Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
The fall of Israel and the call of Gentiles reflect the mystery of God’s sovereign purpose in history. Yet this subject of God’s choice — known as ‘election’ or ‘predestination’ — raises many questions and arouses much controversy, mainly because of misunderstandings of who God is. In this message, preached at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 2 September 2007, Rob Yule shows that if God is properly understood as the sole sovereign power in the universe, many objections to predestination fall away, and the relationship between God’s choice and our responsibility become clear.
I’ve subtitled this message ‘The Riddle of God’s Choice’. A riddle is an intellectual puzzle: something which tests our ingenuity to find its answer or meaning. God’s sovereign choice is a riddle. It’s a challenge to our minds and understanding.
Paul is grappling with the issue of why so many of his fellow Jews failed to believe in Jesus as their Messiah when he came. In the next chapter he will show that there’s a human factor in this: the unbelief of his fellow-Jews. But in this chapter Paul says there is a divine factor. God’s choice is involved. God, in his sovereign purpose and inscrutable wisdom has used the fall of Israel to bring about the call of the Gentiles.
First of all Paul considers whether the unbelief of Israel means that God’s promises have failed (9:6). This is a crucial issue. How can we Christians be sure that God will keep his promises to us, if he hasn’t kept them to his chosen people the Jews? Paul’s answer is that God’s promises haven’t failed. The majority of Jews may not have believed in their Messiah, but a minority have.
God’s promise isn’t fulfilled simply by being a physical descendent from Abraham, but by exercising faith in God like Abraham. Abraham had seven sons by three women, but only Isaac inherited the promise, because only he was born according to God’s promise and will. Physical descent alone doesn’t give you a share in God’s promise.
Paul is here expressing a view that is consistent with what John the Baptist and Jesus had already said. John the Baptist told the religious leaders, ‘Do something to show that you really have given up your sins. Don’t start saying that you belong to Abraham’s family.’ (Luke 3:8, CEV). And Jesus told the people, ‘If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did.’ (John 8:39, CEV).
Just because you are born into a Christian family, live in a Christian country, or attend a Christian church doesn’t make you acceptable to God. It’s not your physical {text:soft-page-break} descent, your social privilege, or your church connections that make you a Christian, but faith in Jesus Christ and obedience to God’s will.
God’s promise hasn’t failed. In every generation there have been some Jews who have inherited God’s promise. They used to be known as ‘Hebrew Christians’. Today they prefer to call themselves, ‘Messianic Jews’. Paul introduces the theme of the believing remnant who will be saved, developed later in the chapter (9:27-29).
Examples of this remnant of Jewish believers are Sir William Herschel, the eighteenth century English astronomer; Joseph Samuel Frey, the founder of CMJ, the Church’s Ministry to the Jewish People; Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth century British Prime Minister and writer; Felix Mendelssohn, the nineteenth century German composer; Alfred Edersheim, the nineteenth century English biblical scholar; and Michael Solomon Alexander, appointed in 1841 as the first Jewish-Christian Bishop of Jerusalem since AD 135 (Hugh Schonfield, The History of Jewish Christianity, pp. 144-149).
Paul now comes to the heart of the riddle: God’s sovereign choice, God’s predestination. There are two common objections people make to predestination, and Paul deals with both:
Isn’t it unjust of God to choose some people before they were born, before they’d done good or bad? Isn’t it unfair of God to choose some people and not others: Jacob, not Esau; Isaac, not Ishmael; some Jews and not other Jews?
Answer: God is perfectly at liberty to show mercy to whoever he chooses. ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ (9:14). What is mercy? Mercy is kindness shown to those who don’t deserve it. No one deserves God’s mercy — for we have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (as Paul showed at the beginning of the letter, 3:23). To show mercy to sinners who don’t deserve it is God’s free choice, his sovereign right and prerogative.
Illustration: God chose Moses to show his mercy, and he chose Pharaoh to show his power. Did Pharaoh deserve God’s mercy? How many opportunities did God give Pharaoh to respond and let the people of Israel leave Egypt (Exodus 7-12)? God gave Pharaoh not one, not two, but ten opportunities — and Pharaoh refused all ten. Ten times he said ‘No’ to God, closed his heart, refused God’s opportunity, and invited God’s judgement.
We resist God’s mercy at our peril. Mercy resisted hardens the heart. Love refused calluses our conscience, makes us insensitive to God’s will for our lives.
How can God blame us, hold us morally responsible, if his will is irresistible?
Answer: the question makes the mistake of treating human beings and God as if they were on the same level. But God is greater than us, just as a potter is greater than the pottery he or she makes. There’s a difference in kind between the Creator and the creature. We creatures can exercise our wills only once we exist; but the Creator exercises his will by bringing us into existence. The Maker is greater than the thing made. God’s will is sovereign and unlimited; our wills are circumscribed and limited.
Another way to put this is this: if you could fully understand predestination you would be God. The fact that you don’t fully understand is a sure sign that you are less than God! You’re a pot, not a potter!
Paul now moves on to one of the greatest evidences that God’s sovereign choice is real and is constantly at work in people’s lives and in human history. This evidence is the fulfilment of prophecy.
Liberal Bible scholars and theologians don’t believe that there is a higher mind and a greater purpose at work in history. That’s why they redate books like Daniel from the 6th century BC to the 2nd century BC, because they don’t accept that Daniel could have predicted the rise and fall of four great world empires during that period — the Babylonian, Persian, Alexandrian and Seleucid — before these great events occurred.
But Paul says you can know that God’s predestination is at work in history because you can see its results in the fulfilment of prophecy:
1. God foretold beforehand that Gentiles would become his people, even though they weren’t his covenant people (9:25-26). The prophet Hosea said, in the 8th century BC, that Gentiles — those not God’s people — would one day become God’s people:
‘I will call them “my people” who are not my people;
and I will call her “my loved one” who is not my loved one.’
(Hosea 2:23)
God was bringing this prophecy to pass, in Paul’s lifetime, eight centuries later.
2. God foretold long ago that only a remnant of Jews would be saved, even though they were his covenant people (9:27-29). The prophet Isaiah said, early in the 7th century BC, that only a minority of Jews would be saved out of the multitude of Israel’s population:
‘Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand of the sea,
only the remnant will be saved.’
(Isaiah 10:22)
This ancient prophecy too was coming to pass in Paul’s day.
So both the calling of the Gentiles and the saving of a Jewish remnant are undeserved. They are expressions of God’s mercy to sinners, when both Gentiles and Jews deserved his wrath and judgment. Neither Gentiles nor Jews deserve God’s mercy. But God has chosen to show mercy. As Paul will say later, ‘God has imprisoned all in disobedience, so that he may be merciful to all.’ (11:32, NRSV).
Rob Yule, 2 September 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
