“And what if God, wanting to display his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he did this to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory—on us, the ones he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? As it also says in Hosea, ‘I will call Not My People, My People, and she who is Unloved, Beloved. And it will be in the place where they were told, you are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God.’ But Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, ‘Though the number of Israelites is like the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved; since the Lord will execute his sentence completely and decisively on the earth.’ And just as Isaiah predicted: ‘If the Lord of Armies had not left us offspring, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

So, yesterday we started a really uncomfortable conversation about God’s sovereignty and our subjection to that sovereignty. We like to think of ourselves as truly and completely free individuals. We are autonomous beings. And then Paul asks something like, “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?'” That hits hard. And the more you think about it, the harder it hits. In fact, it hits hard enough that whereas I was originally going to treat these verses in the same post as yesterday’s passage, there was enough here when I started writing that I had to break it up into two posts. Without further ado, then, let’s keep working through Paul’s exaltation of God’s sovereignty and what that means for us.

We left things sitting in a rather tension-fraught place yesterday. Paul put a pretty significant question on the lips of his readers. It was a question that was entirely natural for us to ask given the things he had recently been talking about. Is God right to judge given His declaration in what Paul thought of simply as the Scriptures and we call the Old Testament that He has mercy on whom He chooses and hardens the hearts of whom He pleases? That’s a legitimate question to ask. But rather than answering it, Paul began scolding us for considering questioning God like we were in a place to meaningfully do that.

In the legal world, you will occasionally hear of a case being rejected because the plaintiffs don’t have the proper standing to bring a certain question before the court. That doesn’t mean the question itself isn’t a legitimate one. Rather, it means that the ones asking the question and demanding the courts give an answer aren’t the ones who can justifiably ask it. The questioners aren’t the ones who are going to be sufficiently impacted by the answer they are demanding that the courts give. To put that more plainly, if the next town over passes a law that I don’t like but which isn’t going to impact me in a meaningful way, I can’t sue them in order to challenge the merits or constitutionality of the law in court. I don’t have standing.

Paul is saying here that we don’t have the standing to question God. Now, again, if God was basically an overpowered version of ourselves, that would be a problem. Paul, though, has spent the previous eight chapters of this letter establishing God’s character, His commitment to our good, and the incredible love He has for us. We don’t have to worry about God’s being an overpowered version of us with all our faults and failings because He’s not that. He’s God. And He is good.

But this doesn’t change or take away from the fact that He is totally and completely sovereign over His world. And in that sovereignty, He can do as He pleases. Now, what He pleases is always good because He is good. It’s not like there is some arbitrary, external-to-God standard of good that He lives up to or that good is capriciously determined by what He does the way some would try to frame the matter here. Rather, God is good and righteous and holy and just and loving, and so He naturally does things that are consistent with His character.

It is with this firmly in mind that we consider what Paul says next. In the first century, people had far less trouble with the idea of the gods doing as they pleased and our not having the standing to question them than we do today. The Jewish people were very comfortable with the idea that God was in charge, that He made the world, and that if He planned for some people to be “objects of wrath prepared for destruction,” then He had a good and just reason for that.

Through the lens of the full counsel of Scripture, and, yes, the influences of our culture, we don’t think about God’s actions in the same way today. We understandably want to avoid even the impression that any kind of moral evil could be attributed to God. We think in terms of God honoring that ability to make meaningful and consequential choices we talked about yesterday and molds and shapes His plans accordingly. He both knows what we are going to do and doesn’t impact in any way our doing of it such that our choice to do it is meaningful and consequential. In other words, His knowledge is both perfect and non-determinative. In short, He is sovereign and we are free.

So, when we see what appears to be determinative language in the Scriptures, keeping the whole council of Scripture in mind, we can read and understand this through the lens of God’s goodness and holiness; His justice and His love. For Paul to speak of people who were somehow “objects of wrath prepared for destruction,” doesn’t mean that God just randomly picked some people to be sacrificial lambs for the sake of some others who are “objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory.” Rather, God allows some to make the free choice to oppose and reject Him and His plans and ultimately receive the judgment and destruction that lies at the end of that path (in spite of efforts to invite them away from such an end), knowing that their actions will result in many others choosing to follow Him faithfully. That, in fact, is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes what he does next. Look at this with me.

“And what if God, wanting to display his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he did this to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory…”

I’ve said many, many times before that context is king. Taking those verses entirely out of context can be framed for modern-minded folks to make God look like a monster. That’s not how Paul thought about it, and, more importantly, it’s not what Paul had in mind. We have to keep reading to understand what Paul is talking about here. “And what if he did this to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory – on us, the ones he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?”

Are you with him here? Paul is talking about God’s decision to open the doors of His kingdom to those outside of the traditionally understood “people of Israel.” The fact that many if not most of the Jewish people in the first century rejected Jesus as the Messiah and the Gospel of God’s kingdom bothered Paul greatly. He’s already shared his anguish over that fact. But it didn’t phase him in terms of celebrating what God was continuing to do in revealing Himself and His kingdom to the rest of the world. Those who rejected His offer of salvation demonstrated, as the apostle John would later put it, that they were never really part of “Israel” to begin with. They were part of a genetic tribe which bore that particular designation, yes, but they weren’t part of the people of faith God was building to be the vehicle through which He would bring the blessing of His kingdom to the rest of the world.

What Paul recognized here was that God was using the rejection of some as the means to secure the reception of many others, both those who were traditionally considered part of His people (like Paul himself), and those who were not (the Gentiles). And, this was something God had said was going to happen. He knew there were going to be those who would reject Him from among His own people, and He knew that He was going to bring into His people those who were previously not considered a part of His people.

“As it also says in Hosea, ‘I will call Not My People, My People, and she who is Unloved, Beloved.’ ‘And it will be in the place where they were told, you are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God.’ But Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, ‘Though the number of Israelites is like the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved; since the Lord will execute his sentence completely and decisively on the earth.’ And just as Isaiah predicted: ‘If the Lord of Armies had not left us offspring, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah.'”

God choose whomever He will to be His people. He is not limited by any means we might imagine or construct to put on Him. At the same time, we are each responsible for our choices. We can freely choose whether or not to follow Him; whether or not to believe He exists in the first place. He will honor both that choice and the natural consequences of that choice. We can choose to be a part of the judgment that will one day come to the world for its sinfulness and rejection of God as rightful king and judge, or we can choose to be part of the blessing God will bring to the world when, after His cleansing judgment, He restores it to its rightful and intended glory. Whatever we choose, though, God knew we would choose that and planned for it in advance. He does not get surprised.

Ultimately, it will be His plans for blessing that will last. Those plans are why you are following Him today if you are. And if you are not, the choice to take part in those plans will yet be the most important one you ever make. God’s got plans for your doing that very thing. I hope you will join Him in those.