The Rest Were Hardened - Part 5

Paul really means to reckon in the hardening with real guilt and real punishment. This is why a lot of people who write on this text use the phrase judicial hardening, meaning that the hardening has in it judgment, retribution, which implies accountability, responsibility. Here's where you can see it in chapter 11, verse 20. He's talking about Israel, the rest of them who are not still grafted into the branch of the covenant and not saved, but they're broken off. Look what it says in verse 20 of Romans 11. They were broken off because of their unbelief. You stand fast through faith. So, there you see the two poles that we as an eldership at Bethlehem, all 25 of us, embrace. God is absolutely free from constraint or control or decisive ultimate influence from the human side. He is free and is dictated in what He does by His counsel, will and wisdom. Men, human beings, are guilty, responsible, so that when they come into judgment, finally, no injustice will have been done to them and no blame, no blameworthiness will be attached to God. Now, that is very hard for most people to get their brain around because it feels contradictory. I don't think it is contradictory. It's just for our finite minds and our limited experience, hard to see. And I'm with you in the hardness that we experience. And we were praying downstairs that this play on words sort of, I wonder, God, if a sermon about hardening would be used to break hardness. That a hard text to deal with would be used to break in right now to some of you. I mentioned in my prayer earlier, and probably they'll hear me say this, that a younger couple in this church came up to me and introduced themselves a year or so ago to say that when I preached this from Romans 9, it was that that did the decisive saving work in their lives. And I just stood back in wonder that God, in His absolute sovereignty, would make that text a means by which somebody said, all right, I lay down the arms of trying to work for myself. I see it has to be totally 110% of God and I yield. I mean, that would be a wonderful thing if that happened tonight. I've been praying that it would and that it happened there in the service in the morning as well. Let me close like this. When God draws you and me to Himself and opens our eyes that we might believe and trust Him and love Him and treasure Him and own Him as our Lord and Savior, when we realize that we have been separated out freely without God being in any way influenced to do it by something we commended to Him, when we feel that our being taken as His child, that His Son dying for us, His resurrection, that He's working everything together for our good, that all of that is totally undeserved, I say again what I said last week, we should be the humblest, most broken-hearted, happiest, most bold, most self-sacrificing, loving people on planet earth. Just a little thing from my devotions this morning. I'm reading Daniel. Some of you are reading Daniel too because we're supposed to be reading Daniel if you're in the discipleship journal reading.