Romans 9:1-18; No Resumé Required

If you have a copy of God's word, turn with me to the book of Romans, Romans chapter 9.

Romans 9 · chapter mention

If you need a Bible, look at the Pew Bible in front of you.

You'll see a Black Pew Bible.

The text can be found on page 961 in the Pew Bible.

If you're visiting with us, we are a church that just goes through books of the Bible, and we try to make much of Jesus when we do so.

And so we believe the Bible is God's word, and it's what we most need.

And so we just work through books of the Bible.

We were in the middle of Romans in the spring.

We took a break and did the Psalms in the summer, back in Romans now to start the fall, and we start with a bang in Romans chapter nine.

And we need to review very quickly where we left off with Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Romans chapter 8 is considered to be the high point in all of Scripture.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Many call it the greatest chapter in all of the Bible.

Paul tells us nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

And so how does the Apostle Paul open after that wonderful chapter?

How does he open chapter 9?

Well, let's look and find out.

This is the Word of God.

I am speaking the truth in Christ.

I am not lying.

My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.

For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.

They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.

To them belongs the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is to Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.

Amen.

But it is not as though the word of God had failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham, because they are his offspring.

But through Isaac shall your offspring be named.

This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.

For this is what the promise said.

She was told, The older will serve the younger, as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.

What shall we say then?

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 will have compassion on whom I have compassion.

So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.

For the scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.

So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

This is God's word.

Let's pray and let's ask for the Spirit to be with us this morning.

Bow with me.

Would you help the one who preaches to make this clear?

Where clarity, where I need clarity, please come and clarify.

Lord, I pray as we hear this word, it is a hard word, and I pray that you uh would give us hearts, soft hearts to receive it.

We come from lots of different places in this room this morning.

Would you make us alert?

Would you make us attentive?

Would we sit under your word, not over your word?

We are your servants, we are listening.

Speak, O Lord, speak.

May we encounter the Lord Jesus Christ through this passage this morning, and may you move us to change and to worship.

Do this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, football season, as you know, is right around the corner.

Everyone is anxious to see just how well their team is going to do this year and how they're going to perform on the field.

If you know anything about college football, you know that every February recruiting services, they rank players.

They rank high school players.

They give them a three-star ranking, a four-star ranking, or a five-star ranking before the kid has ever stepped foot and played one down of college football.

Everyone wants to be that kid.

They want to be validated, they want to be ranked.

And players, if you're playing football, you want the five-star ranking.

Well, we do the same thing with God, don't we?

We want the five-star ranking.

Something we can point to in our lives that tells us and tells God that we belong.

And we say things and point to things like, well, you see, I grew up in the church, or I grew up in a Christian home, or we were in church every time the door was open.

And I give and I serve.

Or maybe it's not church at all.

Maybe it is, well, I'm a good parent.

I'm a better parent than those people I know.

Or I keep my word.

You can count on me.

Or it's, hey, I'm I'm an honest businessman or businesswoman, and I have never cheated anyone.

You see, what we really want is a resume, if we're honest, that we can hand over to God and say, look, I deserve this.

Look at what I've done.

And here's the thing about this passage.

Israel had the ultimate, if there was ever a five-star ranking to be had, it was Israel.

They had the best resume you could possibly have, spiritually speaking, religiously speaking, and yet the Apostle Paul opens up this chapter in anguish over his own people because by and large they had rejected their own Messiah, which raises a question underneath everything else that the Apostle Paul is about to say.

And here's the question: if Israel has a five-star resume, and if that resume was not enough, what makes us think that our resume will be enough?

See, that's the question, and Paul answers it in this passage.

And he answers it by burning our resumes to the ground.

Three things this morning.

Number one, the standing that wasn't enough.

Number two, the promise that hasn't failed.

And number three, the mercy that isn't owed.

The standing that wasn't enough, the promise that hasn't failed, the mercy that wasn't owed.

That's where we're headed.

Let's look at our first heading, the standing that wasn't enough.

Look at verse one.

Did you notice how he how he just stacks, he's saying the same thing three times?

I'm telling you the truth.

I am not lying.

My conscience bears me witness.

Why is he doing that?

Well, the same way, the same reason we do things like that.

You ever said, you're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you.

It's going to be so unbelievable to you, but I want you to know that I am telling you the truth.

And he just stacks it up.

He says, No, you don't understand.

You're not going to believe what I am about to say.

Look at verses two and three.

And he says, I am grieving.

I have great sorrow and anguish in my heart.

And I wish that I could be cut off from Christ to save my own people.

Think about this: the man who just the greatest chapter in all the scriptures in Romans chapter 8, very triumphant, who can separate us from the love of God the very next breath.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

He's in mourning and he is in grief.

And I think that teaches us something.

Here's our first application that I want to just pause for a second.

I think that teaches us something up front.

Doctrine and tears are not opposites.

You see, real theology leads to tears.

Leads to softness of heart.

It doesn't lead to stoicism and pride and arrogance.

And if your theology this morning and doctrine is making you colder instead of softer, something is wrong.

Not with the doctrine.

Something's wrong with the way that you're holding the doctrine.

And notice what Paul doesn't do.

It doesn't make him give up.

You're going to see in chapter 10, verse 1, Paul continues to plead for his people, cry out for Israel and argue for them.

He keeps praying that they will be saved.

You see, grief over someone never becomes an excuse for us to stop hoping.

Your tears never become a reason for you to stop praying.

So don't give up on people.

Don't give up on your family members that you're praying for, and your friends that you're praying for, and perhaps your children that you're praying for.

Paul gives us a model here.

Why does this undo Paul so much?

Well, look at verses four and five.

Look at what they have.

I mean, this is quite a list.

Look at what Israel, the benefits that Israel has here, the adoption, look at it.

The divine glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple worship, the promises, the patriarchs.

And if that weren't enough, from their own bloodline, Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.

And it's easy to miss.

Look at verse 5.

Don't miss it.

He doesn't stop at calling Jesus the Messiah.

Look closely, the Christ who is God overall.

You see, the greatest privilege Israel ever held wasn't a promise pointing to somewhere else.

It was God Himself in the flesh, in their own family line and in their own family tree.

This is the highest standing any nation, religiously speaking, has ever had.

Imagine walking out to your mailbox this week.

And let's say you find a letter, and it's from a distant relative that you've never met, and you in that envelope is an inheritance for you that's quite a big inheritance, real money.

Legally, you're sitting in account somewhere.

And let's say, hypothetically speaking, you never open the letter, you toss it aside into this pile of junk mail, and it just gets buried under a bunch of other mail and things that aren't open, and it sits there for years and years and years, buried under everything else.

And the whole time you live like you have nothing.

You're struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month.

You're working yourself to the bone just to provide when the entire time you were already rich.

You just never opened the letter.

You just never took hold of the benefits that were already yours.

Never claimed it.

That is a picture of verses four and five.

Israel got the letter.

Every Israelite got the letter.

And it was real, and it was a real inheritance, and it did them no good because they never opened it.

They never took some of them, never took hold of it.

And that is the gap that is leading Paul to this grief.

That here, these people, the people of God, had all of these benefits and they missed Jesus.

And if you sit with that long enough, it starts to raise a really uncomfortable question.

If you really think about this, and maybe the question is, so what's the point then?

I mean, why, for example, why bother raising my kids in the church?

Why have prayer in my home and read the Bible in my home and do devotions in my home if none of that guarantees anything?

Notice very clearly, Paul isn't saying that standing and the benefits are worthless.

That's not what he's saying.

He's grieving precisely because it wasn't worthless.

It was real and it was good, but it wasn't the end game.

It wasn't the thing that actually saves.

And so do not confuse benefits and pedigree doesn't save you with pedigree and benefits don't matter.

They are a gift, they are a blessing.

And so the takeaway is keep giving your kids everything Israel has.

Keep giving them the word.

Keep giving them worship.

Get them in the community of God's people and around this table.

And in the services, baptism included.

Every one of those signs are real and they are promises.

They are just not the end game.

They are not a guarantee.

And it doesn't just go for, and this is not just what you hand your kids.

What are you doing this morning as you sit here with what you're holding and what you already have?

Maybe you grew up in the church.

Maybe you sat under really good preaching your entire life.

Maybe you were a part of a church that loved you really well.

Don't make the mistake of trading and thinking that that is the end game.

Open the letter.

Take hold of Jesus by faith.

And so the question is, have you done that this morning?

You see, here's the test.

If someone this week were to ask you, hey, are you a Christian?

And you were to say, Yes, I am a Christian.

And then they follow up with a question, why are you a Christian?

If the first thing out of your mouth is I, if it's pointing to your resume, well, I I give.

I show up, I go to church, then you've if Jesus is nowhere in that sentence, you have missed it.

If that's where you are this morning, that is worth sitting with this week.

Not because your history is bad, but because it wasn't and isn't enough by itself.

Secondly, the promise hasn't failed.

So here's Paul's question.

Look at verse six.

Well, has the word of God failed?

If they had all of the things and all of the benefits and they reject the Messiah, their own Messiah, did God's promises to them just not work?

And the answer to that, of course, is no.

And the reason, notice he works this out, and this is where we got to focus in on this argument here because it's very compelling.

The reason is because the promise was never to everyone who descended from Abraham in the first place.

And you see it there very clearly.

Not all who are descended from Israel are of Israel or belong to Israel.

And then he gives us two illustrations, and it's brilliant because he locks into their history and says, Let's go back to two stories that you will know, and I will work this out for you.

The first story, look at verses 7 through 9.

He talks about Isaac and Ishmael.

Both were Abraham's sons, but the promise ran through Isaac, the child that God supernaturally gave to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, not through Ishmael.

Remember, that was the son of Abraham that he tried to produce through his own efforts.

And then secondly, look at verses 10 through 13.

It gets a lot sharper here.

Jacob and Esau, twins, same father, same mother, same moment of conception, and yet before either of them had done one single thing, good or bad, God told the mother Rebekah that the older would serve the younger because of him who calls.

Not birth order, not performance, just the call of God.

At home with a very strong verse from Malachi chapter one.

Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.

Maybe you're here this morning, or maybe and this is what you've heard, or maybe this is what you were taught.

And maybe it was that you were taught that God looks down through the corridor of time and he sees in advance who is going to choose him, and people are elected on that basis.

And that's a common way that people will try to make peace because it is tough.

But it's a common way that people try to make peace and deal with this doctrine of election and predestination.

And listen, I do know that this is difficult stuff and hard stuff, but it's not what the Bible says.

It's not what this text teaches us.

Paul does not say that God foreknew their faith and responded to it.

He says very clearly that God's purpose was set before either boy had done one single thing, good or bad, precisely so that it would rest on him, the one who calls, not on anything foreseen in them.

And so you see, election, according to Paul, isn't God ratifying a choice that you were always going to make anyway.

It is God's choice first.

And you need to understand that this was not a new idea.

The Jews would not have been hearing Paul and be like completely shocked by what he was saying or appalled by what he is saying.

And you know why?

Because it's the pattern of the Bible from beginning to end.

They would have known that God didn't choose Israel because they were great, or because they were the biggest or the most impressive nation of the earth.

Moses makes that exact point.

It's the opposite point.

In Deuteronomy chapter 7, verses 7 and 8.

Deuteronomy 7:7

You know what it says?

It's not because you were big, it's not because you were powerful.

God chose them, it says in Deuteronomy 7, because he loved them.

And he said his love on them.

It was always the pattern of election.

That's the way it's always been.

Years ago, there was a champion wood carver.

I read this in Jim Boyce from Jim Boyce this week, a commentator.

He shares this great little illustration about a woodcarver from Bavaria who found a scrap of wood that looked exactly like a grain of wheat.

And he carved a whole handful of these imitation grains and he mixed them with all the real wheat.

And he challenged any of his friends to try to tell the two apart, the fake grain and the real grain.

And no one can do it, could do it, not even the wood carver himself, because his work was that good.

The only way you could tell the difference and separate the real grain from the fake was to put them in water.

And a few days later, the real grain would start to sprout.

And the fake grain stayed exactly what it had always been underneath the disguise, which is dead wood.

And it's the same with Isaac and Jacob, pedigree and calling, neither one is enough on its own, without life underneath, without something that's happened on the inside.

And so that leaves us with a really strong question this morning.

Not do you show up?

Not do you know all the right answers, but is there anything alive in you this morning?

The wheat and the wood sat in the same field for years and they looked exactly the same.

And once and only when the water hit one of them could you tell them apart when something had actually touched the inside.

And so when was the last time that something actually got on the inside of you into your heart?

A sermon or a verse or a song or a hard providence?

It got inside of you into your heart in a way that you were not the same afterwards.

When is the last time that has happened?

Or have you been sitting for years in the same field looking the part when nothing has ever touched what's underneath?

If that's you this morning, years in this room with no life underneath, please don't hear that as condemnation or verdict.

That's invitation.

That's God saying, Come, come to the one, come to me who takes dead hearts and makes them alive.

Lastly, the mercy that isn't owed.

Paul knows what we're thinking here.

You hear something like Jacob I loved and Esau I hated, what is the first thing out of our mouth?

That's not fair.

Paul knows that.

Look at verse 14.

What then shall we say?

Is there injustice on God's part?

C.S.

Lewis wrote a essay called God and the Dock.

And it's a dock was where the accused would stand in a courtroom.

And Lewis said that modern people have basically that we have put God on trial without realizing it, that we've made ourselves the judge.

God is the defendant, required to explain himself according to our standards before we will grant him a verdict of not guilty.

And Paul knew that that knee-jerk reaction, that we have put God in a dock, he knew that.

And that we would rise up when we hear this idea of election and predestination, and we would say, that is not fair.

Paul doesn't dodge the question.

He puts it right on the table.

And he says, by no means, and then he proves it.

Look at verse 15.

He goes back to Exodus 33, 19, and he quotes, where it's where God quotes has a quote about his own character.

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and compassion on whom I will have compassion.

What God is doing there is defining, defining the word mercy.

Because you see, the instance mercy is demanded, well, it stops being mercy.

And actually becomes a payment or something that we owe.

And Paul draws the conclusion plainly.

Look at verse 16.

Says it doesn't depend on human desire or will, but on God's mercy.

Please understand that there's a reason why, obviously, Paul talks about what he does in Romans 1 through 3.

And I would encourage you to go back and read that sometime this week.

Because if we don't understand Romans chapters 1 through 3, then we never get election.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

You'll never get predestination.

Because Romans 1 through 3 is talking about total depravity.

And if we get that, what we understand is that mercy has to be free because of who we are.

Because none of us is in a position to earn that mercy.

And Paul goes somewhere even harder.

Look at verses 17 and 18.

He brings up Pharaoh.

And then the hardest verse in the whole passage, he will have mercy on whomever he wills and harden whomever he wills.

Now that's a hard verse.

But before we dismiss it, I want to encourage you to go back and read through Exodus.

And what you will find there is that Pharaoh hardens his own heart over and over and over in rebellion against God, long before the scriptures say that God hardened his heart.

It's the exact same pattern that we see in, again, the beginning of Romans.

That's why all of this letter fits together.

If you go back to Romans chapter one, you'll see God gave them up.

God gave them up.

God gave them up.

He keeps saying that to what they already wanted.

So Pharaoh is not an exception to that pattern.

He's actually the clearest picture of that pattern.

God is free to show mercy to whomever he wills.

And he's also just as free to withhold it.

And again, I know we struggle with that.

But he is God, and we are not.

So that the question is really this is the real miracle is never why didn't why doesn't God save everyone?

No, the real miracle is that why does God save anyone at all?

That's the miracle of the Bible.

And that's the beauty of the gospel.

Because Pharaoh got what he deserved.

We deserve the same thing, but God is so good and merciful that mercy actually takes on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, and he hangs on a cross in our place.

Mercy was not free for God.

It cost him his life.

It cost him his son.

And on the cross, we see that mercy and justice come together.

That Jesus takes the wrath that we deserve so that, and Paul said this in Romans 2, so that God can be what?

Both the just and the one who justifies.

God doesn't soften the rules, He satisfies them Himself and His Son.

And rightly understood, election, it's always meant to produce in us, if it's meant to produce in us not arguments, not arrogance and pride.

If that's where we take it, then we don't understand it and we've misunderstood, rightly understood, predestination and election.

You know what it does?

We throw our hands up and we worship and we say, thank you, Jesus, for your grace and for your mercy.

You see, if we think we're owed something, we'll never sing.

We think we are owed something, we we will never really grasp and we'll miss how good and beautiful the gospel is.

But once you see that you're not owed anything, and it costs God everything, then it leads to worship.

It leads to gratitude and it leads to praise and it leads to compassion.

Those things start flowing out of us.

But if we're honest, that's not always what kind of me.

And you know why?

Because my default, and maybe your default, is to keep going back to my resume, to keep looking at the spiritual checklist and looking at my stats instead of resting in God's mercy because we want to say that we've contributed something in the gospel as we contribute nothing.

And so we keep going back and turning it.

Again, Genesis 3, we keep going back to ourselves instead of standing on Jesus.

Listen, that's not to say we don't do anything.

Yes, engage the disciplines, do the devotions, pray the prayers.

I'm just saying stop grading yourselves by them.

Mercy was never about your resume to get in, and it's not about tracking your resume to stay in either.

Football recruiting.

In that world, everyone gets ranked before they play a single down.

The world of the gospel, there is no scout evaluating your tape.

There is no five-star version of you that God is waiting for you to become so that He can sign you.

In the world of the gospel, it is one thing mercy for whoever asked for it.

And so this morning I'll leave you with that.

Will you ask for it?

Will you cry out like the tax collector in Luke 18?

God have mercy on me, a sinner.

That's an invitation.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for being good and merciful.

Forgive us for the times that we've reached for our resume instead of resting on your grace.

Holy Spirit, would you do the work that only you can do?

There's someone in here that doesn't know you.

Would you give them faith?

Would you make a dead heart come alive?

We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.