Let's turn to Romans 9, verses 6-29.
The message we have today is not one for the marketplace, but rather it is one for the
assembly of God's people, for this is family truth that we are looking at.
Frankly, God has today been so humanized by some that it is difficult for us to accept
the doctrine that we are looking at, which is the sovereignty of God.
Unfortunately, there are many churches that probably, to be honest, should put a disclaimer
on their church bulletin board that would say something like, the God who is preached
at this church, if found similar to the God of the Bible, please understand, is purely
coincidental, because the God that is proclaimed in so many churches today cannot be found
in the pages of the Word of God.
The God we are going to look at today is a God who is absolutely sovereign in what He
does.
The Apostle is a burdened man, as he writes the first five verses of this chapter, because
of the people of Israel, his kinsmen according to the flesh, who have rejected their Christ.
But he goes on to say, It is not as though the word of God has failed.
For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.
Neither are they all children, because they are Abraham's descendants.
But through Isaac your descendants will be named.
That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children
of the promise are regarded as descendants.
For this is the word of promise, at that time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.
And not only this, but there was Rebekah also when she had conceived twins by one man, our
father Isaac.
For though the twins were not yet born and had not yet done anything good or bad, in
order that God's purpose according to His choice might stand, not because of works,
but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, the older will serve the younger.
Just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
What shall we say then?
There is no injustice with God, is there?
May it never be.
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 does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who
has mercy.
For the scripture says to Pharaoh, for this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate
my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.
So then he has mercy on whom he desires, and he hardens whom he desires.
You will say to me then, why does he still find fault for who resists his will?
On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God?
The thing molded will not say to the molder, why did you make me like this?
Will it?
Or does not the potter have right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel
for honor and another for common use?
What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured
with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?
And He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels
of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He has also called, not
from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.
As He says also in Hosea, I will call those who are not My people My people, and her who
was not beloved beloved.
And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, You are not My people, there
shall they be called sons of the living God.
And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, though the number of the sons of Israel be as the
sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved.
For the Lord will execute His word upon the earth thoroughly and quickly.
And just as Isaiah foretold, except the Lord is sabioth had left us to us a posterity,
we would have become as Sodom and would have resembled Gomorrah.
Let's pray together.
Father, as we look at this passage of scripture today, as difficult as it is for our human
understanding, I pray that the Spirit of God would be our teacher so that we may understand
what You want to say to us and reveal to us of Yourself.
In Jesus' name, amen.
The main point that Paul is driving at in chapters 9, 10, and 11 is the fact that God
will yet fulfill His sovereign purpose for Israel.
And that even though that people as a nation have been set aside in judgment, yet God will
fulfill to them what He has purposed for them.
In the outline in your worship folder today, you will see three main points.
If you get nothing else out of this message today except those three sentences, and you
begin to understand what they mean, then you will have gained something very important.
We're dealing here with the matter of Israel's past, her election of God.
For God chose Israel as a nation for Himself.
And there are three truths about that that are revealed to us in our text.
In verses 6-9, we see that election is not based on ancestry.
In verses 10-13, we are given to understand that election is not based on merit.
And then in verses 14-29, that election is based on God's grace and is according to
His own purpose.
Think with me in these early verses about this truth that election is not based on ancestry.
Notice in verse 6, the apostle tells us that even though Israel has failed God, God has
not failed Israel.
He says, it is not as though the purpose of God or the word of God or the decree of God
has failed.
And that word failed means to fall out of place, like some of you fell out of bed this
morning perhaps.
It's a word that's used over in Acts chapter 27 verse 17 of the ship that was driven from
its course by the winds and the storm.
He's saying here that even though Israel had rejected God's word and her Messiah,
Jesus, nonetheless, God's purpose for Israel had not gone off course.
God's purpose for Israel is still on course.
It has not failed.
But then he goes on to say, they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.
Israel, you'll recall, is another name for Jacob.
And he tells us here that even though there were some, there were many actually, who had
descended from Israel physically, they were not all true Israelites spiritually.
There is a distinction here between those who are physically related to their ancestor,
Jacob or Israel, and those who are his spiritual children as well as his physical children.
The same was true in the ministry of the Lord Jesus.
You may recall in the Gospel of John that the Pharisees came to him and argued with
him and tried to trap him in some way to prove that he was blaspheming as he claimed that
he was the I Am, Jehovah God come in the flesh.
And in the middle of that conversation in John chapter 8, Jesus said to them, now listen
who he's talking to, the Pharisees, descendants of Jacob or Israel, very religious men, strong
men in the religion of the Jews, he says to them, you are not of your father Abraham,
but you are of your father the devil.
Actually Dale Carnegie had not been around in those days because Jesus forthrightly said
to them, you are not the sons of your human ancestor Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, but you are
actually spiritually the sons of the devil because you refuse to accept me and to acknowledge
who I am.
So you see even in Jesus' ministry he drew a line of distinction between those who were
the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and those who were their spiritual
descendants because of obedience and faith in the promises of God.
No Israelite could claim to be one of God's chosen, one of God's elect just because he
was a physical descendant of the patriarchs.
And that's important.
God's elective purpose for Israel, you see, is therefore not nullified just because the
physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rejected God's word.
Even though the majority of the physical descendants of the patriarchs ultimately rejected their
Christ, it did not nullify God's word to them, to the nation.
For even then a remnant would be saved and someday God is going to restore the nation
of Israel.
Now what kind of an application can we draw here for ourselves?
Let me just draw one and it's this.
That even today salvation has nothing to do with one's physical ancestry or bloodline.
As somebody has said, God has no grandchildren.
You may come from a godly line of Christians.
Your mother and father may be wonderful believers in Jesus Christ, but dear friend, that does
not automatically make you a Christian.
That does not mean you are saved just because your parents are saved.
It is a personal matter between you and God and whether you will trust Jesus Christ for
yourself as your own savior from your personal sin.
Just as the election is not based upon ancestry when it comes to Israel, so it's true today
with Christians.
Now there may be some who would say, what illustration of this is there?
Well he gives us one.
He brings us back in the Old Testament to the story of Abraham and his two boys.
He says, God said to Abraham, through Isaac your descendants will be named.
In other words, it's not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but
the children of the promise.
What promise?
Verse 9, Sarah shall have a son.
Remember the case of Abraham.
Got to be an old man, no boys.
That was a terrible position for an oriental to be in.
And yet God had said to Abraham, through your seed I am going to bring blessing to the earth.
Abraham believed that promise, but still there was no seed.
At one point he succumbed to the suggestion of his wife Sarah and took her handmaiden,
Hagar as a concubine.
And as a result of that union with Hagar, his son was born, his first born, and his
name was what?
Ishmael, Ishmael.
By all rights, as we think of it, Ishmael should have been his main inheritor.
Ishmael should have had the right of the first born.
And yet God said no.
This boy was born by your own effort, Abraham.
He is a child of your flesh.
The child that's going to inherit the promise is the child who will come to you by a miracle.
So God waited, he delayed until Sarah was dead in her womb for sure and Abraham himself
was impotent.
And then God said, I'm going to come back and visit Sarah and she is going to have a
son.
God gave her the power to conceive and gave Abraham the power to join with her and they
produced out of their love another son.
And that son was whom?
Isaac.
And Isaac was the son of promise.
This was the son who was born miraculously because both of them were too old.
Now get this, Ishmael was just as much a son of Abraham as was Isaac.
But God said, I choose Isaac.
And he overlooked Ishmael and set him aside.
God gave him blessing, read about it in Genesis.
But God said as far as his purpose was concerned for redemption, he was choosing Isaac.
It was through the son of the promise that his purpose would be fulfilled.
Now there were people who might say, well, of course Isaac was chosen.
After all, his mother was Sarah and she was a free woman.
Ishmael's mother was a slave.
That's why God chose Isaac.
Now to show that that is not true, let's proceed to the next point.
And that is God's choice did not depend upon merit.
You see there's the subtle implication in that statement that somehow Isaac had inherent
worth because he was born of a free woman.
So to prove that was not the case, the apostle brings before us another illustration.
This time is the illustration of Isaac and his wife, Rebecca.
She was pregnant with two children, twins.
Before they were born, as it says in verse 11, before they had done good or bad, before
there was any personal merit involved, God selected one of those boys and overlooked
the other.
In this case, he chose Jacob and overlooked Esau.
Now remember, these two have the same mother and father.
Isaac and Ishmael had the same father but two different mothers.
This time we have the same mother, same father, two boys.
They're not born yet.
No good or bad inherent in them.
And God simply looks down and says, I will choose this one.
And he said the older is going to serve the younger one, which was just the opposite is
what you would expect.
Esau was born first and Jacob was born second.
And yet God said, I choose the second born, not the first born.
Now why did God do that?
Because God wanted to underscore to them and to all of us that his purpose, as it says
in verse 11, does not depend upon the merit, get this, of the people who are involved.
If it did, then the people who are involved might fail and then God's purpose would fail.
So God says, I am going to make my choice, my purpose, depend upon nothing except my
choice and my purpose.
It has nothing to do with the merit of the people involved.
When God chose Israel to be his people, it wasn't because there was something special
about them.
It was simply that God chose them.
Illustrated here in Jacob and Esau.
God says he did this in order, verse 11, that his purpose according to choice might stand.
That is that it might remain.
And it still does today.
And you see that is Paul's point here.
Even though there were some of God's chosen people in that broad sense of the term, descendants
physically from Jacob, who had rejected his word and his purpose, it did not at all change
what he had purposed.
Because what he had chosen to do didn't depend upon them, but only upon him.
You see that is the point that Paul is pointing out.
Verse 13, just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
That seems like a very harsh verse, doesn't it?
It's probably a Hebrew idiom, which means something like this.
I have preferred Jacob over Esau.
In other words, God said I choose Jacob I am overlooking, I am disregarding Esau for
my purposes.
What does that mean to us today?
Well, it means just as God's purpose then did not depend upon the merit of those involved,
so today God's elective purpose, his salvation, does not depend upon the merit of the people
involved.
Now frankly, that runs counter to a lot of what you hear from so-called Christian pulpits
these days.
How many times have you been to a funeral, for example, of a man who was godless and
wicked, who gave no evidence at all of God's saving work in his life, and yet there at
his funeral the preacher stands up and says, Joe was a wonderful man.
He was a good husband and father, and he belonged to this lodge, and he gave for that purpose,
and he helped our community.
He was a wonderful man.
The implication is because of all of that, God certainly will be pleased to receive him
into heaven.
There is some kind of merit here, you see, that will impress God and obligate God to
say, well, Joe, I mean after all the preacher said, how can I turn you away?
You see, that is humanism.
That is humanistic Christianity.
It's not biblical Christianity.
God's salvation does not depend one wit upon the worth or the merit of the person
involved.
God can save the moral person and the completely immoral person alike, because whether he is
moral or immoral is not what makes the difference.
Now let's go on to the third statement we have on our outline, kind of pull it together.
If God's elective purpose does not depend upon ancestry, physical relationship, or upon
merit, what one has done, then what does it depend upon?
The answer is that God's elective purposes depend solely upon his grace and his own purpose,
period.
Verses 14 through 29 deal with that statement, and we're going to divide those verses into
two parts.
There are two questions that help us do this.
In verse 14 there's a question, verse 19 there's a question.
Follow me, please, put your thinking caps on, allow the Spirit of God to show you what
is here.
This is astounding truth that we're going to see.
After saying, Jacob I love, but Esau I disregarded, the word of God says, what shall we say then?
There is no injustice with God as there may it never be.
Or let's rephrase that question as some people today would ask it.
Isn't God unjust in selecting one but overlooking another?
That isn't fair.
How can God be just and choose this one and reject that one?
Rabbinic Judaism in that day, like humanistic theology of our day, says this, God is merciful
to those who deserve it.
Doesn't that sound nice?
God helps those that help themselves.
Merciful theology, isn't it?
God is merciful to those who deserve it.
Now you think about that statement a minute.
It is a self-contradictory statement because you see mercy means that there's no reason
for it to be extended, it just is.
A person doesn't deserve it, that's what makes it mercy.
You follow me?
The only true mercy is free mercy.
It has no strings attached.
It is not given because one is related to another or because one has done something.
It's simply given, period.
This is illustrated for us in two men from the Old Testament, Moses and Pharaoh.
God said to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, I will have compassion on whom
I have compassion.
So then it doesn't depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who
has mercy.
You look at the context of that verse from Exodus 33, 19, which is quoted in verse 15
here, and you find that this occurs in a time of conversation between Moses and God.
This happened after the people have worshiped the golden calf.
In the midst of a conversation about all of that, Moses blurts out, oh God, show me your
glory.
God says Moses, I'm paraphrasing, God said, Moses, I can't do that lest you die, though
partially I can show you my glory, but Moses, listen to me, I have mercy on whom I have
mercy and I have compassion on whom I have compassion.
You know what he meant by that?
God was saying, Moses, I'm going to answer your request in part as much as I can, but
it's not because of what you've done or who you are.
I am going to do it just because I'm merciful upon you and I'm compassionate toward you.
That's the reason.
And that's why Paul goes on to say in verse 16 what he does.
It doesn't depend upon the man who wills it.
You see, Moses wanted to see the glory of God or the man who runs, who makes an effort.
Moses would deserve it if anybody could deserve it.
He was a good man, a faithful deliverer of his people.
But it didn't depend upon either of those things.
It was simply the fact that God is a merciful God.
Now, we can understand that.
That's not too hard.
Now we come to Pharaoh.
It gets tougher.
Don't give up yet.
The scripture says to Pharaoh, for this purpose I raised you up to demonstrate my power in
you and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.
God said to Pharaoh, I have raised you up like an actor on the stage.
And the reason I have done that is that I might show my power in you and that my name
might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.
And then it says in verse 18, so then he has mercy on whom he desires.
That's Moses.
But he hardens whom he desires.
And that's Pharaoh.
You see, God hardened the heart of Pharaoh.
If you go back to the book of Exodus, it gives you a little insight into how that it was
accomplished because ten times in those early chapters of Exodus, it says, and Pharaoh hardened
his heart.
Here it says God hardened his heart.
What happened?
Both did.
Pharaoh hardened his heart against what God told him to do and God hardened his heart
in response to it.
Pharaoh hardened his heart again when Moses came and God hardened his heart again.
It was a reciprocal kind of thing, you see.
But the truth is that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh.
God raised him up so that he might do one thing and that was glorify himself.
Did God do that?
Yes.
As Psalm 76, 10 says, the wrath of man shall praise thee.
Pharaoh was filled with wrath and anger toward God and rejected his word and refused to acknowledge
him.
And as a result of that, over a period of months, God poured out plagues upon Egypt like
have never been seen since and only can be compared to what is going to happen someday
in the tribulation period on the whole world.
God displayed his power because of Pharaoh's hardness.
And furthermore, as that power was displayed, God's reputation began to spread throughout
all the nations.
So by the time the Israelites got up to Canaan, they said, oh, you're the people whose God
delivered them down in Egypt.
You see, God's glory had spread because of what happened in Pharaoh's case.
What verse 18 says is that God is selectively merciful.
He has mercy on those whom he chooses to have mercy and he hardens others whom he chooses
to harden.
That's tough, isn't it?
We don't like to think of God in those terms because our humanistic reasoning says that
isn't right.
But that's what God says he does.
You say, why doesn't God show mercy on everybody?
I don't know the answer to that.
God doesn't tell us the answer to that.
The best stab at an answer I could make is this, that if God showed mercy on everybody,
there would be no way for him to display his holiness, his righteousness, and his judgment.
And so he has mercy on whom he will, he hardens whom he will.
And that brings us to the second question, a question you might have in your mind, verse
19.
Why does he still find fault?
Who resists his will?
In other words, how then can such a sovereign God as this find fault?
For who can resist him?
Paul does not directly answer that question, but he does give a threefold reply.
Verses 19 to 21, it's a follow-up question.
Verses 22 to 24, an enlightening statement, and verses 25 to 29, a fulfilled prophecy.
The first part of his answer is actually a question in itself.
And it says this in verse 20, on the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God?
He says, who do you think you are to question what God does?
If God chooses to show mercy in this case and chooses to harden this man, who are you
to say, God, what are you doing?
For after all, you are but the clay, and God is the potter.
He is the one who molds, you're the thing molded.
He has the authority and the right to do what he wants to do.
He is God.
Look at verse 21.
Does not the potter have the right over the clay?
To make from the same lump one vessel for honor, another for common use?
Of course he does.
I've never been a potter, most of the time I'm grateful for that.
But my brother took pottery as a course in college.
And I remember seeing some of the works of art, shall we call them, that he produced
in that course.
And I remember for a time being a little envious about the fact that he was able to get that
clay out there on the wheel as it turned and fashioned it and do what he wanted to with
it.
A potter can have a piece of clay before him and take part of it and make a beautiful piece
of pottery to sit on the shelf for people to admire.
And he can take the other half of the same piece of clay and make a pot out of it if
he wants to.
That's what he's saying here.
Just for common, ordinary use.
Who can question him?
Is the clay going to say, hey, I want to be something else?
Of course not.
Now man isn't just clay.
Man has a will which is stubborn and resistant and rebellious against God.
But what are you saying here that God has the right to do what he wants to?
Now the historical example is Pharaoh and Moses.
You see, God has the right to make a Moses and a right to make a Pharaoh if he wants
to.
And to choose who's going to be which.
And from each of them, God is going to be glorified.
As we've seen, God was glorified in Moses because of the redemption that he brought
to the people of Israel.
God was glorified through Pharaoh because of the judgment that was poured out in that
case.
In both cases, God is glorified as God.
So don't be alarmed when Madeline Murray O'Hare gets on the television and blasphemes
God and says nasty things about God.
Don't think for a minute that God is up in heaven wringing his hands saying, what am
I going to do with Madeline?
My friend, God is God.
And Madeline Murray O'Hare and all the other atheists who tried to blaspheme God and deny
God in the ultimate are actually only bringing glory to God.
Ultimately, all of their attacks against God will be used to exalt God, just as was true
with Pharaoh.
Now he goes on to give an enlightening statement which helps us a little bit.
He says, what if God endured with much patience, vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?
The thing that I see here, the statement that helps me and enlightens me is this, that God
is patient with sinners.
God was patient with Pharaoh.
For many months, God allowed Pharaoh to reject before the tenth and final plague came.
God was patient with him and the people of Egypt.
Nonetheless, they were vessels of wrath, common vessels, to go back to the illustration in
the previous verse, fit for God's wrath to be poured upon.
And he says that they were prepared for destruction.
I want you to notice something very important in that verse.
It does not say God prepared them for destruction.
It says they were prepared for destruction.
What did?
Their own sin.
What was it that prepared Pharaoh for his judgment?
It was his own rebellious spirit against God.
Now the application in Paul's day was for Israel.
Whereas 1,500 years before that, it was Moses and Pharaoh.
In his day, it was Israel, the physical descendants, and Israel, the spiritual descendants.
And he's saying that there were those who were physically a part of Israel, physically
Jews, who were vessels of wrath, prepared by their own rejection of their Messiah for
their judgment, which came nationally in 70 AD.
God was patient with them, though.
God was patient with sinners.
He still is today.
Now we can apply this today in a personal way.
For every person who has not received Jesus Christ is classified as a vessel of wrath.
And throughout eternity to come, he will receive the wrath and the judgment of God, righteously
and justly.
And there is some way in which, although God is not delighted with that, the death of the
wicked does not please him.
He is nonetheless glorified in it because it exalts his holiness.
Now there's a contrast in verses 23 and 24.
He talks here about the vessels of mercy.
Here he's talking about Moses, the children of Israel on that day.
He's talking about true Israelites in his own day, those of Israel who had trusted their
Messiah.
And by way of application, he makes it clear he's talking also about those of us who are
called from the Gentiles.
He says God has beforehand, when?
Before the creation of the world, as we've seen in Romans 8, 28 to 30, prepared glory
for us.
He calls us vessels of mercy.
What did we do to deserve that?
Absolutely nothing.
Couldn't be more clear.
Not because of who we are, not because of what we've done, but because it pleases him,
he sovereignly chooses to make you and you and you and you and you and you and you a
vessel of mercy.
Not because there was some merit in you, not because of who you're related to, but because
God sovereignly said that one and that one and that one, and then he overlooked the rest.
He emphasizes here God's sovereignty.
He doesn't talk much about man's responsibility.
We get to that in chapter 10 somewhat, but here he tells us what God is like.
This is the Godward side of redemption.
Then in verses 25 through 29, and we won't look at this in detail, he simply says that
all of this has taken place in Israel's history according to what God himself foretold.
That is, that the nation as a whole would reject, but that a remnant would receive their
Messiah and be saved, and that beyond that, Gentiles would be included in his purposes.
I do want us to look at verse 29, which says, except the Lord of Sabaoth had left to us
a posterity, we would have become as Sodom and would have resembled Gomorrah.
We can technically hear about Israel, but it's true of all of us.
My friend, if God did not show sovereign grace and mercy toward some, none would be saved.
You would not be saved if God had not sovereignly said, I choose you in Jesus Christ for myself.
Beyond that, we would reserve judgment that would be just as righteous as the judgment
that came on Sodom and upon Gomorrah.
In closing, let me give two applications.
Our salvation likewise is not based upon ancestry or works, but upon sovereign grace.
Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, 4, by grace, you've been saved.
Lot of works, lest any man should boast.
You and I are saved by the free mercy and grace of God.
God is not under obligation to save one person.
The amazing truth is not that he overlooks some, but that he chooses any to be saved.
And then as an extension of that, this application, that we worship a God who is able to accomplish
what he decrees.
And we can humbly depend upon that.
What God has said he will do for us, he will do.
And really that's Paul's point here.
That's Paul's point.
God has chosen us, he's predestined us, he's called us, he's justified us, he's glorified
us.
How do we know he's going to finish that?
Because what God says he's going to do, he does.
He doesn't fail one bit.
Therefore you can stop worrying about your salvation.
If you've trusted Jesus Christ, you are secure in Jesus Christ.
And furthermore you should quit complaining and just be still before God.
You say, well I don't understand what God's doing in my life.
Remember he's the potter, you're the clay.
You may not see what God is doing in this life.
You may not know why some things happen to you that do, but remember who the potter is.
As the psalmist says, be still and know that he's God.
Furthermore, having understood something of what God is like and his awesome sovereignty,
my friend do not play games with God.
If today you feel in your heart a need for Jesus Christ, trust him today.
Do not reject and harden your heart.
You gamble as it were with your own soul.
If you are a Christian, is your life lined up with a God that's described like we've
described God in this passage?
Is your life what it ought to be in the light of who God is?
I hope it is in accordance with his will that you're walking obediently.
If not, I call you today to bring your life into alignment with this sovereign God.
Heavenly Father, may we today be struck by the awesomeness of who you are.
For some of us, that is a hard striking because we have understood from our background other
ideas that come out of humanism.
May we understand who you are as you have revealed yourself and worship you and love
you and obey you.
Of everything else, we praise you for your grace by which you have sovereignly chosen
us to be a part of your family.
Would you sing with me?