I returned today from a 3-week “mini-sabbatical,” for which I am deeply grateful to our congregation and to the Lord. It was a peaceful time of prayer, reading, and relaxing and recreating with family.
Now, here I am looking at one of the most difficult texts in Romans and trying to get ready to preach it in just a couple days. Romans chapter 9 is complicated and controversial. It’s probably the biblical heart of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but that misguided doctrine is not at all what Paul is concerned with here.
Chapter 9 arises because Paul’s overarching concern in Romans is to show how God’s promises to Abraham and thus to the Jewish people are fulfilled and completed in Jesus Christ and in the larger family of faith created by the work of Christ.
Part of getting straight on this chapter is to see that though Paul illustrates his points with Old Testament characters like Jacob, Esau and Pharaoh, he is not talking about individual salvation. His aim, instead, is to show how God’s promises and plan through Israel are not thwarted by Israel’s disobedience. God is able to bring off His purposes through an awesome offer of mercy received by faith.
So verse 16 is the heart of the chapter, “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy.”
Still and all, it’s a lumpy mercy (playing on the image of a lump of clay Paul uses in verse 21). Israel in disobedience and rejection of the Messiah takes its lumps. Still and all, the promises to Israel are not void and God will have mercy on a remnant, and “whoever believes in him will not be put to shame,” (verse 33, paraphrasing Isaiah 28:16).
As Paul’s arguments unfold further in chapters 10 and 11, we see that we as Gentiles have no basis for gloating over the lumps Israel takes. We are all lumpy and all in need of mercy. Part of the point of the clay illustration is that we all, Jew or Gentile, come from the same sinful material. It is by God’s grace that we are made anything better.