“What then? Israel did not find what it was looking for, but the elect did find it. The rest were hardened, as it is written, ‘God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear, to this day.’ And David says, ‘Let their table become a snare and a trap, a pitfall and a retribution to them. Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and their backs be bent continually.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

If you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the journey that is parenthood, you know that one of the biggest ongoing challenges is figuring out how to effectively and adequately discipline children who misbehave. While there are plenty of books out there on the subject, no two children are the same. Some methods work on some children, other methods work on other children. There is no one-size-fits-all approach you can use that will do the trick every single time. That being said, there are some generally transferable approaches worth knowing. One of these is that sometimes the natural consequences are the most effective punishment. The outcome of a particular decision can be its own most effective consequence. This idea plays into what Paul has to say here. Let’s give it a look.

Let’s pause here at the beginning and remember what the whole context here is. Paul is wrestling with how Israel as a nation, a genetic people, could have rejected God’s Messiah when they were given the absolute best opportunity to be ready to receive Him of anybody else in the whole world. He’s already clarified that they have rejected Him. He’s just wrestling with how that could have happened.

Having spent some time thinking through that, in this final part of this section, Paul starts thinking through some of the consequences of their decision especially as these concern the fate of the Gentiles. Where this is going to land over the rest of this week and next is that Israel’s rejection is the Gentiles’ ticket to board the train. We’ll get to that soon. For now, Paul connects their rejection with something he said back at the beginning of the letter.

Think back with me all the way to chapter one. When Paul was describing the heartbreaking path of rejecting God that so many people walk, He said this: “For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.” (Romans 1:21-23)

That’s what happened. Paul next described the consequences of this rejection. Don’t miss this part. Over the next nine verse Paul three times says, “God delivered them over.” God delivered them over in the desires of their heart, to disgraceful passions, and to a corrupt mind. As we talk about then, the point here is that God allowed (and allows) the rejection of these folks to become its own form of judgment. These folks made and make poor choices with respect to God, but rather than smiting them with some divine punishment, God simply let natural consequences of their actions be punishment enough.

To put all of this another way, if someone rejects God long enough and thoroughly enough, their rejection becomes self-reinforcing and the natural consequences of separating themselves more and more fully from Him (i.e., corrupted minds and hearts that lead to corrupted actions with wide-ranging consequences) become their own form of punishment.

Israel rejected God. They went on a search for Him, but because they were committed to looking in the wrong places, they never could find what they were looking for. But the elect—that is, those who were willing to accept God for who He is and His plans for what they are—did find Him. Those folks who were willing to look in the right places found what they were searching for. They found Him. And when they found Him, they found life. Eternal life.

For the rest, though, those who refused to search where He could be found, they were hardened Paul says. That is, their rejection became calcified in their hearts and they lost their ability to believe in their own religious tradition. God took their rejection and made it their punishment. But like with Pharaoh, this hardening of their hearts which Paul put in active terms, was not the result of God’s taking a group of people who were interested and driving them away. Instead – again, like Pharaoh – He allowed a group of people who were already determinedly walking away from Him to finally do as they pleased rather than forcing them to bend to His perfect will and accept the Gospel.

The last two parts of this little passage see Paul quoting two different Old Testament sources. The first is from Isaiah 29, the second from David in Psalm 69. Both are intended to demonstrate that this hardening was not some capricious, vindictive decision on God’s part. We may operate on the principle of petty retribution, but God doesn’t. Instead, this was something God knew was going to happen and had prophesied about its happening a very long time before it finally did.

In Isaiah 29, the prophet is speaking a word of judgment against the city and people of Jerusalem. The culture of the city then, and the broader nation with it, had become hardened against God. They hadn’t given up the rituals of worship, but they didn’t really mean anything by them. They were just religious practices and nothing more. “The Lord said: ‘These people approach me with their speeches to honor me with lip-service, yet their hearts are far from me, and human rules direct their worship of me.'” (Isaiah 29:13) They weren’t pursuing God in the context of a relationship. They were using Him as a means of getting what they wanted so they could feed their relationship with their real god: their own appetites.

As a result, God stopped playing ball by the people’s rules. They were determined to do life apart from a genuine connection to Him, so He got out of their way and let them have what they wanted. ‘Therefore, I will again confound these people with wonder after wonder. The wisdom of their wise will vanish, and the perception of their perceptive will be hidden.” (Isaiah 29:14) But He wanted them to know that their rejection would bring consequences. The path they were pursuing would cause a flourishing of injustice because that’s all that’s to be found on a path leading away from the God who is the source and inspiration of all justice. And while the fruits of that injustice would be its own punishment, because He is a just God, He would also bring judgment on them for their embrace of injustice when the time was right.

But if God’s interaction with the people in Isaiah’s prophecy was formal, David’s words are passionate. He speaks as one rejected and abused and alone and crying out to God from the midst of His misery. From out of his hurt, David cries out to God in honesty, asking God to judge his enemies for unjustly pursuing him by letting the things that would otherwise be good in their world become sources of judgment. Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, sees this as words God put on David’s lips to prefigure His own hurt and anger at being rejected and unjustly pursued by those who should have been closest to Him.

Living a life apart from God doesn’t make someone a bad person. There are countless examples to put the lie to that bad argument that falls on the lips of too many naive believers trying to polemically explain why everyone should follow Jesus. The reason for this, though, is not that being disconnected from God sours a person’s character. Rather, we are all broken by sin apart from God. We’re bad people first and God makes us good. Because all people are made in God’s image, all of us are capable of occasionally reflecting His goodness on our own just like a broken clock is right twice a day.

The problem Paul is addressing here is not someone who is ignorantly or even simply disinterestedly walking a path other than God’s. That’s not a good thing, but that wasn’t what was happening with Israel. Their rejection was more willful. It was intentional. And they were leaning into it. And their rejection was becoming its own form of judgment. In refusing to acknowledge God in Christ, they were losing their ability to believe in Him in the first place.

What this all means for us is that sharing the Gospel really matters. But in our sharing, we must always keep in mind that Gospel transformation happens because of what God enables and allows, not our own efforts. God is the one who ultimately changes hearts, and when people reject your faithful delivery of the message of salvation, they aren’t rejecting you, they are rejecting Him. If you’ve done your part winsomely and well, that’s between them and God. Your job is simply to love and bear witness.