Or, God’s Celebration of God’s Sovereignty
Scripture: Romans 9:14-18
Date: February 5, 2023
Speaker: Sean Higgins
In my Rhetoric class we recently hit a part of the curriculum talking about dilemmas. A dilemma (proper) is not just a problem, it’s when you’re given two really unsatisfactory options, when both choices are bad. These dilemmas are often of the moral kind, and there are some famous ones (e.g., the trolley dilemma).
When responding to dilemmas there are a few different approaches. Maybe you’ve heard these phrases before. You can grasp the horns, go between the horns, or rebut the horns. To grasp the horns means to reject one or both of the options as false. To go between the horns means to provide a third option. To rebut the horns is most fun, because it’s flipping the argument on its head.
Romans 9:14 presents a dilemma, and it’s especially tricky because it’s about God’s nature. Of course wumans don’t get to judge God. To think we can judge God is a judgment on ourselves. The Lord is God. He makes the standards; we have to borrow His standards to complain about Him.
But Paul had been around. His career started as one who killed people who he thought to be wrong about God. He murdered in the name of the Lord. He also wasn’t afraid to mix it up with dangerous arguments, and he’s gotten to a point in Romans 9 where questions are coming pretty fast after each other related to God’s nature.
With the Holy Spirit’s push, Paul lets the argument ride, for a bit. God said He would save Israel, many Israelites weren’t saved, is God unfaithful? Part of the answer is that some of Israel aren’t Israel (9:6). There is an elect within the elect, and He’s always faithful to them. So how are the elect (individuals) within the elect (nation) elected? God chooses on His own, without reference to anything He sees in a man (9:11). Does that make God unjust?
This is framed as a dilemma. If God elects freely—not based on anything in a person, then God is unrighteous. If God is not unrighteous, then His election must be based on something in a person and He isn’t free to show mercy to whomever He wants. So God either shows mercy righteously or freely.
But Paul says, the fact that He elects freely is His righteousness. Paul rebuts the horns, he flips the argument around. If God does not elect freely then He is not electing righteously. Unconditional election is His righteous glory revealed. Sovereign mercy belongs with His excellencies (1 Peter 2:10-11)!
Romans 9:14-18 pushes forward for our faith and hope and worship (and still one more step to come in 9:19-23). It builds our understanding of God’s Word and sovereignty, His mercy and His wrath. It shows us the foundation of His grace and His work in history. It gives us a reason to sing even if we are like sheep led to the slaughter.
It doesn’t seem that Paul is simply dealing with a possible misunderstanding or disagreement, as if he’d spent time talking to people after preaching this sermon before. He is doing that, but the setup and the Scripture quotes and the conclusions he makes are about God’s modus operandi, the way the Lord is and the way He works for the way we ought to know Him. These are His regular and excellent ways.
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! We’ve heard this already; “What shall we say?” is a question in Romans 3:5 and 6:1, and it’ll come back again in 9:30. There is something that people say, so much so that it’s an anticipated response.
The charge is that if God elects like this, meaning, if He elects one twin but not another, and if He elects before they were born, without any reference to their good or bad, and if He elects without any regard for their religious parentage, then how can God be righteous? For eight chapters we’ve been hearing about righteousness, God’s perfect righteousness and our lack of any righteousness and how He will count us righteous based on Christ’s righteousness if we believe. Is it possible after all this that God is ἀδικία, the one with injustice?
“Absolutely not!” (NET). “God forbid.” (KJV) “May it never be!” (NASB). “Not at all.” (NIV). By no means!! This is a formula (the negated optative - μὴ γένοιτο) that denies not just the future, but denies the possibility. That’s the answer to the question. But there are two “for”s and each one has it’s own “so then.”
Here is the first way Paul shows that we can know that God is righteous because He chooses. For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
The quote comes from Exodus 33:19. We looked at the context of this reference last week. Moses petitions the LORD to go with the people of Israel from Mt. Sinai up to the Promised Land, and when the LORD agrees, Moses asks to see the Lord’s glory (Exodus 33:18). Paul quotes the second half of verse 19, which begins, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, ‘The LORD.’ And I will have mercy….”
What it means to be God, what His name communicates, what makes Him excellent/glorious, what reveals His goodness, is God’s self-determining mercy. When God exercises this authority He is doing nothing other than being Godly. If He were not to exercise His Godliness, then He would be giving glory to something else less glorious than Himself. That is what would be unrighteous.
Compare this with the revelation of God’s wrath in Romans 1:18 where unrighteousness is mentioned twice, and unrighteousness is connected to ungodliness and to the suppression of truth about God Himself. Righteousness is less about checking obedience/disobedience boxes and more to do with a commitment to recognizing and proclaiming God’s excellencies.
In verse 16 Paul reiterates the same point of verses 6-13. So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. The “depend” part is assumed in translation; we’re talking about how it is decided who gets mercy. It’s not because anyone wants it, it’s not because they do something to chase it, let alone catch it. There’s nothing internal or external to a man that makes the difference. Election is unconditional. Those who are not accursed and cut off from Christ (see 9:3) but given a share of His presence and blessings, are freely loved by God who has mercy.
“[N]o cause higher than His own will can be thought of.” (John Calvin)
In 9:6-13 there were not just the positives, Isaac and Jacob, but also Ishmael and Esau. In particular, God said “The older will serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23) and that had scriptural support, “As it is written (in Malachi 1:2-3), ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’”
Okay, maybe we can come to terms with unconditional election to salvation if we remember that everyone already starts off in sin, no one deserves mercy, so sure, God doesn’t elect based off of good works (whew! since no one does good anyway, Romans 3:10, 12). But certainly God only shows wrath on those who deserve it, right?
Yes, the wrath of God is revealed against the unrighteous (Romans 1:18). The judgment of God falls on those who practice disobedience (Romans 2:2). “He will render to each one according to his works…for the who obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury” (Romans 2:6, 8). Men deserve death as the wages of their sin (Romans 6:23).
But there is more. In Romans 9 we read that Jacob wasn’t “loved” because of “good” and Esau wasn’t “hated” because of “bad.” There was God’s righteousness in sovereign mercy (Jacob, and “whoever” verses 15-16) and so also in sovereign hardening (Esau, and Pharaoh and “whomever,” verses 17-18). The last part of the paragraph goes out of its way to include the opposite of God’s self-determining mercy.
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.”
Paul quotes from Exodus as the Lord prepares the seventh plague of hail (with three more plagues after that). And it’s also interesting that right before Exodus 9:16 the Lord through Moses told Pharaoh that the only reason Pharaoh and the Egyptians weren’t dead yet is that He had spared them. But the sparing was to set them up for greater judgment. The Lord was getting more glory by enabling the Egyptians to treat His people more unfairly.
Paul makes the inference, the therefore: So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. Pharaoh was not a one-off.
A few more things.
First, Paul is rebutting the dilemma, not denying a premise. God does love/hate and save/harden apart from works. This is negative election, or what is called Reprobation. They are “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” (9:22). If election is under-appreciated by so many professing Christians, reprobation is downright reprehensible to them.
Second, Paul anticipates the next push back in the next verse: “You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who can resist His will?’” If men were judged and hardened only because they deserved it, there would be no reason for this question, and we’ll see Paul’s answer to it in verses 20-23.
Third, this isn’t a denial of man’s, or Pharaoh’s, responsibility for their sin. But Paul’s point here is about God’s freedom to act.
For all the people that like to point out when Exodus describes Pharaoh as hardening his own heart, it’s more than a matter of counting how many times God hardened vs. Pharaoh hardened. God told Moses what He was going to do to Pharaoh (Exodus 4:21). God tells Pharaoh what He was going to do through Pharaoh (Exodus 9:16). It wasn’t God’s response, it was God’s purpose of election “in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—“ (9:23).
“Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145:3). His mercy is infinitely excellent. His justice is infinitely excellent. His righteousness, as in His commitment to showing off His infinitely excellent glory, is perfect. He is not a grand-father figure sitting in His chair giving pats on the head to those who don’t give Him grief.
So there is no dilemma for God. Freedom to show mercy is God’s glory, goodness, and name (see Exodus 33:18-19). His purpose of election stands (Romans 9:11) and it belongs with His outstanding excellencies.
His mercies are new every morning, and His excellencies are majestic for eternity. Live from faith to faith in His righteousness. He is committed to His glory, which means He is committed to showing His mercies to and through you. His mercies are able.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 1:24–25, ESV)