Romans 9:14–16Scripture
Everybody turn your Bibles to Romans chapter 9. We have been navigating Romans 9, we are nearing the halfway mark.
Today our assignment is Romans 9:14-16, and I have named my message "Unconditional Election." Now for some of us that just the simple title is trigger-inducing and confusing, and honestly, I grew up with a Wesleyan Arminian heritage, you know. It's funny, because I've had some questions, some people are kind of scared to ask me, but you wonder about it around your dinner table: so what is Shawn, and what is Echo Church? Are we Arminian, are we Calvinist, are we Reformed, what are we?
And listen, ladies and gentlemen, I am just trying to be biblical. That's what we are. And there are going to be things that we may disagree with and about, but at the end of the day, I'll just say this, I'll just say this, I used to say that the things that we read in his Word and doctrinal positions that we hold, there are what I would refer to as essentials, and I've always referred to as essentials and nonessentials. Listen, if it's in the Bible, it's essential, and so I think it matters more what our position is and where we stand on certain issues, because if the Bible speaks to it, we should endeavor to know exactly what God is trying to say. And so those things that I have labeled
Introduction
As secondary issues, I believe are more, I say "first year" because I can make up whatever word I want, but are more of a primary issue than secondary, because anything that comes from God's Word should be a primary issue for us. So then as we talk specifically about the sovereignty of God in chapter 9, his ability to be able to choose who he pleases, whether that be by showing mercy or by hardening, later on we will read, whether that be the same hands and from the same type of clay, or the clay, he fashions one for mercy, one vessel for mercy and one vessel for destruction, and it begins to simply lay out a very offensive idea in chapter 9 that specifically for American culture is very hard for us to wrap our minds around, because so much of our world is centered around what we do, the choices we make, the will of men, and it begins to then remove us from that idea and place all the hope that we have in God. It removes the glory from man and what man does and then puts the glory on God. How many of you are happy for that yet? As it begins to try to undermine our desire to glorify ourselves, we wrestle with this concept because we want all things to emanate, to begin to emanate and to eventually end with us, but the Bible says it begins and ends with God. And so when we talk salvifically, then it is very important that we understand who is doing the work, and Paul is working very hard to try to help us understand that. Now let me just stop here and say something that I think is very important, and I'll give you some things to maybe consider this week. All right, I am this morning going to read from two translations. One is the NASB, many other translations will align more with the NASB, like for instance the New King James, the New Revised Standard, the NRSV I think it is, or New Revised Version, and several others. All right, that's one translation. Then of course we commonly read out of the ESV here this morning. There are three types of ways that a Bible is translated. I'm not going to go into details about this, but I want you to know why I'm reading two translations today. All right, you can write these down and you can go do research about how they translate specific Bibles. Some people have been asking questions. One is majority text translation, it's the way they translate it. Another one is critical text, right, and then another one is what is referred to as textus receptus, and it is the Greek manuscripts that they use to translate the Bible. So certain Bibles are translated by majority texts, some Bibles are translated by critical texts, and some bibles are translated by textus receptus. I would encourage you to go research that, all right, because that is why we're seeing some differences in these two translations.
Point 1God's justice means righteousness, not equality
Now they don't contradict each other at all, but I like the way the NASB puts it, and I'll tell you why, because it chooses, instead of using the word "unjust," it uses the word "unrighteous." Both of them, if you take the Greek word and you look at the Greek word, both of them are represented in that word or the translation or definition of that word. I like that it uses the word "unrighteousness" because today in our culture, justice can get the meaning of this text convoluted for us.
In other words, today when you hear the word "justice," or specifically attached to the word "social justice," or social justice organizations, or social injustice that is happening in our midst, when we hear the word "justice," what we really hear is equality for all men. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a biblical narrative.
If equality was what we would see, everyone would go to heaven. If equality is what we see, then either everyone would go to heaven or everyone would go to hell.
If equality is what we would see, that undermines the text we looked at last week where God loved Jacob and hated Esau. And so we hear "justice" today, we then look at this and we say things like, God must be unjust because he doesn't fight for equality. But justice is not about equality.
Justice is about righteousness, or doing what is right, or doing what is ethically and morally upright.
And so there are some translations that use the word "righteousness," New American Standard is one of them. Let's start with the ESV, though. Here's what the ESV says in verses 14 through 16: "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part?" Now if you were to interpret this through the lens of our culture, "there is no inequality with God, is there?" And the answer would be, wait a minute, it seems to be, there is a lot of inequality with God. "There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For he says to Moses," and he begins to explain why God is not unjust, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So then it does not depend on the man who wills. Can I get an amen?
It does not depend on you. It does not depend on your will to choose God, but his will to save you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:40
If you put your faith in you will fail yourself by the end of the afternoon.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:54
Our faith is put in nothing, "on nothing less," our faith is built on nothing less than, and what? Oh man, that was good. That was a good song they picked today. Well, that was a good one.
Do you really believe it, or do you believe it's Jesus plus me choosing, or do you believe it's Jesus plus me coming, or do you believe it's Jesus plus me doing good things? Now you need to understand, he's speaking to the Jews who had the law. It was a privilege, they received the law, and because of that they began to turn to their own devices and what they do over what he did.
And today in our culture we're in danger of living the same way. We want to take what is God's and we want to rob him of glory and make it because of what we did. And righteousness, essentially, is God's means by which he is glorified.
He is right. Now let's look at the New American Standard. I like this because we have trouble with the word "justice," right? Romans 9:14, and the NASB says, "What shall we say then? What then shall we say? There is no unrighteousness with God, is there?" Now all of us, even in our modern context, understand that, and we could answer no, there is not unrighteousness with God, more clearly than when we hear "injustice," because "injustice" gets convoluted in our culture. "There is no unrighteousness with God, is there? Absolutely not! For God says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whomever I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I have compassion.' Therefore it does not depend on the one who wills nor on the one who runs, but rather it depends solely on God who has mercy." This is how we can be still and know that the LORD is God. The problem is that people in that day begin to, when they hear the gospel and they hear how God-centric it is and how God does the work and how God shows mercy to whom he'll show mercy and he hardens whom he hardens, that is troubling for people to consider themselves fully in the hands of a God who determines.
We hate being out of control. We hate it, but the goodness of the gospel depends on him being the one who is sovereignly at work through it all.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 11:52
So now that we know the problem, let's look at the argument in 9:14 and 16. So let's do a little bit of Old Testament stuff, right? We did in our small group discussion, and he builds on this story in Exodus, and he continues to build it past verse 16 in the preceding verses as well, but Paul grounds the righteousness of God by
Point 2Trust what God says, not what we see
Quoting Exodus 33:19. That's where this comes from, this whole "I have mercy on whom I have mercy" and "harden whom I'll harden," it comes from Exodus 33:19. Here it is: "I will have mercy on whomever I have mercy." This is in Exodus 33. "And I will have compassion on whoever I have compassion." And to understand how this argues for God's righteousness in election, we need to understand the Old Testament context of Exodus 33:19. Or Exodus 33:18 and 19 says, then "then Moses said to God, 'I pray that you would show me your glory.'" So here's Moses' request. Now don't pay attention to what I'm saying here's Moses' request: show me your glory. That's Moses' request. I want to see your glory. It's no different today, is it? But we don't receive him by sight, we receive him by...
And so the same cry all the way back to Exodus for mankind is to show me your glory. So then we should care about God's response, right? And specifically because Paul is extrapolating text out of Exodus 33:18-19, and he's extrapolating and attaching it to his defense of unconditional election in Romans 9, then we should care what God says here. It's important. Show me the glory, and then he said, this is what God said: "I myself will make." I like that word, that right there summarizes Romans 9. And I want you to say it with me, because I want to really get in there. God says, "I myself."
Not God plus you, not God choosing because you chose.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 14:54
The way that God shows his glory is not God plus you, it's God himself. "I myself will make my goodness pass before you and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you." Proclamation, everybody say proclamation. "And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion."
In Exodus 34:6, when the theophany actually takes place, we read this: "The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, 'The LORD, a God merciful and gracious.'"
So what emerges from these two texts is that the essential revelation of God is not what Moses saw but what God said.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 15:51
What emerges from these texts is the essential revelation of God is not what Moses saw but what God said.
When are we going to get to a place where we trust more in what he says than what we see? And the same struggle that existed thousands of years ago still rears its head even in our culture today in America, where we trust more in what we see than in what he says, and our doctrine, our belief system, the essentials of our faith are not established by what he says but rather by what we see, and what we see robs him of glory. Come on now, listen, now that right there, that's foreign to us, where we will do everything in our power to create environments that are more visual in nature, not knowing that oftentimes what we see, what we manifest, what we construct, what we build up robs God of glory, because oftentimes what we see is not indicative of who he is.
Oftentimes then when we read Romans chapter 9, we tend to base our interpretation on what we've seen, and what we've seen is we've seen a God who looks unjust and unfair and who's not righteous. How many of you have ever shaken your fist at God? Just raise your hand if you've ever done that. Some of you more holy people in here not raising your hand, you have to show me how you've never been mad at God. But it is very easy, and it is at the heart of shaking your fists at God, and he can handle it, by the way, he can handle it, but at the, in this whole shaking your fist at God, we reveal that we trust more in what we see than what he says, because he has a lot to say about the opposition we endure here on this earth, but do we trust in what he says or do we trust in what we see? There is a godly fear.
It's good to be scared to not touch a hot stove, because if you weren't scared of that, but fear not, okay? Yeah, you should fear that.
You should fear a hot stove. Why? Because God established that in you to protect you. There is a holy fear, amen. That's why in the Bible it says that when God or an angel shows up, people fall in complete and utter fear before the Lord. There is a righteous fear, and in everything that we experience in life, any emotional equation of our life, there is an unrighteous version of that, where Satan is perverting that which was put in you for good.
In other words, for example, there is a godly, righteous justice and an unrighteous justice that looks righteous today.
Oh, come on now, I don't have time to talk about all the social justice movements and organizations that want to destroy the patriarchy of family units.
Go read their bio, their About page. They want to destroy what God has designed. This is not justice that's righteous.
This is unrighteous that looks righteous. What are you trying to say, Shawn?
Be careful, little eyes, what you see, and trust more in what you hear than in what you see.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 20:31
I see a lot of good things happening today, Shawn. It looks good. Be careful to not trust more in what you see than in what you hear in his Word, because God has established a family, a patriarchal family unit, that this world hates. This world hates this. This culture, this in America hates a biblical patriarchal family unit where the husband is the leader of the home, and most if not all social justice movements want to undermine and destroy men as leaders of homes. It's just true. Now young people today, this is troubling to you because you would rather be excited about what good things are posted on Instagram, and you form your opinions based on your Instagram feed and not on the About page of that organization. And some of the young people today need to stop fighting for injustices, and you need to take the time you've invested in fighting verbally for injustices in our world and you need to put your faith in the only one in all the world that is just.
It is God who fights, not you. It is God who does it.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 22:10
I'm going to say it again: what emerges from these two texts in Exodus is that the essential revelation of God, even though Moses wanted to see, is not what Moses saw but what God said.
God's glory was revealed in what he said about himself, and he said a lot of things in verses 14 through 16 this morning, didn't he?
Your theological position will be built and based on what he said or what you see. What will you trust?
I think that's why Paul uses this Old Testament context. Along with proper understanding of the meaning of God's righteousness is the key to the argument of Romans 9:14 and 15.
Point 3God's freedom to choose is his glory
God's words in Romans 9:15 mean that it is an essential part of God's glory that he be unbound in choosing the beneficiaries of his mercy.
He's not bound to you, he's not bound to your choice, he's not bound to your ways, he's not bound to what you do.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 23:29
He can choose who he pleases, and he's not bound by that, because as a matter of fact, he does it before Esau and Jacob were born and had done anything. The emphasis here is put on God's ability to choose who he pleases without being bound to you. To then take this text and make it dependent on you robs him of glory, and it's serious business. That is, he would be less glorious if he wasn't absolutely free to choose who he wanted. Indeed, he would not be fully God if he were under the obligation to any particular human distinctive. He would be dethroned, if you will, if his bestowal of mercy were dependent on anything outside himself. If he waited to see how men will or would run before he showed mercy, he would be limited by man and therefore not glorious at all. Man would be glorious.
You see what happens here so quickly.
Many of us would not like to refer to ourselves as a glory robber, but we sure give our level best to do so.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 25:02
If he waited to see how men would run before he showed mercy, he'd be limited by them and therefore not glorious at all. As Exodus 33:19 shows, his glory is his freedom from all human claims. Therefore, since God's unrighteousness consists in his acting unwaveringly for his own name's sake, and since his glory consists largely in his sovereign freedom in election, God is not unrighteous to disregard human deeds and distinctives in choosing whom he wills to bless. In fact, he must pursue his purpose of election in this way in order to remain righteous, for only in his sovereign, free bestowal of mercy on whomever he wills is God acting out a full delight in his own glory, not your goodness. Number three, I want to talk about this real briefly: the essence of God's righteousness is his commitment to the glory of his name. That was one of the keys to understanding Paul's argument for God's righteousness in the freedom of election. The other key is Paul's understanding of God's righteousness. Last time, I simply gave you that understanding and promised that I would give you some time to support this. I said God's righteousness, last week, is essentially his unwavering allegiance to his own name and to his own glory. God is righteous to the degree that he upholds and displays the honor of his name.
He is righteous when he values most what is most valuable, and what is most valuable is not you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 27:07
What is most valuable is his own glory.
Now, is this the way Paul understands the essence of God's righteousness? I believe it is. One place to see this is Romans 3:23-25. Let us be reminded of this verse. It says this: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." How many of you have ever quoted that, all sinned and fall short of the glory of God?
Sin here belittles the glory of God. It makes God look less valuable by desiring something else more than him. Oh, this is so important, so stick with me.
Here, I'm going somewhere. Then Paul describes God's remedy for that derision of his glory, verse 24, and "they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." And then in verse 25, Romans 3:25, "whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness," it says, "because in his divine forbearance he passed over former sins." Praise God. I want to talk today, if we're talking about unconditional election and God choosing freely,
God is the only
Pastor Shawn Gray · 28:52
Point 4Only God has absolute free will
Being in the entire universe that has absolute and total free will. You do not. You do not have absolute and total free will. Some of you have been taken aback, gasped at that, but you would rather trust in what you see than what he proclaims. And what he proclaims is you're either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ. You are not free. Are you with me today? So you can go around tooting and shouting about your free will to do this and that and the other, but your will is not absolutely free like God's will, his will. He can choose who he pleases and he does not have to answer to you, and he is not dependent on what you're going to do in the future, and he goes through painstaking effort to try to help you understand that the way that he reveals his righteousness is the freedom. So let's talk about this free will thing. Verse 16, Romans 9:16 draws the obvious inference from verse 15. Whether a man receives mercy from God or not does not depend on man's willingness or his running, it says, but solely on God. In other words, God's merciful treatment of anyone is never initiated by or in any way ultimately influenced by a person's will.
Do we have a will? Yes. Is it absolutely free like God's? No.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 30:43
Does that mean that God forced me to pick up the keys this morning when I drove here? No.
But our soteriology, I'm speaking so difficultly, you need to understand that God begins it and ends it, and he helps you in the dash more than you would like to admit, that his hand directs and guides and disciplines and rebukes and comforts and is involved in every part, from salvation through sanctification and in glorification, because what God began he completes.
Notice that you're not in there.
God is the Alpha and the Omega, he is the beginning and the end. What he begins he completes.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 31:48
When his Word goes out, that's the means by which he gives the effectual call. There is a general call and there's an effectual call that comes in the midst of the general call. Today I will make a call to respond to the gospel, and those that God effectually calls in the midst of that will then turn their hearts to the Lord. But you need to understand, faith is given as a gift and repentance is a gift of the Spirit, and God is more intimately involved in the initiation of repentance and justification, and he is involved in the sanctification of becoming more like him on earth, and he is completely involved in the glory, and it is not dependent on you. He is the Alpha, he is the middle, and he is the end, and he is all of it, and you are not in it. When he talks about it, to interject yourself when we're speaking of God's sovereignty and the righteousness of God is to pollute the very thing that was meant to be holy. That is why you're hidden in Christ, because if you were not hidden in Christ, you would pollute the glory of his name. Let us not be glory robbers by the way we trust in what we see over what he says. If free will were defined as the native power in a man to determine his own destiny, this text shows that there's no such thing in the entire world. Oh man.
I read an article about a pastor of a church of 800 who preached, and I told you that 9, 10, and 11 are just skipped in commentaries and lots of commentaries, but there's a pastor who preached through 9, 10, and 11 in his church, and by the time he got halfway through 10 he lost 400 members of his church, and the elder board asked for his resignation because we'd rather believe in what we see rather than what we hear. Ladies and gentlemen, that's no different than the Jews, and that's who he's speaking to here.
He's speaking to this issue that is going on, that we trust more in what we do than in what he's done. It's a problem.
If free will were defined as native power in a man to determine his own destiny, this text shows there's no such thing in the entire world. It not only shows free will to be nonexistent, it also shows that the demand, to demand free will, is actually an offense against the righteousness of God, for in Paul's understanding the inability of man by his willingness to elicit God's mercy, verse 16, is a direct inference from the glorious freedom of God in verse 15, which in turn is
The ground of his righteousness. The ground of his righteousness is not in you choosing him but in him choosing you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 35:26
If God's righteousness consists in his maintaining the fullness of his glory, and if an essential side of that glory is his absolute freedom in election from human willing and running, then to insist that man's will ultimately determines man's destiny is to offend the righteousness of God. Shawn, this is a secondary issue, it doesn't matter. No, it offends the righteousness of God, it matters immensely. Are you with me today? And it is our duty to wrestle with the matter.
Point 5Respond in faith and boast only in the Lord
It is our duty to wrestle with the matter. Number four, implications. Let us look at the implications. There's two huge implications, and then I'll close, of the way we understand unconditional election, or election. Number one, we should believe on Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and treasure.
The Bible says if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Notice here that the verbal profession is not enough, that there is a heart transformation that happens.
Now we've learned that in Romans chapter 1, that man is born into sin, man is depraved, man wants to do what is wrong, and even when he hears what is right, his heart is in rebellion against God. And not only that, not only does a man not want to be in rebellion against God, but man desires to get other people to be in rebellion as well. Sound familiar? Sound like Satan, because when we're his children, we act like that. So what is our hope? Our hope is built on nothing less than our free choice and willingness.
We sing the right words, we believe the wrong ones.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 37:54
We read the right words, we argue the wrong ones. Well, you have to determine today what do you believe, and belief really is essentially a matter of you determining, do you trust in you or do you trust in him?
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved, Romans 10:9. That's where that's at. Here's another one. Don't be wiser than the Word of God. Don't say, God chooses whomever he wills, I don't need to choose him, because the Bible says in Joshua 24:15, "choose this day whom you will serve." How do we reconcile that with a verse in the New Testament that says you don't choose him, he chooses you?
Let me just say it's kind of like which comes first, the chicken or the egg? And so our involvement of choosing is involved, but we don't choose unless he first compels us to choose. It is the call that precedes the choosing, and so he calls and because he calls we choose. Let's not become fatalists.
Here's another one: Paul says, "I take hold of Christ because he's taken hold of me." Notice that it's dependent on God first taking hold of him. Philippians 3:12. Don't be wiser than the word of God. That's funny, because many of us think we are, when the Word puts it plain as day. We tend to find our doctrinal position on conjecture rather than his Word. Don't be wise in the Word of God. 1 Corinthians 1:20 says God has made foolish the wisdom of the world.
Humble yourself and turn to Christ and be saved. Number two, here's another implication: beware when you have believed that you do not boast as if your believing were ultimately your own doing.
Instead be thankful and say with the Apostle Paul, as he says in verse 17, I know that's not part of our reading but let's just listen to this. I thank God, he didn't go, I'm so thankful I chose him. Listen to what Paul says: "I thank God," in verse 17, "that from the heart you have become obedient to the teaching of Christ." The Bible makes clear that God saves us in a way that excludes all boasting in ourselves. Boasting is doubly excluded. It is excluded by the principle of faith and by the truth of unconditional election. Boasting excluded by faith is found in Romans 3:27 when it says, "Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith." What is faith? Faith is a gift that no man can boast in. Faith is not human free will to choose.
Faith excludes boasting because it looks away from all human doing and just receives free grace. Boasting is excluded by unconditional election. 1 Corinthians 1:27-29, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God." God chose, exclusive of you, God's choosing, God's free and inscrutable election removes boasting from those who really feel its preciousness. Therefore, now that you've heard the gospel, thank him, and let him who boasts boast only in the Lord, not in human will or exertion, or another translation, not in human will or in your running, but boast in the Lord alone. Notice here that your theological and doctrinal position regarding unconditional election either turns you to boasting in you or makes you one who boasts in the Lord. Which are you? Which are you?
May our boast be in the Lord and in him alone.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 44:07
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