Thank you for your patience over the past several days while I was unable to work on the blog. The case of poison ivy I contracted was bad enough to cause a systemic reaction because my immune system thought it was fighting off something serious and it overreacted to the rash. It turned out I also had a UTI which must have been going on for a while without my knowing it, so I spent Monday morning at the emergency room after spending Sunday night at the emergency room with my little dog. We have had a rough several days and I hope we are both on the mend now.
When we concluded our last passage, Paul was explaining to his readers that even before Isaac or Ishmael were born, God had already chosen to make His great nation Israel of the line of Isaac. And also, before either Jacob and Esau were born, God had already chosen Jacob and rejected Esau as the forefather of that nation. God is able to do these things because He sees the future as if it has already happened. He doesn't cause us to accept or reject Him; He simply knows who will accept or reject Him.
Paul knows some of his readers might accuse God of being unfair for judging people on the basis of choices they haven't even made yet, so he asks, "What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.'" (Romans 9:14-15) We don't deserve mercy or compassion. We can never say that God owes us these things, for we are sinners and lawbreakers. God therefore has the right to dispense mercy and compassion however He chooses, though there is nothing arbitrary about it. As we have seen from the example of Jacob and Esau, Jacob was a man God knew was going to seek Him, while Esau was a man God knew was going to be "godless". (Hebrews 12:16) The KJV renders the word "godless" as "profane", meaning a person who treats the Lord with irreverence and disrespect.
"It does not, however, depend on human desire or effort, but on God's mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: 'I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display My power in you and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth.'" (Romans 9:16-17) Abraham would naturally have chosen his eldest son Ishmael to be his heir, but God had chosen Isaac before he was even born. Isaac wanted his eldest son Esau to be his heir, but God had chosen Jacob before he was even born. It is God who promotes and God who demotes according to His purposes and according to His foreknowledge. God quite often promotes the godly, as proven by the rise to power of men like Joseph, Daniel, and David. At other times He promotes a wicked ruler in order to fulfill a purpose. He allowed the wicked pharaoh of the Exodus to rise to power, not because he deserved the throne, but because God was going to be able to display His awesome power through pharaoh's resistance of Him.
If we knew what God knows, and if we could see the big picture like He can, it would make sense to us why He does the things He does. We sometimes see very wicked people placed in charge. We sometimes see godly people overlooked. We try to make sense of it and can't. Even the Apostle Paul, brilliant though he was, could not explain or understand such things, which is why he will later say, "Oh, the depths of the riches of the knowledge and wisdom of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!" (Romans 11:33) Not everything God does is going to make sense to us, which is why the Bible reminds us "we walk by faith, not by sight". (2 Corinthians 5:7)
No comments:
Post a Comment