Pauls Footsteps #360

“So you see, God chooses to show mercy to some, and he chooses to harden the hearts of others so they refuse to listen. 19 Well then, you might say, “Why does God blame people for not responding? Haven’t they simply done what he makes them do?” Romans 9:18-19 NLT. 

Read Romans 9:17-24 

Footsteps # 360. God needed a missionary people to evangelize a world steeped in paganism, darkness, and idolatry. He chose the Israelites through Jacob and revealed Himself to them. He planned that they become a model nation and thus attract others to the true God. It was God’s purpose that by the revelation of His character through Israel the world should be drawn to Him. Through the teaching of the sacrificial service, Christ was to be uplifted before the nations, and all who would look to Him should live. As the numbers of Israel increased, as their blessings grew, they were to enlarge their borders until their kingdom should embrace the world. Paul is building a line of argument in which he will show that the promise made to Israel had not completely failed. There exists a remnant through whom God still aims to work. To establish the validity of the idea of the remnant, Paul dips back into Israelite history. He shows that God has always been selective: God did not choose all the seed of Abraham to be the object of His covenant, only the line of Isaac. He did not choose all of the descendants of Isaac, only those of Jacob. 

It’s important, too, to see that heritage, or ancestry does not guarantee salvation. You can be of the right blood, the right family, even of the right church, and yet still be lost, still be outside the promise. It is faith that works by love, that reveals those who are “children of the promise” (Rom. 9:8) not some arbitrary choice by God. God wanted Jacob to be the progenitor of the people who would be His special evangelizing agency in the world. There is no implication in this passage that Esau could not be saved. God wanted him to be saved as much as He desires all men to be saved. (see 1 Tim.2:4). We’ve all been elected to be saved, not lost (Eph. 1:4, 5; 2 Pet. 1:10). It’s our own choices, not God’s, that keep us from the promise of eternal life in Christ. Jesus died for every human being. Yet, God has set forth in His Word the conditions upon which every soul will be elected to eternal life – faith in Christ, which leads the justified sinner to obedience. 

By dealing with Egypt at the time of the Exodus in the manner He did, God was working for the salvation of the human race. God’s revelation of Himself in the plagues of Egypt and in the deliverance of His people was designed to reveal to the Egyptians, as well as to other nations, that the God of Israel indeed was the true God. It was designed to be an invitation for the peoples of the nations to abandon their gods and to come and worship Him. 

Obviously, Pharaoh had already made his choice against God, so that in hardening his heart, God was not cutting him off from the opportunity of salvation. The hardening was against the appeal to let Israel go, not against God’s appeal for Pharaoh to accept personal salvation. Christ died for Pharaoh, just as much as for Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the children of Israel. However, when the Spirit of God worked on his heart it hardened. The same sun that melts wax hardens clay. In the parable of the sower that Jesus told in Matt 13:1-23, the seed was the same in all cases, the difference was the four soils. The work of the Spirit upon hearts produces different effects according to the heart’s condition. 

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