Bible Talks - Family Church (9:45am)
Series: Lean On Me - Sermons From Romans
What on earth is God doing?
Sunday, 19 May 2002
Feedback:
Share using:
Post this to: Facebook · Delicious · Google · Twitter · Email
I’m a great fan of John Cleese and Fawlty Towers in particular, and as I approached this passage in Romans this week, I felt a little like Basil Fawlty in the episode called ‘The Germans’. The hotel was hosting a group of German tourists for a few days. Basil had had a bad knock on the head and was acting even more bizarrely than usual, muttering “Whatever you do don’t mention the war!”.
Of course he did, and all kinds of mayhem ensued.
Well, in many Christian circles, if you listen careful you can people muttering “Whatever you do don’t mention election and predestination!”
Now, if you’re not sure what those actually mean – don’t worry, you’re not alone. And by the end of our time today, you may or may not be any the wiser!
At chapter 9, Paul begins a section dealing with these very issues, in relation to the status of the Jews before God.
It was an especially important and pressing problem in Paul's day when the Christian faith was still very new and there were still strong links between the Christian faith and the Jewish people.
The problem for thinking Christians, in Paul's day was to work out where the Jews fit into God's plan.
Now, you may not think that’s a big issue! But the underlying questions that it raises are big ones for us too.
Let’s take a look at the situation:
The Jews had so much going for them! Paul lists some things in verses 4-5. They were God's chosen people, the people he adopted as his own in a special way; they were the ones to whom God had made himself known; with them God had made his covenant; they had received God's law through Moses; they had the temple and most importantly, it was from the Jewish people that God's Messiah, Jesus Christ, was descended.
How could it be, then, that these Jewish people, who had been given so much, as a whole had rejected the Messiah?
How is it possible that they refused to see that Jesus was God's Son and that he came in God's power and he brought God's wonderful gift of salvation? That was the problem!
Of course not all the Jewish people rejected Jesus - all the first apostles and Paul himself were Jewish, but in general terms the Jews had rejected Jesus. The crucial question which followed on from this was whether that meant that God had also rejected the Jews.
This was not only a problem for thinking Christians, but it was also a very big concern for compassionate Christians. Paul was deeply compassionate about his fellow-Jews. V2: I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, he declares. V3: For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Such was the compassion he felt about his own people that he would even give up his own eternal life if they could gain it!
Are there people that we feel that same kind of deep compassion? Perhaps as we see our nation of Australia turning further and further away from its Christian heritage, we feel something of what Paul felt for his people. But more personally, are there people close to you - a husband or wife, a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a mother or father, or a friend you care deeply about, or someone you work with each day - people who do not share your Christian faith?
Are there people you are praying continually and earnestly for; that they would turn to Christ while they have the opportunity? What a struggle it is for us when they don't seem to respond. We pray for them. We witness to them. But they reject the Christ we seek to bring to them or they simply ignore him. They may even die apparently without ever turning to Christ.
How do we deal with that? How do we cope at an emotional level? How do we understand it in the light of what the Bible says? These are not easy questions and we have to be careful of simplistic answers which don't get to the real heart of the problem.
I doubt that you will leave this morning feeling that you have all the answers, but as we work through Romans 9-11 over the coming weeks – especially if you are in a Bible Study group, I think we will gain a clearer understanding of the way that God works and that we will also gain a firmer trust in the Lord Jesus as we cope with these important issues.
A More Important Question
OK, so Paul has raised this question about the Jewish people and where they fit into God's plan. It is an important question, but often we find that as we bring our questions to the Bible, what we discover is not always the kind of answer we are looking for, but rather, the that perhaps we need to be asking a different question.
Behind Paul's question about the Jewish people is a more important question and it comes out in v6: Paul says: It is not as though God's word had failed.
So the real question is whether it could be possible that God's word has failed. It may very well seem that this is the case. God had spoken to his people, the Israelites. He made himself known to them and he told them what he looks for from those who belong to him and what it means to be his people. But it all seemed to have come badly unstuck, because the Jews rejected it.
We make our plans; we set our goals and we do our best to achieve them. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we fail. Sometimes we are simply unable, no matter how hard we try, to do what we have said we would do.
Is that the way it was with God? Is that what happened with the Jews? Did all God's wonderful plans for them fail?
Paul's answer is: No!
But this is a very important question! Is God really in control? Does God really know what he is doing? Is he really able to carry through his plans for this world? Was God really able to achieve what he set out to do with the Jews? Is God really in control when it comes to our lives? Is he really in control when it comes to the lives of those around us and those who are close to us?
Do we have complete confidence in God? Even when we cannot comprehend why he allows certain things to take place, when we cannot imagine how he will successfully achieve his goals, when it seems to us that everything is falling in a heap and God's plan has failed, - can we have confidence in him?
Well, Paul never doubted for a moment. And he goes on to show why he still had complete confidence in God, and to help us understand what is said here we can think about three points that he makes.
(a) God's People
The first thing to understand, is about what it means to be God's people and this is something which has been alluded to earlier in Romans. V6b. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.
There are two different ways in which the word 'Israel' is used and it is important that we keep this in mind as we work through these chapters. There is 'Israel' in the sense literal sense of the nation of people descended physically from the line of Abraham and Jacob. But the same word can also be used to refer to those who are truly God's own special people. Not all who are descended from the Abraham/Jacob are truly God's people.
That is the same as what Jesus said to those Jews who were determined to kill him. Because they rejected him as the son of God, He went so far as to say that their actions showed that they belonged to the devils' family and they were his children.
The first thing to understand, then, about what had happened with the Jewish people is that being God's people is not simply a matter of genetics – of the family line.
(b) God's Choice
The second thing is that God makes his own choices, as he wishes.
He has just been talking about Abraham and Isaac and now he turns to Isaac and Rebekah's children. You may remember that they had twin boys named Jacob and Esau, but God chose Jacob: V11 reminds us that God's choice goes back to before the children were even born!
In fact, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad, Rebekah, their mother was told, "The older will serve the younger." (v11-12)
If we can put it very simply for the moment, 'election' is about God making choices.
We may not fully understand why it was that God chose Jacob rather than Esau but it was a decisive choice. V13 puts it in a way that is intended to shock, quoting from the Old Testament: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." How can that be! How can the Bible say that God hated someone?
Should we water this down so that it simply means that God loved Esau less than he loved Jacob?
Jesus once said: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-yes, even his own life-he cannot be my disciple." [Luke 14:26] Jesus wanted his followers to understand that following him meant a decisive, once-and-for-all choice. It is a choice for Jesus in which we will not allow anything else to come before him.
Perhaps that's not far from what this means. God made his choice and Jacob was the one he chose. And God's choice stands firm.
So, God’s word hasn’t failed. On the contrary, when God makes a choice, that choice will not fail.
All of this means: God is in control!
When he makes a decision, he stands by it.
When he makes a choice, it stands firm.
How different this is to our own experience!
So often we feel out of control. We find ourselves in a situation where we have no choice. We don't have freedom. We find ourselves pushed along by circumstances beyond our control and we don't know what to do because there is nothing we can do or there is only one choice which means that it is no choice at all.
God makes his choices! God is in complete control! We may not always understand his choices, but He alone has perfect freedom to choose.
(c) God's Mercy
Of course, we want to understand God's choices and sometimes when we can’t or don't understand, it seems to us that God's choice is wrong. It becomes, for us, a matter of justice.
V14 puts the question as bluntly as we can imagine. “What then shall we say? Is God unjust?” Is God fair? Does he play favourites? And not surprisingly, the answer comes back: Not at all!
Once again the answer is that we are asking the wrong question. The right question to be asking is not about 'justice', but about God's mercy and compassion. Paul quotes the words of God to Moses: "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." [Exodus 33:19]
This is the third thing we can say from these verses. It all depends on God's mercy and compassion.
If we talk about what we deserve from God and what would be the 'just' or fair way for him to deal with us, we have to say that we deserve nothing good from him at all! All we deserve is God's judgment, his punishment because of our sin. What we need to be reminded of constantly, and what the Bible constantly remind us of, is God's mercy and compassion. That is what we desperately need from God more than anything else and it is the very thing he loves to pour out on those who are his people.
Now that would be a lovely place to stop.
But Paul goes on to make us even more uncomfortable: In Exodus, when Moses confronted Pharaoh, king of Egypt and called on him to let the Israelites go free, Pharaoh continually dug his heels in. The Bible says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, but it also says that God hardened his heart. Both those truths go together, for Pharaoh’s obstinacy towards Moses and God was no accident.
God raised up that Pharaoh at that time for the very purpose of the Exodus.
But this makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? That God actually hardens people against Him seems to overthrow our sense of justice, freewill, and makes us the playthings of God!
But, that need not be. Paul anticipates our reaction in v19 “You will say to me then, ‘How does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’” Is Pharaoh really guilty if it was God who raised him up? Or Pontius Pilate? Or Hitler? Or Osama bin Laden?
Paul’s answer is in v20-21 [read]
What is he saying? I think he is asking his readers – including us – to reflect on what we are protesting about and to whom.
Our readiness to interrogate God establishes the reality of our freewill and our responsibility. In other words, we answer our own question! We are caught in the very act of answering back and asserting our will against God We are like clay and God is the potter, yet these lumps of clay are always standing up to argue with their maker!
However hard it may be logically to hold in tension God’s sovereign will and our guilty rebellion and consequent responsibility, both are true.
We have a responsibility to ‘do the right thing’ and live according to the will of God, yet even when we rebel and stand up to God, he continues to drive history along the exact path he has determined.
The Crucial Answer
Now we’ve only touched on this ‘unmentionable’ topic, but don’t be sucked into thinking this is a bit of esoteric theology. These truths – hard as it is to hold them in tension – have a dramatic effect on the way we live our lives for Christ in a pagan world.
Without a reasonably clear understanding of God’s sovereign control, we can make Him out to be a very different God to that of the Scriptures.
Without a sovereign God, our evangelism becomes incredibly hit or miss – dependant on our own cleverness at persuading people to our point of view, and ultimately tempting us to outright manipulation to get a ‘result’
No. As you are praying daily for people to come to Lifeworks, to come to know Jesus and accept him as their Lord and saviour, we need to first and foremost recognise God’s controlling role in all of this and let Him do his work in and through us.
If you are still a bit confused, good! Because we are only part way through an argument which extends from chapters 9 to 11, but thus far the crucial question is whether God's word has failed. Can God fail? The answer is no!
God's purpose for the Jews had not failed - although on the way they had rejected the Messiah.
God's purpose in our lives has not failed, even though we often mess things up pretty badly.
He is in control. He does know what he is doing. And we can be completely confident to place our trust in him.
