A sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on August 10, 2008 at teh convent chapel of St. Mary's Medical Center in Huntington, WV, and based on:
Romans 9:1-5 - with reference through chapter 10
9:1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, [1] my kinsmen according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. 5 To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
So far in our study of Romans, we have been looking at Paul’s very closely reasoned exposition of the Righteousness of God. We have seen that the overall theme of the book is found in chapter 1 vv 16 and 17: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power (Grk. Dunamis= “dynamite”) of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Paul has traced out for us how we human beings are bound up in sinfulness and cannot produce our own righteousness before God. Faith is shown to be the necessary ingredient to enter into God’s kingdom. Abraham is the paradigm of faith – one who believed God first, and whose faith was ‘reckoned’ to him Righteousness.
Works of the law cannot save us because all they do is highlight how far short we fall. Exercising faith in Christ brings us new life and the Holy Spirit takes up residence within us, giving us hope and power to live the Christian life. Although we still struggle with sin, the role of the Holy Spirit is to intercede for us and to help us in our struggle.
Finally, we see that God loved us before the world began and has an eternal plan for us to become conformed to the image of Christ, thus providing us with a great sense of security before God. So we have had 8 chapters of Gospel if you will.
Now Paul turns his attention to the Jewish people. The bridge for this new topic seems to be the idea of God’s election. In chapter 8 we have had a long discussion of God’s sovereign choice of those who are in Christ. This seems to lead naturally to the question, “Well, then what of the Jews, God’s ‘Covenant people” who were chosen, but now seem to have been set aside?
Paul’s answer
Paul’s answer is very personal” …” I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” In other words, he knows that his own kinsmen as a whole have not accepted Christ and he worries over them, just as we do over our unsaved relatives and friends. And he responds to an implicit question, “If the Jews have not accepted Christ, and God has set them aside, is there any advantage in being Jewish at all?” The decisive answer is Yes! – and here are the blessings:
The Joy of Being Jewish
First, they are Israelites, sons of Israel – and because of it, to them belong eight specific blessings:
The Adoption: being taken in by God to be his special people.
The Glory: the Shekinah Glory of God, divine splendor.
The Covenants: God’s binding of Himself to his people.
The Giving of the Law: both the ceremonial and the moral law.
The Worship: the ritual of the Tabernacle and the Temple.
The Promises: The Great things God had planned for them.
The Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
The Christ: the kinsman redeemer. Messiah born of the Jews.
These blessings are very great indeed!
God’s Sovereign Choice
Yet despite all these blessings God set aside the people of Israel because they didn’t fulfill their mission to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth, and they didn’t accept Christ, their kinsman redeemer. At this point, God passes over them, and give the Good News to the Gentiles –by His sovereign choice.
We can identify this as the theme for the next two chapters. The tone shifts from one of confidence in God’s graceful choice, to the sad consequences of God’s sovereign choosing. As I have contemplated these two chapters, I can’t help but think that they are deeply offensive to our contemporary post-modern mindset. Over and over we are reminded that God has chosen some and rejected others. “Jacob I have loved and Esau I hated” (9:13) …”the older will serve the younger” (v.12). Why? Because God chose to do it that way. That’s it. That’s all the explanation we get. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and compassion on whom I will have compassion(9:15). Period. End of sentence. Paul raises the question: Is God not unjust then?
There’s a book being sold right now with the title: “God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer. By Bart Ehrman. The title of the book reveals the attitude_ God has a problem. Well, I‘ve got news for Mr. Ehrman; God does not offer explanations to his creatures. There is no court of appeals where God must give an accounting of Himself. Job found this out the hard way.
God uses whom He will for His own purposes. Pharaoh is an example (9:17): God hardened his heart against the Egyptians because he was looking for an opportunity against them.
In our essential narcissism, we are like clay pots who say, “Why did you make me like this?” We can’t understand and we don’t like God’s choices.
Even among the ‘chosen’ people of Israel, not all the physical offspring of Abraham are his chosen spiritual decedents. Way before Christ, there were apostate Jews, people who were born Jews, but did not believe their own heritage and so were not true children of the promise. So much so, that God speaks of choosing a remnant from the people (vv. 27,28) those who did not bow the knee to Baal, even as far back as Isaiah’s time.
God’s overall purpose is to have a people for Himself, culled even from his ‘chosen’ people. And so He chooses freely, sovereignly, and without need for explanation. And even though he chooses, He still expects us to exercise faith in order to become one of His children.
The Jewish people as a group have been set aside for the time being because they didn’t excercie faith and believe in Christ. They tried to do things on their own – to develop a system of religion based on law, not faith. They were trying to be self-made religionists. This is what caused them to be set aside so the gospel could go to the Gentiles.
But not all were set aside. Some believed. God has always maintained a remnant people for himself. This People is composed of those who had the same faith as Abraham , who believe God, who recognize Jesus as Lord. They believe in Him in their hearts, and confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord, and they are saved (10:8).
Brothers and sisters, we will never be able to figure out why God chose Jacob over Esau, or why He chose us to be His covenant people. What we can know, however, is that somehow God expects us to believe and that he has given grace to some of us to believe. He knows who belongs to him and who doesn’t - and He’s perfectly justified in choosing whomever He will.
What we need to keep in mind is that God doesn’t kowtow to us. Rather, He demands things from us. One doesn’t trifle with God. All attempts at bargaining with God are foolish babbling.
Our culture desperately needs to hear this message. We constantly operate in a spirit of Hubris, thinking that God owes us something. Bottom line is: He doesn’t. We are indebted to Him and we need to remember it.
This week, as you are going about your daily life, ask yourself the question, “What does the Sovereign God demand of me? What is He calling me to do?”
Respond to this call in Humility and you will be blessed. You will be a person of faith, a true child of Abraham. If you haven’t come to faith, do so quickly. Make the choice to do it. God demands it. Faith is not an optional choice for anyone who wants to live eternally, It’s the only choice.
The people of Israel were set aside for a time. But God seeks to make them jealous by sending the Gospel to the Gentiles. As we will see later, his plan is to eventually bring his ‘chosen people’ back into the fold. He won’t forget them. But he does discipline them for his own purposes.
God loves his chosen ones – the ones who choose to believe in His Christ. Let us pray that God gives us the grace to be faithful. AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment