The God(ness) of God: The God of Glory - Week 3
April 27, 2008 3:30 pm Chapter 9, Romans, Sermon-Texts
This sermon is week 3 of The God of Glory section of our “The God(ness) of God” sermon series. It is an exegetical treatment of Romans 9:14-19, addressing the themes
God’s justice, God doing everything for his glory, the stories of Moses and Pharaoh’s encounters with God, and the great merciful compassion of God. This sermon was originally preached April 27th, 2008 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.
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April 27th, 2008
Pastor Duane M. Smets
Series: The God(ness) of God | Romans 9-11
I. The God of Glory 9:1-29
II. The God of Gospel 9:30-10:21
III. The God of Future 11:1-36
I. The God of Glory 9:1-29
Week 3 - Romans 9:14-19
Review: Romans 9:6-13
The Justice of God
The Moses Story
The Pharaoh Story
The Theology of the Two Stories
Introduction
Good morning. Let’s read the text and pray.
God, God, God, you alone are God. Today I find myself, a mere man, in the midst of a city in the middle of a room with a small band of people, who live in a place and a culture and a mindset which makes it very difficult to hear such words. I pray, I pray, I pray for great humility of heart among us today. Would we let you speak and give your Word our ear and follow it where it leads. Would you help me as we seek not to take the Bible and make it say what we think it ought to say, but rather allow it to speak for itself. Would the truths that are presented here in this text shine forth not as an embarrassment to the Christian faith but rather emerge as the steel filled cement which under girds the great gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Holy Spirit of God descend upon minds today and would a great passion for the proclamation of your name to resound in all the earth consume us. For your glory I pray, Amen.
Our text is striking enough to be its own attention getter this morning. And if not that perhaps my prayer, wherein you may gather that I am somewhat scared to preach what I have to preach today. There was a time in my younger days when I would have jumped at an opportunity to preach on such a passage, mostly because I liked to get into fights…today, many years later, I have learned the hard truth that you can’t make people love God by yelling at them and by winning an argument. So now my heart beats with compassion and sympathy in a great desire for as many people as possible to come to see greatness of our God and the wonder of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
My fear is that some of you may not quite be ready for words like these and that such a sermon would be stifling to the health and growth of this young church plant. But I have a greater fear than that still and it one greater than a fear of your potential reactions and that is the fear of dishonoring the God I serve and the book he has given us.
So before I begin, I start with a plea because I know the words of this text instantly raise tons of questions for many of you. The plea is necessary because we ended last week by exacerbating the whole problem and not really even getting into answering any major questions. We ended by clearly seeing that God hates people. Verse 13, quotes Malachi and Genesis where the Bible says, “Jacob I loved and Esau I hated.” We looked at Malachi and saw this hating really is hating and Paul the author of Romans here says this loving and hating of God occurred in God’s self-election long before Jacob and Esau were ever born.
So here is some of the big questions, at least the ones that come to my mind: How can God hate, isn’t he supposed to be a God of love? If God hates someone before they are even born, but enables them to be born anyway, then isn’t God somehow sick and wrong? If God is really that loving why doesn’t he just save everyone? Is God some sort of control freak or self-centered wacko? Does he really do everything in order to display his power and his name? What deficiency does he have that he feels he must do such a thing? Why does God want his name proclaimed in all the earth?
Big, big questions. I hope to answer a few today. So here is my plea to you as we work through some of this: Let us not be rash and quick to cast judgment upon God. We must be careful here, lest we plunge ourselves into the sea by concocting mad schemes in our heads to either try and get God off the hook or us supposing that we will sentence God and cast him into the lot of condemnation. Those are the two dangers, that we will have such a distaste for these words that we will force them by a great feat of textual gymnastics into saying something they never meant to say or that we will accept their words and conclude them false and turn away from their God and going our own way.
Review: Romans 9:6-13
So just withhold judgment about what you think about all this until where done today. Give the text a chance to say what it seems most naturally be saying and let me walk us through it. Here’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to follow the two stories in this text and then we’ll talk about the theology that gets brought out by them here in Romans after each story. There’s two stories here like last week, stories that come from his two quotes out of the Jewish Bible.
Like I said last week, these stories from these quotes are important. The Jewish Bible is the first two-thirds of our Bible and is in our Bible because Jesus says those first two-thirds are all about him. It’s important for him to quote it because the words of God, from the Jewish Bible are what’s at stake, whether God’s word stands or falls.
The Jewish people during Paul’s day had in large primarily rejected Jesus, not all of them but most of them, which made for a big theological problem because God made promises to Jewish people in the Jewish Bible. Now in the book of Romans, Paul is saying God offers a promise to us, that if any person puts their faith in the person and work of Jesus for their sin, they will be changed and saved from their sin and it’s consequences of hell. But how do you know that is true, because if God’s promise to the Jews didn’t hold up what’s going to make this one? That’s the issue of this series, whether the gospel from God that the first 8 chapters of Romans presents, can really be true…God’s Godness is on the line.
Last week we dealt with Paul’s first two answers. First, he said sperm doesn’t count. I said sperm because the Greek word behind the English word “offspring” in our Bibles is sperma. I just didn’t mean to say it like I did and I’ve been kicking myself all week about it, so sorry once again if you had some inappropriate images in your head during church. But the theological point stands. It was not sperm that saved, it was not racial ethnicity or bloodline that ever caused God to have favor on the Jews in the first place. He came to Abraham first, who was just a regular old ancient Mesopotamian pagan guy who didn’t have anything and promised to make him into a great nation through him and his 90 year old, wrinkly, infertile wife.
Then to make things even clearer, that God’s favor was not based on race, Paul made his second point with Abraham’s grandkids, Jacob and Esau. God only loved one of them and he determined who that was going to be before they were even born. Not the good one Esau, but the lying deceitful schemer, Jacob.
Now Paul knows here that he opened up a can of worms. But he did it intentionally because he wants you and he wants me to really believe and trust in Jesus for our salvation and that real and true offer from God. So the smart lawyer that he is he anticipates the negative response.
The Justice of God
Verse 14, “What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part?” By no means!” God being unjust is not an option. If there is a God at all there is one thing he surely is and that is that he is good. Like Psalm 145:17 says, “The Lord is righteous in all his ways.” Last week I told the story of Isaiah 6 and the angels calling out “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord.” God is wholly holy and perfect in all that he is and does, it flows out of his very being.
A defense for God is not even necessary, to think that our little human minds could understand an infinite mind and then in our blindness call him on justice! You don’t want to try and put God on trial. Yet, we get an answer here. It’s not necessary…he could have stopped after, “By no means!” But he doesn’t, God in his grace has enabled mankind to be capable of apprehending standards which are greater than human. So Paul goes to work with some presuppositional evidentialism appealing to our reason with Scripture. He wants to shows us that God is good and right in all that he does.
So he says this…look at it, “We’ll guys God can’t make us love him and didn’t want us to be robots so he gave us free will and God has mercy and saves whoever chooses him and that way he’s still just.” No, it doesn’t say that at all. If there was ever a place to say something like that it would be here. But Paul doesn’t go anywhere near saying anything of the sort. Here is what the text actually says, we read it earlier:
“For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.”
Now, how is that an answer justifying the justice of God? Let’s get the stories in our heads and then we’ll tackle it.
The Moses Story
Okay, there’s two stories here. The first one. Where there’s this quote of God’s to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” Those words come from Exodus 33. Here is what was going on.
God first showed himself to Moses by audibly speaking out of a burning bush out near where he was tending sheep out in the wilderness. He tells Moses that he is going to use him to deliver the group of people of Israel (God’s chosen loved people) out of Egypt after being there for 430 years. We’ll talk about what happened when they left in a minute with the next story Romans references. But let’s skip it for right now. Moses really doesn’t want to lead these people at first but ends up doing it anyway. So he leads over a million people out of Egypt and they go out into the desert and start camping out. They do that for forty years.
Then they end up at Mount Sinai, and God tells Moses to go up onto the mountain. The mountain gets enveloped with smoke and fire, while Moses is in the middle of it. He’s up there for 40 days and while he is up there God gives him the ten commandments. Two tablets of stone, with the universal moral law of man written on them by the finger of God. The first one says, “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” Moses comes down the mountain after 40 days and what had the people done that he left at the base of the mountain? They had taken all their jewelry and gold and made a big golden calf and said here is our god that we will worship. Moses gets pissed and throws down the stone tablets, breaking them, and goes outside the camp by some rocks to pray.
And here we come to this recorded conversation between Moses and God, that Romans references. So I’m going to read the whole thing, you can follow with me if you want. This is Exodus, the second book of the Bible, chapter 33, verse 13-23.
Alright, now there is a ton here, we’re just scratching the surface today because otherwise it would take us until Christmas to just get through chapter 9 of Romans. But now at least you got some background and context to the phrase that ends up in Romans. So we’re not going to spend time working through all the stuff from the Exodus passage but rather go back to Romans and work with the phrase it picks up from Exodus, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
There is this statement and then we get the reason why this whole story gets brought up in verse 16. Explanation, “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” There’s two components to this answer. One negative and one positive. The negative, it’s not you. God’s determination to love or save particular individuals does not consider a human person’s will, desire, efforts, are attempts to run toward him.
He is completely free to dispense mercy to whomever who wants. And it’s mercy. It’s mercy twice. Once because God is the creator and he has rights over his creation, we did nothing to get created in the first place. And second once we were created every human since Adam has turn away and our will, desire, efforts and running have been toward ourselves, not God. It is mercy, not getting what we really deserve.
To say God is unjust for not loving or saving some assumes salvation is something he ought to do in the first place. This first story points at God’s freedom as God to do what he wants. So you say, well how is that an answer justifying the justice of God? Here it is, listen, because if there is some higher standard than God that he must answer two and abide by, then whoever or whatever that is, is God. And we are stuck with the same question.
So that idea will not help. God’s justice must be preserved by his freedom to be God, and his justice is right and true because it isn’t outside of him but come from within him, it’s out of his character, his very being. So in everything he does, he is perfect and pure.
In fact the more amazing thing about this is that God has compassion and mercy. That’s actually a harder problem for the justice of God. How can he save anyone at all, which is why we need Jesus to die in our place to satisfy the justice we owe. This passage highlights that God is one of a merciful and compassionate character, just not at the expense of his justice or freedom to be God. God is a God of mercy. That what this is all about, pointing to who God is, what his name represents.
In Exodus Moses asked to see God’s glory, his answer was “I will make my goodness pass before you and will proclaim my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I show mercy.” So the point is that God’s glory, who his name represents, is where God’s justice resides. Justice comes from consistency and God is consistent in doing everything for his glory…and in that, amazingly he is one who has a great propensity to mercy in his passion for his glory!
Now, one last thing about this story and we’ll move on to the other one. The last thing I want to say about this story comes from something an old preacher named Augustine of Hippo said. Augustine said if there is a “mutual co-operation (then) there ought to be a reciprocal commendation.” What that means is this…when this text says it depends not on the will or running of man, but on God…there is no co-operation there.
It is not man coming half-way and God doing the rest. It is all God. And that is important, you want that. Because if you did any of it, if you can take any credit at all, even in the smallest particle, then you rightly deserve praise for it. And if we rightly deserve praise and claim it for our own, we are essentially saying we are gods ourselves and that God, God, the real God is not that great. If we rightly deserve praise then we ought to just sing to ourselves about how great we are. But we know that’s not true and that we’re not that great.
The Pharaoh Story
The world is not about us, it’s about God and his glory. Our mission in San Diego is to show the city that. That as beautiful as San Diego is, it is broken when it’s life is cut off from the true and living God. So we get a second story to help us see that understand that, the story of Pharaoh. Here in Romans we read, “The Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’”
Let me fill you in on the story of Pharaoh. There were lots of Pharaohs in Egypt, the Pharaoh being referred to is the one who reigned sometime around 1400 BC and had the cities of Pithom and Raamses built. God’s chosen people Israel, ended up there because of man named Joseph, who’s brothers hated him and sold him into slavery, but the Bible tells us that God took that situation and turned it for good by granting Joseph favor with the Pharaoh of his time. Joseph becomes that Pharaoh’s right hand man, and so all his family, Israel move to Egypt to live with him. But Joseph dies and after a few hundred years there is a new Pharaoh who doesn’t care about any of that and decides to turn all these Jews into slaves.
So God comes to Moses like we read earlier and tells him he has a plan and is going to use Moses to lead his people out of Egypt. Now Egypt was much like San Diego, where you got a lot of different gods, a lot of different religions. A sort of melting pot of religion. And each person was just sort of free to pick which God and religion you like and worship them.
But if there really is a God and you really are the one true God and you have all these hijackers of your name claiming to be you, you’d rightfully be a little perturbed. So when God delivers Israel out of Egypt it’s slow. There is this constant going back and forth between Moses and Pharaoh, where Moses says let God’s people God, Pharaoh says okay but then he changes his mind each time because the Bible says there is this hardening of Pharaoh’s heart and another plague. And in each plague God attacks all the gods of Egypt.
1. The goddess of the Nile was Hapi, so in the first plague God, turns her river blood red. 2. In the second plague God, goes after the god of the crops, a statue they worshipped named Heqt who had the head of a frog, so God sends a swarm of frogs into the land to kill all the crops.
3-4. In the third and fourth plagues God goes after the god named Kheper, a beetle who was supposed to be the insect god of the life and creation, so God sends gnats and flies all over the land covering it like dust.
5. Apis, was the god of the cattle, so in the fifth plague God kills all the livestock.
6. Imhotep, was the god of medicine, so in the sixth plague, God sends incurable boils to break out on man and beast.
7. The god, Nut, was to control the weather in order to protect the crops, so God sends this gnarly hail storm to ruin all the fields in the seventh plague.
8. The god, Seth was the god of the harvest, so in the eighth plague God sends in locusts to eat up any remaining food not yet damaged.
9. In the ninth plague, God goes after the god of the sun, Ra, and causes an unheard of visible and internal darkness to cover the land.
10. And in the tenth and final plague God goes after Pharaoh himself, who was considered to be the people’s divine ruler, and God strikes down his family.
That brings us to this passage Romans quotes from. Here it is in Exodus 9:13-16, you can check it out with me if you want, “13 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, “Let my people go, that they may serve me. 14 For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself, and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth. 15 For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. 16 But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.”
There’s our phrase Romans quotes. The purpose clause in the middle of the whole plagues of Egypt Pharaoh story. Why did God let all that happen and do all those things? Answer, so that God’s power and name might be proclaimed in all the earth. How does Paul use that and interpret that in Romans? Verse 18, “So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.”
The first part we already talked about, the mercy part. That was the first story, with Moses in the cleft of the rock and God proclaiming his glorious name in being free to bestow mercy. Now we have the other side. The negative side, those whom do not receive mercy. He calls it hardening here, God “hardens whomever he wills.”
Paul uses this word, “harden” because it is used 19 times in the Exodus story with Pharaoh. The very first reference is in Exodus 4:21 when God comes to Moses and tells him that he is going to lead the people out of Egypt and he says he is going to do through Pharaoh in this way, “I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.” And then God can bring on a ton of plagues, taking down all their gods, and showing that he alone is God in all the earth, the only one worthy of worship and praise.
Now, this hardening is connected with the phrase right before that “For this very purpose, I have raised you up.” Pharaoh was raised up from birth as a child for the appointed day when God would harden his heart in order to make a great display of his glory in letting the people go.
So any commentary or person or preacher you hear saying God hardened Pharaoh’s heart in response to him hardening his own heart…they’re simply wrong. God told Moses he planned to do it from the start, that’s why he raised him up. The Bible is clear on this, Proverbs 19:21 affirms it, “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”
Okay, that’s the story. Now some theology. We’ll save some of this for next time because Paul expands on this purpose clause and on the issue of God determining before people are even born who is going to be hated or hardened and who will be loved and shown mercy.
The Theology of the Two Stories
We’ve got two stories, one about Moses and one about Pharaoh. In one story, God has mercy and compassion. In the other story God raises up and hardens. In both stories God’s name, God’s Godness is the concern. He is just in powerful freedom to always act for his own glory. These stories were brought up to answer the question of whether or not God is unjust for hating one person and loving another before they are even born and have done anything good or bad.
How does it add up? Paul’s concerned about the truth and promise of the gospel, whether God can be trusted. His first argument was that it isn’t ethnic race, but God’s gracious election. Now his second argument is mainly that God is free to elect whoever he wants because that is what makes him God, he is not obligated to anyone and when he does elect, it’s mercy. If there is someone or something that he is obligated to then that is God and that is what we ought to be worshipping!
Now how many of you after hearing everything we’ve worked through this morning, it still is just hard for you? I mean this morning is intense. Somehow last week I was able to be funny and I’m never funny…and I wanted so bad to be funny again because this stuff is gnarly.
Well if you are still like what the heck? I can’t believe this stuff is in the Bible. If all this is really true how can God still find fault with us if it is just whatever he decides? Right? You’re not alone. Paul knew we might be thinking that. Look at verse 19, “You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’”
Well, we’re going to leave those questions for next time and we’ll get fully into God’s eternal purposes and eternal goal of his glory and talk about doube-predestination, the reprobate and why there is evil in the world. But what I want to do conclude today is talk about our heart issue, why this teaching of the Bible is so hard for us, why we don’t like it and naturally buck against it.
I mean am I right? Don’t most avoid this? I grew up in a Bible believing home, we read the Bible, a lot, but we never read this chapter. I’m sure of it. But it is here and the teaching is pretty clear. You got to be pretty clever to try and do away with it. You either say it doesn’t belong in the Bible and it’s wrong, or it’s not talking about anything relevant to us, just Jews or group identities, or you do some other gymnastics with it. What you end up with is a “you” instead of the Bible, where whatever “you” like and decide is right is right, instead of letting the Bible speak for itself.
I think if we let the Bible speak for itself, what is here is pretty plain. But that doesn’t change the fact that many of us have a hard time with it. I’ve been thinking about that. My first move was to ask you in the beginning to just suspend judgment and hear out the sermon. Now we are at the end and I suspect there are a still a number of you who either just don’t know what to think or you don’t like anything I said today at all and you think either I’m crazy or the Bible is crazy.
So let me throw you two ropes. One is a practical one and the other is a spiritual one. Here’s the practical one to consider. We started out talking about God’s justice. And if you don’t like what is here, your affection is somehow wrapped up in that you think this isn’t fair or just of God, right?
Okay, in America, especially in San Diego probably the most common idea when it comes to God is that he is a relative truth depending on if that is something a person is into. Nobody usually has any problem with a God of love who supports us no matter what we do. When it becomes a problem is when we think of a God who punishes people for their beliefs because the people were “sincere.” It doesn’t matter if they are mistaken or not as long as they are genuine in their belief.
Now consider a different perspective. You may like some things in the Bible about forgiving your enemies and turning the other cheek but this idea of God being totally free to have mercy on some and not on others appalling. For other middle-eastern cultures, it’s not the idea of God’s justice they have a problem with, but with the turning the cheek and forgiving your enemies, that’s appalling to them because it violates their sense of the good and the right being vindicated.
So who’s culture is right? It’s my contention that culture changes and varies depending on the place and the time, but God’s God(ness) is transcultural and if so it’s going to rub up against our cultural ideas and make us uncomfortable from time to time. So my first rope is to say, who’s idea of justice are you operating on? We come to the Bible with all kinds of baggage, so I ask you what are you bringing to the table that is informing your senses right now.
I think as you begin to search those out, you will find any answer comes back to God and he alone as having the right to be God and if there is any hope for us it must be in his elective mercy to give us Jesus. So that’s my first rope, before you call God on justice consider your own justice.
Here’s my second rope. Yes, this text unashamedly speaks of God electing particular individuals to salvation and others to damnation. But note this, God is compassionate and merciful. So rather than gravitate toward God’s raising up to harden purposes gravitate to his mercy and compassion. It is probably not wise to stake your claim on the latter, so instead call God on his compassion. The text clearly says God in his freedom has mercy and is compassionate, so ask God to be compassionate on you.
This second rope is God’s Word. Like Moses we can call God on his passion for his own glory and say, “God, how else will people know that you are a good and glorious and compassionate God unless you have favor on a people. Have favor on me Lord! Have compassion on me!”
Conclusion
Okay, let’s conclude. This whole series is implicitly tied to the gospel of Jesus Christ itself of whether or not it is true or can work. I’ve said that several times. However, if you noticed the text doesn’t mention Jesus a whole lot here. That’s because we are sort of doing this, it’s like we are stepping backward a little bit and looking at the big picture of God and how he works. It’s almost as if we had a magnifying glass on the gospel in the first eight chapters of the Bible and now we’ve pulled back and are looking at how far back God’s gospel goes.
So I’ll conclude this way today. Ephesians 1:3-4 says this, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”
So hear this today, our passage lays the foundation for the gospel to be true. There cannot be a free offer of the gospel to wholly save us if we have any claim to our good deeds, or good wills, then it is not good news but is bad news that we have to work really hard and there is no hope that we will reach it.
Since God has determined to love and save us from so long ago, we can know that the gospel has a sure foundation, one that goes back to long before we were born. So if you put your faith in Jesus today, and that is really true of your heart, it will not fail you, it is surer than your birth itself because it is secured in God’s free determination to make his glory shine. He will have mercy.
Let’s pray.