Friday, April 22, 2016
Romans Chapter 9 The Justice of God's Rejection of Israel
Romans 9:1-29
1 With Christ as my witness, I speak with
utter truthfulness. My conscience and the Holy Spirit confirm it.
2 My heart is filled with bitter sorrow
and unending grief
3 for my people, my Jewish brothers and
sisters. I would be willing to be forever cursed—cut off from Christ!—if that
would save them.
4They are the people of Israel, chosen to be
God’s adopted children. God revealed his glory to them. He made covenants with
them and gave them his law. He gave them the privilege of worshiping him and
receiving his wonderful promises.
5 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are their
ancestors, and Christ himself was an Israelite as far as his human nature is
concerned. And he is God, the one who rules over everything and is worthy of
eternal praise! Amen.
6 Well then, has God failed to fulfill his
promise to Israel? No, for not all who are born into the nation of Israel are
truly members of God’s people!
7 Being descendants of Abraham doesn’t
make them truly Abraham’s children. For the Scriptures say, “Isaac is the son
through whom your descendants will be counted,” though Abraham had other
children, too.
8 This means that Abraham’s physical
descendants are not necessarily children of God. Only the children of the
promise are considered to be Abraham’s children.
9 For God had promised, “I will return
about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”
10 This son was our ancestor Isaac. When he
married Rebekah, she gave birth to twins.
11 But before they were born, before they
had done anything good or bad, she received a message from God. (This message
shows that God chooses people according to his own purposes;
12 he calls people, but not according to
their good or bad works.) She was told, “Your older son will serve your younger
son.”
13 In the words of the Scriptures, “I loved
Jacob, but I rejected Esau.”
14 Are we saying, then, that God was
unfair? Of course not!
15 For God said to Moses, “I will show
mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose.”
16 So it is God who decides to show mercy.
We can neither choose it nor work for it.
17For the Scriptures say that God told Pharaoh,
“I have appointed you for the very purpose of displaying my power in you and to
spread my fame throughout the earth.”
18 So you see, God chooses to show mercy to
some, and he chooses to harden the hearts of others so they refuse to
listen.
19Well then, you might say, “Why does God blame
people for not responding? Haven’t they simply done what he makes them
do?”
20 No, don’t say that. Who are you, a mere
human being, to argue with God? Should the thing that was created say to the
one who created it, “Why have you made me like this?”
21 When a potter makes jars out of clay, doesn’t
he have a right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for decoration and
another to throw garbage into?
22 In the same way, even though God has the
right to show his anger and his power, he is very patient with those on whom
his anger falls, who are destined for destruction.
23 He does this to make the riches of his
glory shine even brighter on those to whom he shows mercy, who were prepared in
advance for glory.
24 And we are among those whom he selected,
both from the Jews and from the Gentiles.
25 Concerning the Gentiles, God says in the
prophecy of Hosea, “Those who were not my people, I will now call my people.
And I will love those whom I did not love before.”
26 And, “Then, at the place where they were
told, ‘You are not my people,’ there they will be called ‘children of the
living God.’”
27 And concerning Israel, Isaiah the
prophet cried out, “Though the people of Israel are as numerous as the sand of
the seashore, only a remnant will be saved.
28 For the LORD will carry out his sentence
upon the earth quickly and with finality.”
29 And Isaiah said the same thing in
another place: “If the LORD of Heaven’s Armies had not spared a few of our
children, we would have been wiped out like Sodom, destroyed like
Gomorrah.”
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