“You will say to me, therefore, ‘Why then does he still find fault? For who resists his will?’ On the contrary, who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ Or has the potter no right over the clay, to make from the same lump one piece of pottery for honor and another for dishonor?” (CSB – Read the chapter)

You may have noticed I didn’t post anything at all last week. Then again, you may not have as well. Either way, my bride and I were able to get away for a week to celebrate our upcoming 20th anniversary. It was a wonderful trip in every way, but we are glad to be back home safe and sound and in our own bed again. Let’s get down to business.

Have you ever seen someone do something with their own stuff that you didn’t understand? Maybe you got all judgmental toward them about it. If you had sufficient self-control, you kept all those thoughts to yourself. If not…well…then you probably had some other issues to deal with. Here’s the thing, though: It wasn’t your stuff. You really didn’t have any place to register an opinion on what she did with her stuff. Your opinion doesn’t make a bit of difference. Again: it’s not your stuff. Well, when it comes to creation, that’s all God’s stuff. What He does with it is not something on which we get a vote. Let’s talk about it.

One of the hardest parts of the Gospel to get our minds wrapped entirely around is the fact that God is the sovereign creator of all we see and don’t, and we are creatures who are entirely dependent on Him for everything. We don’t draw even a single breath that He does not enable and sustain. What makes this such a challenge is that in creating us uniquely in His image, He gave us a measure of what we experience as autonomy. He gave us the ability to make meaningful and consequential choices, and He has committed Himself to fully honoring that gift.

How this works out practically is that we have what we experience as a measure of self-determination. We can decide where we will go, what we will do, how we will live, what we will believe, and so on and so forth. Again, this feels to us like autonomy. Because God doesn’t sit up in Heaven and bark instructions at us from His throne, we feel like we are pretty well able to do as we please.

When you give someone a measure of that kind of freedom for a bit, you’ll quickly discover their character as they unwisely take advantage of it for the sake of meeting base desires, or judiciously use it to better themselves and the world around them. Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this with your kids as you gradually prepare them for entering the world of adulthood by letting them experiment with more and more freedom. If you have raised and trained them well, they do pretty well with it. If you haven’t…well, you may still be picking up the pieces of that mess.

But when someone lives with that kind of freedom for very long, they start to get used to it. They start to imagine themselves as well and truly free from any kind of authority. Perhaps the authority of the state is one they’ll still recognize because if they violate public passed laws, they can quickly find themselves facing the real and painful consequences of their decisions. But beyond that? A boss at work maybe? That’s about it. If you’ve invested in a good and close relationship with them as a parent, you might find that they honor some level of authority in your words to them, but not necessarily so.

Well, God made us with that kind of freedom in the beginning, and He has honored it ever since. He honored it even when we decided fairly quickly out of the gate to use it to openly rebel against His natural and rightful authority as our Creator and declare ourselves the only sovereign we would recognize. Because of this, we tend to think of ourselves as autonomous from God. We don’t recognize His authority. And when we encounter reminders of it, especially in the Scriptures, we don’t tend to receive those very well.

Paul was writing this next part of chapter 9 to a group of people who thought differently about God’s authority and their relationship to that authority than we do. Unlike us, they still imagined themselves fairly well beholden to His authority. As a result, their reaction to Paul’s revelation of God’s total sovereignty over the question of who receives an invitation and welcome into His kingdom and who doesn’t was to ask, “Why then does he still find fault? For who resists his will?”

In other words, if God decides who gets in and who doesn’t, then we’re all just stuck with His decision. How can He justifiably hold any of us responsible for our decisions if we aren’t really free? That’s a good question. It’s one worthy of some serious thought and reflection. It’s why theologians have been so uncomfortable with the tension in which the New Testament authors have consistently held the Scylla and Charybdis of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility over the centuries of church history. We keep trying to resolve that tension in favor of one or the other, but the New Testament authors maintain the tension whether we like it or not.

This rhetorical question from Paul seems like a perfect opportunity to speak a word of resolution to the issue. He could have offered some counsel (from the Spirit, of course) that would have brought some relief to our aching minds and avoided centuries of intense, church splitting theological debate. But if anything, his answer creates even more tension and theological heartache. And if his answer was difficult for his original audience to hear, that pales in comparison to how hard it is for modern readers to square with their consistent experience.

Paul’s answer is essentially this: “Who are you to ask God a question like that? You are the creature; He is the Creator. Shut up and receive whatever He gives with gladness.” If anything, Paul’s response here is vastly more difficult for us to deal with today than his initial question, living as we do in a culture that is so accustomed to imagining ourselves to be fully autonomous individuals. “On the contrary, who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ Or has the potter no right over the clay, to make from the same lump one piece of pottery for honor and another for dishonor?”

In other words, God is the one who is sovereign and autonomous. We aren’t. At all. If He wants to do something with His creation, His stuff, that’s His prerogative, and we don’t get a vote. We don’t have value that He doesn’t give us. We don’t have rights that He doesn’t grant us. He doesn’t owe us anything. He isn’t beholden to us in any way. He can do with us whatever He wants. He’s God. We’re not.

Now, when we hear something like that spelled out, our first reaction is one of shock and horror. We immediately imagine God to be basically made in our image rather than the other way around. And because of that, we imagine Him to have a side that is capricious and cruel like we do. We picture Him as the stereotypical mean kid sitting over the ant hill with a magnifying glass. We consider Him—as has been the case with so many of the gods we have made for ourselves over the centuries of human history—to have no value such that we can be treated as utterly dispensable tools to use or not on the way to His accomplishing His selfish personal goals.

Indeed, it’s just as I have said over and over in the past: If we don’t get the character of God right, we will be able to make positive sense out of very little of the Scriptures. This passage is an especially notable example of this fact. If we don’t have a clear and sharp understanding of the fact that God is not only sovereign, but good and just and loving and merciful and kind, this kind of stuff is going to blow us up theologically.

If we imagine God to be basically in our image, sharing in our weaknesses and failings, this will all sound utterly off-putting at best; absolutely terrifying at worst. But if God is perfect in holiness and righteousness, if He made us in His image to be vessels of His love, bearers of His goodness, and partakers in His glory, then there isn’t anything to fear here. If we can trust without reserve or hesitation that He has our best interests in mind and heart – and indeed that He, being the God who made us, knows what our best interests are far better than we do—then there is nothing to fear here at all. In fact, there is far greater reason for us to give ourselves fully to the goodness and grace of this awesome God.

Rather than talking back to God, we are far wiser to receive with gratitude what He plans for us than to ungratefully insist that He meets with our standards and expectations or somehow fits inside our itty-bitty God-box. His ways are higher than ours. Our best wisdom is nothing more than folly to Him. His goodness makes our best deeds look like filthy rags. Again: He is God and we are not.

Now, does this resolve all the tension here? Hardly. But if we are willing to accept it, it does put us in a much better place to be able to live far more comfortably with the tension than we were before because it is indeed unresolved in the Scriptures and history makes abundantly clear that our efforts to deviate from it or otherwise resolve it always wind up going disastrously. His ways and plans are better than ours.

Of course, there’s still this thing about His creating one piece of pottery for honor and another for dishonor, but we’ll unpack that a bit more tomorrow. Until then, it’s good to be back.