(Genesis 25:19-26, Malachi 1:1-5; Romans 8:38-9:13)
When I was laying out this sermon series last January, I was pleased to see the conclusion of Romans 8 landing on the last Sunday before my vacation. One of the signs I look for in planning the year’s messages is how everything fits together, and to have the timing fall into place like that helped confirm that I was on the right track. That’s partly because I didn’t want a three-week gap falling in the middle of Romans 8—or worse, Romans 9—but it’s also because a break right between those two chapters is entirely appropriate. I won’t say taking three weeks between them is necessarily best, but it’s entirely appropriate—because that break is right there in the text.
That’s why I included the last two verses of chapter 8 in our reading this morning, to underscore this fact. Chapter 8 ends with this ringing declaration of our victory in Christ, a great rocketing leap of praise for our confident hope and faith in him—but what goes up must come down, and Paul comes down like Evel Knievel in the Snake River Canyon, because everything he’s said in chapter 8 brings him back to the central problem he’s grappling with in this letter: what about the Jews?
In chapter 2, he lays out the case from Scripture that they deserve God’s judgment just as much as the Gentiles, and are just as dependent on the grace of God. In chapter 5, he establishes that the promises of God to his people apply in Christ beyond the Jews to the Gentiles. In chapter 7, he confronts the problem of the Law and its place in God’s saving work. But that still leaves the biggest problem of all: if Jews aren’t guaranteed salvation for being Jews—if God can reject them and give their place in his kingdom to someone else—then does that mean God has gone back on his promises to them?
It’s a vast question with broad implications for our understanding of the church—and one in which all the easy answers are wrong. Unfortunately, those easy answers were driving considerable conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome, and no doubt elsewhere in the first-century church, which we’ve seen was Paul’s great practical concern in writing this letter. As such, he’s going to answer it at great length and with great care, across three chapters of this book; and he’s going to do so in the full understanding that he really isn’t the first to grapple with this question.
If Paul in the first eight chapters has told the story of our salvation in Christ in terms of the salvation history of Israel, now he gets to the unhappy part. Now he gets to the exile, and he wrestles with the same basic issue as Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Malachi: if God brings down disaster on his people and drives them away for their unfaithfulness, does that mean the end of his promises? Does it mean he’s changed his mind and abandoned them? Or is there, somehow, hope that they will be restored—and if so, how? The only real difference between Paul in his day and the prophets in their day is that he knows the full story of Jesus, while they only had bits and pieces; and he leans on them heavily, especially Isaiah, in these three chapters.
You see, as H. L. Mencken once observed, “For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.” Or in this case, two. One is to say, well, Jews are still saved just by being Jews and doing their best to keep the Law, just the way they thought—Christ is only for the Gentiles; but if that’s the case, why did he bother going to the Jews? And why did the Jews even need Messiah? Paul has pretty well debunked that idea over the course of this letter, and his conviction that his fellow Jews can only find salvation in Christ—and thus are reaping damnation in rejecting him—is clear in the agony he expresses in verses 1-3. Like Moses in Exodus 32, he expresses the wish that God might even condemn him, if only it would save his people.
Of course, that isn’t possible; Jesus has already died for them, and there’s nothing Paul’s sacrifice could do that Jesus didn’t. But that he even expresses the thought shows the depths of his love and concern for his people, and his grief that they have rejected their God. Clearly, the one simple answer will not stand. At the same time, though, Paul also rejects the other one, which is that the church has simply replaced Israel—the promises have been transferred, the Jews are out in the cold, and that’s that. Obviously, Paul doesn’t want to believe that, due to his desire that his people be saved; but more significantly, he recognizes that to draw this conclusion is to make God a liar who cannot be trusted to do as he says. The message of Christ is only good news if God is faithful to keep his word, and so Paul’s task is to show that the gospel is not the cancellation of God’s promises to Israel, but their fulfillment.
Now, the root assumption of Paul’s Jewish opponents is that God’s choice of Israel as his people obliged him to save every individual Israelite, as long as they didn’t flat-out reject him; as we talked about some weeks ago, it was the idea that their special status as the people of God exempted them from his judgment. Chapter 2 attacks this assumption by showing from Scripture that all people are under judgment for sin, Jews and Gentiles alike. Here, he counters it from a different direction, pointing out that God’s choice of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never meant that mere physical descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was enough to guarantee salvation: God chose Isaac and rejected Ishmael, and he chose Jacob and rejected Esau. Just because someone belongs to the nation of Israel doesn’t mean they belong to God’s people Israel.
God has chosen his people, and we don’t get to determine or define the basis on which he makes his choice. There is absolutely nothing given to us to say that this person must be saved, or that person cannot be saved; there are no markers by which we can predict or decide the eternal fate of anyone. More, there is nothing that we can say controls or obligates God to do anything, and nothing that we can say must be the basis for his choice. His children are the children of the promise, not of any human effort or any human process, and he gives his promise to whomever he will.
At this point you might be thinking, “What about faith?” Certainly Paul argues quite strongly, earlier in Romans, that we are justified by faith alone; doesn’t that make our faith the basis of his choice? No. Even faith, even the desire for faith, is impossible for us apart from the saving work of God in our lives; faith is his gift to us as much as anything else. As St. Augustine put it, “God does not choose us because we believe, but that we may believe.” It all begins with God; it has to, because we were utterly powerless even to try to save ourselves—our salvation had to be his work from first to last.
The standard objection here is that this trivializes human faith and the human response to God, and makes us nothing more than puppets; and there are teachers in the church who have gone that way. I don’t believe it does, though. Paul tells us that we cannot insist on any basis for God’s choice of his people outside of God himself—whether descent from Abraham or our decision to pray the sinner’s prayer—but that doesn’t mean that God’s choice is random or capricious; that we cannot know the reasons for his choice doesn’t mean he doesn’t have reasons. It simply means we cannot know the mind of God, which isn’t really news. It means that here we stand at the edge of what we can comprehend, looking into the mystery of the grace of God.
Let me give you an illustration which I’ve found helpful over the years. I’ve spent a fair bit of time hanging around writers, and one thing I’ve found to be true of those who write fiction is that their characters are real people to them, with minds of their own. My friends created those characters, but they aren’t just puppets to be manipulated around the stage. They act out their own intentions according to their natures, sometimes doing things that their author didn’t expect, creating the story as they do so. And yet, it’s the mind and hands of the author that produce the story, and the author is in control. So in some sense, you see, everything that happens in the story is the product of two wills, of the author and the character; and authors will talk about their books that way, taking credit in one breath for writing a line of dialogue, but in the next crediting the character’s wit.
This is hard for us to understand; but I think it shows intuitively how it’s possible for our decisions to be the result both of our will and of God’s will. God is outside the story of creation, while we are within it. From within, we are free agents, willing our own actions; from without, he is the author, writing every scene as he chooses. And after all, as free agents we are acting out our characters—and he is the one who created our characters. There’s no contradiction here, it’s just a matter of which side you’re looking at; and it’s important that we emphasize both sides—both that our response to God in faith and our decision to follow him is absolutely crucial and deeply meaningful, and that our salvation is God’s work first to last, entirely his free gift to us.
What this all comes back to is the point Paul is determined to defend: our salvation rests, not on ourselves, not on our own efforts or abilities, not on where we were born or who our family is or what nation or race or tribe we belong to, but only and entirely on the infinite power and absolute faithfulness of God.