Chosen By God (Romans Week 21) by Michael Williams

Romans 9v6-29 raises some of the Bible’s most challenging questions about God’s sovereignty, election, and human responsibility. In this message, we carefully explore Paul’s teaching on God’s choosing love, discovering that His sovereignty is never arbitrary but always serves His redemptive purposes in history. Rather than leading us to speculation or pride, these truths call us to humility, worship, and confidence that the God who began the work of salvation is faithfully accomplishing His good purposes. 

Transcript

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We're gonna get into our message today. We've been in the book of Romans and we're in chapter 9, which is a dense, heavy chapter, and so we're gonna dive right in and sort of just go through it verse by verse. You should, if you got some at the door, have some notes. There's not actually fill in the blanks, but but today's passage is uh we'll just call it complicated and has been used and misused by lots of different church traditions. And so we're gonna just try to go through it really carefully. And you might feel a little bit like this is more teachery or lectury, and if that's the case, I'm sorry. Next week we'll make sure it's a hoorah motivational speech. But but this week we're gonna unpack some difficult ideas that really hang up people a lot. Um, and it's all about God's sovereignty, his election, his choosing people, not choosing people, and all that good stuff. So we're gonna get started in Romans 9. Before I read the text, though, I actually I want to come at this kind of sideways a little bit, and I want to talk just briefly about the love of God. Um I think a lot of times we live in a culture where there's this sort of base understanding that if God exists, that he's loving. That God is like a therapist or a teddy bear, maybe, and that like he just he just loves people, he oozes love. If he's if he's out there, that's what he must be like. And what's fascinating is we're really the first society in human history that's ever ever thought about gods that way. Um, for all of human history up until until this moment, it was just assumed that the gods were mostly violent, that they were angry, that they they were contesting for space and power, and and the gods were really a reflection of how we are as human beings. And because of the influence of Protestantism and Christianity on the West, we we live in a culture that has a very different set of assumptions. We're actually offended if you think of God as violent, right? We're offended if you think of God as angry in any way. And so when we come to a text like this, I think it's really important to have have a frame for the love of God. The Bible talks about God's love in five different ways. It talks about his love in a Trinitarian sense. What this means is simply this: that God is too many to be one and too one to be many, that he's somehow trinity, that he's more than one, that in himself there is love. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Father and the Son love the Spirit, and the Spirit exalts the Father and the Son. That before there was any creation, God was love. If God was not Trinity, then creation would be necessary for him to have something to love. But because God is plural, God is able to within himself be a community of love. And so when we say God is love, one of the things we are saying is that God's love exists, whether we do or not. Another way the Bible talks about God's love is his providential love. Whether you know it or not, hopefully you're aware of this, he causes the sun to shine on the wicked and on the righteous. The rain falls on the wicked and on the righteous. There's a providential love of God. In Psalms, it talks over and over how God meets the desires of every living thing. That God is somehow providentially loving all of creation. Third way we talk about the love of God is his yearning love. He doesn't desire that any should perish. It says then, I think Ezekiel, that the Lord takes no delight in judging the wicked. He doesn't like to be the bad guy. He yearns for all of his creation to be in right relationship with him. Fourth kind of love we see is his choosing love or his elective love. Over and over we see in the scriptures that God chooses people, that they become his special treasure, the object of his love. And our text today is gonna look at God's choosing love. And then finally, we don't talk about this often, but the scriptures do have a category for God's conditional love. It says in John 15, if you obey my commandments, you'll remain in my love. There's this sense in which when we obey, we remain in his love. Now, all those versions of love that I described, they're all true. And if we try to break them out into neat categories, we're gonna get in lots of trouble. Because they don't break out into neat categories. But my point, and why I wanted to start here, is God's love can be understood in a variety of ways. And anytime we absolutize one of them, at the expense of the other, we end up with the wrong picture of God. And so today we're gonna talk about God's choosing love. And it's real, it's important to wrestle with, but we don't want to absolutize it. We don't want to say this is the only way that we read or understand God's love. And so as we get into chapter 9, we're gonna be in verses six, and we're gonna go, I think, all the way to 29. I'm gonna read these to you. It is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham's children are his true descendants. But it is through Isaac that the descendant shall be named for you. This means it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise who are counted as descendants. For this is what the promise said about this time I'll return, and Sarah shall have a son. Nor is that all something similar happened to Rebecca when she conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac, even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad, so that God's purpose of election might continue not by works, but by his call, she was told that the elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau. What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I'll have compassion on whom I have compassion. So it depends not on human will or exception or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says the Pharaoh, I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses. You'll say to me then, why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will? But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who moulds it, Why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction? And what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory, including us, whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles. As indeed he says in Hosea, those who are not my people I will call my people, and her who has not been beloved I will call beloved. In the very place where it was said to them, You're not my people, they shall be called children of the living God. And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, though the number of the children of Israel are like the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved. For the Lord will execute his sentence on the earth quickly and decisively. And Isaiah is as Isaiah predicted, if the Lord of hosts has not left survivors to us, we would have fared like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah. We'll stop there, because that's enough, right? Yeah. So what is Paul talking about? Let's set the context a little bit, because like any good passage in the Bible, we have to read it in context. And so, if you remember, we've been in Romans since January, and chapters one through eight was one continuous argument. Paul was building up a cathedral, if you will, and it's one continuous argument, and it peaks at chapter 8. Rich preached on it two weeks ago. You can listen to it online. It was one of my favorite Rich messages, actually. It ends with this crescendo that nothing can separate us from the love of God. And it's beautiful, it's a hallelujah. It seems like the letter could have ended right there, and everybody would like Romans way more than they do. Instead, this might be the only time you get to hear Romans 9 preached in your whole life, because most people skip on through it. Because it's difficult and it's complicated. And what we saw last week is from the very high mountaintop, the crescendo of Romans 8, Paul does this shocking thing. In fact, it's so surprising that scholars debate whether it's even meant to be in Romans at all. But there's this section between chapter 9 and chapter 11 where he talks about Israel. And he moves from ecstasy to anguish. He talks about the beauty of salvation for all, and then he says, I would give up my salvation if only my people would come to Christ. And he carries this anguish for Israel. And Paul, he's wrestling in chapters 9, 10, and 11. What about Israel? Now, for us, it's a largely theoretical question. I mean, we do have some debates about whether the modern state of Israel is the Israel in the Bible, and we're actually going to talk about that in a couple weeks, but but Paul is not raising a theoretical debate, nor is this a theology textbook. Because we are linear thinkers and like to categorize things, we often approach the Bible like a textbook and not like a personal letter. The best metaphor I've heard is from a guy named Gordon Phi. He says, when you read letters in the New Testament, it's like listening in on one side of a phone call. You're hearing Paul talk to people. He didn't have email, didn't have a phone, so it's personal correspondence. You're hearing one side of a conversation he's having with real people. And these real people are much closer to this problem than we are. See, the church that Paul is writing to, it's made up of Jews and it's made up of Gentiles. It's made up of people sitting in the room listening to this, and they do not view Romans 1 through 8 as a great cathedral. Instead, they're thinking, what about us? What about us? We're the special, chosen people of God. What about us, Paul? That's great that you've given us this beautiful gospel, but but what about the Jews? And even a more pertinent question that Paul was often asked, how could Jesus be the Messiah and be rejected by the people of Israel? Like, how could the Jews miss their own Messiah? How could they miss what God had sent to them? And so that is what Paul's wrestling with. And so last week he started with the heart. Before he got into the theology of how Israel missed it, he started with his heart. And I think it's crucial that we interpret this passage through Paul's heart. The same guy who wrote the words we're going to go through just said, I want them all to be saved. My heart is bleeding for all of them. I want them to know what I have found. And now he's answering the question: has God been unfaithful to his people, his original people? Has he been unfaithful to them? And so we read right from the beginning in chapter verse 6, he says, It is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all Israelites belong to Israel. It's not as though the word of God has failed, for not all Israelites belong to Israel. Now he's taking this step, he's making a jump, and he's making a category change. He's saying, actually, not all Israel is actually Israel. God hasn't failed his people. We have a wrong understanding of who his people are. And he's going to give us two examples. The first example he gives us is the example of Isaac and Ishmael. And then he gives us the example of Jacob and Esau. Now, if you are not familiar with the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, these are people at the beginning of the Jewish story. The nation of Israel came when God called out a man named Abram. And Abram became Abraham and he was promised a son. And while he was waiting for a son, he kind of rushed things and decided to have a kid with his maidservant, and that was Ishmael. And because he was getting old, he thought, this is the only chance I have to pass on my lineage. But then he miraculously has another kid named Isaac, and God chose Isaac. So Paul's argument right away is look, we know it's not just bloodlines, because I kept picking different members of the same family. And in case you didn't get the point, it's not because Isaac and Ishmael had different moms. Let me give you another example. And then he goes into Jacob and Esau, who had the same mom. He's saying, look, I picked from within this family. And in fact, I picked this family. If you want to go back even farther, he picked Noah, or further back, he picked Adam and Eve. He's like, I chose for a purpose. I chose for a purpose. It's not based on bloodlines because they had the same mom. In case you think it's based on some merit they have in their self, he said, I actually picked before they were born. So nobody could say I liked one more than the other. It wasn't like two babies were born, one was a little bit like less crying, and God was like, this is the one that the promise is going through. Way better, right? No. Wasn't that one was smarter, wasn't one had more religion, offered better sacrifices to God. God simply chose. He simply chose. Now this is crucial. What did God choose? What is election? He's not choosing who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. He's choosing for a vocation. He says, I chose Israel so that Israel would be a blessing to the world. That's what he told Abraham. I choose you to be a blessing to the world. He reiterates that to Isaac. He reiterates that to Jacob. The election that Paul is talking about here is an election to a vocation. He's choosing people to serve the salvation of the world. It's not a call to, you're my favorite child, and everybody else is going to go to hell. It's a call to be used by God. And Paul's simple point is this: God chooses people to be used. He chooses people for his purposes. That within Israel there's this true Israel. And we see this throughout the entire Old Testament. It actually narrows all the way down until the only true Israel that there is is Jesus Christ. And all of the promises that God gave to Abraham get answered in Jesus. That he is the elect, the chosen, but chosen for something, for a vocation. And so that's the first piece that we have to grapple with. That God chooses, and it's up to God to choose. Immediately, Paul anticipates an objection. The Jews are thinking, alright, what I heard you say, Paul, is that not all of us are true Israelites. That sounds offensive. We are all the people of God. We all should have the promises. We should all have the favor. And now you're saying you choose? That's not fair. That's not right. And Paul says what he says Jesus, or what God said to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. In verse 14, is there injustice on God's part? By no means. Now notice what he doesn't say. Some people read this as God arbitrarily will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. He doesn't say it's arbitrary, but he does say it's it's beyond us. But it by no means makes God unjust. Now how could this be the case? How could God choose, but by no means is it unjust that he uses some people more than others or differently than others? And I think you have to understand where Paul's general assumption is. In chapters 1, 2, and 3, Paul, if you remember, makes the case that we are all guilty. That we are all guilty. That we have violated nature, conscience, law. We have broken God's commandments. Nobody is righteous. I mean, imagine for a second you went home to your house on Monday, and five of your friends were in a garage planning a bank robbery. Five friends, your good friends, in your garage planning a bank robbery. They say, ready break, just as you're figuring out what's happening, and they go off to rob a bank. You can't stop them all, but you run and you tackle one of them. But four of them go off to rob the bank, and they rob the bank and they get caught. Imagine the four of them before a judge saying, I shouldn't be found guilty, because my friend didn't tackle me and keep me from getting caught. No, we would say they're guilty because they were already guilty. That the one person who got tackled, the one person who, because of your mercy and stopping them, got stopped, they are the recipients of generosity. But mercy is never entitled. Mercy is never entitled. See, if we look at this as we're all just morally neutral, we're all just pretty good people. Then God picks a few to be good and a few to be bad. Then we wouldn't have responsibility. We would blame God. But that's not Paul's argument. His argument, remember, this is about Israel. His argument is they've all left the path. And God has chosen for his purposes to bring some back on the path for the sake of the salvation of the world. And we cannot say to God, why, why are you holding me responsible? Why am I found guilty? And Paul uses a really interesting example to back up his point. He talks about Pharaoh. Now, Pharaoh is like the bad guy in the Israel story. In the Israel story, the Exodus is their salvation, kind of like the crosses to Christians. And Pharaoh is the enemy. And what's fascinating about Pharaoh is Exodus talks about Pharaoh's heart three different times, and every time it uses different language. Once it says Pharaoh hardened his own heart. A couple times it says God hardened Pharaoh's heart. And then a couple times it just says Pharaoh's heart was hardened and leaves it up as a mystery. But what's important to understand is Pharaoh was a bad guy. He was already evil. He was already persecuting and subjecting people to slavery. And when he says Paul, when Paul says that God hardened his heart, or it says in Exodus that he hardened his heart, what he's saying is that God is giving Pharaoh what he wanted. He was strengthening him to have what he wanted. But it wasn't like he was causing Pharaoh to be bad. Pharaoh was responsible for his own actions. Pharaoh was hardening his own heart. It's actually very similar language to Romans 1, where Paul says that God in his wrath gives us over to our desires. Now catch Paul's argument here. He's saying, look, the entire human race, including the Jews, the soul of humans, it's been bent, it's been twisted, it's gone wrong. And the fruit of that is on us. And God may step in or he may not step in. But what you can't do is say, it's your fault that I've been twisted. Because we are all guilty. We have all hardened our own hearts. We are all culpable and responsible. And so he has this picture. Of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh is hardening his heart, and God is hardening Pharaoh's heart for a purpose. And then he moves on and he says, I'm going to anticipate even more of an objection. You're going to say, Who can resist God's will? Who can resist God's will? Another way you could say it is, you made me this way. You made me this way. I mean, is it really my fault? Because the question behind the question here is, why, you know, in the in the bank robbery story, it makes sense, we're limited, we can only tackle one of our friends and keep him from doing something stupid. Why doesn't God tackle all of us and keep us all from doing stupid things? And we think that there's some sort of obligation, and we think if if God didn't stop me from being myself and doing stupid things, then like how can he blame me? Right? Like, like, is it fair if you made me this way? If I was born into this world this way? Like, like, am I really fully responsible? And the question behind the question is like, if the world is determined, then I shouldn't be responsible. But Paul never paints this world as determined. In fact, the consistent testimony of Scripture is that there is this thing called human agency. In Psalm 8, it says we're made a little lower than the angels, and we're we're given dominion. We're given permission to act. His entire argument in chapter 3 and 4 is that we're actually culpable, capable of making different choices, but we don't. On the other side, though, the Bible doesn't present us as having a completely free will. There is no, I'm just free to do whatever I want. In fact, it describes us as enslaved, as dead, as broken, that we have a limited will, but it's not so limited that God is responsible for what we do. And one of the problems with this idea that we have a completely free will is it would make God contingent on us. God is not waiting around for us to decide how human history goes. We don't have the power to do absolutely anything and everything. Somebody today with lots of power, maybe their fingers near the big red nuclear war button, they don't have the freedom to end this world before God wants this world to end. There's a limit to human freedom. But we are also not determined. He uses the example of Pharaoh to show that God uses our free will for his purposes and he's over our free will, but he's not limited by it. Instead, Scripture paints what we might call this both and, this tension. God, in his sovereignty, in his power and in his control, has sovereignly decided to let human agents and other spiritual agents make a difference in this world. But that difference is hemmed in by his hands so that history never escapes him. And more than that, he uses our free will to accomplish his purposes. I'll give you a few examples. In Genesis 50, we read about the story of Joseph. God intends Joseph to save Israel or Egypt. There's a famine in the land. But in order to do that, his brothers sell him into slavery. Potiphar accuses him of sexual misconduct. He ends up in jail where he's forgotten about. It's this wild backward story. And when his brothers come to him to apologize, he says, famous lines, what you intended for evil, God intended for good. That doesn't leave his brothers off the hook. It doesn't mean that the bad things that happened were caused by God, but God knew what would happen, and he used it for his purposes. In Isaiah 10, we read a similar story. God wants to punish the nation of Israel, and he wants to punish the nation of Assyria. And so he says that I'm going to use Assyria to punish Israel, and then I'm going to punish Assyria for punishing Israel. I'm going to manage to spank them both, because they both deserve to be spanked, but they're going to do it in their own free will. We read a similar thing in Acts chapter 4. Talking to the Jews at the persecution of Jesus, he's sharing the gospel. He says to them, You killed the Christ. And then, in two lines later, God sovereignly ordained for the Christ to be killed. He holds them in this tension. God did not let Jesus be crucified by accident. It was his plan from the beginning, the foundations of the world. The cross was always plan A, because it was how God was going to reveal his heart to all that he made. The cross was prepared beforehand. And yet to the people who crucified him, he said, You crucified the Christ. You're responsible. Now we could have a lecture upon a lecture where we talked about how this goes together. And if this were a philosophy class, I would love to do that. We could get into compatibilism and how free will and sovereignty go together. We could talk about secondary causes, middle knowledge, all the different things that might help us wrap our mind around that. But once again, that is not what Paul is writing about. I think Paul would be shocked that 2,000 years later Calvinists and Armenians would be dividing and basing their camps off this letter. I think he would look at both and be like, you totally missed what I was writing to my friends in Rome. I wasn't writing to them about the whole picture of salvation and how God's going to pick. One major air that's been taken out of this text is this idea of double predestination. Double predestination says that God chooses some for eternal life and he chooses others for hell, and there's nothing you can do about it. And it's this picture of God actively acting in people, taking them to their destinies. And that's not at all the picture that Paul consistently portrays in his letters. Rather, we are all on the path leading to darkness, and God sovereignly intervenes in our lives. And we get to Romans 10, we're going to look a little bit more about where faith comes from and why it seems to grip some people and not other people. But his purpose here is not at all to say that some of you are going to hell and some of you are going to heaven and there's nothing you can do about it. Remember the context. Paul is praying for all of them to get saved. How crazy would Paul have to be to say, I want you all to get saved. By the way, some of you just have a one-way ticket to hell and there's nothing you can do about it. It wouldn't make any sense at all. And in chapter 10 and 11, he's going to propose that this all has a bigger purpose. That God is electing some for the purpose of everyone else. That it's not a question of your final destination, but about who God's choosing to use. And I think it's really important that he chose Pharaoh. Not just because we have verses about Pharaoh hardening his own heart and it lets us off the hook a little. I think it's important because he's holding up the two salvation stories in parallel. He's saying God gave Pharaoh away to the desires of his heart. He hardened him, he strengthened him to have what he wanted. And the reason he let him have what he wanted to do what he wanted is because God wanted to use Pharaoh in his evil to bring about salvation for the whole people. And he did that. And then he's saying the exact same thing is happening right now. God gave over the Jews who were alive at the time of Jesus. He gave over them to their hard hearts so that they would crucify Jesus, because that was his plan. And so he's saying, whether you were chosen to carry on the seed that would lead to Jesus, or whether you were given the desires of your heart to crucify him, all of it has been God's sovereign plan. All of it has been orchestrated and superintended by our God in heaven. None of it has escaped his notice. He uses a metaphor that has caused lots of people to have sleepless nights. He talks about clay in the potter. He says, Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, Why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? What if God desiring to show his wrath to make known his power has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction? Once again, we have to be careful. It's a metaphor. We don't want to come up with our entire view of how God views humanity from a few verses, because there's plenty of other verses where God interacts with humanity and gives us incredible dignity. But remember the context. The lump of clay is not all people, it's Israel. It's Israel. And God uses Israel for his purposes. And Paul's argument is really simple. He said, What if God wants to? Let this misshapen clay be used and endure it with great patience. And he endures Israel with great patience. And he's going to come back to this line in Romans 10 and 11. So put a footnote there. He endures it with great patience, so that his purposes would be accomplished. Another way you could say it is, God did not change Israel's heart. He endured Israel with great patience because it was going to accomplish his plan for glory. He allowed them to stay the way they were, and they crucified Jesus, which was actually for the mercy of everybody else. And we, we do not have the right, and Israel does not have the right to say to God, why did you let me stay the way I was? Because we are the way we are because of our choices. Because each of us has sinned, because each of us is guilty. Paul here, he's not giving us a doctrine of salvation. He's saying that God steps into human history and there's a mystery to it, but he uses it for the purposes of everybody, that he is good and his heart is kind. He ends by giving us the purpose. He says it's for the Gentiles to come in. It's for the Gentiles to have a place. And so, what are some of the lessons we can draw from this? This is a super dense text, and I'm going through it really quick. But what are some of the lessons we can draw from Romans chapter 9? And I think the first one, which has been a repeating lesson in Romans, is just simply that there is no room for boasting. There's no room for boasting. However, we wrestle with these texts, what's clear is salvation belongs to the Lord. That He has mercy on whom He will have mercy, that we do not boast. We do not boast. The second thing we see is that outward religion can become fatal. The Jews here, they were thinking we're all God's people, we're all God's people. And Paul's saying, no, you had the outward signs, right? You you might all biologically be related to Abraham, but that doesn't make you God's people. That was a theme we saw in the Gospels and John the Baptist's ministry, that actually there is an inward thing that matters more than the outward thing. We might say that not everybody at church or in the visible church is a part of the invisible church. That we have this outward religion that we can put on, and it doesn't mean that we've truly surrendered or been born again. And so we are called to remember that God sees the heart. Third, I think this leads us to worship. This leads us to worship. Look, if you read Romans 9 and you end up in a debate about determinism, I would argue you've missed it. It should lead you to worship. It's not how does God choose who to have mercy on? It's it's absolute wonder that God ever had mercy on me. We are not entitled to mercy. Jesus tells a famous parable where people are working in a vineyard and he offers to pay a certain amount to the people who come at the beginning of the day. And then as people get hired throughout the day, he gives them the same amount. And the people who worked just half an hour at the end of the day are mad that they got paid, or the people that worked all day are mad that they got paid the same amount as the people that worked a little bit. And Jesus has this famous line about, why are you mad about my generosity? Like, what right do you have to demand it? See, so often we come to God thinking we are deserved mercy, that we are owed it, that somehow we have the right to it. No, when we read Romans 9 correctly as creatures in need of mercy, it's a miracle that God shows mercy at all. That he has shown mercy to us. Another thing we see is that this gives us assurance. If salvation belongs to the Lord, then it's not up to me to keep my salvation, that he will hold me tight. We saw this at the end of Romans 8, where there was what's often called the golden chain. Those whom he called, or predestined, he called, those he called or saved or glorified all the way down. It's this idea that all of salvation is the Lord's and that he holds us in his hand. Another picture, a lesson from this, is that there is mystery to the ways of God. There's mystery to the ways of God. Paul here, he clearly hits this wall. He anticipates the questions, but there's always more questions. All right, I get it. God can be merciful, we're not entitled to it. Alright, I get it. We have enough free will to be accountable. But why didn't he intervene all the time? Or why didn't he intervene here? Like, why did he change their heart but not change my heart? Why did he soften them but harden them? And there's this mystery to how God works, and there's this mystery to life. Some people they operate with what some scholars call like this blueprint model of reality, where they think that everything is determined by God, that everything that happens is God's will, that there's some divine blueprint for human history, and that we're all just living out a script, that it's predetermined. But Paul and Jesus did not seem to look at the world this way. They seemed to think that humans in some limited capacity are on the stage and making an influence in the play of this history. That human beings are somehow responsible, that there are spiritual beings that are somehow responsible. When somebody came to Jesus and said, Why is this person born into this sickness? He doesn't say God wanted it that way. Jesus, in fact, never blames evil on God. He never blames any of the bad things he faces on God. He does say that God's going to be glorified, so we can zoom out and say, whatever the reasons are, God is good and he's going to get glory from it. But there is a real mystery. As people who believe in the kingdom of God, we might say there is competing wills on the stage of life, and it muddles our understanding of why things happen. And we can always ask the question, why doesn't God intervene more? But we won't get a satisfying answer. We won't fully understand. We have to hold in tension these views of the love of God, that he yearns for everybody, and that he chooses people, but he doesn't seem to choose everyone. And we don't know why. Another way you can say this, that Billy Graham is famous for saying, he says, the gates of heaven on the outside say, Come, all who are thirsty. And on the inside it says, Welcome, you who are chosen before the foundation of the world. We hold them in tension. But if we have been called, if our hearts are warmed towards God, we know that He has chosen us, He will hold us, and He will bring our salvation to completion. And what we do know is that God is not at fault. That God is good, that He yearns for the salvation of everyone. I think as we as we close today, as we wrestle with this text, as we carry it throughout the week, we have to stay grounded in what Paul is writing to the church in Rome and what it means for us. He's saying God is sovereign over the salvific or the history of salvation, and he uses people. He uses events to accomplish his purposes. He also is saying God wants and yearns for all of us to be saved. That he intervenes and he steps in. And I think in chapters 10 and 11, we're gonna see that it's not actually very arbitrary at all. That Paul actually has some answers to some of the questions that this chapter raises about why and how faith comes to people. If faith is a gift, why do we not all just get it? What might allow a loving God to remain resistible? I mean, we are holding together these tensions. The same Paul, who raises the question, who can resist God, writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that love does not insist on its own way. And he holds them together. He holds them together. And it's super easy to fall from one side to the other, but we have to hold these tensions together, and we have to worship the God of salvation. We have to leave these kinds of texts with this overwhelming sense of awe that God has been merciful to us, that the gospel has come to us, that faith has come to us. There is not a hint, at least in how I read Romans 9, there's not a hint of Paul trying to say there are some people just out there that God doesn't want to save that are just lined up for destruction for hell for eternity. That is not what those lines mean. Paul is saying, yes, I gave people over to their desires to accomplish my purposes, but he's talking about Israel and the purposes of Jesus and salvation for all. And so we marvel at a God who, over all of our chaos, all of our brokenness, all of our mistakes, he sovereignly brings good out of them. This whole chapter is really an extension of those verses we read two weeks ago about God working for the good of those who love him. This is unpacking a bit into the mystery of God that he's working for our good through the choices of others and through our own choices. That he is both over them, he sees everything we are going to do, and he holds history in his hand. Nothing surprises him. Let's pray.