Romans 11:33-36; To Him Be Glory

If you have a copy of God's word, turn with me this morning to Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

Romans chapter 11.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

If you need a Bible, you'll see a Pew Bible in front of you.

And it is the passage is found on page 964 in the Pew Bible.

We have been walking through as a church the book of Romans for the past several months, and all I can say is we made it.

The letter's not over.

We didn't make it all the way through, but we have just finished this morning a huge doctrinal section and argument in the book of Romans that Paul has brought to a close and brings to a close this morning.

In the first 11 chapters, he's told us that we are guilty, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as our children saying this morning.

He's told us how we are made right with God.

So he spent a lot of time on the doctrine known as justification by faith alone.

He's told us how we grow in the Christian life and what that looks like.

He's wrestled with very hard questions, questions of predestination and election.

He's talked to us about how God deals with Jew and Gentile and where does all of that theology and all of that doctrine lead the Apostle Paul in the book of Romans.

Not to further debate, not to more arguments, not to in conclusion, and then let me summarize with a summary chart.

No, it leads him to doxology.

It leads him to singing.

It leads him to worship.

Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th-century preacher in London, once preached on this passage, and he began by giving up.

Listen to what he says.

I will affirm that there is no living man who can preach from this text a sermon worthy of it.

No one among all the sacred orders and eloquent preachers of God, there never did live and never will live a man capable of reaching the height of the great argument contained in these few simple words.

No one, he says, not even including the great Charles Spurgeon, certainly not me, has ever and will ever preach a sermon worthy of this passage.

And after studying it this week, I could not agree more.

I think you'll see what I mean as we read.

This is God's word, Romans 11, 33 through 36.

Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable are his ways.

For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor, or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid.

For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be the glory forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Father.

I feel two things in this moment.

And the first is privilege and honor that I get to open up this word to your people.

And I don't take that lightly.

This is an amazing passage in your scriptures.

But at the same time, I am trembling because this passage is too much for me.

There's no way we can ever reach the bottom of it.

And so would you come?

Not because we need to understand all of it, but because we need to see you.

And we need your help.

I am praying one thing this morning, and that is that you would show us just a glimpse of your glory.

A glimpse of your beauty and your majesty.

Make us a people this morning that cannot help but worship.

Holy Spirit, preach this to us because I cannot.

And so help.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

In 1952, there was an English pastor by the name of J.B.

Phillips.

You might be familiar with the name.

He wrote a little book called Your God is Too Small.

And his point in the book was that everything else grows up with us.

As we grow, our understanding of the world grows, and our understanding of ourselves and people and history grows.

But our picture and our view of God often stays very, very small.

And he uses these pictures to illustrate his point.

And he has these different names for God, and I won't list all of them, but he says often our view is the resident policeman, where God is waiting up in heaven to pounce on us, to catch us doing wrong, so that he can start handing out tickets.

Or the grand old man, really kind and really gentle, but a bit old-fashioned and out of touch with reality and out of touch with the world in which we live.

And he has a name that he uses for all of them, and the name is God in a box.

That we've created this God that fits us, that we can put in a box, a God that we can tame and manage.

That was 1952.

Today we've traded it for phrases like the man upstairs or the big guy in the sky.

What has happened in our lives, in our view of God, that the God of the universe has become small enough for us to manage and comfortable enough for us to simply joke about.

I think it starts with how we treat him.

You treat someone like you can manage them, well, before too long, then your view of them gets really, really small.

And how do we do it?

Well, we demand oftentimes that God explain himself to us.

Or we try to be his counselor and offer him advice, or we start keeping records quietly of all the things that we've done and ways that we have sacrificed for him, as if to say he owes us.

And underneath all of those things is the exact same thing: us, me.

We've made ourselves the point.

We've made ourselves the center of our stories.

And we might not say this out loud, but from me and through me and to me.

In this passage, Paul takes that problem head on.

Not with a better argument, but by showing us God in hopes that we could just get a glimpse of who he really is.

He doesn't give us a system.

Paul takes our eyes up to the riches and the wisdom and the glory of God.

The question this morning is what happens to us?

What happens to us when we see this God in Romans chapter 11, verses 33 through 36?

Romans 11:33–36

Three things.

He astonishes us, number one.

Secondly, he humbles us, number two, and lastly, he frees us.

He astonishes us, he humbles us, and he frees us.

Let's look at all those in turn this morning.

Number one, he astonishes us.

Look at verse 33.

He starts with this first word, oh, he exclaims.

And he's not talking to anybody.

I mean, after 11 chapters, he cannot catch his breath.

He stops and he simply throws his hands up after all the analysis, after all the argument, and he all of that gives way to adoration and to worship.

And so let's walk through these this verse, verse 33, just really one word at a time.

Look at the three things he mentions here, the three names, riches.

Paul's actually used that word before in the book of Romans, the riches of his kindness, the riches of his glory, the riches of everyone who calls upon him, grace upon grace, mercy upon mercy poured out for sinners that he loves.

And that truth throughout these first eleven chapters completely undoes Paul.

What about us?

It's the grace and mercy of the gospel.

Would we say that it undoes us and leads us to throwing up our hands in worship?

Wisdom.

Well, Israel stumbled and the gospel went to the Gentiles.

And then we learned last week the mercy to the Gentiles received is on its way back to Israel.

And no one would have drawn it up this way.

It's like a tapestry.

We look at the back of a tapestry, and what do you see?

That's often what we see: knots, entangled threads.

It's not much to look at.

It makes zero sense.

And we never know how all of that quite fits together, but God does.

And God in his wisdom is the one who's weaving it all together.

And there are parts of your life right now that look like a complete mess.

They look like the back of a tapestry, perhaps.

Maybe that's the way you would describe it.

God in his wisdom says they aren't a mess to me.

That I am weaving them into something beautiful, even though you cannot see it.

And even though you do not understand it.

Knowledge.

God is all knowing.

He knows everything.

He knows you all the way to the bottom.

He knows how your story ends.

He knows you completely.

How unsearchable are his judgments.

And you could study what God decides to do.

You could study that forever and ever and never reach the bottom.

How inscrutable his ways.

The picture there is imagine being at the beach or in the woods, perhaps, and you're standing still and you see, and you've all had this experience, you see footprints.

And you follow the footprints until they go past where you can see.

And that's what he's getting at by how inscrutable are his ways.

We can only trace the footprints so far before they go out of sight, and we can no longer see them.

Now let's be clear what Paul doesn't say.

He's not saying that God's unknowable.

He's just spent 11 chapters giving us some amazing truth about who God is.

God has shown himself very clearly in the scriptures and in the world in which we live.

We can know him truly.

We just can't know him completely.

It's a theological word called the incomprehensibility of God.

To say it another way, this does not mean we cannot know God.

It just means we can't fully get our minds around God or our arms around him.

September 11th, 2001, a 32-year-old husband and father, Todd Beamer, was aboard United Flight 93.

And he had two boys and one on the way.

And not long after he took off, we know that the plane crashed over Pennsylvania.

And his car was still parked in the airport, and they eventually recovered the car and got it back to his wife, Lisa.

And as she was cleaning out Todd's car, she looked in the armrest, and there was a stack of memory cards.

There was a rubber band around those cards, and the top card was Romans 11, 33 through 36.

These verses that they had been memorizing together as a couple.

And she wrote afterwards in her book, she says, those words they helped quiet the what if and the if-only questions that often haunt people that experience sudden loss.

She went on to write that she had to rest in the fact that God had allowed this to happen.

She never got an explanation.

She got these words.

She got a God whose ways that she could not trace out.

And she found in him someone in which she could rest.

You see, the depth of God's ways, listen, it's not there to frighten us and to scare us.

It is to there for us to rest in.

And some of you this morning need that resting because you find yourself this morning in a very dark place.

And I don't know all the stories in this room, but maybe it's a diagnosis or a funeral or a job loss or a miscarriage.

And I can't begin to explain all of those things this morning, but I know because I've experienced and I know the temptation when you encounter suffering and you encounter pain, it's to say underneath that, well, if I can't see a reason for this, well, then there must not be one.

But did you know where the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God all come together and can be seen most clearly in a person hanging on a cross on a Friday afternoon?

And no one could explain it.

And the Bible says the world looks from the outside and it looks like foolishness to the world.

But the cross, friends, is the wisest and richest thing that God has ever done.

And you want to know how you can trust God's ways even when you don't understand them, and even when you can't see them, you look at the cross.

He who did not spare his one and only Son, but graciously gave him up so that he could graciously give us all things.

We might not ever see the bottom of what he's doing, but you can trust his heart.

And you can trust his heart because of the cross.

Unexplained does not mean unloved.

And so we can stop trying to manage God.

We couldn't if we tried.

And you don't have, and please hear this: you don't have to figure it all out in order to worship him.

Paul doesn't.

And I think that's so significant.

We can praise and we can worship and we can have doxology, yes, from the things that God has shown us clearly, but we can also praise him for the things that are still beyond our understanding.

Secondly, humbles us.

Look at verses 34 and 35.

We get two questions.

We don't get answers to either one of them.

We get an implied answer to both of them, and it's the exact same.

Who has known the mind of the Lord or been his counselor?

Answer nobody.

Nobody advises him.

A counselor is someone who's wiser than the one he advises.

So who's wiser than God?

Well, we know the answer.

No one is wiser than God, but yet we often try, don't we?

Or at least I try.

You ever pull up a chair next to God, so to speak, and maybe we don't say this out loud.

Maybe we're driving in the car.

God, I don't agree with this.

Who do you think you are?

I don't like this.

And if I'm honest, I think you're wrong.

But nobody has ever been seated above him.

And that doesn't mean that we can't bring our questions to him.

That's the whole book of Psalms that we've looked at this summer.

Of course.

Bring them.

He invites it.

This is about posture.

We bring our questions as a child, not as God's consultant and counselor.

Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?

Well, the answer is the same.

Nobody.

Nobody repays him.

Repaid means a fair payment.

And to repay God fairly, well, that would mean you would have to be God's equal.

And nobody is God's equal.

Everything you've been given that is ever given to him was his first.

I love John Stott here.

He said, We are not God's counselor and we are not God's creditor.

He is ours.

We are the ones who owe.

And that's a really hard sentence until you understand the gospel.

The creditor didn't collect.

Jesus pays the debt that we owe through his own blood.

And so if you're keeping a quiet ledger, God, look at all the stuff I've done for you.

Look at the ways I've sacrificed.

Thinking about all the things you are owed.

You can close the book.

You can put your pen down.

It's finished.

The debt has already been paid.

And this second question here echoes Job.

And this is the thing that stuck out to me this week that I learned more about, and it's worth slowing down for this morning.

Remember Job?

This has echoes of Job, and the commentators point this out.

Remember Job in the Bible?

He lost his wealth, he lost his health, he lost his children.

And he demanded that God explain himself.

And when God finally explained, he didn't give Job an explanation.

Job chapter 38, you know what he says?

Job 38 · chapter mention

Brace yourself like a man.

Who are you to talk back to God?

Who are you to question me?

You answer me.

And then he asked Job a series of questions that only the creator could answer.

And he says, Job, where were you when I created the very foundations of the earth?

His point, God owes nobody anything.

And that's what Paul has been getting at.

Remember, starting in chapter nine in a big way, this is not fair.

Is this, is there injustice here on God's part?

And the answer, he answers the same way God answers Job.

God owes nobody anything because everything is already his.

And Job's response is the response that Paul is after for us.

And that is to stop demanding and bow down.

You see, Job never got an explanation.

But he got God up close and personal.

And so what do we, what can we bring him?

If he can't be advised and he can't be repaid, what are we to bring him?

Well, only what he's already said.

Did you notice that?

It's very easy to miss, but notice where Paul roots his worship.

He's just quoting scripture here.

Paul's not reaching for his own ideas and own words.

He sings scripture.

He sings what God has already said.

Paul is moved.

Paul has emotions.

Oh, the depth.

But notice what moves him to those emotions.

His feelings come from what he knows about God and about who God is, and that should free you.

You're not at the mercy of your mood.

You're not at the mercy of trying to muster up some sort of feelings or trying to imagine who God might be.

No, the root of our worship.

And we see it very clearly here is what God has already said to us.

And I think that is so helpful and so such good news, especially on those days that we all have where we don't feel it and we don't feel like worshiping.

And when we find ourselves in those places, borrow the words.

That's what Paul did.

When you have no more words, borrow them.

Read the psalm out loud when you can't pray.

Say the creed with the church when your faith feels very, very thin.

Sing the hymn when you don't have a song to sing.

That's not wrong.

That's not insincere.

That's how worship works.

It's what we do every single week in this room.

God puts a song in our mouths.

We love because God first loved us.

First John chapter four.

Lastly, he frees us.

Look at verse 36.

Again, let's just walk through it.

From him, everything starts with God.

The world, your life, your salvation, through him.

So he doesn't just start it, he sustains it.

Even the very breath in which you're breathing right now.

The only reason you are breathing in this room and taking your next breath is because God is sustaining your life in my life.

To him, to him.

So everything is headed somewhere.

And where is it headed?

To him, to God.

He's the goal of all things.

In all things, let's be very careful.

It doesn't mean God's the author of evil.

Doesn't mean that God is the author of sin.

It means simply that nothing, not even your worst day, is outside of his care and outside of his hand.

To him be the glory forever.

That word glory means weight.

So to give God glory is to give him weight and worth.

It is to say God is the most valuable thing there is in our lives and in our world.

And God doesn't need our glory.

So why does he say this?

Well, he does it to show us himself.

And how does God show us himself?

Where do you see the glory of God?

Well, you see the glory of God very clearly on a cross.

A God who gave his only son for sinners.

And there is no better thing for us to see than that.

And so when God, when Paul says, to him be the glory, he's saying, God is worth it.

And so why don't we give God the glory?

Well, because of who we are.

Romans 3.

Before that, Genesis chapter 3, left to ourselves, we don't give glory, we take glory.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

And the cross is for people like us who want glory for ourselves.

All have sinned and fallen short of what?

The glory of God.

Romans 3 23 again.

We're glory thieves.

Every single one of us, nobody says that out loud.

To me be the glory forever and ever, but boy, we sure live that way.

When we take fifty plus pictures and review our caption multiple times in order to post the perfect photo on social media.

When we take credit for what we have, our gifts and our abilities and our opportunities and our income.

To me, to me be the glory.

Which way is your heart running this morning?

Is your heart running towards yourself or towards God?

You see, the thing about self-glory is it it's never enough.

It never fills you up, and we know this.

Why?

Because you have to keep earning it and you have to keep performing for it and you have to keep protecting it.

And so, where do you take an empty, exhausted, glory-seeking heart?

Well, not to a better performance, but to the person of Jesus Christ.

Think about Jesus.

He's the only person in the world that ever deserved the glory.

In Philippians chapter 2, says our Jesus emptied himself and made himself nothing, all the way to a cross in our place.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

So, what does Jesus do for people like us who are glory thieves?

Well, he shares it with people that have stolen it.

Isn't that amazing?

John chapter 17.

John 17 · chapter mention

The Father said, he says to the Father, the glory you've given to me, I have given to them.

And so what does that mean for you this morning?

What does that mean for you, as we say on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m.?

It's really good news.

It means you can stop exhausting yourself, trying to prove your worth.

You can stop chasing all these other things in the world to prove that you are somebody and that you matter and that you're loved and seen, because in Jesus, all those things are already true of you.

You are chosen before you were born.

You're forgiven and adopted.

You do not have to seek it, you already have it, and that brings an enormous amount of freedom.

You're actually free at that, if you get that in our hearts and it starts to change us, then we're free to celebrate.

We're free to celebrate when someone else gets the credit.

And we're free to fail without it completely undoing us and being the end of us.

We're free to be ordinary because you already have all the things that you're chasing.

And that is freedom.

We have freedom to be who God has actually made us to be instead of pretending to be someone we're not.

Free from making a name for ourselves because you already have the name.

You got Jesus' name.

And he bought you with his own blood at a price.

Think about the places that you've traveled, and I'll close with this.

Places that you've traveled, and and it's a sightseeing thing.

So either think about the New York City, the top of the rock, or the shard in London, or some other lookout skyscraper, maybe it's a mountain lookout or an o looking out over an ocean that's standing near a cliff, and you ride the elevator up, you hike up, you take the steps, whatever.

And when you get there, there's always this protective glass around the lookout.

And nobody, when they get to the top of where it is, wherever it is that you're going for this lookout, no one says, hey, look at the glass.

Great glass.

No one does that.

What do you do with the glass?

You look through it.

You look at the city and the ridge and the valley and the mountains and the ocean that goes on forever.

Now, does the glass matter?

Absolutely, the glass matters.

It's really important.

It keeps you safe.

It's just not the point.

It's there for looking through.

And I tell you that because that's Romans 1 through 11.

The richest, most glorious doctrine in all the scriptures.

And don't get me wrong, it matters, and it's really important, but it's the glass at the lookout.

It's not the point.

All of that theology and all of that doctrine that Paul has been laying out for us is meant for us to look through to get to God.

And when you get to God, you worship.

You see majesty and you see beauty and you see mystery, and all you can do is worship.

No one has to tell you to worship.

You can't help but worship.

Why?

Because theology truly understood always leads to doxology.

That's why Paul doesn't end with a summary chart.

He can't see the bottom of who God is.

All he can do is throw his hands up and start singing.

Because God is the point.

He's the point of your life.

He's the point of this world.

He is the point of all things.

And he ends with one word.

Did you notice?

Look at the end of the passage.

Amen.

So be it.

And he invites us as the church to say it with him.

From him.

And through him.

And to him are all things.

To God be the glory forever.

And the people of God said loudly, Amen.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for the depth and the riches and the wisdom of your glory.

Would you forgive us for the times that we've tried to advise you?

The ways that we expect you to repay us.

The ways that we make ourselves the point.

To you be the glory forever.

Amen.