Romans 9:19-29 "The Purpose of Promise"

Introduction

It might surprise you to know that God has an objective in the world. He desires that His glory to be made known and displayed in and through Jesus Christ among the Nations of the world.

You may promise your child that you will take them to the zoo on Saturday but when Saturday comes the care won’t start or you get called in to work or you find out the zoo is closed on Saturday.

But with God His promises don’t work that way. If God makes a promise to His people He has the omniscient wisdom and the omnipotent power to ensure it will come to pass.

He promises are not empty and His providence is not impotent. He rules in the absolute sense in His divine power.

This is what Scripture teaches us but such a view challenges our human understanding of how things work in the world. Especially when it comes to salvation.

Particularly when it comes to His exercise of divine justice it is very easy for us to fall into a potential fallacy regarding the justice of God when it comes to Him being sovereign over salvation in the lives of men. Paul points this out in verse 19-21. Look back at your text.

I. The Potential Fallacy (19-21).

The potential fallacy would be that God would be unjust in holding sinners accountable, if He was the one who was hardening them as He did in the case of Pharoah in the Book of Exodus (19).

First notice that this question only makes sense if Paul is arguing for the absolute sovereignty of God in election. If God is looking ahead in time and only electing in response to human choice then there is no reason for Paul to raise the question of God being unjust.

The idea of , “No one would being able to resist His will” is why Paul raises the question of God being unjust.

He answers the potential fallacy simply by asking another question that raises the legitimacy of a human being questioning the character of God on such a level.

Man is a creature of God’s making and he is created for God’s purposes.

He uses a metaphorical example of a potter and his uses of clay creating pottery for common use and some pottery for noble use.

This metaphor is right out of Jeremiah 18:1-4 where God uses the potter and the clay to demonstrate His freedom to do as He pleases with Israel and the other nations of the world.

And even though He declared this to His people through the prophet Jeremiah the people still lived out their lives in their own vanity.

The clay doesn’t have autonomy, the clay doesn’t exercise self rule over itself. It is the Potter that has the absolute authority over the clay. It is the Potter that designs according to His purpose and plan.

God is the only true autonomous Being in the Universe and beyond. Fallen human beings have the perception of being God due to the fall. The lie that we will be like God knowing good from evil and capable of establishing such categories on our own are all an expression of our perception of being like God.

We have such a profound problem with such doctrines as these because we believe that true freedom can not exist if man is being controlled or manipulated in his choices. This is why Paul anticipates the objection on the basis of the perception of God being unjust.

We imagine for God to be just He would have to deal with everyone equally from the standpoint of what they actually deserve.

But this is not the case when it comes to the Sovereign God and His sovereign grace. He operates from a whole different principle. Look at The Principled Objective of God in verses 22-24:

II. The Principled Objective (22-24).

In these three verses Paul is still addressing the potential fallacy raised in verse 19. And he is still making the point that the idea of God being unjust is unthinkable.

And he does this by putting forth the principled objective that God is working out in His relationship to fallen man in the world.

God desires to make His wrath and power known as He patiently endures those prepared for destruction. God is patient with the wicked. He doesn’t usually just destroy them on the spot. They are vessels for dishonorable use.

And He does this because He is making known the “riches of His glory” to those He already prepared for glory from among the Jews and the Gentiles.

It is so hard for us to get our brains around such an idea. This is because in our experiential world living out experiential relationships on a human to human plain.

We are not thinking about God’s providential mysteries and how those mysteries relate to life relationships and experiences in making choices.

We may think about some of them later when a light goes on in our minds because we can see the dots connecting. But most of our time we live out the idea of freedom from an enlightenment humanist perspective.

And in that tension we are so uncomfortable because we have a sense of the autonomy of self-rule and that gets juxtaposed in contrast to the autonomy of the Sovereign God.

This tension is meant to be there at a practical level because it sanctifies us at the deep levels of our heart where the prideful motives of the human condition are hard to discern because they feel like they are so much a part of who we are as individuals. Like a cancer that we are comfortable ignoring.

But it also shows us something about God’s Providential Plan. Look at verses 25-29:

III. The Providential Plan (25-29).

There are many OT Scriptures that Paul could point to but remember he has been talking about Israel as an ethnic identity.

He gives us three prophecies, One from Hosea and two from Isaiah.

The Hosea prophecy tells us that God will expand the scope of His covenant people to the Gentiles as well.

The two Isaiah prophecies tell us that only a remnant of Israelites will be saved. And that if it were not for God they would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah. No one left and cut off from the earth.

Sodom and Gomorrah show us what happens when a people are given over by God and He judges them accordingly. Jude verse 7 tells us that Sodom and Gomorrah serve as an example of eternal judgement.

Conclusion:

Christian when you work through Romans 9 you quickly find out that salvation is initiated by God on the basis of divine grace and that if God had not initiated it we would all perished in our sins and suffered eternal judgement.

When you see this the question is not why does He save some and not others? The question is: Why does He save any?

There is only one place where a fallen man might legitimately question the injustice of God. But in 20 plus years of preaching the gospel no one ever has seriously raised it to me.

It is in the act of punishing His holy and righteous Son in the place of a sinner like me. Why would He do that? No one ever has argued the gospel can’t be true because that would make God unjust.

From a biblical perspective when Grace, Love, Mercy converge on Calvary’s Cross where Christ as a substitute took our place and paid our penalty and died for us divine justice was not compromised but it was upheld higher than the highest mountain and deeper than the deepest sea!

Unbeliever how will the justice of God prevail upon your life in the end, on that final day when you must stand before a Holy God. You the created and defiant vessel of clay in the presence of the Divine Potter?

To what or whom will you make an appeal? You need a Savior who can wash your sins away and you need Him today. Believe the gospel.

Believer, You who are redeemed by Sovereign grace, beneficiaries of divine love and mercy, the covenant people of God there is no other name under heaven by which man must be saved.

He calls us to proclaim good news and to make disciples. Sharing the gospel and being a light of His divine grace is what we are to do in he world.

As we live in this grace we are secure in His work on our behalf. This truth is the only sanctifying truth that will confront the deep levels of pride and cultivate humility in us before God.

That’s what Grace does as revealed in the gospel. Christian embrace it as the kindness and goodness of God to you. Confess and receive. Let’s Pray!