Romans 9
9
God and the Jewish People
1I am in Christ, and I am telling you the truth. I do not lie. My feelings are ruled by the Holy Spirit, and they tell me that I am not lying. 2I have great sorrow and always feel much sadness for the Jewish people. 3I wish I could help my Jewish brothers, my people. I would even wish that I were cursed and cut off from Christ if that would help them. 4They are the people of Israel. They were God’s chosen children. They have the glory of God and the agreements that God made between himself and his people. God gave them the law of Moses and the right way of worship. And God gave his promises to them. 5They are the descendants of our great ancestors, and they are the earthly family of Christ. Christ is God over all. Praise him forever!# This can also mean, “May God, who rules over all things, be praised forever!” Amen.
6I do not mean that God failed to keep his promise to them. But only some of the people of Israel are truly God’s people.# Literally, “Israel,” the people God chose to bring his blessings to the world. 7And only some of Abraham’s# Most respected ancestor of the Jews. Every Jew hoped to see Abraham. descendants are true children of Abraham. But God said to Abraham: “The descendants I promised you will be from Isaac.”# Quotation from Genesis 21:12. 8This means that not all of Abraham’s descendants are God’s true children. Abraham’s true children are those who become God’s children because of the promise God made to Abraham. 9God’s promise to Abraham was this: “At the right time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.”# Quotation from Genesis 18:10, 14. 10And that is not all. Rebekah also had sons. And those sons had the same father, our father Isaac. 11-12But before the two boys were born, God told Rebekah, “The older will serve the younger.”# Quotation from Genesis 25:23. This was before the boys had done anything good or bad. God said this before they were born so that the one chosen would be chosen because of God’s own plan. He was chosen because he was the one God wanted to call, not because of anything he did. 13As the Scripture says, “I loved Jacob, but I hated Esau.”# Quotation from Malachi 1:2–3.
14So what should we say about this? Is God unfair? In no way. 15God said to Moses, “I will show kindness to anyone I want to show kindness. I will show mercy to anyone I want to show mercy.”# Quotation from Exodus 33:19. 16So God will choose the one he decides to show mercy to. And his choice does not depend on what people want or try to do. 17The Scripture says to the king of Egypt: “I made you king so I might show my power in you. In this way my name will be talked about in all the earth.”# Quotation from Exodus 9:16. 18So God shows mercy where he wants to show mercy. And he makes stubborn the people he wants to make stubborn.
19So one of you will ask me: “If God controls the things we do, then why does he blame us for our sins? Who can fight his will?” 20Do not ask that. You are only human. And human beings have no right to question God. An object cannot tell the person who made it, “Why did you make me like this?” 21The man who makes a jar can make anything he wants to make. He can use the same clay to make different things. He can make one thing for special use and another thing for daily use.
22It is the same way with what God has done. God wanted to show his anger and to let people see his power. But God patiently stayed with those people he was angry with—people who were ready to be destroyed. 23God waited with patience so that he could make known his rich glory. He wanted to give that glory to the people who receive his mercy. He has prepared these people to have his glory, and 24we are those people whom God called. He called us from the Jews and from the non-Jews. 25As the Scripture says in Hosea:
“I will say, ‘You are my people’
to those I had called ‘not my people.’
And I will show my love
to those people I did not love.” Hosea 2:1, 23
26“Now it is said to Israel,
‘You are not my people.’
But later they will be called
‘children of the living God.’” Hosea 1:10
27And Isaiah cries out about Israel:
“There are so many people of Israel.
They are like the grains of sand by the sea.
But only a few of them will be saved.
28For the Lord will quickly and completely punish the people on the earth.” Isaiah 10:22-23
29It is as Isaiah said:
“The Lord of heaven’s armies
allowed a few of our descendants to live.
Otherwise we would have been completely destroyed
like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.”# Two cities that God destroyed because the people were so evil. Isaiah 1:9
30So what does all this mean? It means this: the non-Jews were not trying to make themselves right with God. But they were made right with God because of their faith. 31And the people of Israel tried to follow a law to make themselves right with God. But they did not succeed, 32because they tried to make themselves right by the things they did. They did not trust in God to make them right. They fell over the stone that causes people to fall. 33As it is written in the Scripture:
“I will put in Jerusalem a stone that causes people to stumble.
It is a rock that makes them fall.
Anyone who trusts in him will not be disappointed.” Isaiah 8:14; 28:16
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Copyright © 2015 by Tommy Nelson™, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Romans 9
9
God Is Calling His People
1-5At the same time, you need to know that I carry with me at all times a huge sorrow. It’s an enormous pain deep within me, and I’m never free of it. I’m not exaggerating—Christ and the Holy Spirit are my witnesses. It’s the Israelites . . . If there were any way I could be cursed by the Messiah so they could be blessed by him, I’d do it in a minute. They’re my family. I grew up with them. They had everything going for them—family, glory, covenants, revelation, worship, promises, to say nothing of being the race that produced the Messiah, the Christ, who is God over everything, always. Oh, yes!
6-9Don’t suppose for a moment, though, that God’s Word has malfunctioned in some way or other. The problem goes back a long way. From the outset, not all Israelites of the flesh were Israelites of the spirit. It wasn’t Abraham’s sperm that gave identity here, but God’s promise. Remember how it was put: “Your family will be defined by Isaac”? That means that Israelite identity was never racially determined by sexual transmission, but it was God-determined by promise. Remember that promise, “When I come back next year at this time, Sarah will have a son”?
10-13And that’s not the only time. To Rebecca, also, a promise was made that took priority over genetics. When she became pregnant by our one-of-a-kind ancestor, Isaac, and her babies were still innocent in the womb—incapable of good or bad—she received a special assurance from God. What God did in this case made it perfectly plain that his purpose is not a hit-or-miss thing dependent on what we do or don’t do, but a sure thing determined by his decision, flowing steadily from his initiative. God told Rebecca, “The firstborn of your twins will take second place.” Later that was turned into a stark epigram: “I loved Jacob; I hated Esau.”
14-18Is that grounds for complaining that God is unfair? Not so fast, please. God told Moses, “I’m in charge of mercy. I’m in charge of compassion.” Compassion doesn’t originate in our bleeding hearts or moral sweat, but in God’s mercy. The same point was made when God said to Pharaoh, “I picked you as a bit player in this drama of my salvation power.” All we’re saying is that God has the first word, initiating the action in which we play our part for better or worse.
19Are you going to object, “So how can God blame us for anything since he’s in charge of everything? If the big decisions are already made, what say do we have in it?”
20-33Who in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? Do you for one moment suppose any of us knows enough to call God into question? Clay doesn’t talk back to the fingers that mold it, saying, “Why did you shape me like this?” Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? If God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness, isn’t that all right? Either or both happens to Jews, but it also happens to the other people. Hosea put it well:
I’ll call nobodies and make them somebodies;
I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved.
In the place where they yelled out, “You’re nobody!”
they’re calling you “God’s living children.”
Isaiah maintained this same emphasis:
If each grain of sand on the seashore were numbered
and the sum labeled “chosen of God,”
They’d be numbers still, not names;
salvation comes by personal selection.
God doesn’t count us; he calls us by name.
Arithmetic is not his focus.
Isaiah had looked ahead and spoken the truth:
If our powerful God
had not provided us a legacy of living children,
We would have ended up like ghost towns,
like Sodom and Gomorrah.
How can we sum this up? All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened out their lives. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their “God projects” that they didn’t notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together:
Careful! I’ve put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion,
a stone you can’t get around.
But the stone is me! If you’re looking for me,
you’ll find me on the way, not in the way.
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THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of NavPress. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.