefore deserved God’s favor. But as Paul points out here in Romans 9, not all who claim to be part of Israel are the true Israel. And the proof of that fact is that God chose only one of Abraham’s sons as the one through whom His promise would be fulfilled.
Paul is introducing the idea here, that God’s promises were never intended to apply to all of Israel, but rather only to a smaller remnant that God chose. That is an idea that he will continue to expound upon in this section of his letter.
So we see here that God chooses Isaac and Isaac chooses God and God rejects Ishmael and Ishmael rejects God.
I think Paul anticipated the objections that would be raised to his first example. After all, Ishmael, who becomes the father of the Arabs, wasn’t born to the same mother as Isaac. In fact, he was actually born to a non-Israelite mother, an Egyptian. So perhaps the parental lineage of the two boys explains why Isaac was chosen and not Ishmael.
But the next example of Jacob and Esau, clearly shows that can’t explain how God chooses. Again, for those of you who may not be familiar with their story, let me summarize the most relevant parts.
Isaac marries Rebekah, which is a really interesting story in itself. And like Sarah, Rebekah remains barren until God answers the prayers of Isaac and Rebekah and she becomes pregnant with twins. So in this example, both sons, Jacob and Esau, have the same Israelite mother and father, so that excludes the possibility that God chooses merely on the basis of parental lineage.
Before the boys are ever born, before they have a chance to do anything that might earn God’s favor or His judgment, God reveals that the older son, Esau, is going to serve the younger, Jacob. In verse 11 Paul reveals that this is so God’s purposes might be carried out. This is all about what God wants to do in the lives of Jacob and Esau and not at all about what either of them might have to offer to God in the way of their works.
But what is really interesting is that the lives of both boys end up reflecting the choice that God made.
Jacob is certainly not without his faults. With the help of his mother, he takes things into his own hands and deceives Isaac and Esau in order to get the birthright and the blessing that otherwise would have gone to the older brother. But Jacob does seek out God and has a heart for the things of God. In Genesis 32, we read the account of how he wrestles with God and how God changes his name from Jacob to Israel, the name that God gives to His people. So God chooses Jacob and Jacob chooses God.
Esau, on the other hand, essentially wants nothing to do with God at all. He is more concerned with worldly pleasures than with pleasing God so he ends up selling his birthright to his brother for a bowl of stew. So God rejects Esau and Esau rejects God.
In both cases, God’s decision to choose or to reject is proven to be right by the lives that Jacob and Esau live.
To clinch his argument, Paul quotes from Malachi chapter 1:
“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
Does that statement trouble you a bit? I think if we’re honest it tends to offend all of our human sensibilities. So it’s not surprising that many have tried to explain it away:
• If you go back to Malachi 1, you’ll find that in that context, Malachi is referring to the two countries that descended from Jacob and Esau – Israel and Edom. So some will claim that God’s statement there only applied to the two countries and not to the two individuals. But that ignores the context here in Romans 9 where Paul is clearly referring to the two sons of Isaac.
• The other main way people try to explain this away is to cite Luke 14:26 where Jesus told His followers that unless they hated their own family they couldn’t be His disciple. So they claim that the word “hate” here only means that God loved Jacob more than Esau. The problem with that explanation is that the Bible is full of verses that show all the things that God hates and in every one of those places the word “hate” means “hate”.
Personally, I love how Charles Spurgeon handled this verse. One day a woman approached him and said, "Mr. Spurgeon, I don’t understand how a loving God could say in His word that He hated Esau."
Spurgeon replied: "That has never been my problem. My problem has always been, how could God have loved Jacob!"
Paul now gives a third example, one that anticipates the question that would result from the first two:
If God is free to choose whoever He wants, isn’t that unjust?
To be honest, I think we probably have the same question. In our finite human minds, it just doesn’t seem fair that God chooses some and doesn’t choose others.
But Paul answers that question in the most emphatic way possible, using a phrase that he used earlier at the beginning of Romans 6. The English translation of that phrase – “by no means!” – is really inadequate to express the forcefulness of his answer. He’s essentially saying, “Absolutely, positively no way God is being unjust.” And he is going to use his third example, that of Moses and Pharaoh, to illustrate why that is.
First, Paul cites Exodus 33 where God says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” God says those words right after Moses has witnessed God kill 3,000 of His fellow Israelites because of their sin in making and worshiping the golden calf. And now Moses wants to know if God is going to treat him with mercy. So when he questions God about that, that is the answer God gives.
Paul cites that example to show that God’s mercy to Moses was not based on anything that Moses had done. God was just in exercising mercy with Moses simply because that was what He wanted to do.
Moses is contrasted with Pharaoh, who received God’s judgment. Paul explains that God also chose Pharaoh, but rather than choosing him for mercy, he chose him for judgment in order that the power of God would be made known and that God’s name might be proclaimed in all the earth. And that was certainly the result of the plagues that God brought on Pharaoh and the Egyptians.
I want to spend a couple minutes talking about the idea that God hardened Pharaoh. If we just read verse 18 without going back to the context in Exodus, this could seem like Paul was saying that God didn’t give Pharaoh a choice – that somehow God created him to be a robot who was completely controlled by God and therefore who was not responsible for his own choices. That is a question that Paul will address further beginning in verse 19 and we’ll look at that next week.
If you read the accounts of Pharaoh in Exodus, you will find a number of places where it says that Pharaoh hardened his heart and a number of other places where it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. So which is it?
Both. While Pharaoh had already hardened his own heart, there is a sense in which God lets that process proceed to its logical end. God didn’t make Pharaoh godless. His sin did that. God just used the godlessness which was already present in his life to accomplish that which God had already predetermined he would do. It’s similar to the way that God predetermined to put Jesus on the cross. He accomplished that through godless men. God didn’t make them godless. He simply used their already existing godlessness to carry out what He had planned to do from before creation.
Paul is making the point here that God is not unjust at all. His justice is seen in both extending mercy to those like Isaac, Jacob and Moses who don’t deserve it and in extending judgment to those like Ishmael, Esau and Pharaoh who do deserve it. God is holy and must punish sin. Pharaoh illustrates that. But God is also loving and longs to save sinners. Moses illustrates that. But no one is treated unjustly because they all deserve judgment.
That is the divine mystery that we have observed this morning, From God’s perspective, He chose Isaac, Jacob and Moses and He made that choice completely apart from anything that any of them had done to cause that choice. But from their perspective, Isaac, Jacob and Moses also chose to respond to God in faith, which is the only way that God chooses to save.
At the same time, we see from God’s perspective that He rejected Ishmael, Esau and Pharaoh in order to accomplish His purposes. But from their perspective, those three men all rejected God and chose not to respond to Him in faith.
Still confused? Good, because to at least some degree so am I. I’d actually be worried if there was someone here who claimed to be able to reconcile all these seemingly competing ideas. But even though we may not have this figured out exactly I do think there are three important ideas that we need to take away this morning:
APPLICATION
THREE IMPORTANT TAKEAWAYS
1. God is free to choose who He wants
God is completely sovereign, which means He is free to make whatever choices He wants. And because He is God and we are not, those choices often are contrary to the way that we would choose. But as we’ve seen this morning, God always chooses rightly, in accordance with all of His attributes.
2. God’s choice is not subject to man’s conditions
All three examples that Paul gave illustrate clearly that God’s choices are not subject to who man is or what he does. They are not dependent on our heritage or what we do or even on the decisions we make according to our human will. If that were the case then man, and not God would be sovereign.
3. God’s sovereignty does not preclude man’s responsibility
This is an idea that Paul is going to address further next week as we move on to verse 19. But what is clear in today’s passage, is that man can never excuse his sin by claiming that he was not chosen by God. Ishmael, Esau and Pharaoh were all responsible for their own actions and they made the choice to reject God. And it is their own choice to reject God that requires a just God to judge them for their sin.
INSPIRATION/ACTION
While most of you are probably a lot like me in that you don’t understand this idea completely, what we have learned this morning is really good news for those of you who have chosen God by putting your faith in Jesus. It is good news because it means that your salvation is secure because it does not depend on you, but rather on the God who has chosen you.
I think that most of us here this morning have chosen the God who has chosen us, and if that is the case, then as we close with prayer in a moment, will you just take a few moments to thank God for choosing you and for the fact that your salvation is secure because you did nothing to earn or deserve it?
But this is also good news for those of you who have not yet made that choice because it means that there is nothing that you have done that is so bad that God cannot choose you. While it is true that God’s justice does require that He judge those who have chosen to reject Him, it is never too late for you to choose God by putting your faith in Jesus. If you’d like to know more about how you can do that, our Elders will be at the back during our closing song and they would love to talk to you more about that decision.
R.C. Sproul went to be with the Lord last December. But before he died, the same man who gave his Old Testament class one of the greatest lessons on mercy and justice, posted these words on Twitter:
We are secure, not because we hold tightly to Jesus, but because he holds tightly to us.
Discussion Questions for Bible Roundtable
1. What are some things that people think make them God’s children that actually don’t?
2. Some have argued that if God can save all people, but chooses not to, then He isn’t a God of love. How would you respond?
3. Some contend that God’s sovereignty promotes fatalism: What will be, will be. So why pray? Why witness? How would you answer this biblically?
4. Someone asks you, “How can I know that God has chosen me?” How would you respond?
5. If God chooses some, but not others, how can He hold those He does not choose responsible for rejecting Him?
