Soli Deo Gloria

vv. 9:14-24

Intro

Soli Deo Gloria is another one of the 5 Solas, and our passage for today brings us to this beautiful truth. We’ll read this in a month or so, but Romans 11:36 “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”

From God, through God, and to God all things were made, all things are sustained, and all things work together for His will. That is, that all of His creation will bring His glory back to Him.

This is the essence of Soli Deo Gloria. God alone gets all the glory. While we don’t submit to any catechisms here, we often reference the widely agreed upon truth spelled out in the WSC Q&A 1. What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to Glorify God and enjoy Him forever. There it is, right there. As, not just a part of God’s creation, but as the crown jewel of His creation, His image bearers, we exist to bring God’s own glory back to Him.

We’ll talk more about it as we go through the passage, but this is going to be central to the argument that Paul is making here. Paul is making it clear that no created thing has any kind of authority, or sovereignty over it’s creator.

We’re going back to some basics here again so that we can anchor in this unifying truth. All glory is from God, and all glory returns to God. He alone get’s the glory.

This part of Romans 9 is another passage that have divided the church body across denominational lines for all of church history. Not because the passage itself is divisive, but because it can be difficult to understand or interpret. We’ve already alluded to the discussion between predestination and free will, but today, this topic is right in front of us, yet again.

I want to start with a couple of things. Mazevo’s position is that we are going to unify around the doctrines that we see clearly laid out in scripture. We affirm the apostles’ and the Nicene creeds to be necessary truth to find yourself within orthodox Christianity, and we are always going to hold Scripture as the final authority on all issues, and we will always have a melting pot of various theological position within our church.

That means a few things for you. One, regardless of whether we hold an Arminianist view, a Calvinist view, a Dispensationalist view, or if you come from a Baptist background, or a Catholic background, or Presbyterian, or Charasmatic, or wherever you come from, if we’re all in agreement about who God is, who Jesus is, and that we affirm the divinity of Jesus, and His virgin birth, and His death on the cross and resurrection and ascension. As long as we all affirm that our hope and trust and faith in our salvation comes from Jesus Christ alone, who has paid it all, then we can be unified as the one body of Christ.

And this may make someone here mad, but you don’t know it all. You don’t have all of the right answers. There is something, likely many things that you believe in your theology that are flat out wrong. Same goes for me. The moment that you think you understand all that the Bible teaches is the moment that you have created for yourself your own God who is small enough for you to understand.

We must come to Scripture with an open mind, and welcome the Lord to correct our understanding where we may be wrong. When we have a conversation with another brother or sister in the faith who disagrees with you theologically on some points, you can find great comfort that this person is a member of the same body, the same family of believers, and there is room for you to disagree.

We all need to work out our own personal theology. We all need to be humble about the positions that we hold, and recognize that we could have it wrong. We need to understand where our brothers and sisters are coming from, and that just because we disagree, or that you have never heard a perspective before, that their view is unbiblical.

And while we need to be humble and understanding as we discuss our theology, I also encourage you to be bold, to be passionate about what you believe. We don’t need to walk on eggshells with one another, or withhold our views from one another, but we welcome open discourse within the body, where these discussions can take place, and more clearly see the beauty, mystery, and complexity of Scripture.

That said, and I try to do this rarely, but as we exegete this passage, I am going to share with your the traditional reformed understanding of this passage. That said, again, I’ll be clear when I am sharing my own personal perspective, but I feel strongly about this particular passage because the Reformed understanding takes a passage that is otherwise difficult to understand, and gives it beautiful clarity.

My goal in sharing this is not to try and convince any of you that this is the correct understanding. My heart truly is to make you aware of a perspective that you may have never heard, or have heard misrepresented, and I only share it to show you the beauty of this interpretation to me personally.

We’ll walk through Romans 9:14-24 while answering 3 questions.

1. Is God Just?

2. What is God’s Glory?

3. Why does it matter?

1. Is God Just?

Anchor: v.14 – “What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!”

Remember, Paul started His letter reminding us that we were all dead in sin, and that God alone can justify. We used Luther’s image of a courtroom, where God, decrees from behind the podium, not guilty, not now, not ever, when reading Romans 8:1 “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

There is not a single condemnation that can be brought against the believer. Now, we’re happy to rest in God’s judgement when that’s the verdict that we hear, but the harder truths for us to understand are those verses in Romans 1-3. We are all sinners in need of God’s grace. We have all fallen short. There is sin in every single one of us. And there are many today who try to boil righteousness down to being a good person. This all calls into question exactly what we are talking about today.

God, to appropriately judge us, must Himself be just. So He, as the just judge, must uphold justice. If he doesn’t, and if His rulings are unjust, then God Himself is unjust. This is the very question that Paul is writing, anticipating the question coming after he pretty clearly articulates that, before either Jacob or Esau were born, or had done anything good or bad, God chose one over the other. That, to us, sounds like injustice, no?

Well, the argument that I believe Paul, pretty clearly, goes on to make here is that you are right to notice something here, but what you are noticing is not injustice, but mercy.

And mercy, to be explicitly clear, is not injustice, but it is also not justice, it is, non-justice. That is, not that God is wrong to give someone something they don’t deserve, but the requirement for righteousness, that none of us could ever obtain, has been obtained by One who gave His own life as payment. So, justice is still carried out, because the debt has been paid by the blood of Jesus, but let’s be clear on the other side too, God’s bestowing upon us the blood of Christ for the forgiveness of our sins is not justice. Be careful, those of you who are quick to call for justice, because if justice is what you want, you may just get it. Justice sends every single one of us to the grave. Justice, is that we all get what we ourselves have earned, which is condemnation. We, in ourselves, can do nothing good. That is the point that Paul has belabored above all of his other points in this letter.

Beloved, we don’t want justice. We want mercy.

Mercy is not justice, it is non-justice. It is God, withholding His divine wrath from us, that we have justly earned, for sake of the blood of Jesus. Do you see the beauty in that? We didn’t earn it, we don’t deserve it, and perhaps most of all, and this is what Paul is getting at, we aren’t owed God’s mercy. We are owed His wrath, but He, in His divine mercy, withholds that wrath, resurrects our dry bones, and raises us to new life in Jesus Christ.

Oh, what a merciful Savior. Oh, what a beautiful salvation. Oh, what a loving Father.

Now we turn to the other side of the coin. We have some various ways that we can understand or explain the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. When we read it in Exodus, we can see clearly that before God ever hardens Pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. That is true, but before Pharaoh harden’s his own heart, God tells Moses, go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go, and he will refuse.

When we read that, we could get away pretty cleanly with a foreknowledge view, until we read these verses here. Romans 9:17 “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.””

Now Paul is not just talking about the mercy that God can bestow however and whenever He wills, but now we have God acting, not to create any new sin in Pharaoh, but to strengthen, to fortify the heart that Pharaoh already has for wickedness. God unmistakably acts to harden the heart of Pharaoh, be he isn’t making him do anything, He is only strengthening Pharaoh’s heart for the thing he desires the most. Power, fame, approval, control, fortune… glory. Pharaoh want’s glory, and God, for this purpose, made for Pharaoh a great nation. He was the most powerful man in the known world. He was look to as a God by the people whom he governed. Literally, Ancient Egyptians believed that their Pharaoh was not just like a god, but was himself a god.

God showed in Pharaoh, the pinnacle of human power, then showed His own power over all mankind. God is sovereign over all things.

The hardening of Pharaoh—judgment, not injustice

2. What is God’s Glory?

Anchor: v.17, v.22-23 – The language of God’s name being proclaimed and vessels of mercy displaying His glory. This sets up Soli Deo Gloria as not just a theological category, but the very goal of election, wrath, and mercy. Show that Pharaoh’s hardening wasn’t arbitrary—it was to display God’s name to the nations.

God’s sovereignty serves His fame

Vessels of wrath and mercy alike display His character

God does not exist for our comfort—He created us for His glory

When we speak of God’s glory, we are speaking of His Godness, that is to say that there is glory in His love, there is glory in His peace, there is glory in His strength, there is glory in everything that comes from Him, that is, the source of all glory in this world is God. Every good thing comes from good, who works out all things for our good, and for His glory.

An analogy that I’ve heard here has proven itself helpful for my own understanding.

Glory is to God as the rays of light are to the Sun

All glory belongs to God. We are not meant to gather up glory, or fame for ourselves. To be set apart and considered holy. God alone is holy, so for us, we are simply meant to reflect God’s glory. This is true of all creation. And we get into something important here. God did not create this world and everything in it because he needed this world to be glorified. God didn’t need this world at all, but He created all things to reflect His glory back to Him, foremost us, His image bearers.

We can only reflect, or rightly attribute glory to God. In other words, all glory comes from God in the first place, so, when we glorify God, we aren’t adding glory to God, it was His in the first place. We are reflecting that glory back to Him.

How about Romans 8:30 “And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

So what is this about our glory? Well, we will indeed be glorified. We will, one day, reflect God’s glory perfectly, when you are made perfect in the Lord. You yourself will not have glory, but the one who is glory will make His glory perfect in you.

3. Why Does It Matter?

v.20 – “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”

If God really is sovereign over all things, why obey, why submit, why do anything?

If God is sovereign over all things, and has already chosen those who would be saved, why evangelize? Why devote your life to missions, to service, to the church?

If God is sovereign over all things, what’s the point?

Well, there is no doubt that God will work out His will for His glory, with or without us, but, as C.S. Lewis put it,

“For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ch. 7 (“Divine Goodness”)

God will receive His glory, and carry out His divine will and purpose, with or without you. Regardless of what you believe, whether predestination or foreknowledge, apostasy or perseverance of the saints, Covenant Theology or Dispensational Theology, Arminianism or Calvinism, these are all important topics to discuss and try to understand, but none of these doctrines or theologies are enemies, in the same way that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility are not enemies, but complementary to one another.

We are all laboring hard to draw from Scripture the truths that God has revealed to us, so no matter what views you hold in your own personal theology, let’s not get cynical. Let’s not cast down one another’s positions just for the fact that we disagree, but let’s see that each of these differing viewpoints are trying to make sense of these things that, to us, don’t go together. How can we have free will if God chooses us?

“Free will does not mean the ability to choose contrary to God’s decree, but the ability to choose according to one’s greatest desire.” — Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will

If you, this morning, do not have the Spirit of God in you, if you have not professed Jesus as your Lord and Savior, your greatest desire is to gather up glory for yourself. My hope is, that by this point, you have seen, you can’t gather up sunlight. You weren’t made to, nothing was made to, but EVERYTHING was made to reflect the glory of God back to Him, through Whom, in Whom, and to Whom is all Glory.

And for you, who put your hope, your trust, you faith, in Christ alone, see that Paul has this great grief for those who are lost, but His heart petitions God on their behalf, that they may be saved.

Romans 10:1 “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.”

Nothing is outside of God’s sovereignty, but that doesn’t lead us to grief, that leads us to awe, to wonder, and to glorify God.

Conclusion

1. Calvinist – John 6:37, 44

“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out… No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:37, 44)

2. Arminian – John 3:16

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

3. Calvinist – Romans 9:15–16

“For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” (Romans 9:15–16)

4. Arminian – 1 Timothy 2:3–4

“This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:3–4)

Benediction

Romans 11:36 “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”