Romans No.21 Election

Let's read from Paul's epistle to the Romans, and the verses that we're going to be looking at this evening are from the 9th to the 18th in the 9th chapter of that remarkable letter. Romans chapter 9, verses 9 to 18. For this was how the promise was stated, at the appointed time I will return and Sarah will have a son.

Not only that, but Rebecca's children have one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose in election might stand, not by works but by him who calls, she was told, the older will serve the younger, just as it is written, Jacob I loved but Esau I hated. What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all.

For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. It does not therefore depend on man's desire or effort but on God's mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, I raised you up for this very purpose that I might display my power in you and that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.

Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy and he hardens whom he wants to harden. Father, give us eye salve to be able to see the truths of this scripture and not only minds but informed but wills that are obedient, that are prepared to accept that your word is truth even when human intellect flounders at trying to comprehend it. For the saviour's sake, amen.

I remember the occasion as though it was yesterday. Actually, it was 1963. I've known and thank God for this many great and precious experiences of his grace.

Times when I think I could humbly say and sometimes honest advise with humility and one must always be honest. Times when I have known what it's been to be God's lost in wonder, love and praise as the Wesleyan hymn indicates. Times when God has been exceedingly precious when I have felt his touch upon my life and have been prepared to have banked on that experience as affirming that God is even if the whole of the world had risen up and said that he was not.

Times when I have felt the great ecstasy in my own heart and life as I've been liberated to praise God in a way that I would never, humanly speaking, by my own intellect have been able to do. How you theologize those experiences, I don't know. Some people would refer to them as the baptism of the spirit but I'm not prepared to argue the toss over mere terminology.

But having said all that, there is one particular day that will ever live on in my life until the moment that I'm taken from this world to be with the Lord. I was just two or three hundred yards from the London Planetarium in a little room which I shared with one or two other people. It was still small but cramped.

And I was spending the afternoon translating as best I could this epistle of Paul to the Romans from the Greek into English. I'd always felt that my salvation which differentiated me from some of my family circle was as a result of my spiritual intuition and the grace of our Lord Jesus exhibited especially on the cross of Calvary in dying for me. The thing that marked me off from my relatives was that I had believed.

I had taken the step of faith. I had intellectually responded to what I believed that the Lord had done. That's how I came at the gospel.

That's how it had always been presented to me and that's how I believed it. But I was driven that particular afternoon to a fresh conclusion that it wasn't as a result of my initiative that I had been saved. What had happened was that the prior grace of God had been manifested in my life compelling me, enabling me, giving me the abilities to respond to the truths of the gospel as they were presented to me in the early years of my life.

I was amazed, utterly amazed at that fact. To the extent that I still recall the tears just going down my cheeks. It was for me a pivotal experience.

It was a holy moment, one of those moments that are almost too sacred to speak of in all their fullness. It became the bedrock of my thinking from that moment on. It became the stimulus for my evangelism.

It didn't in any way make me lethargic. It enabled me to believe as a preacher, as I was ultimately to turn out, that whenever I faced a particular group of people, be it a congregation of ten or thousands of people, that probably there would be within those congregations people who also had known that prior working of the Holy Spirit, whose hearts had been prepared to receive the good news of the gospel of Jesus. And I wrote in the Bible that I was using in those days, the English version that I was using to check my attempts, my feeble attempts at the Greek.

I wrote on the 21st of May, 1963. "'Tis not that I did choose thee, Lord, for, Lord, that could not be. This heart would still refuse thee, hadst thou not chosen me.

Thou from the sin that stained me hast cleansed and set me free. Of all thou didst ordain me, that I should live for thee.'" And I know what it is to sing with John Newton, "'Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.'" Now, I preface my remarks this evening as we come to what is perhaps a difficult passage of Scripture with that personal illustration. And I do so because it seems to me that when we're dealing with the concept of God's elective grace, we have to approach Scripture with great humility.

We need to take the shoes off our feet, for we stand on holy ground. And when you're dealing with the intimacies of God's revelation, the problem is this, that you might be carried from one extreme to another, that you might make conclusions that are utterly unwarrantable, that you might not be able to hold intention, that sometimes God in his grace, this side of eternity, reveals certain things about himself and about his ways which cannot be rationalised, which cannot be fully understood. There is a word that theologians use called antinomy.

And what it really means is there's two conflicting principles. And in Scripture, you get sometimes the conflicting principle where you are asked to go into the whole world and preach the gospel and endeavour by pure logic to convince men and women of the error of their ways. I believe that God entrusts us with that, to make an assault on the reason of people and to outthink them, to outmanoeuvre them, to bring them face to face with the truth, to realise that within every human breast there is the potential of salvation.

On the other hand, you must be driven to this conclusion even by a casual reading of the Old Testament Scriptures and the New Testament Scriptures, that there is a divine election. Abraham is utterly astonished. Get up, Abraham, from Ur of the Chaldees and move out to a land that I will show you.

God tells Abraham that he's going to make of him a great nation. The whole world will be blessed through Abraham's seed. It will be so prolific that if you could count the stars, then you can count his seed.

If you can count the grains of sand, then you could compute the descendants, the number of the descendants of Abraham. But why Abraham? Why Abraham? Here's our blessed Lord walking on the seashore of Galilee and he sees a couple of men mending their nets. He says to these men, come, leave off what you're doing because I'm going to make you fishes of men.

And Peter stops immediately as a result of the authoritative, magnetic voice of Jesus. And he aligns himself with the Son of God. But why Peter? Why John? Why that bunch of twelve men as opposed to another twelve in Palestine? Why is it that Jesus says, you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you that you should bear fruit? Why is it that our Lord Jesus in the high priestly prayer in John's gospel says to the Father, speaking of those for whom he died or for those for whom he would die, thine they were and thou gavest them me.

Why is it when the Apostle Paul pens his letter and with the adrenaline in his bloodstream as he dashes off his amazing thoughts to the church at Ephesus, to the Christians there, he talks about the Lord Jesus, God the heavenly Father and the ministry of the Holy Spirit who has made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure and goes on in the eleventh verse of the opening chapter, in him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, chosen in Christ, chosen in him before the foundation of the world. The scriptures you can heap them up on this side that speaks of God's elective grace and I tell you it is nothing short of wonderful to appreciate that God in the magnitude of his love has directed his grace towards you and if you ask him why it is that he loves you, the only answer he will give you is, I love you because I love you. And you ask him but why me Lord and why not someone else and there is no response from the divine heart to that question.

He just tells you to get on with proclaiming the gospel of his grace, to tell men and women that God so loved the world. You get these scriptures which come to us and stimulate us to take this gospel which has brought us to a knowledge of God and to share it in blanket fashion like the sower distributing the seed in generous supply across the whole of the land so to speak, praying that in God's grace the seed might fall upon good soil and ultimately bring forth a hundredfold in terms of harvest. Now it seems to me that you have to be dealing with these aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ as you come to these particular verses.

The apostle has been telling us in the seventh chapter that he above all men appreciates that in his heart there is a bias towards sin. I was sold in the slave market of sin says the apostle. There was nothing that I could do to redeem myself.

The good that I wanted to do, I could not do. The evil that I didn't want to do, that I found myself so often in its power. Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me? And you say to Paul, well pull your socks up, turn over a new leaf, improve yourself, move towards God and he'll tell you, man you don't know what you're talking about.

If I had the ability to do that, I would do it. But then the passion of his heart moves to a crescendo. As in his misery he cries out, what a wretched man I am, who will rescue me? And he lifts himself to a peon of praise as in the 25th verse of that seventh chapter he says, thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

What I couldn't do for myself, God did. He sent his son. Jesus came looking, as God came looking for Adam in the early days of creation, so Jesus the good shepherd comes seeking for his sheep.

You are born, my brother and sister, with a bias towards evil. And apart from the grace of God, there is nothing that you can do to overcome that bias. And in the grace of God, as he deals in some ways with, if you please, he allows the apostle to deal in some ways with the mechanics of this grace, you discover his elective love.

Not all the world is saved. One wishes that that might be the case from the human vantage point, but scripture indicates that the death of Jesus does not offer blanket salvation or does not bring about the blanket salvation of the world. That's what universalism teaches, but the gospel doesn't teach that.

The gospel goes on to teach that the death of Jesus is efficacious for all those who make a response to his death, to his saving life, to his mighty resurrection. And in that response, there is involved the prior workings of God's spirit as he brings to himself those who must be saved. Isaac becomes the blessed son of Abraham through whom the covenantal promises are realized and through his seed they find fulfillment.

Not only does Paul cite Isaac as being an illustration of the elective love of God, but he takes us to the sons of Isaac, the twins Jacob and Esau, and we discover the apostle saying, and it's rather a difficult comment because he's quoting from Malachi, and it seems at surface level to be unfair, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. We'd like some explanation, wouldn't we? But there isn't much of an explanation that is given apart from what is smuggled in in the 11th verse where you read just after the dash in order that God's purpose in election might stand. You get in the life of the twin sons of Isaac an indication that God has a selection, a selective love.

Jacob I loved, and God did love Jacob, and to me it's extraordinary that God loved Jacob. I wouldn't have wanted Jacob on our pastoral team. If he'd had a shop, I wouldn't have actually been too disposed towards buying stuff from him.

I once quit from the pulpit. I wouldn't have bought a secondhand camel from Jacob, and yet Jacob is a man who has the mark of God upon him. I can understand God twinning his name with Abraham in degree.

I understand him even more, but he doesn't. I could have understood him had he done twinned his name with Joseph. I love Joseph, don't you? He speaks to me.

If you're moved by the addresses on a Sunday morning, then thank God, but I tell you I got in on it first. I've fallen in love with the character of Jacob as I did with the character of Ruth. I can understand God being called the God of Jacob, the God of Joseph.

I think I confused the names then. You sought me out. I'm getting old.

I can understand God calling him, twinning himself with Joseph, but not Jacob, and yet in one sense I'm glad that he did because if God can love Jacob, then God can love me. Jacob I loved, and he did love him. Now Malachi here, of course, is not speaking specifically of the individuals in this quotation.

If you check it back in the context, Jacob and Esau were both used, if you please, to found respective races, and from the loins of Esau, so to speak, came the Edomites, and they were always the enemies of the Hebrews. They dealt in a very nasty fashion with the Hebrews as they were pushing their way through Sinai, and in the centuries that were to come, there was always great hostility between the Edomites and between the Hebrews, as is indicated to this day in the conflict that rages often between Syria and the Jews, Syria and Israel. Jacob I loved, but Esau, for what has been done by the descendants of Esau, then the Lord seems to indicate there is an attitude of distaste in his heart towards Esau.

I don't think that you can use hatred in the absolute sense of the word. I'm not trying to soften it. I think some commentators do.

I don't think that you do scripture any justice by diluting down words that you don't like. I think there are times when you have to say, this is what scripture says. I don't really understand, but nonetheless, I will accept it as it logically seems to, as a meaning logically seems to be.

There is within the descendants of Esau that which causes God hurt. You remember our Lord Jesus on one occasion said that as far as discipleship was concerned, our priority is so to love him, that in contrast, our loyalty to anyone else, even our nearest and dearest, would seem to be hatred. Now, it's in that area that I would try to help you in understanding that word hate.

I'm not trying to soften, but I am trying to contextualize it as far as the biblical history is concerned and as far as the use of that language is concerned in the New Testament. You see, one of the things that confuses people, well, not confuses people, but puts people off when they come to the tab, and I know what I'm talking about because sometimes at least they've had the honesty to tell me, is that I am prepared to preach on the wrath of God. I'm prepared to say that I do believe that sin is so offensive to God that he can have no truck with the sinner in his reprobate condition, in the hardness of his heart, the man, the woman who refuses to respond to the overtures of God's grace, then the wrath of God remains on that person, and their ultimate destiny is an eternity without God, which at the bottom line means hell.

I don't enjoy preaching that. I don't want to preach that, but that's what Scripture indicates, and where I cannot understand the revelation of Scripture, I'm still called upon to proclaim it. The apostle Paul later on will say in this epistle, who has known the mind of God? His ways are past finding out.

He's quoting there from one of the prophets who says of God, my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts. There are things about this God I do not understand. I don't apologize for that to you, for if I could understand God, if the whole of divinity had somehow been placed in that small computer that I call my brain, to the extent that I could describe to you God and explain all that there is in his nature, then the Trinity would have moved into a quartet, and I would be amongst the Godhead, and that illustration is almost foolish, but I use it to make the point.

There is an election. God has his hand upon Jacob, as opposed to Esau, the descendants of Jacob, as opposed to the descendants of Esau, who in stubbornness and rebellion went their own way. And so the apostle deals with this matter of the elective love of God and the possibility of the Lord showing great rejection.

What word am I trying to find? The Lord showing that he cannot have dealings with the Esau type. Now this seems to be, says the apostle Paul, at least it's as though he hears someone objecting that this is indicating unfairness on the part of God. What shall we say? Is God unjust? Is it unjust of God for him to have chosen a group of people over against another group of people? Well, at the human level, it might seem that that is the case, but God does not answer at the human level.

He does not answer to us. He is the great unanswerable one. We do not bring God to book.

He brings us to book. Is God unjust? No, says the apostle. It is impossible for God to be unjust.

It's against his attribute. He cannot sin against himself. The apostle takes you to Moses.

Moses, you remember, I'm now in verse 15. Moses has interceded on behalf of his people, and rightly so. His people have engaged in idolatry, and Moses has come before the Lord, and he's expressed his contrition and his sorrow, and he's arguing with the Lord as you and I argue with God that the Lord ought to be merciful.

But the reason why God is merciful has little to do with your prayers, essentially. Your prayers are necessary. Prayer is for your benefit, not for God's benefit.

But God does not answer prayer simply because you have prayed. God answers prayer because of his character. God is merciful because that is his nature.

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. Prayer is a great mystery, and you have to be careful how you handle prayer, because the last thing that one wants to do is to take the theology of the Archbishop of York.

I'm not being critical of archbishops for the sake, but if they're going to print, then I do have a right as a preacher to object to some of the things that they say. And when he argues that prayer is unnecessary and that God does not pick up all the prayers of the thousands of people around the world as though God has some great heavenly computer, then I say, Mr. Archbishop of York, I suggest you come to our discipleship class and listen to the ABC of the doctrines of the gospel. Yes, it is right that we pray.

It's right that we engage in heart-aching prayer before the Lord. But when our prayers find answer, let us always remember this, that God is merciful because he is merciful. God is compassionate because he is compassionate.

You may have to persuade me as a hardened Yorkshireman to be compassionate in a particular situation. You don't have to persuade God because he is essentially merciful and compassionate. That's what Paul is here teaching us as he backtracks to Moses and pulls out this particular quotation.

The basis of forgiveness is not the speech of human pleading, I write in my notes, but the mercy of the divine heart. And to quote a better authority than myself, though not the absolute authority, F. F. Bruce is moving up the ladder. God's mercy has its cause in himself and not in human will or activity.

That's a good statement coming from the assemblies of the brethren. There is no unfairness in God, says the apostle Paul, as he's quoting Moses. And he takes us on.

He takes us on to the situation of Pharaoh. It does not, verse 16, therefore depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy that people are saved. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, verse 17, I raised you up for this very purpose.

Interesting, isn't it? The way the apostle Paul refers to scripture as though scripture was a person for the scripture says. Actually, when you look to the reference in Exodus, you'll discover that it's God speaking. But that's an interesting observation for us just to take aside for a moment and to think through.

When scripture states God speaks, some of you feel that I'm stretching things when from time to time I've argued that we are not impoverished in the 20th century over against the enrichment of the patriarchs and the prophets and the apostles. That God spoke to Abraham, that God spoke to Moses, that God spoke to the prophets, that Jesus came alongside his apostles does not mean that we poor mortals in the 20th century are therefore spiritually disadvantaged. In fact, the reverse is the truth.

The reverse is the truth. They never had a full Bible. You do.

Moses never lived to see the New Testament days, if you'll exclude his experience uniquely on the Mount of Transfiguration. The word of God is the inerrant now word of God spoken to every generation. How many times have I taught you the epistle to the Hebrews quotes the Old Testament as though God is speaking now as he is.

So to say that you've never heard the voice of God is in effect, if you use biblical language, saying that you don't read scripture because when scripture speaks, God speaks. That's why every alleged prophecy must always be checked from the word of God. And if it's contrary to the grain of the word of God, then dismiss it.

It doesn't mean that you have to stone the prophet or the person who offered his thoughts, but they were his thoughts. They were not God's thoughts. And sometimes in human thoughts there's a mixture of the divine and the human, and it's right for us to distinguish.

It's right for us to judge. That's what the apostles said. Don't get hot under the collar under prophecy.

Of course, the prophetic gift is still with us today, but it's not with us with the same authority as scripture. When scripture speaks, God speaks. That's what the Paul is saying here.

The scripture says to Pharaoh, I raised you up for this very purpose. Now here is a man who creates a great deal of theological problems, this man Pharaoh. I mean, what do you make of it? Well, it seems to me that you can interpret, I raised you up in this sense that time and time again, the word of God was given to Pharaoh through Moses.

He had extraordinary opportunity, but he was already hardened. You see, you can't say that God hardened the heart of the man. Essentially, what God did was allow the hardening that was already there to intensify, as happens at the tab.

You think it's easy to preach the gospel on a Sunday night to people who've been coming for 18 years, who I know have listened to cartloads of sermons, and they go from our church completely unmoved. I wish they didn't come. I wouldn't preach that publicly on a Sunday.

I once got reprimanded, at least I once got advised against making that sort of statement by a great American Bible teacher whom I respect, but he heard the anguish of my heart. You see, when you come and you listen and you reject, then what is happening, possibly, I pray God not, that there's a hardening and a toughening. Now, those of you who've got loved ones who are in that category, don't misunderstand my words.

It does not necessarily apply to everybody, and we have known remarkable occasions when people have listened to the gospel for years and they've been impervious. They haven't responded, and yet the day came when God moved in and turned them upside down and inside out, and we must pray to that end. But you see, this man, Pharaoh, he had opportunities to listen to the word of God, but he was hard.

But the very hardness of Pharaoh, this is what Paul is arguing, the very hardness of Pharaoh is overarched by the sovereignty of God. And though the Hebrews might have been apoplectic at Pharaoh's hardness of response to the pleadings of God through Moses, ultimately God is glorified by the hardness of that Egyptian king. One of the wonders historically of the old world was the emancipation of the Hebrews from Egypt.

When later on in centuries yet to be, even heathen people looked at the Israelites, they had some knowledge, perhaps in rumor fashion, as to what God had done for that remarkable race. Watch out when you deal with the Hebrews. They've got a hidden weapon.

Their God is on their side. You see, this is what Paul is saying, I raised you up, at least quoting the Old Testament, I raised you up, Pharaoh, for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. Therefore, Paul brings in the bottom line conclusion.

God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy. He does that. He has mercy on Jacob.

You say that's unfair? Who are you to talk about the unfairness of God? Would it have been more fair for both Esau and Jacob and their descendants not to have been recipients of the grace of God? Could you say that you really are clinging to the doctrine of the justice of God? No one who clings to the doctrine of the justice of God can ultimately object to being sent to hell. That's the place for those who have broken the law, and this God, by your own definition, is a God of justice. God will be just and seen to be just in all that he does, but within the justice of God, there is a mercy, a remarkable mercy, a remarkable compassion, and it affects Jacob and the likes of Jacob.

It affects the apostle Paul. Before he ever became a Christian, he was detailed to one Ananias as being a chosen vessel unto the Lord, and that's where you fit in. You say, why? I don't know.

I don't know why you. I'm even more confused. Why me? But this I am persuaded because our Lord taught it, that he has chosen us before the foundation of the world.

We've been in Christ, so to speak, and our concerns is to take this burden of the gospel and to preach it persuasively, compassionately, with pleading and with tears that men and women might respond, and where your theology remains untidy, relax. God never promised to fill you in with all the drama that he's been about this side of eternity. Martin Luther says, God has revealed so much of his character as we need to know, but there is a hiddenness in God that yet we are to explore, and when eternity becomes present time and experience, then you will discover how these antinomies, these seeming contradictions, assaulting the will of men that they might be saved, and a recognition of the sovereign decree of God bringing to himself an innumerable number of people.

You'll see how these balance up, and you will see how God vindicates the promise that he made to the first acknowledged child of faith in the book of Genesis, Abraham, the judge of all the earth, will do right. There is no unfairness, there is no lack of morality, there is no questionable ethic within the character of our great and holy God. Let's pray.

He is the great uncontrollable who is governed by his own holy character. All are answerable to him, but he is answerable to none. Father, we thank you for your word.

We praise you for its power. Lord, if it were the case that our evangelism was to develop simply because of our own enthusiasm and our abilities to explain the gospel, how hopeless the situation would be. But we thank you that there is an endowment of power, the power of the Holy Ghost, playing upon us and going ahead of us to the people that we're trying to reach.

We're asking, Lord, that that power of your spirit might work in the lives of men and women who you'll bring into our path, and that as we explain the gospel to them, they'll seize it and respond to it, as we believe many Muslims are doing. The theophany, the unusual, the supernatural experience, the in-breaking of God that they don't understand, and yet they realize that something is happening in their lives. Then someone comes along and tells them about Jesus, and all those strange events make sense as they appreciate that God had gone on before preparing them.

Lord, what you're doing in North Africa and in parts of the Middle East, in Christ's name, do it in worthy, do it amongst our relatives, and help us to believe that this doctrine of the sovereignty of God, far from dulling our evangelism, gives body to it, gives it verve, gives it stimulus. Lord, come upon these dear people, come upon the ministries of our church, baptize them afresh by the power of your spirit, and make us effective to reach men and women with the good and glorious gospel of the Savior. Amen.

Let's sing that hymn, Oh what a Savior that he died for me, which brings in that balancing scripture, verily, verily I say unto you, and maybe during this third or fourth verses, assuming there are three or four verses, those friends who've already been in prayer and want to slip away, then you can do so, and God be with you as you go. Brother Tim Saunders is going to take over helping us in our time of intercession.