One time during Jesus’ ministry a cocky rich kid comes up to Jesus looking for some life pointers. “Good teacher, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life.” And Jesus looks at him and instead of giving him a direct answer, asks him a question about what it means to be good.  Why? Because Jesus knows that to help the young man really find what he’s looking for—life with God, he first needs to be humbled. On another occasion a woman at a well asks Jesus for water, and Jesus starts talking with her about her marriage. Why? Because he knows that to help this woman find what she’s really looking for—everlasting joy, she first needs to understand how Jesus can save her. This happens a lot. People come to Jesus thinking they know what they want, and Jesus surprises them by offering what they truly, deeply desire. 

And Paul does something similar in this morning’s passage. Chapters 9-11 respond to one question. What happened with God’s promise to Abraham? Way back in Genesis God promised to bless Abraham and to bless Abraham’s offspring. He will forever be the God of Abraham’s offspring and care for them and give them a great inheritance. But now, the people of Israel, Abraham’s offspring, seem to have rejected Jesus and have forfeited God’s blessing to them. So what does that mean—has God’s promise failed?  

This is why Paul in verse 6 begins, “It is not as though the word of God has failed,” and it will take him three chapters really to explain why. But Paul doesn’t just provide a quick and logical argument. Because Paul, like Jesus, is a pastor. He recognizes that there’s a deeper and much more personal question that’s being asked here. “Can I really trust God? Can I fully and completely trust him with all of my life?”

In chapter 8 Paul has told us, “Yes, right now we will face hardship. Yes, right now we will groan and experience loss and even death as we seek to follow Jesus. But we can be filled with hope. We can cling to the knowledge that God is entirely committed to us—that he has promised to bring about our ultimate joy. We don’t need to hedge our bets—we can put all of our eggs in one basket. Even in the darkest, most uncertain moments, we can fully, completely trust God.”

And to trust like this is something that all of us deep down desperately need. This world is confusing and daunting; death is frightening. We deeply want to know that there is someone who holds us in his hands, who is a Father to us that we can count on no matter what.

And yet, trusting in that way is something we’re also afraid to do. Because so often we’ve counted on something, only to be disappointed. Can we really rely on God in this way? 

As a kid, I lived near a small reservoir that would completely freeze over in the winter. At a certain point in January, you could literally drive a car across it. And so we sometimes would ice skate on it. But there was always a tentative first moment say in late December when you were told that it was safe, but it was a different thing actually to step on to it. You felt a kind of uncertainty—can it really hold me up? 

That’s so often how our faith feels right? As we learn to place our weight, all of our lives, upon the promises of God, there’s a part of us that asks, “Can this really hold me?” And that’s really the underlying question here. “Can God really hold me up? If this is what happened to Israel who received God’s promises, couldn’t that also happen to me? Can I really trust God?”  

Paul understands that this is the deeper question. And what he also knows is that for you and I to experience the capacity to trust and rest in God that we long for, the real issue is often not those confusing questions about God we can’t yet understand. The real obstacle to our capacity to trust is how we see ourselves. For us to rest in who God is, we must know what we are. And that’s what Paul focuses on in this morning’s passage.  

God’s Blessing Doesn’t Depend on You

Because of the age of my three sons, last few years of our family has felt like non-stop applications. Applications for college, scholarship, jobs. Again and again, they, like many of us, have had to try to demonstrate that there is some quality in them that would cause a particular institution to select them. Smart, hard working, skilled in a particular way, people person, whatever: it’s all about showing that there is something about you that would make someone else want you. 

Since this is such a common part of our lives, our tend to think of our relationship with God this way: that God’s acceptance of us as a Christian, his decision to bless us, has to do with something about ourselves that makes it worth it to him. And that is deeply wrong.

In laying out his argument that God’s promise did not fail, Paul starts by making a simple point in verses 6 and 7: from the beginning the promise was never that every single child of Abraham would be the offspring receiving God’s promise. For Abraham had more than one child. And yet God said, “It is through one particular son of yours, Isaac who will be the object of my blessing.” This means, Paul says in verse 8 “It’s not children of the flesh,” not every genetic child of Abraham but the “children of promise”—specifically, in the case of Isaac, the child miraculously born, who are counted as those who would be blessed.

Why is that important? If every single one of Abraham’s children were automatically guaranteed to be loved by God, simply if they had Abraham’s DNA, what would people think? God loves me because I am an ethnic Israelite. I am part of a superior race. The blessing of God is because of something in me.” And they would be wrong! So God does not choose to bless every child of Abraham to make it clear: it’s not because of something about you.

Paul goes on to trace how God worked in the next generation. Isaac’s wife Rebekah had twins, and even before they were born—before, Paul says in 11, they had done anything, either good or bad, God chose Jacob, the younger of the two, to be the heir of his promises. According to the tradition in that day, the firstborn receives the inheritance. But God does the opposite here. According to the ways of our day, rewards should go to the person who deserves it, to the better son. But here, God does neither of these things. He chooses to bless the younger son, and he does that before Jacob did anything to deserve it. In fact, if you know the story of Jacob, you’ll know that he really didn’t deserve it. For much of his life he got ahead by lying and manipulating and tricking others. And yet God still chooses to set his love upon Jacob. All through his life God works on Jacob to change him and bring him to himself. Paul is saying here, “Look at God’s choice of Jacob! It shows us that God doesn’t choose to bless people because they are wise or especially moral. Because, again, if God always chose to bless the firstborn, or if God chose to bless those who did good things, they would be able to say, “Well, it’s because of something about me. Because I’m the firstborn, or because I did this.” God does the opposite so that it can be absolutely clear: it’s not because of something about you.

Look at verse 16: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion.” Do you hear what that’s saying? God’s blessing of us isn’t based on our hard work. God doesn’t say, “Well, this person is really showing that he takes me seriously—look at how much he’s trying. I’ll love him.” And even more than that, God doesn’t bless based on human will—based on the decisions we make. He doesn’t love you because you chose him.

Just think about that. Do you believe that God loves you BECAUSE you chose Jesus? Do you believe that God is blessing you with eternal life BECAUSE you chose to be a Christian? If so, you are misunderstanding something very important about yourself and your relationship to God. God does not love you and bless you because you turned to him. You turned to him because God already loved you and chose to bless you by opening up your eyes and leading you to faith. 

If you don’t understand that, you will continue to be held captive by the lie of the flesh: by the idea that “It’s up to me. It’s up to me to make sure God is kind to me. It’s up to me to make sure my life is okay.” And that lie will destroy you.  

For you to learn to trust God, you need to understand, It’s not because of something about you. It doesn’t depend on your choices or your hard work—but on God, on his mercy.  

You Are Not God’s Peer

The second truth we must come to understand in order to learn to trust God is that you and I are not God’s peers. That seems like an obvious thing to say—of course we’re not. Why even need to say this? 

If you’re familiar at all with the history of Christian theology, you’ll realize that we’re talking about one of the most difficult to understand truths in the Bible: the doctrine of election. The doctrine of election teaches that everyone has so messed up their lives that if we are left on their own, we all will stubbornly choose to reject God and follow the pathway of death. But God steps in and chooses to rescue some of us, to bring some of us into faith and life that is found in him. And this choice that he makes, as we have just said, is not because of our merit, but because of his mercy.  

But you might have noticed something unsettling about this: “some of us.” If God chooses to save only some of humanity, that means he also chooses to allow other human beings to continue on the pathway to destruction. It means that there are some people in this world that God simply hands over to their choices and allows them to experience the death they deserve.

This is exactly what Paul says in verse 18: God has mercy on whom he wills—saving some. And he hardens whomever he wills, handing them over to their own sin. 

Which is hard, right? Which is confusing, right? 

Often as people wrestle with this idea, they raise an objection: Wait, doesn’t that mean God is unfair? Verse 19. “You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 

And here again is where we see Paul the pastor addressing our deepest need, not by answering the question we are asking but by taking us where we need to go. Paul easily could have pointed out that it is our “fault” that we are in this situation and that “fairness” would mean God allowing all of us to experience the consequences of our sin. 

But to answer in that way would be to leave unaddressed the more important issue. The way we ask this question reveals that we don’t yet see ourselves clearly. Deep down we assume that what God is doing should basically make sense to us. That our minds are sufficiently capable and knowledgeable for us to reasonable make judgments about what God is doing. That, while we’re obviously not as smart as God, we are still close enough to be able to “get” God. 

And so Paul gently asks us, “Who are you?” “Who are you to answer back to God?” 

Now Paul is NOT saying that it’s wrong to ask questions of God or even express doubts. If you read the Psalms, you’ll see that the very songbook that God gives us to help his us relate to him is filled with confused questions like “Why?” and “How long?” and even, “Have you forgotten me?” Questions and even doubts are not the issue. The word for “answer back” has the idea of speaking to another as an equal. Relating to another as someone you have the right to second-guess and perhaps even point out where they might have gotten something wrong.

Who are you to try to debate with God? Paul includes the answer to his own question: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”

The book of Job tells the story of a truly great man who experienced some truly awful things. Job was a virtuous man of faith, the guy you would love to have as a neighbor or church elder—a genuinely good guy. And then the worst imaginable things happened to him: through a series of natural disasters his children all died and he lost all of his wealth, and he could not understand it. He knew he had been faithful to God. So why would God allow these things?  And in his anguish, he moves from the confused, aching questions of, “Why God?” to a kind of anger, to a conviction that he was wronged by God. He calls out to God, demanding a trial to put God on the stand and explain himself: prove to me that you were in the right to allow me to suffer in this way!

And in an act of severe mercy, God actually speaks to Job in response. He doesn’t directly answer Job’s question. Rather, like Paul does in Romans 9, he asks, “Who are you?” “Were you there,” God says, “when I created every inch of the earth and of the universe according to my plan? Do you make the sun rise and cause the weather patterns? Have you walked along the depths of the oceans and seen all of its mysteries? Do you supervise the animals? Can you explain why the ostrich and hippopotamus are the way they are?”

“Job,” he’s saying, “you’re acting as if we are on the same level: as if you understand about things enough so that you can look over my shoulder and check my math—as if I’m somehow accountable to you. But do you not see how utterly beyond you I am?”

And Job is undone. He says, “When I was questioning you, I was talking about something way beyond my understanding. Before I only had heard about you. Now I see, and I am filled with shame at my arrogance.” I am only a man—I cannot hope to understand the ways of the eternal God.

Here is one of the most basic truths about you. You are a creature. God is the Creator of all things. You are a mortal who has lived on this earth for less than a century. God has always, always been. You seek to learn all of your life, and you will read a fraction of what has been written, and you will understand a tiny little drop of the ocean of knowledge about this world, and God is the one who made that ocean, who knows every star, every atom, who keeps it all together. When we think of the mind of God, we must not think of someone who’s just a bit smarter than us. Einstein is a bit smarter than you. God’s understanding makes Einstein seem less than a mindless ant by comparison.  

What does this mean—that it’s wrong to even ask questions about election? No. But there is a right way to ask, a right posture. As we seek to grow in our understanding of God and what he does, we must always recognize that there will be things God does, ways that he chooses to work that we will not get. That will feel frustratingly confusing. Anything less than that—any “god” who makes sense to us is cannot truly be God. Because the true God, the one worthy of our worship, the one worthy of our trust, is someone who is truly far beyond us.

Conclusion

What Paul is doing here in these verses is crucial, even if it’s also a bit uncomfortable. Intuitively, we feel like it would be better if God’s blessing did depend on us. Because we like the idea of control, of being in the driver’s seat. But once we begin to recognize how flawed and failing we really are, we see that being in the driver’s seat would be terrible and terrifying. To know that God loves you, simply because he loves you; he is committed to you because he has chosen to rescue you means you don’t need to be afraid of your own failings. It’s not up to you. It’s up to the mercy of God.

And, again, at first it feels like an easier thing to imagine a God that always does what we think he should, whose every choice we can explain and even admire. But really, do we want a God who is only a little bit smarter than us? What a terrifying thing that would be. I mean, isn’t it far far better to know that the God who holds us in his hands is just way better and wiser and greater than our imaginations? Isn’t that the God you want to trust in? And that is the God who really is. That’s the God who chooses to have mercy on us.

We want to be the center of our story, in control, and knowing everything. But as long as we stay there, we are stubbornly staying in a lie, and we will never be able to experience the trusting relationship with God we were meant for. We need to let God put us back into our rightful place. As philosopher Kent Dunnington has put it, “Christian worship graciously displaces us from being the center of our story and instead incorporates us into the story of God.”

I love that way of putting it. Because it is grace. It is because God loves us that he is pulling us out of our false self-centered way of seeing things and teaching us how to be part of the story where God is at the center. This is grace, because we need to know what is true. And this is grace because once we start understanding the story, then we come to see the most amazing part of all of this: the mercy of God toward us. This God who is at the center of all things who does what he pleases; this God who is great and wise beyond our imaginations—this God has chosen to love me and show mercy to me.  

And this is where our passage ends. “As indeed he says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ ” We need the context to more fully understand these words that God said to his prophet Hosea. 

Hundreds of years before Jesus, Hosea married a woman named Gomer, they had three children, and then she cheated on him and left him for another man. Hosea doesn’t tell us about his emotional response, but we can only imagine the pain that would have caused. The betrayal of the one you are meant to be able to trust. The anger.

Gomer’s choice to leave her husband does not go well for her. She ends up being treated poorly by the man she went to, perhaps even becoming a slave in her poverty. Which, I suppose feels like a satisfying outcome. She deserves that. 

But then, there’s a plot twist. God says to Hosea, “Now, buy her back from slavery, and take her back, and make her your wife again. Receive her again and love her.” 

Why? Because, God says, this is my story. I have loved my people, and they have cheated on me, turned from me, and will suffer because of rejecting me. But even still, even still I will love them. Not because of anything they do, and not for a reason you will ever understand, but I will love them. I will say to people who have lost the privilege of being my people, “You’re my people again.” The people who have turned from my love I will say, “I love you.”  You are my people. You are my sons and daughters.” “And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’ ” 

Let me tell you something that cannot possibly make sense to you or me, because God is so far beyond us. Whoever you are, whatever you have done, even if up until this very moment you have done nothing but turn your back on God, if right now you receive his gift; if right now you trust in Jesus to save you, God says to you, “You are my beloved, and I forgive you. You are my child. And I will always love you.”

If you can hear God’s Word this morning, you will begin to experience more deeply that you can really, truly, trust God with everything. Let’s turn to him now.