Romans 9

Reasons to stop at Romans 8
Well, this morning, as Trevor said, we’re starting up again in our Romans series that we’ve been doing this year, and picking up at Romans chapter 9. At one level that’s a pretty obvious sort of thing to be doing - there are sixteen chapters in Romans, we did the first eight chapters earlier in the year, and now we’re picking it up again and doing the last eight chapters. At one level it’s pretty obvious, but at another level it’s quite unusual. There’s a long tradition in churches and Christian conventions and bible study groups of the Romans series that goes through the first eight chapters of Romans and then stops there, as if Romans 9-16 didn’t exist.

And there are reasons why that happens! Over the last few weeks, as Romans 9 has loomed on the horizon, I’ve begun to feel the force of some of those reasons.

To begin with, there’s the fact that Romans chapter 8 rounds things off so magnificently. The chapter begins with this fantastic declaration that there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What the law was powerless to do in making us right with God and giving us a heart to please him, God has done in Christ, coming in our flesh to be a sin offering for us and pouring his Spirit into our hearts and making us sons and daughters of God.

And then there’s the middle section of the chapter where Paul talks about the way that even though we are now God’s sons and daughters, if we are in Christ - even though we are now sons and daughters of God and his Spirit lives in our hearts, we still experience pain and frustration and longing in this world, because we live in a world that has not yet been set right, and we groan for the things that are still to come; and the whole creation groans with us, and God’s Spirit groans with us and helps us in our weakness.

And then there’s that magnificent final section of Romans 8, that starts off, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose...”, and then finishes off - Romans 8 verse 38: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

It all ends so brilliantly, and it feels so complete, and it seems so natural to just stop there and leave it at that. Which is what we usually do!

And then you look at Romans chapter 9, and suddenly it seems that there are a whole lot more reasons to stop at Romans 8.

* Irrelevant issues
To begin with, when you turn the page to Romans 9, you’re plunged into the middle of an issue that seems profoundly irrelevant to your daily life and mine. The basic issue that Paul is writing about in Romans 9 and 10 and 11 is the failure of Israel and the majority of Israelites back two thousand years ago to put their faith in Jesus as the Messiah. That’s the basic issue in Romans 9-11, and I can almost guarantee you that if I asked a hundred people inside or outside the church about the top ten issues that they were keen to hear sermons on, this would not make it onto anyone’s list.

* Uncomfortable doctrines
The issue that we’re plunged into in Romans 9 is a seemingly irrelevant issue, and worse, the doctrine that Romans 9 teaches is a sharply uncomfortable doctrine. Because Romans 9, perhaps more than any other chapter in the Bible, is the great predestination chapter. It’s the chapter that teaches that God chooses who is going to be saved, that he has mercy on whoever he wants to have mercy on, and it’s nothing to do with how good or how deserving they are.

So when I was growing up, all the way through my childhood and teenage years I never once heard Romans 9 quoted or referred to or preached on or explained. It was just ignored, because it was the Calvinist chapter; and I remember discovering it for myself some time in my late teens and thinking to myself: I never knew this sort of thing was in the Bible!

When we turn the page from Romans 8 to Romans 9, we really are plunged into the middle of seemingly irrelevant issues, and extremely uncomfortable doctrines.

Reasons to go on to Romans 9
And yet I don’t want to stop at the end of Romans 8. I think it’s really important that we do turn the page and go on to Romans 9. And there are two reasons why I think that.

* The surprising relevance of ‘irrelevant’ issues
The first is the surprising relevance of ‘irrelevant’ issues like this one in the Bible. You see, one of the great problems and constraints that our culture imposes on us is the problem of the tyrrany of relevance. The overwhelming tendency of human nature in general and Western culture in particular is to look out on the world through egocentric eyes; to look out on the world as if the human race was the centre of the universe, as if I was the most important person in the human race, and as if the present moment was the central point of all time. And so we measure everything by how immediately relevant it is to me and to my little world and to my little moment in time. Relevance is everything, and so our horizons contract and contract until we’re left inside this tiny little self-referential bubble of 21st century pop culture and self help books. And the temptation for us as Christians is to try and fit church inside that tiny little bubble as well, and preach sermons every week about the spirituality of the Simpsons, or how to learn to like yourself. That’s what the relevance mentality does to us if we let it enslave us.

But if we read the Bible it keeps blowing that bubble apart and liberating us from it. It keeps reminding us that you and I are not the centre of the world. It keeps reminding me that the little planet that is my life derives its meaning and its direction from the great sun that it revolves around - that is, God, and the whole orbit of his plans and purposes for Israel and the nations and the universe.

And then having transformed my perspective like that, it then takes me back to the microscopic issues of my heart and my relationships and my lifestyle, and suddenly I see those things in an entirely different light,

* The surprising comfort of ‘uncomfortable’ doctrines
When you read the Bible you keep learning that there is a surprising relevance in the seemingly irrelevant issues that it directs your mind to. And similarly, when you read the Bible you keep discovering that there is a surprising comfort in some of the Bible’s most uncomfortable doctrines.

We were away on holidays last week and Jacob got his first splinter. It was there in the fleshy part of his index finger, and it was quite a nasty splinter, and we knew we were going to have to take it out. So we got hold of a pair of tweezers and we disinfected, and we set about taking out the splinter. It was a two person job - I held onto Jacob and talked to him and kept him still and Nicole dug around with the sharpest thing that we could find in the place where we were staying, and then the tweezers to pull out the splinter. To say that Jacob found the experience uncomfortable would be quite a significant understatement. Generally he’s a pretty stoic little boy, but this was really pushing the boundaries. He wriggled and writhed and screamed and cried... and then we got the splinter out, and we showed him how it was all gone, and he looked down at his splinter, and then he looked back at us, and then he looked back at his finger and he touched it, and he said to us: “I feel so happy now!”.

Romans 9 is a bit like that with us. It cuts its way into the fleshy part of our hearts, and it digs away at the splinter of our arrogance - that’s why it feels so uncomfortable. We take offence at the idea that God has the right to say who is going to be saved. It challenges our human-centred pride, and it says things like: “who are you, O man, to talk back to God?”. But the purpose of the chapter is actually for our good, to humble us and to heal us, and to help us to see things as they really are, and to remind us that God is actually God and not us. In the end, Romans 9 and the doctrine that it teaches is actually a deeply comforting, reassuring chapter, and I hope that you’ll see that as we read it together this morning - or perhaps when we get to the end of Romans 11 in two weeks time, when this part of the letter is complete.

Paul, God and the problem of hardened Israel
So here we are, at the end of the long introduction, ready to launch together into Romans chapter 9.

Paul’s anguish (1-5)
It begins in verses 1 to 5 with a description of Paul’s anguish at the fact that overwhelming majority of his fellow-Israelites have rejected the gospel and refused to believe in Jesus as the messiah. Verse 1, Paul writes: “I speak the truth in Christ — I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit — 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5 Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.”

It’s significant, isn’t it, that this key chapter in the Bible on the doctrine of election - about how God chooses and predestines those who are going to be saved - this key chapter on the doctrine of election comes not in the context of an abstract theological textbook, but in the context of Paul’s personal anguish about his brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and parents and the whole nation that he belongs to. This is not a cold, bloodless argument.

At one level, this issue that is so personal and so agonising for Paul is an issue that is quite remote for us. The vast majority of us are Gentiles not Jews by background, and the fact that Israel rejected Jesus and crucified him is kind of good news for us. At that level the issue feels quite remote. But at another level, of course, this is not a remote issue for us at all. Most of us have people that we know who have heard about Jesus, again and again, and who have hardened their hearts against him and refused to believe. For some of us it’s our own kids, or our parents, or our brothers and sisters. In fact I suspect that’s not some of us but most of us. And we read about Paul’s anguish and we feel an echoing kind of anguish in our own hearts - either that or we just try not to think about it too much, too often.

Has God’s word failed? (6)
So Paul writes in these opening verses about this perplexing situation that he finds himself in, where God’s people, the people of his own race, the people who had all the glory and the covenants and the temple and the promises of the Old Testament have had the messiah come into their midst and have rejected him. And Paul goes on from town to town in his missionary journeys, preaching Jesus in the synagogues, and again and again the story is repeated.

And so Paul asks, verse 6: “Does this mean that the word of God has failed?”. Well, actually, he doesn’t ask the question, he gives the answer: “It is not as though God’s word has failed.” And the really the rest of the chapter - with a little detour in the middle about the justice of it all - the rest of the chapter is about the way Paul backs up that statement.

As deeply as Paul feels the agony and the anguish of so many of his fellow Israelites being cut off from God by their rejection of the gospel - as deeply as Paul feels that issue, and he does, the even bigger issue for him is what it says about God, and this question of whether the tragedy of Israel means that God has broken his promise or failed in his plans. For Paul, that’s the biggest issue of all, because if God has lied or has failed, then the whole universe falls apart. As Paul says earlier in the letter, quoting from the psalms: Let God be true and every man a liar. So that’s the biggest issue in Paul’s mind: Does the tragedy of Israel’s unbelief mean that the word of God has failed?

- There has always been an ‘Israel’ within Israel (6-13)
And the answer Paul gives is no. From the beginning, he argues, from right back in the Old Testament, there was never any guarantee from God that everyone who was physically descended from Abraham would be inheritors of the promises that God gave to Abraham. There was always an Israel within Israel, a subset of the physical nation of Israel that inherited the promises of God and relationship with him.

Verse 6: “It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. 7 Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” 8 In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. 9 For this was how the promise was stated: “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.” 10 Not only that, but Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. 11 Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad — in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: 12 not by works but by him who calls — she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” 13 Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

There’s two stories that Paul focuses on to make his point - two stories that go right back to the first two generations of Abraham’s descendants. In the first place, verses 7-9, he goes back to the story of Isaac and Ishmael, the two sons of Abraham, and the fact that it was through Isaac, the child of the promise, that Abraham’s true descendants were reckoned. Ishmael was just as much a physical child of Abraham, but Isaac was the one who came about through faith in the promise of God. And then in the second place, verses 10-13, he goes one generation down the family tree, to Isaac’s two sons Esau and Jacob, and once again he says, it was one and not the other. ‘Before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad — in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: 12 not by works but by him who calls — she was told, “The older will serve the younger.”’ It wasn’t that Jacob was better or nicer or cleverer or more religious - it was simply that God chose one and not the other. Right back at the earliest generations of the history of Israel, Paul says, the story of Genesis makes it clear that being born as a physical descendant of Abraham doesn’t give anyone an automatic right to salvation. It is simply a matter of who God chooses in his kindness to save.

Is God unjust? (14)
And so in verse 14 Paul raises the obvious question: “What then shall we say? Is God unjust?” Is it unfair that God chooses and saves one and passes over and rejects the other. And he answers it in three ways.

- Mercy is a gift not a right! (15-18)
In the first place, he says - verses 15-18 - God’s mercy is a gift not a right. Verse 14: “What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 16 It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” 18 Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”

At the end of the book of Exodus God reveals his name and his glory to Moses and he says to him: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” The God of the Exodus story is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. But he makes it very clear that his mercy is always a gift that he gives in his freedom, not a right that we can demand as if we earned it. “It does not depend”, Paul writes, “on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.” And mercy by it’s very nature is freely given. It’s not a fairness issue; it’s a grace issue.

I used to think that God’s dealings with people were on a spectrum that stretched from fair at one end to unfair at the other. Some people get a fair go and all the opportunities and they end up in heaven, and the others get pretty unfair treatment really, and they end up under God’s judgment. That’s how I used to see it. But that’s the way it is at all. The spectrum is not from fair to unfair; it’s from fair at this end to overwhelmingly gracious and merciful at the other. And if God wants to show mercy, he has the right to show it where he wants to show it.

- The potter can do what he likes with the clay (19-21)
The second way Paul responds, in verses 19-21, is with the analogy of the potter and the clay. Verse 19: ‘One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” 20 But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” 21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?’

Do you see what Paul is saying? At one level he doesn’t really answer the question, does he! He simply says - verse 20: “who are you, O man, to talk back to God?”. But that is the answer to the question, isn’t it. He’s saying, God is God, not you, and not me. He is the one who gives us our very existence in the first place. And if he chooses to make some of us for one purpose and some of us for another, surely that is his right.

- What if God makes some vessels for destruction and others for mercy? (22-24)
And then thirdly, verses 22-24, Paul extends that point and applies that analogy into a kind of what if. Verse 22: “What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath — prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory — 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?”

What if God created Israel, made that a nation when they were originally nothing, then bore with them in great patience, just as he bore with Pharaoh through all his arrogance and didn’t wipe him out at plague number one? What if God created Israel, gave them their existence, bore with them for centuries in undeserved patience, then eventually, finally, as he had planned from the beginning, brought down on them his just and deserved wrath and judgement - what if his purpose in doing that was in order to make his glory and mercy and kindness known to other people - to the Gentiles and Jews that he saves through Jesus?

It’s a strange kind of sentence, that he deliberately leaves incomplete. He just says, “What if this was what God was doing?” That’s humbling in itself, isn’t it. Paul is saying by implication, “I’m not saying that this is what God’s purpose and reason was; God doesn’t have to give his reasons to you; but what if this was God’s purpose in what he did with Israel? Doesn’t he have a right to do that? Doesn’t the potter have the right to make some vessels for destruction and others for mercy? Particularly when he treats even the vessels made for destruction with such patience and such justice?

The reversible line between Jew and Gentile (25-29)
And if that is the basic outline of what God has done with Israel and the church, then Paul says in the last few verses - verses 25-29 - this is no real surprise. This is exactly the sort of thing that the prophets foretold. In fact, according to the Old Testament, Paul says, the line between Jew and Gentile has always been a reversible one. So God send Hosea to tell Israel, “Becaue of your sin, I am going to make you not my people any more; I am going to make your just like the gentiles around you; and then in my mercy I’m going to restore you again and turn “not my people” back into “my people”, and “not my loved one” back into “my loved one”. And Isaiah says the same sort of thing: “Unless the Lord Almighty had left us descendants, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.”

If God can do that with Israel - turn “my people” into “not my people”, and then back into “my people” once again - if he can do that with Israel, or with the remnant of Israel, he can do it with the gentiles as well - hje can take a whole lot of “not my peoples” like you and me, and make them into his people in Jesus. And that is exactly what God has done.

At the end of the day, that is where Romans 9 is meant to leave us. It’s meant to leave us realising that in the end, all we have is mercy. If we are God’s people - whether Jew or Gentile - if we are God’s people who have received his mercy in Jesus, then we utlimately have no response that we can make apart from gratitude and humility. So let’s express that gratitude to God now.