Most of us come to the Bible with some kind of lens through which we see the scriptures. What I mean is, most of us have been trained by someone on how to correctly interpret the Bible. For the most part, this is a good thing. Sometimes, however, this can lead to a misunderstanding regarding the nature of God. And when we have a skewed picture of God, sometimes it can lead us to blame Him for things that simply are not His fault.
Let me begin with an example. I have counseled people who to this day, due to their inaccurate view of God, live with deep resentment toward Him. Due to their theological belief in the “sovereignty of God,” they blame Him for their alcoholism, financial problems, marital problems, and anger problems.
These individuals are Christians who have been taught that God is sovereign over all things. And therefore, God is to blame. But let me ask you, is God not “sovereign”? Of course, He is. But let’s define sovereignty. Sovereignty means simply to have “supreme power or authority”. The Old Testament continually agrees with this: that God is LORD over Heaven and Earth. Also, the New Testament now tells us that Jesus is Lord and that He now sits at the place of ultimate authority at the Father’s right hand. So, God IS sovereign.
What are we to conclude then? We are to conclude that there is a misunderstanding of what it means for God to be sovereign.
According to their definition of sovereignty: God ordained all things regarding their life even before they were born, even miscarriages, car wrecks, divorces, job losses, times they were raped, and the day of their death? But does the Bible agree with this definition of God’s sovereignty? Absolutely not! However, God’s grace is big enough to redeem all these things for good.
How did they ever arrive at such a misconception of God? It all began a very long time ago. There are church fathers of the past who when they read the Bible, unintentionally read it “unhinged” from its history. What I mean is, that they stopped reading it using its own historical and grammatical context. They forgot who the original audience was and how the original audience understood these things. They forgot that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament writings, were originally Jewish, set in a Jewish context, using Jewish terms, and grounded in an Old Testament understanding of God. So, they began reading the Bible as Westerners and from a Gentile perspective. Along with this, they replaced words like “Israel” with “Church” and ended up lumping every statement and context into one and turned things regarding “the past” into “the present” and things regarding “them” into “us.” In doing this, they made things that applied only to Israel apply to everyone and things that applied to one situation and context apply to every situation and context.
Here are a few examples of scripture verses that they took that applied to Israel in particular, and which meant something “specific,” and took them and applied them to everyone for all time.
"Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Rom 9:13).
"The elect believed, but the rest were hardened" (Rom 11:7).
"What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction..." (Rom 9:22).
If you and I understand the history of the Old Testament and the prophecies regarding Israel found there, and if we understand that the writers of the New Testament were at many times pointing back at something from there, it will help us clear things up.
Let’s pretend there is no New Testament yet and none of the four gospels have been written. All we have is the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus from His mouth. If we can put ourselves in that mindset, then we will be able to understand difficult passages more clearly. It will cause us to read these New Testament passages more from the point of view of the author. But to do that, we need to see things through their worldview. And their worldview was the Old Testament. Oh yeah, I forgot something very important. We Christians also assume that every passage that has to do with election, predestination, choosing, and calling, automatically applies to eternal life. In truth, it doesn’t.
Now let’s address those three verses above from Romans and see what we find when we unpack them.
"Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Rom 9:13).
First, you may read this as “Jacob was predestined before time to eternal life while Esau was predestined before time to eternal destruction”. But in truth, what Paul is addressing here has nothing to do with personal salvation or personal damnation. Paul is doing nothing more than showing God’s “predetermined method” for bringing salvation to the entire world. Paul is saying that God chose Jacob, meaning Israel, as the nation through which He would bring the Messiah into the world. Though Esau was the firstborn, God chose, for His own reasons, to “love” (meaning to bless) Jacob as His firstborn, and to “hate” (meaning not to bless with the firstborn’s birthright) Esau, with this calling and election. If you go to the Old Testament story of Jacob and Esau’s birth and notice what God says there, you will notice that God is predestining “nations,” not “individuals.” And you will notice that it is completely unrelated to salvation.
"The elect believed, but the rest were hardened" (Rom 11:7).
Here we must begin by asking “who” are the elect here, and “who” was hardened? A close reading will tell us that Paul is talking about something that happened in the past. So then, let us take ourselves out of the picture. Paul, once again, is referring back to the Old Testament to show once again the “process” that God chose to use to bring salvation to the whole world. In the Old Testament God repeatedly told Israel that only a “remnant” (an elect group) of Israel would be “saved.” God calls them “His sheep.” In several passages of the Old Testament God calls Himself a “Good Shepherd” and that when He would come to earth He would gather His sheep to Himself. And though you and I are also God’s sheep, that title “first” applied to the elect of Israel. And what I mean by the elect of Israel is those who believed that Jesus was their promised Messiah predicted in the Old Testament. These elect are of course the 12 Apostles, but beyond them, there were many others from the nation of Israel who came to recognize Jesus as their Messiah. We see this happening in the beginning chapters of the book of Acts and slowly fade out as more and more of Israel reject Jesus and the gospel begins to go to the Gentiles. But then who were those “hardened” as Paul calls it? Those hardened were those who the Old Testament prophesied would continue to be “stiff-necked” in unbelief, even if God showed up right before their eyes. You see Jesus Himself addressing them in the gospels. He tells them that, “they are of their father the devil!” And He calls them “white-washed tombs, dead inside.” And He tells them, more specifically, that they are NOT His Sheep. Once again, all of this is prophesied in the Old Testament regarding the nation of Israel. And I must point out that God did not “harden them” into their unbelief, but instead, their “predestination” to unbelief was simply “predicted” in the Old Testament. So, what is Paul’s point in sharing all this? Paul was explaining, once again, God’s ordained process for sending the gospel of Jesus Christ into the entire world. What do I mean? I mean that if a portion of Israel did not reject Jesus then they would never have crucified Him. They would have accepted Him as their King and He would have never gone to the cross. Therefore this was God’s “predestined method” for bringing salvation to the entire world.
Now for the final and most difficult verse:
"What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction..." (Rom 9:22).
Does everyone remember Pharaoh? God explains to Moses in the book of Exodus that He was going to glorify His name through Pharaoh. Specifically, God says that He raised Pharaoh up for this very purpose. God “hardened” Pharaoh so that the entire world would hear about Israel’s almighty God of salvation who brought them out of Egypt. Did you see that? God hardened Pharaoh SO THAT the rest of the world would hear of God’s salvation of Israel. But did you know that before God hardened pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh hardened his “own” heart several times. Pharaoh fought God repeatedly and finally, God hardened his heart.
This story fits in the context of Romans 9:22. If we, once again, put Romans 9:22 in its historical context, we will end up in the Old Testament. But before we go on, let me put the whole context of Romans 9:22 up here.
"You will say to me then, “Why does he (God) still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? 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.’”
“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.’”
And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved," (Rom 9:19-27).
In the book of Jeremiah God explains that the nation of Israel is compared to a clay pot being formed on the Potter’s wheel. He explains that if that lump of wet clay that He is forming into a beautiful vessel of glory goes astray, He is able to reform it into a vessel of wrath. Also, if that vessel which He is now forming into a vessel of wrath returns to Him, He is able to reform it once again into a vessel of glory. This same idea is used in the book of Ezekiel. God tells Ezekiel to write to the nations around Israel and tell them that whenever God pronounces a curse over a wicked nation and that wicked nation repents from its wickedness, God will relent from His wrath and instead do good to that nation. With this, let us look at the context of Romans 9:19-27.
According to the context, who is Paul talking about? He is talking about the nation of Israel. How do I know? Because he is constantly pointing us back to it as his reference. Who then has God been so patient in enduring with? He has been patiently enduring His rebellious nation called Israel. Over and over in the Old Testament, He calls them “stiff-necked,” which means stubborn. Therefore in context, Paul is actually pointing out how all through the entire Old Testament, but especially in the Prophetic books, God has always had a small remnant of faithful Israelites along with a larger number of unfaithful and rebellious ones. In context then, Paul is saying that God used His already rebellious people and allowed them to simply continue in their rebellion in order that they would accomplish His preordained will, even to the point of putting His own Son on the cross in order that salvation would come to the entire world.
So then, what does Paul mean by saying God “prepared them beforehand” some for glory and others for wrath? Once again, Paul points back to the Old Testament. For God “predestined” in the Old Testament that all of this would occur. And to show that Paul is not talking about something being predestined before time but instead predestined through prophecy, he quotes from Hosea and Isaiah saying:
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.’”
“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.’”
And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved," (Rom 9:19-27).
Paul is telling us here that both Jews and Gentiles were predestined in the Old Testament to be saved, but that the much smaller group to be saved were those of the nation of Israel. For us Gentiles who were “not God’s people and not beloved” have become through the cross of Christ, “God’s people and become beloved,” but the nation of Israel, who were called “God’s people and beloved” as a nation, now only some have remained as His own. I would like you to see how “predestination and preordained” are referring NOT to something before time nor necessarily regarding personal salvation, but instead are predestined and ordained only in that they are foretold in the Old Testament.
I would like to present this definition though for the majority of passages that surround the subject of predestination when referring to something “outside of time” found in the New Testament: “God has predestined before time, that all those individuals who come to be “in Christ” through the preaching of the gospel, that they will be sanctified, made holy, and ultimately glorified.” With this definition, we find that the “individual” who is before time, is Christ. And that all those throughout the generations who hear the gospel and believe, are then placed “in Christ” and partake in all that He has accomplished on their behalf through His death, resurrection, and ascension to glory.
Hopefully, through this message, you have seen that when scripture is correctly understood, God has not predestined, before time, things that have to do with “individual eternal salvation or condemnation.” Instead, God has designed certain things which were previously recorded in the Old Testament to come about so that His name and glory might be known to the ends of the earth through the preaching of the gospel of salvation.
Finally, when we come to the scriptures through the lens of God’s love being expressed through the cross of Jesus Christ, we come with the correct understanding that texts that “appear” at first as inconsistent with a gracious and merciful God who has sent His one and only Son into the world so that the world might not be condemned, are not actually inconsistent. Instead, we just lack the historical and grammatical context of those texts.
God so loved the world...
For further insight on this topic please check out Soteriology 101 on YouTube.
Aletheia: Truth in the Darkness 