Romans 9

Division 3. (Romans 9:1-33; Romans 10:1-21; Romans 11:1-36.)Israel’s special promises, how and when to be fulfilled. The grace of the gospel has now been carried to its issue in glory. The doctrine of the epistle is so far concluded; but we have yet to see the bearing of all this upon Israel and the special promises given to her of God. The sin of man at large and of Israel, we may say especially, has been fully proved. “There is no difference, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God;” but that does not affect at all the question of the faithfulness of God to His own Word. Let man be what he may; if God has spoken, He will surely fulfil what He has promised, and here we have to remember that the promise to Abraham was a very different one from the conditional one of law. The promise to Abraham was indeed not directly to the nation at all, and therefore the standing or fall of the nation could not affect it. It was absolute grace in its nature, and as we see in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, if trial and suffering, if the furnace were needed as well as the lamp, the covenant included both, in order to work out the purpose of God.

When law came in, it was exceptional entirely, as the apostle says, “It came in by the way,” and for the purpose, not of putting Israel’s title to the inheritance upon a new foundation, but really in order to show that nothing but absolute grace could be the foundation of such promises as hers. The law was the ministration of death and condemnation, as we have fully seen, and if the inheritance were of law, as the apostle tells us afterwards, it were no more of promise.

Law and promise are in absolute contrast, in contradiction, one may say, to one another. Israel chose the law, and so far, therefore, as she could do it, gave up the grace in which God in fact had been hitherto dealing with her, to accept the recompense of her own desert. She found this in result; and it was seen from the beginning that it would be terribly against her. The new covenant, which still remains to be fulfilled, provides for the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant, but to a people who have sinned, and expressly in view of their sins; but it is absolute grace once more. It is all God’s “I will,” not the legal “Thou shalt.” Thus, these unconditional promises must be fulfilled. The prophets fill them out and show us Israel on their conversion as a nation not lost in the midst of the Gentiles, but, on the contrary, the centre of the divine rule for the earth and in special nearness to the divine King.

The promises of the Old Testament have nothing to do with heaven, no thought of any one going there. They concern the earth; and here the blessing for the earth of necessity implies the blessing for Israel.

Isaiah affirms the eternal perpetuity of their seed and name, not merely for the millennium, but “as the new heavens and the new earth,” says God “which I will make, shall remain before Me, so shall her seed and her name remain.” Thus Israel’s distinct existence, and as it is implied, distinct privilege, remains eternal. There is no escape from this, except into the utter confusion in which so many are, between the earthly people and the heavenly, Israel and the Church. If we will only read Scripture with the simplicity which belongs to it, if we will only allow that God means exactly what He says, there will be no difficulty at all in discerning that Israel’s promises abide in spite of all that has come in apparently to set them aside, and (for a time,) in fact has done so.

Romans 9:1-33

Subdivision 1. (Romans 9:1-33.)The election of Grace. The first part of that which we find here shows us Israel as the elect of God, but election necessarily means grace. It is God acting in grace from Himself and without claim on man’s part. Thus, in the very way in which it is carried out, we may be sure that we shall have the manifestation of this. Man will never be able to use the fact of God’s election in order to get credit for himself or to establish a fleshly claim.

1. But, in the first place, before the apostle proceeds to this, he affirms, in the strongest way, his sorrow over and devoted love towards Israel. He had not been behind Moses in his desire, if it were possible, to sacrifice himself for the blessing of the people. “He had wished” (it is not as if it were indeed something that could be deliberately entertained or something which was thought possible in itself to be realized) that he himself “were accursed from Christ on account of his brethren, his kindred after the flesh.” He does not say: “I could wish.” It was simply an uncalculating, unreasoning longing, if you please, for their blessing. It was the agony of a soul beside itself with the thought of their loss of all that God had made their own. He shows us, thereupon, the ground of their endearment to him, a people connected with the whole history of God’s dealing with man hitherto. To them, as he says, belong, the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of law and the service of God and the promises. To them belong the fathers, and Christ too, as concerning the flesh, but He is much more than what this implies: He is “over all, God blessed for ever.” Let us look at these separately. First of all we must not confound the adoption of Israel with that which we know in Christianity. It is the peculiar privilege of the Christian dispensation, as we call it, that we both have the adoption, the open acknowledgment that we are sons of God, and the Spirit of adoption to seal and manifest this. Israel had nothing of this kind. Nationally Israel indeed could be called God’s son, and, as in relation to the nations of the earth, His first-born, for the blessing of Israel implies the blessing of the nations of the earth also, -the first-born implies the later born. Nevertheless, the character of this is entirely different from Christian adoption. “You only have I known,” says the Lord, “of all the families of the earth.” They were still a family of the earth and never ceased to be that.

Their adoption does not in the least certify the salvation of one single soul among them, nor the spiritual relationship to God on the part of any one. Nationally, they might call God, Father, and He says: “I am a Father to Israel,” but the very fact of His saying that implies, as the apostle tells us, that at the time He says it, the true children of God are scattered abroad. God is not owning His children as such. The owning of the nation is in distinct contrast with this. In the time to come, as we know, Israel will be a nation all holy, but up to the time in which the apostle writes, up to the time in which we are now, the condition of the nation has been a very different one from this. The adoption, as we have seen, is an adoption of a family of earth and for earthly privilege and blessing. Next, we have the glory; and here it is manifest that we have to think of that which dwelt in the midst of them, their peculiar privilege, the presence of God, whether in the tabernacle or in the temple, a presence manifested amongst no other people. Thirdly, the covenants all belonged to Israel. There was no covenant with the Gentiles, except indeed, that Abraham was to be a blessing finally to all the families of the earth. Indirectly they come in there; but, as expressly made to them, there was no covenant, and with regard to ourselves also, Christians as we are, and in the fulness of a blessing which Israel could know nothing of, the new covenant is still not made with us, but ministered to us, -a very different thing. The foundation has been laid, as the Lord refers to it when He institutes His memorial feast. The cup was the cup of the new covenant in His blood. The foundation of all blessing, as we know, was in the cross, and thus if Israel for the time, or, as to the mass of them, have rejected God’s grace, the provisions of the covenant can, nevertheless, be ministered far and wide, and that is what we have distinctly in the New Testament. The covenants then belonged to Israel alone. Then we have the giving of the law; and here the “ten words,” as they are called, the ten commandments, are expressly declared to be a covenant with Israel. The lesson of the law was for all, the conviction of human unrighteousness was the conviction of all the world; but the law itself, which was, in fact, one of Israel’s covenants, was expressly and exclusively their own. Next, we have the service, the ritual service which God instituted in Israel. He has never instituted another yet. He has brought us indeed into the place of worshipers and given us the Spirit, that we might worship acceptably and in the nearness which divine grace has given to us; but just on that very account a ritual is not that which God has provided for us. We have nothing that answers even to the book of Psalms. The joy with which God has filled our heart and the truth which He has made our own, enable us to use all the assurances of blessing which we find there or elsewhere. We are “blessed with all spiritual blessings” in Christ, and therefore we can freely claim as ours anything that can be called a “spiritual blessing.” If God says to Joshua: “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,” the apostle assures us we can claim that; although if there were any promise which could be thought of, perhaps, as special to the individual, it would be that.

But all spiritual blessings are ours. That does not in the least take them from those to whom they were made. It does not deprive Israel of any part of her inheritance or of her privileges. God simply is the same God to us, only more fully known, and therefore in greater fulness of blessing for us. The greater includes the less, and the blessings spoken, of throughout the Old Testament, so far as they are spiritual blessings, are, therefore, fully ours. We would need a large service book to be able to put them into voice aright, but in fact anything of this kind would be contrary to that which we have as our peculiar blessing, the presence of the Spirit of God amongst us. Are we to put words into His mouth? He is with us, as we have seen, to give full expression to those prayers even, which may be expressed only by a groan, but it is a groan intelligent in the ears of God; but the service of God, the ritual service, was Israel’s alone. Then we have the promises; and these are in the same absolute way claimed for Israel. It is plain, of course, that the Old Testament promises are meant, those which any one in the apostle’s time would recognize to be the promises. The Christian ones were still a mystery, -and the apostle shows us what is meant by this, namely, that they were things hidden from ages and generations and now made manifest to the saints. Thus the new covenant itself, as ought to be most plain, if we consider the terms of it, does not and cannot cover the fulness of our blessing. The ministers of Christ are “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1). What is characteristic of Christianity is just that which is beyond even the new covenant itself, -the opened sanctuary even is no but it is not here the place to look further. “The fathers” present to us the venerable forms that we are familiar with in Old Testament history; but Christ, again, as concerning the flesh, belongs to Israel also; that is, He came of them; while at the same time it is carefully guarded here that there was in Him that which of necessity made His manhood of much deeper significance than could be implied in the fact of His coming of Israel. The title which He constantly uses with regard to Himself in this connection is that of the Son of Man. Israel could have, in this sense, no exclusive title to Him, and, in fact, not even a special title. He is, of course, much more than Man, One over all, “God blessed forever.” The distinct force of this has been attempted to be set aside by many, and in different ways, which it does not need to consider here. The words as we have them in our version perfectly express the original, and affirm in the strongest way that Christ is God in the highest sense, the God who is over all. That does not conflict in the slightest with the supreme title of the Father, but assures us that Christ is one with the Father Himself, in the same way, supreme. All this belongs, says the apostle, to that Israel, his kindred according to the flesh: expressly cutting off in this way any spiritual application, so-called, as to the Christian Church. It still belongs to, and cannot be taken from them, notwithstanding their present condition, so long existent. God is strong and patient. This, then, is the people over whom the apostle mourns, and no wonder. How is it possible for us to forget Israel’s claim to the most affectionate remembrance? But if they have failed and, as to the mass, been for the present set aside, the word of God has not failed on that account. “All that are of Israel,” says the apostle, “are not” therefore “Israel.” A nation in the flesh, there were amongst them (scattered by the system, as already said,) the true children of God; but outside also of Israel were children of God, as we know. To belong to the nation could not deprive any one who sought God, of the blessing of that; and on the other hand, the belonging to Israel could not confer blessing upon those whose backs were really towards Him. But God had taken care expressly to show, in the very history which they had in their hands, that the seed of Abraham were not, as they constantly assumed, the mere seed after the flesh. These were not necessarily the children of Abraham in any proper sense.

Thus, the history itself marks out, and from the beginning, that in Isaac the seed shall be called. Ishmael was, as to that, as much a child of Abraham as Isaac, but Ishmael is not reckoned as of the seed, as Isaac is.

His being the child of the bondwoman might seem, perhaps, to account for that; therefore we have another case, and a plainer one, which God has taken abundant pains to make plain to us. Jacob, the younger, was in this the one chosen of God, and not Esau. Yet they were both children of Rebecca; according to the flesh they had both an equal title, if indeed the fullest were not Esau’s, but here God Himself speaks out in the fullest way. Before the children were born, before anything had been done by either of them, either good or bad, God says: “The elder shall serve the younger.” He does not base this upon any conduct of theirs. He simply affirms it to be His will, and thus if Israel will maintain that the seed of Abraham according to the flesh have rights based upon the flesh, they must admit to these rights the Ishmaelites on the one hand and the Edomites on the other; that election is of grace, therefore, that is of God’s will alone, is settled by history. But let us remember here that the moment we speak of God’s will, it is not merely, as we say, an arbitrary thing.

In God’s will, His whole nature speaks. You cannot find anywhere the will of God expressed in which you will not find His character expressed also.

In fact, where this is manifested in the fullest way, just there we may expect the fullest and sweetest manifestation of what God is. We must never lose sight of this when we speak of the absolute will of God. God’s love is free: when He pleads with His people in Malachi the love He had shown to Jacob, He uses the name which reminds them of the natural character of their father, stamped so upon his descendants also, before divine grace had made him Israel. These names are used according to their different significance, in application to his seed, as one may see conspicuously in Balaam’s prophecy. Here it suitably points out how little the “worm Jacob” had merited divine love. On the other hand, if He has to say in contrast, “I hated Esau,” He carefully marks the wickedness on their part which had called forth His anger against them. “They shall call them the border of wickedness, and the people against whom the Lord has indignation for ever.” This was not, as in the former case, before the children were born, or had done good or evil; and the free love of divine grace has no corresponding free hate, but longsuffering patience toward the creatures He had made. “Esau have I hated” was said at the close of the Old Testament, after long trial extending over many centuries. 2. But here immediately a question is raised by men. Is this righteousness? It was the very question which the law that they had was meant to settle for them and which it does effectually settle, that on man’s part he has none; that therefore he cannot claim anything from God on that score. If God set him aside wholly from blessing, it is no question of righteousness in God. If we speak of righteousness in that way, we ignore our own condition.

The apostle appeals to the history with regard to this. When they made the golden calf at Horeb, all was gone as far as that generation was concerned. God retreats into Himself. He says: “I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion.” It is upon this ground alone that He can take them up again. The Israel of Paul’s time owed thus, in fact, their very existence to this compassionate will of God. The case of Pharaoh is another which men speak of much. God says of Pharaoh: “For this same purpose I have raised thee up, that I might show in thee My power and that My Name might be declared in all the earth.” But what does He mean by this? If God is going to declare His Name, for what purpose is it? In fact, when God did thus raise up Pharaoh, the world at large was sunk in idolatry. Pharaoh was the head of the most idolatrous nation, probably, upon the face of the earth. He was also in a place in which that which was done to him, the manifestation of God’s sovereign power in his case, would go far and wide amongst the nations.

Was there no goodness manifest in that very fact, that “against all the gods of Egypt” He was executing judgment? We find that it did indeed speak, and the song of Israel at the Red.

Sea shows what was the effect amongst the nations. Not indeed, that they were brought to God by it; not necessarily that any were. Of this we have no knowledge. Yet in the case of Rahab, supplemented, no doubt, by other testimonies, we see how much it wrought. Thus, if God raised up Pharaoh and made him a monument of His judgment, it was mercy, nevertheless, that made him so, and that mercy had been displayed with regard to Pharaoh himself, as it is very easy to see. Nay, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was largely wrought by the very mercy shown him. “Because judgment is not speedily executed against an evil work, therefore the heart of the sons of men is thoroughly set in them to do evil.” But shall not God show mercy then?

He does show it, again and again, removing the judgment threatened or brought about in the ease of Pharaoh, and when the king finds relief from that which had for the moment terrified him, his heart hardens itself against God. One may say that we are told that it was God who hardened it; certainly not by any putting forth of His power to do this.

It was rather the very mercy that was displayed, by which the hardening was effected, and thus God’s goodness remains all the way through, whatever might be the effect upon a human heart in opposition to Him.* The sun which melts the ice may harden the clay. It is the same sun that does both. Thus, while it is true that “on whom He will He showeth mercy, and whom He will He hardened),” and although we may be little able to follow out in detail the mystery of God’s ways in this, we are not in the least called to justify Him. The day will come when everything will be fully manifest; and then He will be “justified in judgment and clear when He is judged.”
3. We are next told that in all these things, in the judgment, as well as in the grace, God is manifesting Himself. The apostle first of all indeed, rebukes the thought of a man replying against God, whatever God may be pleased to do. Such replying must necessarily be in vain. Could one succeed in establishing his cause against Him, what could it be? It would be the ruin of everything. Think of being able to show that God was not the righteous, holy, gracious God He is! Think of the disaster everywhere which would result from such a thing.

The moment we speak of God, we must be still and know that He is God; and the apostle insists upon this in the first place. If Be be the potter, He has power over the vessels to make one vessel to honor and another to dishonor. Who shall deny Him that? How He will use His power is another matter. He never says that He makes vessels to dishonor, but as a mere question of power and wisdom, as merely the question of His Godhead, are we going to dethrone God? As a fact, when the apostle comes to the different character of vessels, be shows us that if God was minded to show His wrath and make His power known, He did it, as in Pharaoh’s case, while He “endured with much long suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.” That was exactly Pharaoh’s case; but he never says that God fitted the vessels for destruction.

On the other hand, if He would make known the riches of His glory upon the vessels of mercy, He carefully adds: “Which He had afore prepared for glory.”* God’s intervention in the one case is as carefully noted as it is positively absent in the other, and this is the character of all His ways; His wrath needs to be made known, and His power. The necessity of that in such a world as is around us ought surely to be manifest.

God’s judgments thus have a character of mercy which we must never forget in relation to them, but if He comes out in that which most fully expresses His will, as election does, for instance, here we find all His heart conveyed in it. If election be of grace, then grace is that which we must in the fullest way ascribe to God. “We,” says the apostle, are a sample of this: “We, whom He hath called not only from amongst the Jews, but also from amongst the Gentiles.” We are upon the same ground, and thus it is that the apostle quotes Hosea here in two passages which manifestly apply directly to Israel only: “I will call them My people which were not My people, and her beloved which was not beloved;” and again: “It shall come to pass that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not My people, there shall they be called the sons of the living God.” Both passages, as I have said, refer to God’s purposes with regard to Israel in the time to come, but as a principle they equally show how He is acting and how He has title to act in His present grace. The men of the Gentiles, who were not His people, He is calling His people; and where He had said unto them, “Ye are not My people,” there they are now called of Him His children. The apostle does not say that this is an exact fulfilment of Hosea’s words. It is a fulfilment in principle, and that is all that is implied in his quotation.
4. Mercy then, in fact, is Israel’s only hope, and here everything has been declared already and her own sins by the prophets. Isaiah crieth concerning Israel: “Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sands of the sea, a remnant shall be saved.” It will be a remnant only out of many, and this applies to the time not yet come, when “He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness,” when He is making a short work upon the earth. In the fourth chapter of his prophecy, Isaiah has shown us how this will be carried out and how the nation will become at last a holy nation, when “it shall come to pass that he that is left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem: when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning.” It is the time of which He says again that, “When God’s judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness”; and this principle applies to Israel also. Judgment must do its work, but in order that at last grace may be able to be manifested. But thus, in contrast with the proud expectation of blessing from God as a whole, a remnant only will remain to enjoy it.

The remnant of that time will become the nation for God. He quotes another witness from the same prophet, that “Unless the Lord of hosts had left us a seed, we had been as Sodom and been made like unto Gomorrah.” The judgment of the cities of the plain would be their judgment, except divine grace had made a difference. 5. But if there were no escape, except in God’s mere mercy, from such an issue as to Israel, a plain reason can be given for the rejection of the many which was now taking place, although it was at that very time that Israel manifested, as we know, their zeal for the law, in a certain sense therefore, for righteousness. How strange a fact that while the Gentiles, largely men who had never followed after righteousness, who were mere sinners of the Gentiles, attained righteousness as believers in Christ, Israel, pursuing after the law of righteousness, did not attain to it; but why? Because it was by law that they sought it, in the way in which there was utter impossibility of ever finding what they sought. This has been shown us already, again and again. They rejected distinctly God’s principle of faith, and thus they stumbled at the Stumbling Stone, -Christ in His grace come low enough to be stumbled over, in that humiliation which was the expression of His perfect grace, as well of the need which that grace was to meet.

It was the very thing which in their condition became a stumbling block to them, and God had declared that this would be so. He was to place in Zion a “stone of stumbling and rock of offence.” The fulness of God’s love exhibited in Him could be no other to men filled with the Pharisaic self-righteousness which characterized the nation. They knew not their need and therefore the very goodness which ministered to that need -grace, was rejected because it was grace: the lower it had come to minister to men, the more ground had they in their thought for rejecting it.