God’s Mercy To His People
2002-11-14
The following essay is an exegetical study of Romans 9:10-18.
Synthesis
Subject: God chose Israel to be His people.
Complement: Because of His special purpose, for they had no merit of their own; only by God’s sovereignty can a people become His people.
Synthesis: God chose Israel to be His people because of His special purpose, for they had no merit of their own; only by God’s sovereignty can a people become His people.
Exegetical Outline
I. God in His sovereignty chose IsraelA. Jacob was chosen over Esaui. They were of the same free parentsii. They had no works of meritiii. Primogeniture had no effect in God’s selection
II. God shows mercy towards whom He choseA. God chose to have mercy on Israel despite disobediencei. Inner-will has nothing to do with itii. Acts of people have nothing to do with itiii. Only in God’s sovereignty does one receive mercyB. The enemy of the one who receives mercy will be thwartedi. Pharaoh was raised up to give glory to Godii. Pharaoh allowed for the Israelite’s Exodus to become world renownediii. Hardening is a part of God’s plan for mercy to all
Introduction to the Exposition
The context of this passage is in the beginning of a section that focuses on God’s dealing with Israel, which starts in chapter 9. Paul shows great sorrow in the majority of the Israelites’ rejection of Jesus, especially since they are God’s people that have received the law, covenants, and the blessings mentioned in 9:4. Paul nonetheless assures the readers that God’s promises have not been made obsolete (9:6). Leading into this passage of study, Paul distinguishes between what Murray calls ‘elect Israel’ and ‘the elect of Israel’ (Murray 18). There are the children of the flesh, who are the descendants of Abraham, but there are also the children of promise, between whom Paul will begin to distinguish. In verse 9, he will talk about a ‘word of promise,’ which is an oracle that precedes the birth of the predecessor of the children of promise (through Isaac). First Paul talks about Isaac, in whom Abraham’s seed will be called (9:7). God told Abraham that he would have a son through Sarah. From here Paul explains how God not only chose Israel to be His people for His own divine purpose, but also demonstrates how God shows His mercy to the people of His choosing regardless of their individual merit.
It is important to mention that chapters 9-11 are not an aside from Paul’s exegetical study of the Gospel, but are essential to the message of the Gospel. Since the Jewish people had at large dismissed Jesus Christ as being their rightful Messiah, God’s promises to Israel could be seen as obsolete, and therefore His promise made in Jesus Christ could be called into question. In this section Paul demonstrates that God will fulfill His promises.
In Romans 9-11, including the passage of interest 9:10-18, the argument of individual predestination or election to either eternal life or eternal perdition has often been submitted. This is not the case within these chapters of Romans. Cranfield, quoting Karl Barth states “the doctrine of election must not begin in abstracto either with the concept of an electing God or with that of elected man. It must begin concretely with the acknowledgment of Jesus Christ as both the electing God and elected man” (Cranfield II:449). The election of this community Israel from the womb of Rebekah and the redemption from their slavery in Egypt must be seen as part of a redemptive act not only for the Israelites themselves, but also for the whole world since Jesus Christ will come from the midst of the Jewish people in the following centuries.
I. God chooses Israel
Paul has already established that God chose the seed of promise through the line of Isaac. This supports his statement ‘they are not all Israel, which are of Israel,’ and God’s distinction can be understood by comparing the birthright of Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac was born miraculously by Sarah in her old age, while Ishmael was born of the slave girl Hagar. Paul begins in verse 10 with another example in the next generation with Jacob and Esau. ‘And not only this’ connects verse 10 to what preceded it. This second example of Rebekah’s conception will reinforce God’s selection, but differently from the first example. Jacob and Esau, as opposed to Ishmael, were both sons of the legitimate wife of Isaac. They were twins, but with Esau as the firstborn, so the selection went counter of the tendency of primogeniture (Murray 13). This example of God’s volition and power, therefore, is more apparent in the example Isaac, because there seems to be no difference between Esau and Jacob, where Ishmael was the son of the concubine Hagar.
Neither Jacob nor Esau had been generated, nor had performed and good or evil. This means that there was absolutely nothing these two men could have done to bring God’s favor upon themselves. Therefore, this selection of Jacob in the oracle in the coming verse was according to the word of promise from God only. The word ‘promise’ is in contrast to the word flesh in verses 8 and 9. The promise, therefore, is entirely from God, and not from the efforts of humankind.
Furthermore, there is a phrase worthy of some commentary. Murray notes that there is a shift from this concept of ‘promise’ to the phrase ‘the purpose of God according to election’ in verse 11 (Murray 14). First, some definitions are necessary. ‘Election’ is the act of choosing out (Perschbacher 128). ‘Purpose’ could also mean a predetermination (Perschbacher 346). According to Danker, the phrase means “the purpose of God which operates by selection” (see Danker 306, 869). This is the progression in Paul’s thinking: to explain more fully what he means by ‘promise.’ If God has stated that He will do something, it will be done.
In verse 12, there is an excerpt of the oracle to Rebekah, which is the last part of Genesis 25:23. The quotation from the Old Testament speaks of two nations and two peoples in her womb, and that the older would serve the younger. The terms used in Genesis 25:23 nations and people. Cranfield states, that neither in this original context nor in Paul’s explanation is there reference to individuals; the main idea first is of two nations (Cranfield, II:479). The second quotation is from Malachi 1:2-3, ‘yet I loved Jacob, And I hated Esau.’ Cranfield desires to use these terms ‘love’ and ‘hate’ as terms meaning election and rejection respectively (Cranfield, II:480). Esau and his descendants are under “God’s merciful care,” but not a part of the covenantal relationship. Murray points to the original context to denote what the term ‘hate’ means for the case of Esau and the Edomites. The hate is not a sinful hate, which is full of malice, but a hate that is in man that is “the expression of holy jealousy for God’s honor and of love to Him.” Furthermore, the verbs ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are in the past tense. From the context of the passage, this separation of election and rejection began with Jacob and Esau, but is continuous through all of their descendents.
II. God has loyal love toward Israel
In verse 14, Paul is going to propose a false conclusion based on what he had just said, then deny it, and then make an explanation why. He is saying that one could possibly conclude there was unrighteousness in God if they do not properly understand what Paul is saying. The way the question is written, beginning with the negative particle ‘me,’ demands a negative answer. Paul uses his standard emphatic ‘God forbid’ to cancel out the ridiculous impossibility of God being found unrighteous. Remember that Paul had written in verse 6 that God’s word had not failed. Paul is defending that there is “no inconsistency between God’s dealings with contemporary Israel and His dealings with Abraham’s offspring in the remote past,” and His ways have been righteous from the beginning in ancient times to the present (Cranfield II:482).
Paul, in defense of the consistent righteousness of God, quotes Exodus 33:19. Perschbacher states that ‘mercy’ could be used in this passage to mean “to be an object of gracious favor and saving mercy” (Perschbacher 134).
The original context of Exodus 33:19 is Moses asking God for guidance after he had received the law on Mount Sinai while the people had made the golden calf in the land below. The concept of mercy here implies a covenantal loyalty and cannot be separated from the context of the covenant (Kittel 479). The covenant was given through Moses, and God showed His covenantal love to His people by not destroying them after their sin. God was faithful to the covenant even though they worshipped the golden calf. He also bound Himself freely to them in this covenant, which reinforces His sovereignty in showing mercy. ‘God is faithful to these people even when they are unfaithful’ is another way of phrasing this, which is surely pertinent to Paul’s quoting of this verse by defending God’s consistent faithfulness (Kittel 480).
The word ‘mercy’ also can mean demonstrating love. This word appears in Exodus 33:19. Paul, when quoting Exodus 33:19, translates the word ‘mercy’ to the word ‘compassion’ in the New Testament. This is a parallelism in both Exodus and Romans, where God is emphasizing His mercy, compassion, and loyal covenantal love. God’s “[mercy] applies to Israel, to the [holy ones], to those who love Him and fear Him. His [mercy] is gracious action. He reveals it. It is expected, hoped for, prayed for” (Kittel 481). This concept of mercy is key to the entire theme of Romans 9-11. Even Israel’s unbelief during this current church era is connected with God’s mercy; mercy not just for one people, but for all peoples (Cranfield II:448).
Looking at Romans 9:15 as a whole, both in Paul’s letter and in its original context in Exodus, the phrase testifies of the freedom of God’s mercy, independent of anyone’s control (Cranfield II:483). God is righteous in His distinguishing between Ishmael and Isaac, and Esau and Jacob. But here, beginning in verse 15, the careful usage of the words ‘compassion’ and especially ‘mercy’ imply a concept of covenantal love with God. The covenant had just been made between God and Israel through Moses, so this change in terminology is warranted. God is righteous in choosing Israel to be His people and to have a special relationship with them, and not doing so with the rest of the nations. In other words, God is saying to those whom He might choose to be His people, ‘I will be faithful to be merciful to them, love them, etc. throughout the future without fail.’ He chose Israel as a people, and will be faithful to them to the end (cf. Romans 11:25-26).
Verse 16 supports the point Paul is making. This choosing to be lovingly merciful to the people of His choice has nothing to do with the people themselves: not who they are or what they do. This is all God’s doing. To return to Paul’s example, there is no reason to see that Jacob was preferable in any way to Esau, for Jacob dealt deceptively with his brother, his father, and his father-in-law Laban. Neither Jacob nor Esau were men of good works or of good character. The subject of verse 16, as Cranfield argues, must be supplied, and it is most logical according to the context that Paul is speaking of God’s mercy (Cranfield II:484).
Beginning in verse 17, there is a shift from mercy to a negative counterpart, which seems to be ‘hardening.’ Paul states that Scripture says to Pharaoh, that he was raised up for the purpose to show forth God’s power. When it refers to God raising him up, he implies a raising up into existence, or into a certain condition (Perschbacher 148). God appointed this king to show His glory differently from His loving mercy to the people He called to be His own, which is also according to His sovereign choice.
Verse 18, therefore, sums up God’s sovereignty in choosing people to be His own, all of which is related to His mercy. Pharaoh, as it says in Exodus many times, hardened his own heart, such as in Exodus 8:15 and 9:34, and many times, it speaks of God hardening his heart, or at least Pharaoh being passive in the hardening of the heart. In the case of Romans 9:17, Perschbacher chooses to use ‘to leave to stubbornness and contumacy’ (Perschbacher 372). MacArthur says that God did not “actively create unbelief or some other evil in Pharaoh’s heart, but rather that He withdrew all the divine influences that ordinarily acted as a restraint to sin and allowed Pharaoh’s wicked heart to pursue its sin unabated” (MacArthur 1711; cf. James 1:13).
Considering that Pharaoh considered himself and was thought of as divine, he would have been hardened by the idea of submitting himself to a foreign god, regardless of the miracles going on around him. This particular Pharaoh who was king during the Exodus was Amenhotep II. Being son of the conqueror Thutmose III, and trying to hold onto his father’s advances and strongholds in the East, he had a tough model to follow. Amenhotep II was a man of sport and physical strength in his youth. He had keen interest in horses as well, which would contribute to his campaigns in the East. When he was crowned king he set up a stela to himself. He had successful conquests in the East (Steindorff 67-71). Surely his heart was hardened enough by the time this eighty-year-old man Moses came and told him to release thousands, if not millions, of people who gave him free labor on building projects (probably most of which were to honor himself!). All of these events were under God’s control, which contributed to his hardening of heart.
Pharaoh, a self-proclaimed god, was in the position of his heart being hardened his whole life since he was raised to be a king. This process was all under God’s sovereignty and Paul defends that there is no unrighteousness with God (9:14). All the same, Pharaoh was the one who hardened himself in response to the circumstances of his life that God put around Him. As Paul had already discussed in 1:24-28, he wrote to the Romans of God’s three-fold ‘giving over’ of humankind to uncleanness, vile affections, and a reprobate mind. People were alienated from God because of their own sin. This is also the case with Amenhotep II. God chooses those whose hearts will be hardened in the same way, just as He is the one who gives mercy to the people whom He chooses. It is also good to mention that Pharaoh was hardened and raised up as an example for the sake of God’s elect. For the sake of God’s people, plagues were put upon Pharaoh and his people, where the Israelites were protected.
It would not be unreasonable to say that a proper analogy exists between Pharaoh and Israel at the time of the Exodus, and Israel and the nations at the dawn of Church Age. The nation Israel, generally speaking, seems to be hardened before God in the same way the man Amenhotep was hardened. Israel could easily see themselves as already having God’s full blessing with the covenants, the Law, the promises, and the wonderful things God ordained for them in ancient times. They saw the valiant efforts of the Maccabees in recent centuries that had thrown off the yoke of the heathen government. They thought the appearance of the Messiah would yield the same result, but this time the Messiah would establish a permanent removal of the enemy forces. Israel, when hearing the Gospel, would fall on deaf ears, not wanting to hear about their need for a Savior from sin, but a savior from heathen domination. But God had something else in mind. By taking occasion from this hardening, God is spreading the Gospel to the remote parts of the world to the heathen that would have never heard of His mercy. This hardening comes from human sin, that despite God’s effort to show Himself to them, they “changed the truth of God into a lie,” and were then given over to their own evil passions by God (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Not only were the heathen left to their stubborn ways of sin, the chosen people of God, namely Israel, also were left to their stubborn ways. But God’s faithfulness to the Abrahamic covenant that God alone swore to Abraham (Genesis 15:17) will ensure that Israel will be saved in the end (Romans 11:26), though it will take many terrible events of God’s wrath to make Israel cling to God (cf. Revelation 11:13).
Conclusion
God is sovereign over the election of His people, who possessed nothing and did nothing to obtain this election. In His sovereignty, He chose Israel to be His own people from Abraham’s seed, and showed them mercy: a loving loyalty toward them. Paul uses this in the context of first century Israel who had mostly rejected their Messiah, defending God’s promise in His word (9:6) and His righteousness (9:14). The message to the recipients of the letter, of ancient and contemporary times, is that God is sovereign and that He is loyal to the covenant, namely the Abrahamic Covenant, and to both the physical and spiritual descendents of this man whom He had chosen.
This act of choosing a people unto Himself was for not only to benefit the people Israel themselves, but to the whole world, since the truly elected Man Jesus would come from among the descendents of Abraham. It is the election of this Man as to why God chose these people, so that the entire world would be brought to Himself. He chose Jacob over Esau, which does not mean anything about the eternal destination of the individual Esau, but chose Jacob and his descendents to glorify His Name in the entire earth. Secondly, He saved Israel from bondage and left Pharaoh to his stubbornness, for the same reason, to glorify His name. Pharaoh, at the height of his empire’s history, who had glorified himself as God, was left to his own desires and passions, and at a ripe time, was judged by God (cf. the Amorites and that there came a time that would be ripe for judgment, Genesis 15:16). He was given many chances to repent, ten times with each plague, but just as the teachers of the law responded when seeing the Holy Spirit at work, never submitted to God (cf. Matthew 12:32).
God’s mercy overwhelms His chosen people, and this is because of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the personification of His mercy to us. Our ancestors, whether Jewish or heathen, did not seek God and were not worthy of His love. But because God loves all people, the Jewish people and the Gentiles, He sent His Son Jesus to die in our place and to pay for our sins. Jesus was resurrected from the dead by God, and destroyed the power of death. Therefore, when we trust in Jesus, we can be sure of the promise of the resurrection, since death could not keep Him in the grave. God’s sovereign power from ancient times ensured that Christ would come at the time God ordained.
It does not matter who you are or where you have been. God wants all people to turn to Him. He is the God of second, third, fourth chances, and there is no sin you have committed that is not forgiven in Christ. Praise God for His mercy that is available to all people when they trust in Him.
References
Armstrong, Terry A., Douglas L. Busby and Cyril F. Carr. A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989.
Cranfield, C. E. B. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Volume 2. Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1979.
Danker, Frederick William. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Third Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000.
Kittel, Gerhart, ed. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume 2. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1964.
MacArthur, John A. The MacArthur Study Bible. Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998.
Murray, John. The Epistle to the Romans, Volume 2. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965.
Perschbacher, Wesley J., ed. The New Analytical Greek Lexicon. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1990.
Steindorff, George and Keith C. Seele. When Egypt Ruled the East. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1942.