“What should we say then? Is there injustice with God? Absolutely not! For he tells Moses, ‘I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ So then, it does not depend on human will or effort but on God who shows mercy. For the Scripture tells Pharaoh, ‘I raised you up for this reason so that I may display my power in you and that my name may be proclaimed in the whole earth.’ So then, he has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy and he hardens whom he wants to harden.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the great theological debates within the church over the centuries is the question of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. Where’s the line? How do those two things go together? Do they go together? Which one should get emphasized more and which one less? Can you emphasize both equally and still be intellectually consistent? The real challenge here is actually not the debate itself, but the fact that the Scriptures seem to hold both ideas in tension and they don’t resolve it. Some passages seem to point pretty clearly in one direction. Some passages point in the other direction. Here’s one that points toward the sovereignty side of the equation. Let’s take a few minutes to examine what Paul is saying and what he’s not saying.

The last thing Paul said in the previous section was to quote from Malachi where God famously (infamously?) declared “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.” In other words, He chose the one but not the other. The natural question in response to this declaration is how could it possibly be just of God to choose one but not the other to be included in His covenant promises?

The trick, of course, is that the charge of injustice is silly considering that God’s covenant promises were always about using one people to bring blessing to the rest of the world, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. It is hard for us to see God actively choosing one person over another. That simply doesn’t seem just to us. Paul understands this struggle and addresses it next. “What should we say then? Is there injustice with God?”

One of the ideas I come back to often here is one that I have tried to drive into the hearts and minds of my church members as well. That idea is this: We have to get God’s character right if we are going to be able to make positive sense out of much of anything in the Scriptures. If we don’t really know who He is, we will either believe something wrong about Him leading to behavior that is inconsistent with His, we will start following some other god thinking we’re actually following Him, or we’ll reject Him on the basis of false premises. None of those are good outcomes.

So then, what is it about God’s character that we need to understand here? God is sovereign and free. God is not dependent on us at all. He is the one who created the world and everything in it at His pleasure. He didn’t have to create. He didn’t need us. He didn’t need anything in creation. Rather, His love was (and is) so great that He wanted the chance to share it with more free individuals than just Himself. He knew that He is glorious and worthy of worship, and so He wanted other creatures to be able to enjoy the goodness of His presence and the blessings of worshiping Him. His sovereignty over His creation is absolute.

What this means practically is that He can choose or not choose whomever He wants to be part of His covenant promises to reveal Himself to the world so that the whole world can know Him. And when He does this, because He is perfectly sovereign over His creation, there is no injustice with Him or His choosing whatsoever. Thus Paul’s answer to his question: “Absolutely not!” That, as we have talked about before, is the strongest negation available in the Greek language. He’s used it several times before and will a few more yet again. Paul is stringently insistent that there is no injustice with God at any level.

Having stated this, he goes on to explain. “For he tells Moses, ‘I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.'” God is free to choose whomever He wants to be a part of His people. This has always been the case. As He told the people through Moses: He could have chosen someone else. He didn’t choose them because of anything inherent to them, but simply because He chose them. He chose them because He was fulfilling His promises to Abraham. And He chose Abraham because He chose Abraham. Abraham wasn’t particularly worthy of being the father of God’s people spiritual or otherwise. He went on to quickly demonstrate how unworthy he was. But God chose him and worked with and around his foibles all the same because He is sovereign and good.

Just as God chose the people of Israel to be the vehicle through whom He would accomplish His plans to bless the world, He didn’t choose Pharaoh. “For the Scripture tells Pharaoh, ‘I raised you up for this reason so that I may display my power in you and that my name may be proclaimed in the whole earth.'” In other words, and as we talked about way back toward the beginning of our Exodus journey, God used Pharaoh’s freely chosen resistance to Him and His plans to advance those very plans. Pharaoh was never going to be able to meaningfully oppose God. God is God and Pharaoh was not. But God was nonetheless perfectly able to use his rejection to move things forward. And that’s just what He did.

Being a part of God’s plans and promises, then, doesn’t depend on any amount of effort or will on our part. It’s all about God’s merciful choice. “So then, it does not depend on human will or effort but on God who shows mercy.” And again, “So then, he has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy and he hardens whom he wants to harden.” God chooses and we are the beneficiaries of His choosing.

Okay, so then how does this factor into that divine sovereignty versus human accountability debate? Well, on the one hand, this seems to point pretty firmly in the direction of God’s sovereignty. Paul has gone out of his way to emphasize God’s choice almost at the expense of our freedom and responsibility. Before we take this and run in the direction of forming a conclusion about the nature of salvation, let’s take a small step back and remember the context here.

Paul is not talking about salvation. He’s talking about the geopolitical and religious group considered to be Israel in his day and their rejection of God. He’s talking about how God’s promises to this Israel are not somehow in error now that they have rejected them. He’s talking about the fact that the distinction “Israel” as an indicator of a line of people God intended to use to reveal Himself to the world so that He could invite all the world into a right relationship with Him is not primarily a genetic one. No one was simply born into it. Yes, the children of someone who had received God’s choice to be a part of the covenant would be automatically assumed to be a part of it as well, but they would eventually be responsible for receiving His choice or not. And, as Paul has made clear, just because one child was born to a parent who was chosen to be a part of the covenant doesn’t mean they would be as well. A genetic line is a line not a cluster. God’s choice was the determining factor.

When it comes to the question of salvation, what we have to keep in mind is that God’s covenant promises were made to a small group of people so that He would be able to bless everyone. Some people still refuse to receive this blessing, but God exercised His choice of some along the way to the revelation of Jesus to the world so that He could invite the whole world into a covenant relationship with Him through Jesus. God’s choice was always of everyone. He sovereignly and carefully chose certain people along the way, but the invitation to be the people of God and the promises that came along with such a distinction was for the world. Now, because of His choosing, anyone can be a part of God’s covenant people. We simply receive that choosing in Christ. We’ll talk more about how that works in chapter 10.

For now, though, this leaves us with another difficult question. If God chose some and not others along the way of revealing Jesus to the world, how can He be upset with those who didn’t participate in His covenant? That’s where Paul goes next. We’ll join him in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.