Romans 9:14 - 9:24

Romans — Steve Gregg

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Romans 9:14 - 9:24

RomansSteve Gregg

In this section of scripture, Paul reconciles the rejection of Christ by Israel despite being given covenants and promises of salvation. Paul explains that physical descent from Abraham is not significant to God's selection as he has always chosen a special selection of family members to serve his purpose of bringing forth the Messiah and blessing the nations. Moreover, Paul argues that God's choice of Jacob over Esau was a prophecy about the destiny of the respective nations that would descend from them, and God's mercy is based on individual choices and conditions of the heart, not predetermined by total depravity.

Transcript

So last time we were looking at Romans chapter 9 and we got up through about verse 13. Now there's certainly more that could be said about those verses than was said for the simple reason there are controversies surrounding this chapter and the whole section that it inaugurates, which is Romans 9 through 11. We will not have time to look at everything in detail because of the limits we have on our time and the number of sessions, we can take, but I would remind you that Romans 9 through 11 is a discrete section where Paul has begun to explain the question of why it is that God, having given Israel covenants and promises and all these things, including promises of salvation, why it is that they are not saved, that most Jews are not following Christ, though Christ has come, the Messiah has come to Israel, and the majority rejected him, and so it appears that Israel has not been saved when they had the opportunity to do so, and this seems like a violation of what God said would happen, the Messiah would come and save Israel.

So Paul realizes this is a very important question, especially to the Jew, but also to the Gentile who wonders about such things. I'm not a Jew, but I would wonder about these things, you know, why aren't the Jews the first to follow Jesus? Why aren't they saved? And so Paul has an answer. He's not stumbling around for an answer.

He knows the answer, but it's different than what people think because Jews are different than what people think. Paul says they are not all Israel who are Israel. I should say the opposite.

They are not all Israel who are of Israel, and so there are lots of people who we think of as Jews and think of themselves as Jews, but they're not really Israel as far as God is concerned. They're not part of the faithful remnant. By definition, the faithful remnant are faithful.

The faithful remnant believe. They believe in Christ. Any Jew who rejects Christ is not faithful to Christ, is not faithful to God.

The faithful remnant in the Old Testament always received the prophets, while the majority of the Jews were usually apostate and killed the prophets or persecuted the prophets, but there was always a faithful remnant that honored God's Word, honored the messengers of God, and that being so, there was a faithful remnant also that honored the Messiah. We now call them Christians. They were called disciples then.

The rest of Israel was not the faithful remnant and were not saved because the promises are for the salvation of the remnant, and the way Paul develops this and has up to the point we've come, which is the first 13 verses of chapter 9, is he points out that Abraham, of course, the promises were made to Abraham and his seed, but he had multiple persons who could be called his seed in the biological sense because even in the first generation after Abraham, there were eight men who each had equal claim to being the offspring of Abraham. They all had just as much of Abraham's parentage in them. There were three different women by whom Abraham had children.

Hagar had Ishmael, Sarah, or Sarah as she came to be called, had Isaac, and then there were six more by Keturah. Eight men, all the seed of Abraham, but God had said in Isaac your seed shall be called, which means that he eliminated seven out of the eight from actually having any significant connection to Abraham. Certainly a biological connection to Abraham then is declared not to be that significant, and even Isaac, who was the one who was picked out to be the special seed, even not all of his children were picked.

He had twins, and one of them, Jacob, was chosen as he himself had been chosen among his father's children, so his son Jacob was chosen among his children, and the other one, Esau, was not chosen. And that's what Paul's saying, and the simple point that he's making is being descended from Abraham or even from Isaac, and presumably even from Jacob, although he doesn't carry the argument down another generation, but the idea he's saying is physical descent is not all that matters. In fact, it doesn't matter at all because Ishmael and the six sons of Keturah, it didn't matter at all that they were children of Abraham.

They didn't even get the inheritance because he sent away all the children of the concubines and gave everything he had to Isaac, it says in Genesis. So even having biological origins from Abraham didn't allow them to have a particular inheritance from him. It was insignificant, and of course, the point Paul's making is that being a Jew today is similar.

A person who's a Jew today might be able to claim physical descent from Abraham, but if that's all they can claim, it's not significant. They're not the Israel to whom the promises apply. So his point is that God has, throughout the history from Abraham on, always had a special selection of one or a few members of a family, and the other members of the family were not significant.

And his argument here is that of the nation of Israel, of those that are of Israel, not all of them are Israel. That is significant Israel, Israel to whom God makes promises, not all of that faithful remnant. And for him to only take some of the nation, namely the ones that believe, is not inconsistent with his behavior throughout the history of the family.

That's Paul's point. Now we mentioned that those references to Esau and Jacob, how God chose Jacob over Esau in the womb, is a favorite passage of Calvinist to prove unconditional election, but what they're trying to prove is that God chose individuals, Jacob in this case, to be saved, and other individuals, Esau, for example, not to be saved. And the problem with using this text this way is it ignores what Paul's talking about.

Paul's not discussing who's saved and who's not saved, not yet. Eventually it will come down to the point in the argument that the Messiah is the chosen seed, and certainly being in him does involve salvation in another sense, in an eternal sense, in a spiritual sense. But in general, in the Old Testament, being the chosen seed of Abram didn't carry with it any particular promise of salvation as we speak of that in the New Testament, because the purpose of Abram's family was not to go to heaven.

The purpose of Abram's family was to serve a purpose on earth, namely to bring the Messiah who would bless, again, earthly nations. All the nations, all the families of the earth would be blessed through him. That's what these people were chosen for.

Were there individuals among the Jews who were saved? Of course. Many of them had faith. Abram had faith, Isaac had faith, even Jacob eventually had faith.

But we're not told that Ishmael, who was rejected, we're not told that he didn't have faith. We're not told that Esau didn't die in faith. For all we know, all of these men may have gone to heaven, even the ones who were not chosen to be the special seed.

And it would have been equally possible for them all to not go to heaven if they had not had faith. You see, individual faith determined salvation. But God's choice in this family was determining which branch of the family would continue on to bring forth the next generation toward the production of the Messiah in the world biologically.

And it was not necessary that those who were biologically involved in that process should be specifically saved in the New Testament sense of that word. Now, that being so, we can see that Paul's discussion here is not even talking about who's going to heaven and who's not going to heaven. Salvation, in the sense that we think of it, is not in the discussion yet.

He's simply talking about the choice for an earthly vocation of a branch of the family. The second thing we saw is he's not really talking about the fate of individuals at all. Jacob and Esau, of course, were individuals.

But more than that, and more significantly in the Old Testament, they were the progenitors of nations. Jacob, the progenitor of the 12 tribes of Israel, the nation of Israel. Esau, similarly, had a nation named after him, Edom.

And throughout the Old Testament, Israel is often called by the name Jacob. In fact, Israel is the man's name too. Jacob was named Israel as well.

The nation is named after the progenitor. So also, Esau had another name, Edom. They called him Edom, red, because he sold his birthright for red pottage.

And also, he was covered with red hair. So, two good reasons to call him red. But the point is, Edom, which means red, was the man's name or his nickname.

And it also became the name of his nation. So, to speak of Jacob and Esau goes beyond speaking about an individual and his destiny. And it's a nation and his destiny.

And Paul makes that very clear by quoting two Old Testament passages about Jacob and Esau. And one of them was uttered while they were still in the womb, which means the choice that God made of Jacob over Esau was not based on anything Jacob did or Esau did. It's not because Esau was a bad man and Jacob was a good man.

It's not entirely clear that that is the case with the two. Nor is it relevant. It says the choice was made according to God's sovereign election, not according to works.

But what is the choice? The choice was that the nation of Jacob would be the seed that would bring forth the Messiah and the nation of Esau would not. It is not talking about what will happen to these men in their lifetimes or after death. Because the first scripture Paul quotes to make his point, and it must certainly make the point he's trying to make or else why would he quote it? He quotes Genesis 25-23 where it says, the older shall serve the younger.

That's what God told Rebecca when the twins were in the womb. The older twin, the first to be born, would not be the prominent one. He would serve the younger.

Now for one brother to serve another has nothing to do with post-mortem things, destiny after death or after the judgment. This is an earthly status. Jacob had the higher status than Esau.

However, we can see that the prophecy is not about the men as individuals but their nations for two reasons. One, the earlier part of the same prophecy that doesn't necessarily quote, begins two nations are in your womb. Two peoples shall be separated from between your feet.

One shall be greater than the other and the older shall serve the younger. That is that the two nations have different destinies. Esau's nation is going to serve the nation of Jacob.

And as I pointed out, the man Esau never in any sense served the man Jacob, which means that if God was making a prophecy about individuals, it was a false prophecy. If God was saying the man Esau will serve the man Jacob, the older son will serve the younger son, that just never happened. It's a national destiny and therefore what he's saying, as he was saying earlier in the earlier part of his argument, is that when God makes a choice in Abram's family, it's a choice of which line of the family is going to bring the Messiah.

Even among Jacob's sons, Judah was chosen and not Asher or Gad or Manasseh. Judah was selected to bring the Messiah. Somebody had to be.

The Messiah can only really come through one family line. So every generation, a choice had to be made of who's going to be the one through whom the promises really are fulfilled. And that's what's being discussed.

To make this a reference to God unconditionally choosing some individuals for salvation is to bring a subject up that Paul doesn't have in his mind here. He's not discussing that. And it's not really very wise to create doctrines based on things, scriptures that are not talking about them.

Furthermore, this is the only scripture, if it were talking about unconditional election, it's the only scripture that mentions unconditional election. Many scriptures mention election, that is chosenness, but none say that election is unconditional, except this one. And this one's not talking about individual election for salvation.

So there's really no passage in the Bible that teaches unconditional election. Much to the chagrin of the Calvinists, and they would never, you know, John Piper, a very important Calvinist speaker, pastor of our time and writer, he wrote a thesis. I think it might've been his doctoral thesis or some kind of an important postgraduate thesis on this very passage, arguing that what I just said is wrong.

I've read as much of his thesis as I could bear to read, but to my mind, he was dodging, dodging in a big way, because it doesn't take a doctorate to see what Paul is talking about. You just have to follow his sentences. There's no secret meanings in the Greek words.

He's making a clear argument that God chose some parts of Abraham's family and not other parts of Abraham's family to fulfill his promises. What promise? That the Messiah would come and bless all nations. That Messiah was Jesus.

And so only some in Abraham's family were really involved in Jesus coming into the world. Now that Jesus has come, of course, he is the Messiah and those who are in him are Abraham's chosen seed. And that being so, there's also another element.

We're not only bringing blessing to the nations, we're experiencing blessing. As Galatians 3 talks about, the blessing of Abraham has come to the Gentiles, namely justification by faith. We have been justified and saved in Christ, and we are the seed through whom that blessing is being brought to the nations.

That's the mission of the church. That's what missionaries do. That's what we all do in some ways, is represent Christ and present him to the world.

That is the fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham. Now, having said that, we come to some more verses that are relevant and often used also by the Calvinists to prove their point. They are not done with this chapter when they're working on the subject of unconditional election.

They have some verses yet to come ahead of us that they use, but you have to realize that everything Paul says ahead here is still talking about the same subject. He was talking about the verses we just looked at. In verse 14, he says, what shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God or injustice? Certainly not.

For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion. So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, even for this same purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be declared in all the earth.

Therefore he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens. You will say to me then, why does he still find fault? For who has resisted his will? But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, why have you made me like this? Does not the potter have power over the clay? From the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God wanting to show his wrath and make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy which he had prepared beforehand for glory? Even us, whom he called not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. As he says also in Hosea, I will call them my people who were not my people, and her beloved who was not beloved.

And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, you are not my people. There they will be called sons of the living God. Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel, though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant will be saved.

For he will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because the Lord will make a short work on the earth. And Isaiah also said before, unless the Lord of Sabbath had left us a seed, actually in Isaiah chapter one, which he's quoting, it says a remnant, we would have become like Sodom and we would have been made like Gomorrah. What should we say then? That the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith.

But Israel pursuing the law of righteousness has not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were by works of the law, for they stumbled at the stumbling stone, as it is written, behold, I lay in Zion, a stumbling stone, a rock of offense, and whoever believes in him shall not be put to shame. Now that latter part, which we will also get to after we take the earlier part of what we just read, is an emphasis on the inclusion of the Gentiles, quite obviously.

And the scriptures he quotes make two points. One is that not all the Jews are saved, if only a remnant will be saved to them, he says when he quotes Isaiah, but also there will be people who were not previously his people who will be called his people. And that is a reference to the Gentiles.

Although he quotes Hosea in a passage where Hosea seems to be talking about Israelites who had been banished from the land and where they had been not his people, that he would restore them and they'd be his people again. In the context of Hosea, one gets the impression that Hosea is talking about alienated Israelites who have, by alienation from God, ceased to be God's people, that he will restore them and will be his people again. These verses are favorites of dispensationalists to prove that God is going to restore Israel, though they've been, they're not his people now, they will be again.

However, when Paul quotes it, he's clearly talking about Gentiles. He believes, as remember, the apostle saw the Old Testament scriptures through the illumination that Jesus gave them. He sees the reference to those Israelites as being spiritual Israelites come from the Gentile nations, Gentiles who become part of Israel.

We'll talk more about those verses in a moment. We need to deal first of all, though, with verses 14 through at least 22 because it says, what should we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not. Now, why would somebody suggest there's unrighteousness with God? Well, because God made a selection and didn't even take into consideration actions of the people.

You know, if you're going to make a judgment of someone, you ought to take into consideration whether they're good or bad or not. If two people are equally good and for no reason at all, except your own whim, you choose to punish one and reward the other. Well, then that's, that's an injustice, isn't it? If two people are equally bad and you choose to punish one and reward the other, that's also an injustice.

So for God to choose Jacob over Esau seems like an injustice since neither of them had done good or bad, just seems like God's showing favoritism. And in a sense, God is showing favoritism, but it's not unjust because He's not punishing anybody. You see, if you're thinking like the average person who thinks that Paul's talking about some are chosen to be saved, others chosen to be lost, it really is a question.

How could God be just in choosing somebody to be lost before they're born and done anything? That doesn't seem very fair, but that's misunderstanding what Paul's saying. What Paul is saying is God hasn't necessarily punished anyone in this situation. Ishmael was not punished.

Esau was not punished. In fact, they were both became great nations. God told Abraham he's going to make Ishmael a great nation and Esau became a great nation.

These men were not punished. They were simply passed over for special blessing. God doesn't owe special blessing to anybody.

He can be especially generous to somebody without being unjust to the people that he isn't especially generous to if he's not actually punishing anybody. Now, if you're innocent and he punishes you, that's unjust. If you're innocent and he chooses somebody else than you, that's just.

I mean, it may be that many people wanted to marry Dana before I met her and I was fortunate I got to marry Dana. Was that unjust because others didn't marry her? Well, no, no one had the intrinsic right to marry anybody. It's, you know, somebody has the, someone's the lucky one.

Somebody's the privileged one, but the others are not being treated unjustly. It's not as if they have some innate claim. And so also to have a special role in bringing blessing to the nations, no one has any intrinsic claim on that special calling.

God can call anyone he wants for that without being unjust to anybody else. And so Paul says, no, Paul says, God says to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.

Notice there's no one being punished there. God is having special mercy on someone, special compassion on someone. He's not hurting anybody.

He's not wronging anybody. He can do special favors for somebody if he, in his own, you know, mind has reasons that he wants to do so. He doesn't have to justify showing exceptional generosity.

And so, by the way, the statement that's made there is made to Moses when God was about really to destroy Israel. It's when they made the golden calf and Moses was up on the mountain and God said, get out of my way. I'm going to wipe them out.

And Moses interceded for them and God changed his mind and didn't destroy them. And this is in Exodus 33, verse 19. In the context of that decision, God said, I'll have mercy on whom I'll have mercy.

I'll have compassion on whom I'll have compassion. He had had compassion on Israel by not destroying them because of Moses' intercession. God is just saying, I can show special mercy if I want to.

They deserve to die, but I won't kill them now. So God is not talking about his right to damn people unilaterally because he's a sovereign God. He's talking about his right to give special favors to people who don't deserve them without bringing any negatives on somebody else.

And he says in verse 16, so then it is not of him who wills or of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. Again, it's very common for people to take this as if God's saying salvation is not anything to do with your will. It's a unilateral sovereign choice that God makes.

God chooses to some and to not save others. And if Paul was in fact talking about salvation, that would be the best way to understand this, but he hasn't made any statements about salvation yet. He's talked about God's choice of Jacob over Esau and that it's not unfair to Esau for him to do that because Esau has no innate claim on special blessing.

God can have, can make the choice to show special privilege to anyone he wants to. Obviously, even in your circle of friends, there are people who have benefits that others don't have. Some have good health.

Others are sick. Some have good looks. Others struggle with, you know, in a world that cares about those things and don't have that.

There's people who have money and people don't have money. There's, there are different privileges God has bestowed on different people. Every good gift is from above and God gives different gifts to different people.

And you might say, I wish I had what he has or what she has. Well, you don't. And God wasn't unfair not to give it to you.

You didn't, they didn't deserve to have it. You don't deserve to have it. By you not having what they have, you're not cheated.

You didn't deserve it. They didn't deserve it either. It's special mercy, special blessing from God to them.

And whatever God gave you is special to you. The point here is that Esau wasn't cheated out of anything that he somehow deserved. God can show mercy on whoever he wants to.

Anyone can do that. I can choose my friends. I, but this does, as long as I'm not condemning the ones I don't choose to some kind of damnation or something.

And that's not what's happening in this passage. So the choice that God made within the family of Abraham, considering which line of the family would bring forth the Messiah was a choice that did not depend on the will of man. It was not of him who wills or him who runs, but of God who showed special mercy.

Once again, this is a, you know, to acknowledge what I'm saying is would cause many Calvinists to tear their hair out because they love this verse. It's, it's such an important verse against free will. Now they want to argue that you didn't have any choice.

Really. It's God who made the choice of your salvation. And look here, it says, it's not of him who runs or him who wills.

It's of God. True. What Paul is talking about is not of man.

Jacob didn't run or will or do anything to be chosen. God chose him. Same thing with Abraham and Isaac before.

And so this is, again, not yet even discussing the subject of salvation and damnation. This is still talking about the choice of Jacob over Esau. And then he says, verse 17, for the scripture says to Pharaoh, even for this same purpose, I have raised you up that I might show my power in you and that my name might be declared in all the earth.

Therefore he has mercy on whom he wills and whom he wills. He hardens. Now he hardened Pharaoh and he can do that if he wants to, he can harden whoever he wants to.

He can also show mercy on whoever he wants to. Now, of course, the mercy he's talking about here was special mercy to Israel because they were descended from Jacob and delivering them from Egypt. At the same time, he certainly did not show that mercy to the Egyptians, nor did he owe it to them.

He didn't owe it to Israel or to the Egyptians, but he had made a promise to Israel, at least to their ancestors. And therefore he was fulfilling a promise to them. And that was something he chose to do.

No one made him do that. He showed mercy on who he wanted to show mercy in that sense. And he hardened who he wanted to harden.

Now, what we often will hear in discussions of Calvinism from this passage is that those that he shows mercy on are those who are saved and those whom he hardens are those who are not saved, suggesting that if you're not saved, you've been hardened by God. And if you've been hardened, you can't believe. You're totally depraved.

There's no way that you can become a Christian because if you're not one of the ones that he showed mercy on, that is saving mercy, then you're in the category of those that he's hardened. Now, this, of course, is to wrench the passage out of the context of this passage and out of the context of the Bible. The Bible does not say that everybody who's not saved is specially hardened, nor does Paul say that here.

He's not divine. See, Calvinists, when they read the passage, it's just like it's always about the elect and the non-elect, okay? The elect, God showed mercy on. The non-elect, he hardened.

Well, he doesn't say that. He doesn't even tell us that he's talking about the elect and the non-elect in terms of salvation anyway. What he's saying is that God can do what he wants.

He showed special favor on the Jews and delivered them from Egypt. He hasn't done that for other nations. That's a special mercy he showed, and he can do that anytime he wants to for anyone.

He can harden who he wants to harden, assuming it's a just thing to do because God can do no injustice. But he hardened Pharaoh because that was quite a just thing. Pharaoh was not born hardened.

He was born normal, and because of the evil choices he made, God hardened him. The hardening of Pharaoh was not the default condition of him as an unregenerate man. The hard heart was a special imposition of judgment upon him after he had lived as an unregenerate man, making his own choices to be an evil man, an oppressor, and to kill babies, and do things like that.

It was time for this man to be judged, and the judgment that came out of him happened to take the form of God hardening him against repentance for a season so that God would be able to really lower the boom on him in the form of 10 plagues. Certainly, any man who wasn't specially hardened would have repented and caved in before that whole 10 plagues had run their course. The first two or three would have done it for most sane people.

But God hardened him so he wouldn't repent, so that the whole series of plagues could run its course, and the whole nation of Egypt, which deserved judgment, would come under judgment because of Pharaoh. The hardening of Pharaoh is not represented here or anywhere else in the Bible as an example of the typical unregenerate man. The elect are the ones God shows mercy on.

The non-elect are all hardened by God. Hardly. The Bible does not say that everybody's been hardened by God, even the non-elect.

The Bible talks about some people becoming hardened. Their foolish heart was darkened, and their hearts were hardened, it says, about certain people. But this is something that happened to them in their lifetime, not from birth.

They weren't born hardened. And therefore, this provides no general statement about the condition of the non-elect, and therefore not a general statement about the condition of the elect. This is talking about history, the history of Israel and Egypt.

He chose to deliver Israel. He showed mercy on them. He can do that.

He can have mercy on whomever he wills, and he can harden whomever he wills. Now, that doesn't mean he hardens them or shows mercy for no reason. In the case of showing mercy on Israel, it's because of promises he made to their ancestors.

In the case of showing mercy on you and me in terms of saving us, it's because of things we choose. Now, that sounds heretical to a Calvinist, but it's certainly what the Bible teaches. I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.

Well, who's that? Well, God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Okay? If God gives grace to someone because they are humble, it's hard to argue as Calvinists that he's not taking into consideration anything in the person. He's telling us exactly what he's taking into consideration.

If they were proud, he'd resist them. If they're humble, he'll show grace to them. Jesus said in this Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the merciful, they shall obtain mercy.

And expanding on that, he said, if you forgive those who wrong you, God will forgive you, your trespasses. If you don't, God won't. He'd make it very clear.

You get the mercy of God to the extent that you show mercy to others. Blessed are the merciful, they shall obtain mercy. It's not as if God has some mysterious reasons for showing saving mercy to some people and not to others.

This is what Calvinism teaches. Why did I get saved and my neighbor didn't? Why did this man get saved and another didn't? It's just the sovereign election of God before the world began that this person would believe and the other wouldn't. And there's no other explanation.

No, there are other explanations, and they're found throughout the Bible. You honor God, he'll honor you. You despise God, he'll lightly esteem you.

You humble yourself and he'll give you grace. You be proud and he'll resist you. You show mercy, he'll show mercy.

So when Paul says he shows mercy on whoever he wills, well, sure, you'll show mercy on whoever you will too, but it doesn't mean you won't have reasons for showing mercy to the ones you do and reasons for not showing mercy to someone else. The choices you make are not irrational, but you still do it by your own volition. God can show mercy on whoever he wants to, but it's not as if we don't know who he wants to show mercy to.

It's the ones who, according to Scripture, have certain conditions of heart. Now, the Calvinist says, well, God has to give them that condition of heart, but that's only based on their assumption of total depravity, which has not yet been established anywhere in Scripture. So, in other words, they have a system that demands the imposition of meanings on verses instead of having a system that rises from the exegesis of the verses and seeing what they're saying in their context and saying, oh, I guess this won't work for my doctrine.

Maybe that doctrine needs to be questioned. And that's what an honest Calvinist, I think, would have to do in a case like this. Paul is not here describing anything different than God's choice of Jacob over Esau, of Israel over Egypt, and so forth.

God's national choices to bless this nation, and not necessarily with salvation because not all the Jews that came out of Egypt ended up in heaven. The earth opened up and swallowed a bunch of them. In fact, all of them, of the older ones over 20, died in the wilderness under the wrath of God except for Joshua and Caleb.

So, even though he showed mercy to them as a nation, this was not directly connected with their eternal destinies. Most of those who came out of Egypt and to whom he showed this mercy, most of them didn't find mercy in the end because they didn't follow God. They didn't have faith.

There are conditions for salvation. There was not a special condition that these people had to meet to be shown the mercy of deliverance from Egypt, but that's all that Paul's talking about here at this point. Now, back in verse 14, he anticipated an objector as he does several times in Romans previously.

What should we say then? Should we sin that grace may abound? You know, this kind of stuff. Paul knows that some things he said can easily be misunderstood by a reader and may lead to a question that's a really misguided question, and he needs to correct the thinking of the person asking it. That's why the question in verse 14, what should we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? It comes from a misunderstanding.

How is it unrighteous for God to show special generosity to someone as long as he's not depriving somebody else of something they deserve or punishing somebody who hasn't done something wrong? You're misunderstanding here the nature of justice. Likewise, a similar objection comes up in verse 19. You will say to me then, why does he still find fault for who has resisted his will? But indeed, oh man, who are you to reply against God? Now, I will have to say that for most of my life, even though I was not a Calvinist, I was influenced by Calvinist thinking about this passage.

I was thinking, and certainly Calvinists teach this, and people who aren't strictly speaking Calvinist who are influenced by this thinking think this because they haven't really followed the train of thought. They think that what he's saying is Paul has just said that God chooses some people unconditionally to save them and other people he unconditionally damns, and that just doesn't seem fair. But if you raise an objection, how can God find fault with these people then? Because they don't do anything but what he willed for them to do.

They can't resist his will. He predestined all this. If this objection rises, the answer is it can't be explained, so just sit down and shut up.

You're not God. You, oh man, who are you to raise objections to what God says? Just be quiet as if Paul's saying this action cannot actually be defended on God's part. It doesn't really fit with any reasonable ideas of justice that we know, so we just have to take it by faith that God knows what he's doing, and you're just a man.

You don't know what he knows. Just be quiet and let him do what he's going to do, and just trust he's a good God. Now, I would say this.

If Paul has been arguing for that doctrine and somebody did say God's unjust, I'd say the same thing Paul did in a sense. I mean, frankly, God holds all the cards. He's got all the rights.

He could create a whole world and smash them like bugs, and no one could say he didn't have the right to. It's his. He made it.

I can build a house of cards and then kick it over. I mean, who's to say I did a wrong thing? It's my house of cards. I made it.

I can destroy it if I want to. If God wanted to make a whole creation and just smash it, kill everybody, send them to hell, I mean, he could do that. Who else has any rights besides him? He is God.

You're the created thing. He's the potter. You're the clay.

Can't the potter do what he wants with his clay? Does the clay have any right of appeal? Why have you made me like this? I don't like what you're doing. Paul certainly does and can argue, and we can too. Whatever God does that might displease us is nonetheless his right to do.

He owns the whole show. He writes the script. If he writes hardship into my life or even damnation into my eternity, that's his business.

True, but that's not what Paul is saying. If Paul was saying that, I would have to agree with him, but that's not what he's on about. He has not introduced any Calvinist doctrines yet that he has to defend God for.

The truth is, he is defending God in a way, but he's not defending God for having some kind of irrational basis of election or some kind of unconditional basis of election for salvation. That subject, again, has not yet come up in the passage. Everyone just wants it to be there, but Paul hasn't introduced it yet.

So, what is he saying here? Well, let's see what the objector is saying. The objector has two questions. They're both rhetorical, which means they actually are not questioned so much as they are statements made in a rhetorical questioning manner.

Who has resisted his will? How does he find fault? Obviously, when they say, how can he find fault? It's another way of saying, he really can't find fault, can he? When it says, who has resisted his will? It really means nobody has resisted his will, have they? I mean, that's what the rhetorical question means. So, the person asking the questions is reasoning thus. Well, Paul, since you're suggesting that nobody resists his will because he's predestined everything, you know, he's going to show mercy on who he wants to show mercy.

He's going to harden who he wants to harden. You know, people just basically are puppets in his hand. If no one can resist his will but inevitably does what God has preordained, how can he find fault with what they're doing? Which is a very logical question because if they can't choose, how can they be responsible? How could God fault people for things that they were predestined to do and had no power in themselves to do otherwise? Now, there's two ways of looking at this question.

There's something wrong with their questioning and their reasoning because Paul says, well, he rebukes them. He rebukes them, but what is he rebuking? Now, there's two points about which they could be wrong. Their assertion that no one has resisted God's will or their assertion that because this is so, God cannot find fault.

There's two parts to their statement and Paul's not pleased with what they're coming up with. What is it that he disagrees with? Now, the Calvinist says, Paul agrees that no one has resisted his will, but Paul does not agree that God cannot find fault. There is some secret justice that only God understands and we just might as well just shut up and acknowledge the fact that God's ways are not our ways and he has secret counsels that are unknown to us.

So even though it is in fact true that no one has resisted his will, nonetheless, God can find fault somehow. And if you can't see the connection there, just keep it to yourself. You have no right to object to God.

That's what the Calvinist thinks Paul is saying. In other words, what they're saying is there's a premise and a conclusion in the two questions. The premise is no one has resisted God's will.

The conclusion, God can't find fault because no one has resisted his will. The Calvinist says, yes, the premise is true, but the conclusion is flawed. The premise is true.

No one has resisted God's will because he's preordained everything. The conclusion, however, is flawed because it assumes that if God has preordained everything and no one resists his will, that God can't find fault, but he does anyway. So you just better figure out he knows what he's doing and there's something going on.

He can find fault, even though the premise is true. So the Calvinist thinks the reasoner's logic is flawed. They've got a good premise, but they've reached a wrong conclusion.

Have I lost you? I don't want to lose you here. The questioner has a premise. No one resists God's will.

Paul, isn't that what you're saying? God's preordained. God makes all the choices. So everyone just does what he chooses.

Okay, that's the premise of the argument. The conclusion is, obviously, if justice is justice, he can't find fault with those who just do what he ordained for them to do. Paul says, you're wrong.

The Calvinist thinks Paul is saying your premise was good. Your conclusion is bad. I believe Paul's arguing your premise is bad, and that's why your conclusion is bad.

God can certainly find fault because people do, in fact, resist his will. The objector has misunderstood Paul once again, as they often do. Every time Paul raises an objector's question, they're always misunderstanding what he's saying, and they have thought that he is saying nobody resists God's will.

Everything's preordained. Everything's foreordained, and therefore, everything just goes the way God ordained it to go, and God certainly can't find fault with that. Nobody can.

But Paul has not argued that no one resists God's will. Paul has not argued that every choice, even salvation, is preordained. He has not gotten there.

The person who raises the argument has made that mistake. Now, Calvinists, when I mentioned this, or when anyone mentions this fact, they say, no, that can't be how Paul's thinking because if Paul wasn't teaching the Calvinist doctrine prior to these verses, then the objector wouldn't have this objection. In other words, the objector is raising an objection that non-Calvinists always seem to raise.

If everything's predestined, why does God find fault with people? Non-Calvinists always raise this objection, and Calvinists say if Paul was not making this Calvinist assertion, then the objection would not arise. So, the very presence of the objection shows that Paul is saying that God unilaterally saves some and not others, unconditionally. Well, why couldn't the objector make the same mistake the Calvinist was making? It's obvious that when you read that God hardened Pharaoh because he wanted to, he showed mercy to Israel because he wanted to, he chose Jacob over Esau because he wanted to, it's easy for people to get the impression that Paul is saying something about salvation that he's not saying, and to raise this objection.

Well, it looks like everybody just does what God wants them to do. The Calvinist makes that mistake, and there's no reason why an objector couldn't make a same mistake, but Paul makes it very clear he is not saying that no one resists his will. People do resist his will, and that's found even in his answer to the objector because he says, well, who are you to reply against God? Isn't replying against God resisting him? Notice the who are you follows the question who.

Who has resisted his will? Well, who are you? Aren't you kind of doing that right now? You're resisting God. You're replying against God. It's sort of a rhetorical turnaround.

You say God can't find fault because you're suggesting no one can resist God's will. Well, you want to know who can do it? How about you? Aren't you the person doing it right now? Who are you that's replying against God? Paul is not saying anywhere here that people do not resist God's will, and if someone says that that's how they understand him, he's saying, well, I can prove you're wrong right there. You're resisting his will right now.

You're answering against God. Isn't that a proof that not everyone does God's will? Now, not everyone does God's will. Now, I should clarify that Calvinists admit, of course, that there are people who do not do what God says to do, but they argue that God has two wills.

There's two wills. The one that he has prescribed, that is, you shall not kill. God has expressed his will that we should not murder, but people do anyway, so God's will is not always done, right? And they say, yes, people can.

They can violate God's prescribed will, but they can't violate his sovereign secret will, by which he's foreordained everything by secret decrees. That is, if you violate the command, you shall not murder, it's because God ordained that you would violate that command. It was at one level, his will that you don't do that, but at a deeper level, it was his will that you do it, because it happened and he makes everything happen.

So they're arguing that even if you do things that are clearly not God's will, let's say even you're replying against God here, the Calvinists would say, Paul is not here saying that they are resisting God's will successfully. Even their reply against God is foreordained by God. Well, Paul doesn't say so.

That's necessitated by Calvinist presuppositions, which are not necessary to bring to the text at all. As we've shown, there's not one thing yet that Calvinists have said about any of these verses that are in the context. So there's no reason to assume the Calvinist idea that even when people sin, they're doing God's will, his secret will, his secret preordained will, because he's ordained some people to go to hell.

And so their avoidance of righteousness and their sinning and their refusal to believe in Christ, although presumably being good is God's will, for them it's not. His secret will is that they will not be good and that they will go to hell because he's going to glorify himself in their judgment. Well, this is simply not what the Bible teaches.

It's a Calvinist idea that came from Augustine, who was a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, and it agrees very well with Neoplatonist Greek philosophy and Manichaeanism, which is Augustine's background. And he introduced it and it became Calvinism. But look at Luke chapter 7 just for a moment.

We could look at other verses. This is good enough to make the point. There are many others we don't have time to look at.

But in Luke chapter 7 and verse 30, it says, But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God for themselves, not having been baptized by John. The word counsel there in the Greek is the same word that's translated will in certain places like Ephesians 1.11, where it says that God works all things according to his will. That's the same as the word counsel here.

The lawyers and the Pharisees rejected God's counsel or his will for their lives by not being baptized by John. Does this not suggest it was actually God's will that they should be baptized by John and they violated it, they rejected it by not being baptized? What else could this possibly mean? God's will was that they should be. Not his general will, but his will for them.

Not his general prescribed will that all people should be baptized, but he really secretly willed that some individuals would not. They rejected the will that God had for themselves. God had a plan and a will and a counsel for their lives and they just didn't do it.

So God's will was not done in their case because it makes it very clear God's will was that they would be baptized by John, but they rejected that and didn't. So do any resist God's will? Absolutely. When Stephen was preaching to the Sanhedrin, one of his closing statements was you always resist God.

And they did. Stoning Stephen was certainly resisting the righteous decrees of God. Now to say that God had secretly decreed that they would stone Stephen is what Calvinism would necessitate, but you'll never find anything in the Bible that suggests that that was God's secret will.

The secret is that God didn't tell us anywhere in scripture that he has such a secret will as that. And because of that, it'll have to stay a secret and we cannot declare it to be true. So the people mistakenly think that Paul is saying that everything that God ordains cancels out people making their own choices.

No, God can ordain some things without ordaining everything. We don't have to believe that God ordained everything about Pharaoh's life, but he did ordain that Pharaoh would be hardened after a certain point, but that was something Pharaoh deserved because of choices he'd made. Pharaoh wasn't hardened in the womb like Jacob was chosen in the womb.

The hardening of Pharaoh is simply an act of judgment on God's part on a man who had done plenty deserved judgment. And he will harden whoever he wants to but he doesn't want to harden everybody. So Paul's words about this are not suggesting that no one resists God's will.

And since not everyone does obey God's will, God certainly can find fault. So the objector is on the wrong track here. And Paul points out you are on the wrong track.

Now he does assert God's right to do things because the Jewish objector especially might object to the fact that God chose part of the nation of Israel, namely the believing part, to continue his blessing through and rejected the unbelieving part. And for that reason, if they're in the unbelieving part, they'd be saying, well, that's not fair of God. How dare God just only take part of the nation of Israel when we're all descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? And so he says this.

After he says, who are you a man to reply against God? He says, will the thing formed say to him who formed it, why have you made me like this? Does not the potter have power over the clay from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? Now, this is imagery from Jeremiah 18 and also from Isaiah. Two places in the Old Testament tell us that Israel is the clay and God is the potter. Paul is talking about Israel.

He's not talking about Calvin. See, a lot of times Calvinists act like Israel's not even in this story. In this passage, it's like he started talking about Israel in the first verses, and he's going to be talking about Israel later on, but he's kind of gotten sidetracked off into unconditional election.

And, and, uh, in other words, Paul, because there were no good verses in the Bible to support Calvinist doctrine, decided to provide a few here, although it interrupted his discussion about Israel. But Hey, you got to do what you got to do. How else are the Calvinist going to emerge if you don't provide some verses to support their doctrine.

So Paul got off the subject of Israel and got onto the subject of Calvinism just for a little while. He's going to come back to Israel later. But if you understand that Paul didn't get off the subject of Israel all the while, he's been pointing out, God, not all are Israel who are of Israel.

Ishmael wasn't Esau wasn't. And now people who don't follow Christ are not. God has always made a selection within the race to say some of them, but not all of them are my people.

But of course the selection ever since Jesus came is based entirely on, do you believe in the Messiah or not? That part of Israel that believes in the Messiah is saved. God uses them to be Abraham's seed to bring blessings to the nations. That part of Israel that doesn't believe, well, they're excluded.

And they may be complaining about that. We should be allowed just because we're Israelites. He says, well, no, the Potter has right to take the clay, the lump.

And in the Jewish thinking, of course, from Jeremiah and Isaiah, the lump of clay is Israel, the nation. And the Potter can take one lump and make two vessels. That is divide the nation into two categories, the saved and the unsaved.

They're based on whatever he wants it to be based on. He happens to want it to be based on faith in Christ. So he can take the nation of Israel and say, here's one lump of clay.

I'm not going to make all one thing. I'm going to make two things. Those of you who believe I'm going to make over here into a vessel for honor.

And I'm going to use you for honorable purposes to fulfill my purposes. Those of you who don't believe I'm going to, you're in the same lump of clay. You're still part of the nation of Israel.

I'm going to make a different vessel out of you. And you're going to not be honored. I don't have to honor you.

Those who honor me, I'll honor. Those who don't honor me won't. And if you don't receive my son, you're not honoring me.

Remember Jesus said in in the gospel of John, he said, if you, whoever does not honor the son does not honor the father who sent him. So if they don't honor Christ, they're not honoring God. And he will honor those who honor him.

There's no unconditionalness here. Those who honor him, he has chosen to put into a vessel, a segment, a portion of the lump of clay, a percentage of Israelites who are going to be used for the honorable purposes that he promised Abraham. The others, not so.

Now Paul talks about not vessels of honor and dishonor, but vessels of wrath and mercy, because he says, what if God wanting to show his wrath and make his power known endured with much long suffering, the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy. Now he had mentioned vessels of honor and vessels of dishonor in verse 21, meaning, and there's not actually vessels, but one, one vessel of honor, one vessel of dishonor. We're talking about the elect, the believing Jews, they are one vessel.

The unbelieving are the other vessel. The vessel is a corporate thing, just like the lump was. The lump from which it's made is a Israel.

That's a corporate entity, not one person. Likewise, the two vessels that are made are not one person. These are not individuals.

These are groups of Israelites. The whole nation of Israel is in two categories now. One vessel he's going to use for honorable purposes, one not, but now he does speak of vessels as individuals, though he changes the language.

He's not, he talks about vessels of of mercy, because in each of these two vessels, there are individuals, and this is not unusual for Paul. He'll talk about the temple of the Holy Spirit this way too. He'll say the church is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Then he'll talk about, you need to treat your body a certain way because your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit. What, is me individually, am I the temple of the Holy Spirit, or is the whole church? Both, and he can use both in the same context. Paul just does that even when he talks about the body of Christ.

It's the church corporately is the body of Christ, but in a sense, each of us embodies Christ. He's in us and living out his life for us. It's not unthinkable for Paul to shift metaphors or shift some aspect of the metaphor.

He has spoken of the whole category of believing Jews as a vessel of honor, but those who are in that vessel are themselves vessels who will receive mercy. The whole category of unbelieving Israelites is a vessel of dishonor, and those who are in that vessel are individually vessels of wrath. Now that vessels are people, individuals, in some of Paul's writings is seen also in 2 Timothy 2. Here he uses honor and dishonor, but he's got a different thing going on in this discussion.

He's actually talking about things within the Christian church, and in 2 Timothy 2.20 he says, but in a great house, there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honor and some for dishonor. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from the latter, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful for the master, prepared for every good work. An individual can be a vessel that will be honored by God, can be a gold or a silver vessel instead of a clay or a wood vessel.

That is to say, there is something you have to say about what kind of vessel you are. God can make the categories unilaterally. Okay, I've got one lump of clay, I'm going to make two categories, vessels of honor, a vessel for honor with vessels of honor and mercy in it, and a vessel of dishonor, which will have individuals who are vessels of wrath and of dishonor in them.

Among the Jews, there are some that God will honor and some that he will dishonor. That's the point Paul's making. God is going to honor some just like he honored Jacob, he honored Isaac above his brothers.

So there are Jews who, because they believe in Christ, are honored by God, while others are not. They both came from the same lump of clay, the nation of Israel, but they're not the same vessel. A vessel is an implement, usually a kitchen implement, though not necessarily could be a bathroom implement, but a vessel is something in which something is carried, usually something desirable, water, wine, something like that, something that's being served to other people.

The believing Jewish community made up the Jewish church, and it's that portion of Israel that God has decided to serve the water of life to the world through, not the other one. It's an honorable calling to serve God and to serve the world and to bring the blessing of Abraham to the world, but not all Jews are part of the vessel that's going to bring that blessing to the world. The church is, and he makes it very clear he's not talking about just the Jewish church because he says that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he called not of the Jews only but also the Gentiles.

So now he's pointing out that the vessels of mercy are not just that segment of Israel that is in the vessel that God made for mercy, but now Gentiles are in there too, and it won't be till chapter 11 that he kind of makes that really easy to understand because it's like a olive tree, and it's like the Gentiles have been grafted into this olive tree. Before the Gentiles are grafted, only the believing Jews are on it. The unbelieving branches are broken off.

The believing branches, that's the Jewish believers, are still on, but then the Gentiles get added on. So this vessel, this tree, whatever metaphor you want to use for Israel has been trimmed back to include only the believers who are in Israel and then the Gentiles who are believers too, and so we've got a new entity called Israel. We would call it often the church, the believing Jews and the believing Gentiles.

So that's what he says up to this point, and we're going to have to take a break here and finish this chapter, and maybe we can get through chapter 10 if we're lucky in our next session as well.