(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.