(Isaiah 8:13-15, Isaiah 28:14-18; Romans 9:30-10:13)

As we’ve seen the last two weeks, Paul in Romans 9 strongly insists on the sovereignty of God in salvation—God chooses his people, he chooses whom he wants to choose, and our salvation is his work from first to last; it’s only by his power that we can even desire to be saved, much less turn to him in faith. I noted last week that laying it out as baldly as he does is distressing to us, and I got some of that distress reflected back at me after the service. Does this mean that God could look at someone who wanted to know him and worship him and reject that person, send them to Hell? Does it mean that no matter what you do, you might find yourself chosen for damnation anyway?

No, it doesn’t, for a few reasons I’ve already mentioned, which lead us into our consideration of this morning’s passage from Romans. First, that fear rests on the assumption that God’s choice of his people is irrational, based merely on his whim; it views God as capricious, unreasonable, unfair, and untrustworthy. This isn’t true. Again, just because we can’t know the reasons why God chooses to save this person and not that one, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have reasons; and the Bible is very clear on this point: “No one who believes on him will be put to shame.”

Second, Paul’s point is not, absolutely not, that God chooses people with no regard to whether they want to be his people; the point, rather, is that no one is able truly to choose God unles God has already chosen them first. It isn’t, “Oh, I go seeking God, and then I hope he lets me find him”; no, it’s, “I sought the Lord, and then I realized that the only reason I went seeking him is because he moved me to do so.” His work is always first. The sincere desire for God is always the work of his Holy Spirit in our hearts, and he will never reject his Spirit whom he has placed in us. Anyone who truly desires the salvation of Christ need have no fear, for that desire is itself evidence of his saving work.

And third—though this is deep water, I know—to insist that God saves us entirely by his own choice and his own will is not to say that our own choices are not real, or not important. I wound up going into this a fair bit in each of the last two weeks, so I’m not going to do that again; the key point is that Paul insists on both the absolute nature and importance of God’s choice and on the importance of our own choices and actions. It isn’t obvious how both those things are true together, but it’s clear to Paul that they are, and must be. Lose the first, and the door is wide open to spiritual pride and judgmentalism, as our salvation becomes the product of our own work and thus reason for boasting; lose the second, and our lives become inconsequential, leaving us to drift into despair or dissipation; and lose either of them, and our view of God is diminished.

Thus in this passage, having passionately declared that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and will harden whom he will harden, Paul now turns to show that God’s rejection of Israel—not all Israelites, to be sure, but national Israel in general—is the result of their own rejection of him. He doesn’t try to say that one is the cause of the other, he just sets them together and holds them in tension: both are true, and we cannot diminish either one, or explain either one away.

His basic critique of Israel in these verses is that they got righteousness wrong, and then refused to let God put them right; he lays this out in one contrast which he repeats three times. On one hand, there is “a righteousness that is by faith” which is “the righteousness of God,” which he then describes again as “the righteousness that is by faith.” On the other, he says that Israel “pursued a law of righteousness,” seeking to “establish their own righteousness,” and thus to achieve “righteousness based on the law.” They understood that God was righteous—not at every point in their history, to be sure, but they eventually learned—and they wanted to be righteous, but they wanted to be righteous their own way, by their own efforts. When Jesus tried to tell them, and his disciples tried to tell them, that their way wouldn’t work, and that God had ordained a different way for them to be made righteous, they refused to listen.

That phrase “law of righteousness” is particularly telling. Grammatically, it’s more than a little out of whack—it doesn’t make obvious sense—because it’s describing an attitude that’s out of whack; the Jewish understanding of both righteousness and the law had become seriously skewed. To pursue a law of righteousness is to think that one can earn righteousness or make oneself righteous through effort in doing the law. The Old Testament law did indeed promise righteousness, but it didn’t actually guarantee that that promise could be reached purely through our own work; it was always predicated on faith in God. To believe that we can make ourselves righteous by our own work in keeping the law is to substitute faith in God with a different faith: faith in ourselves.

That may sound like a strange thing to say, but think about it. To commit ourselves to become righteous in God’s eyes by keeping the law is to put our faith in our own wits—that we can be smart enough to understand it well enough to do it right—and in our own commitment and endurance—that we can keep doing it right all the time, without ever giving up, backing down, breaking down, or wearing out—and in our own strength—that we can overcome all of our weaknesses and bad habits and temptations by sheer force of effort and will. It’s the faith that we are good enough, smart enough, strong enough, and committed enough to compel God to bless us and save us. That is the pursuit of salvation by a law of righteousness: we keep the law, and by our own efforts we keep it so well that God rewards us with salvation.

And you know, that’s religion; but that’s not God, and that’s not his way. Instead, he calls us to a righteousness that is by faith. He freely makes us right with him by his grace, through the sacrifice of Christ who took all our sin and all our guilt on himself, and paid the penalty for all of it. He gives us faith to receive his gift of salvation, to trust that he truly means it and he has really done it all, and that we truly don’t need to do anything at all to earn it—and indeed, never could. And then, yes, he calls us to live lives that reflect and illustrate his righteousness, not in order to earn anything from him or to make him do anything, but simply out of love for him and gratitude for all he has done for us. The outward behavior may look much the same; but the heart is completely different.

The thing is, this was really nothing new. One of the things Paul keeps pointing out to his opponents is that obedience to the law was never the basis for God’s choice of Israel. God’s choice of his people began with Abraham, and what does the Bible say about Abraham? Paul quoted it back in chapter 4: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Even from the beginning, what mattered was God’s choice; even from the beginning, the righteousness of God came not by law but by faith. The law came not so that Israel could earn their salvation, but so that they could respond in gratitude to the salvation they had been given by living in a way that pleased God.

The idea of earning salvation by outward obedience to the law was a misuse of the law from the very beginning; but because they’d gotten fixed on that idea, they failed to see that Christ was the end and purpose of the law. Jesus is the cornerstone of God’s work, the foundation of the people God has been building for himself all along; but because they refused to see, because they focused solely on the law, Christ became a stone over which they stumbled, on which they were broken.

(Exodus 33:15-23, Isaiah 45:9-13; Romans 9:14-29)

If you were here last week as we began Romans 9, you remember that Paul is grappling here with the problem of the salvation of the Jews. He’s argued that Jews aren’t guaranteed salvation or exempted from God’s judgment just because they’re Jews; he’s insisted that they cannot be saved through the Law, no matter how hard they try. Salvation is in Christ alone, even for the Jews; if they reject him, they have no part in the kingdom of God. But if God can give their place in his kingdom to someone else, does that mean he’s gone back on his promises?

As I said last time, this is a vast, complicated, and critically important question. To be faithful to Jesus and his gospel, we must affirm both that salvation is indeed in Christ alone, even for the people of Israel, and that this truth doesn’t represent a betrayal of God’s promises to Israel, but their fulfillment. God has not failed to keep his word to his people; in Jesus, he has done exactly what he said he would do.

Now, we saw last week that Paul begins by arguing that this is really nothing new—God’s choice of Israel never meant that just being Jewish, or even being a reasonably good Jew, was a guarantee of salvation. He uses Genesis and Exodus to show that salvation has always been a matter of God’s free choice, not something guaranteed by birth or family; and he draws on the prophets, and particularly Isaiah, who faced the same question he’s facing: if God brings down disaster on his people and drives them away for their unfaithfulness, does that mean the end of his promises? Like them, he says, “No.” God will not save all of national Israel, but those within Israel who are truly faithful to him—the remnant, to use the language of Isaiah—will find his salvation and inherit his promises, in Jesus Christ.

Just in making this case, Paul was guaranteed to provoke his opponents; but he raises the stakes by the way in which he goes about it, because his argument in this chapter isn’t a comfortable one for us. He could have said, “Well, the promises of God were always contingent on Israel’s faith, and so Jews who decide not to put their faith in God naturally aren’t saved”; the Pharisees at least would have agreed with that, except of course for the whole Jesus thing. But he doesn’t do that. Instead he says, “God chooses his people, and he chooses whom he wants to choose, and we don’t get to determine what choices he has to make.” It’s God’s choice, it’s God’s work, it’s all God, it’s only God, and that’s all there is to it.

This sits pretty raw with us. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think the most basic one is pride. If our salvation is all God’s work, that leaves absolutely no credit to us; there’s not even a sop for our egos, nothing to give us any reason at all to boast. We resist that; we feel the pull to find a way to put our own works back into the picture.

To be sure, we don’t put it that way. We say it’s a matter of justice, by which we mean that no one who deserves salvation should be left out, and no one should go to Hell unfairly. Part of that is that we all seem to have at least one person whom we deeply desire to see come to faith, though why we should think that’s more likely to happen if it’s up to them rather than if it’s up to God, I’m not sure; maybe it’s because we don’t really trust God that much. At the same time, ego is also at work here: we want to believe that we’re saved because we deserve it. The truth is, no one does go to Hell unfairly; if it were a matter of justice and what we deserve, we would all be in Hell. The only injustice in God at all is that he shows mercy to anyone at all.

Still, some object that Paul makes us merely God’s puppets—we have no control over whether we’re saved or not, it’s all at God’s whim. If he’s right, they ask, how can we be held responsible for actions and decisions that aren’t really ours? What right does God have to judge anybody, if his judgments are based on things he made us do?

Paul doesn’t cite the book of Job here, but this is a question rather like those which Job hurls at God; and it’s worth noting that Paul’s response is rather like God’s response to Job. He doesn’t really answer the question—instead he says, “Who do you think you are? By what right do you think you can get away with filing charges against God?” He makes no effort at all to explain God’s reasons or justify God’s decisions; he doesn’t even attempt to show that God chooses whom he will save based on criteria that we find appropriate and acceptable. Not his the goal Milton sets out in Paradise Lost, to “justify the ways of God to man.” Instead, he reaches back to Isaiah to say, “God is as much bigger than you as the potter is bigger than the clay; he understands you and everyone else much better than you do; and he has every right to do whatever he knows to be best, and you have no right to say otherwise.”

Now, to our ears, that sounds harsh; Paul isn’t pulling any punches here, nor is he making any effort to soothe our wounded pride. But then, it’s amazingly arrogant of us to presume to judge God for not doing things the way we think best, as if we were somehow qualified to make that judgment; what Paul is going after here is sin, and a particularly insidious and dangerous kind. He doesn’t want to appease it, he wants to kill it. That, I think, is one reason he doesn’t dignify this question with an answer—that, plus the fact that he’s no more qualified to read God’s mind than any of us are. He does, however, say something very important here, in that he gives us the image of God as a rational actor who does what he does for good reason: a potter, who chooses what to make based on what kinds of vessels will serve his purposes.

This is key, not merely because it illustrates the power of God, but because it answers the implicit assumption which underlies the objection of verse 19. We talked about this last week—it’s the assumption that if we can’t know the reasons why God chooses to save this person and not that one, it must mean that he doesn’t have reasons. It’s the idea that if God won’t tell us why he does what he does (and let us tell him he’s wrong), it must mean he’s capricious, unreasonable, unfair, and untrustworthy. Paul’s point is that this isn’t true. God has his reasons, and they’re good reasons, because he knows what he’s doing—but we’re too small and too limited to fully comprehend them. We can’t expect God to explain everything to us, if only because we’d never understand the explanation.

Take that to heart. We aren’t going to be able to get answers to all of our questions that make perfect sense to us; God is far too big and far too great for that to be even conceivable, let alone possible. We should expect our faith to be paradoxical at some points; after all, we worship a God who is three and also one, and one of those three—Jesus Christ—is completely and totally human at the same time as he’s completely and totally God. How all of those things can be true together is beyond me to know; my brain is too small for that. Somehow, they are. God is that big and that marvelous, that in him all those things fit together.

Here, we affirm that at one and the same time, our salvation is entirely God’s choice and his work, and we are free actors who are responsible for our own choices, whether we turn to God or reject him. I can’t explain that; though if you were here last week, you may remember I offered an analogy to human authors to illustrate it. Every writer of fiction I’ve ever heard talk about the writing process speaks of their characters as real people with minds of their own, who sometimes do unexpected things and refuse to cooperate. Obviously, everything that happens in the story is the product of the author’s mind and will—and yet, at the same time, each character speaks and acts according to their own will, according to their own desires and concerns, according to who the author created them to be.

This is, I think, an aspect of the image of God in us; to borrow language from J. R. R. Tolkien, we are subcreators who create secondary worlds in imitation of God who made us and the world within which we live, and in so doing we relate to our creations in somewhat the same way he relates to us. Inside the great story of creation, we act of ourselves and our own will; God is the author of the story who has given us our wills and our characters, whose will sustains them every moment, and who writes every scene as he chooses. We affirm both the absolute authorship and authority of God who created all things and holds all things together, and our own freedom to choose as we will, even on matters of ultimate importance; it’s just a matter of whether you’re looking at the story from the inside or the outside.

But given that, why does God write the story the way he does? Why does he save some people and not others? I don’t know. We all, lost in our sin, begin by rejecting him as our enemy. Some of us, he shows mercy—he doesn’t allow us to reject him, but overwhelms us with his grace. Others, he allows to reject him, and hardens in their rejection—though he shows them great patience and lets them work their own way, so that they may have every chance to do otherwise. Why doesn’t he save them too? Why doesn’t he save everyone? He doesn’t tell us. But really, why does he save anyone? The only answer we get is love—and not just that he loves those whom he saves, but also that he loves those whom he doesn’t save, and is grieved by their death. God doesn’t explain himself to us; again, we probably wouldn’t understand if he did, and it really isn’t our place to demand an explanation. Instead, he points us to his Son, Jesus, who died for those who murdered him, and calls us to trust him: to trust that, as Abraham puts it in Genesis 18, the judge of all the earth will do right.

(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.