Romans 9:17-18

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church iconCoram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

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So we are still in Romans, chapter 9. We're gonna be taking a look at verses 17 and 18 today.
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But as usual, we'll start the reading in verse 1.
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I'm speaking the truth in Christ. I'm not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the
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Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
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They're Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.
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To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the
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Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever, amen. But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring.
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But through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
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This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.
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For this is what the promise said about this time next year, I will return and Sarah shall have a son.
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And not only so, but also, when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather
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Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls, she was told, the older will serve the younger.
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As it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. What shall we say then?
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Is there injustice on God's part? By no means.
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For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom
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I have compassion. So then, it does not depend, sorry, so then, it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.
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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.
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So then, he has mercy on whom he wills, and he pardons whom he wills.
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So last week, we dove into the previous verses talking about justice according to God's standard,
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God's mercy, the mercy that he has in the elect, and the justice that he serves to the reprobate.
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What we've been dealing with overall as a reminder is this hard truth that Paul is putting forth in chapter 9.
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That hard truth that people deal with, you have to struggle with it, is election and predestination.
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But as we see, as we go forth from here, that it's not just predestination that Paul is talking about.
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It's not just the predestination of the elect, but the predestination of the reprobate also.
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This is commonly termed double predestination. And if you think that people have a hard time with the first one, then saddle up.
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Here's the thing. Here's the first thing. If we are to concede to scripture and God that the saints are elected from before the foundations of the earth and that we are predestined to walk in what we walk in, that we are predestined for all eternity, for glorification, then logically, it concludes that those who are not elect are also predestined to not be elect.
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That they are predestined for something else. They are predestined for what they deserve, justice.
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As R .C. would say, it is double or nothing. Predestination is either double or there is no such thing.
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But this is where we're going to be over the next couple of Sundays. Now, the next question right after that is usually going to be, then why share the gospel?
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And you get that question from both ends of the stick. Well, because we don't know who is elect and who isn't.
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We have no idea. God knows, but we don't. Also, we have been commanded to do so in the
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Great Commission. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation and men are saved by the hearing of the word.
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This is the means by which God has ordained to save mankind and we're commanded to do it.
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So we do it. Even though we know, ultimately, most of the people that will hear it will reject it.
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The Holy Spirit will not transform their hearts. But getting back to the text, verse 17 says,
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For the scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up. Now, to dive in here a little bit more, if you turn to Exodus chapter 7, well, this is what
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Paul is referencing here. The scripture says,
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Then the Lord said to Moses, Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh and say to him,
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Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
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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.
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For by now I could have put out my hand and struck your people with pestilence and you would have been cut off from the earth.
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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.
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You are still exalting yourself against my people and I will not let them go.
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Behold, about this time tomorrow I will cause a heavy hail to fall such as never been seen in Egypt from the day it was founded until now.
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Now therefore send and get your livestock and all that you have in the field into a safe shelter.
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For every man and beast that is in the field and is not brought home will die. When the hail falls on them.
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Then whoever feared the word of the Lord among the servants of Pharaoh hurried his slaves and his livestock into his houses.
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But whoever did not pay attention to the word of the Lord left his slaves and his livestock in the field.
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Then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand toward heaven so that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt.
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On man and beast and every plant of the field in the land of Egypt.
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Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven and the Lord sent thunder and hail and fire ran down to the earth.
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And the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt. There was hail and fire flashing continuously in the midst of the hail.
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Very heavy hail such as had never been seen in the land of Egypt since it became a nation.
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The hail struck down everything that was in the field in all the land of Egypt, both man and beasts.
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And the hail struck down every plant of the field and broke every tree of the field.
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Only in the land of Goshen where the people of Israel were was there no hail.
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Pay attention to this part. Then Pharaoh sent and called Moses and Aaron and said to them,
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This time I have sinned. The Lord is in the right and I and my people are in the wrong.
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Plead with the Lord for there has been enough of God's thunder and hail.
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I will let you go and you shall stay no longer. Moses said to him,
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As soon as I have gone out of the city, I will stretch out my hands to the Lord. The thunder will cease and there will be no more hail so that you may know that the earth is the
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Lord's. But as for you and your servants,
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I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God. The flax and the barley were struck down.
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For the barley, sorry, the flax and the barley were struck down.
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For the barley was in the ear and the flax was in the bud. The wheat and the ember were not struck down for they are late in coming.
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So Moses went out of the city from Pharaoh and stretched out his hands to the Lord and the thunder and the hail ceased and the rain no longer poured upon the earth.
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But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants.
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So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened and he did not let the people of Israel go just as the
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Lord had spoken to Moses. So first I want to point out that in this passage, and in verse 17, for this very purpose
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I have raised you up. Note that God is taking responsibility for the status of Pharaoh.
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Not taking responsible for his sin or his wickedness, but taking responsibility for that man being on that throne at that time.
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It is because of God Pharaoh was Pharaoh. This is what
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Paul is saying. This is what God is saying. In a similar fashion, similar, not the same, the story of Joseph.
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Joseph was raised up according to the Lord's will by his providence to be the prime minister of Egypt, to serve the
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Lord's purpose. In a similar fashion, the
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Pharaoh in the Exodus was raised up to serve the Lord's purpose. Again, in our confession about the civil magistrate, in paragraph one it says,
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God, the Supreme Lord and King of all the world, has ordained civil magistrates to be under him and over the people for his own glory.
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Now, we will talk about civil magistrates and whatnot later, but lending to governments and kings, they are there because God put them there.
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It's not a matter of God stepping back and doing nothing and allowing this
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Pharaoh to take the throne. That's not what happened. That is exactly the opposite of what
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Scripture is saying. David.
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David becomes king of Israel, why? A lowly shepherd boy in the middle of nowhere,
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Bethlehem over Jonathan. Why?
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Because God said so. Saints, think about this.
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Is it not reassuring to you that there is nothing in this world that is left to chance?
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Everything is ordered in the manner in which God wills it to be, down to the direction of the ant, all of it.
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And knowing this, how much more as he directs the lives of unbelievers and things that creep on the ground, how much more secure are you in the fact that he loves you, that the
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God who created everything and controls everything sees you the same way that he sees his son, and that the things that he orders in your life, as we read before in chapter 8, are ordered in such a way that it is for your ultimate good to conform you to the image of Christ.
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The rest of 17 says, that I may show my power in you. So he raises Pharaoh up so that he may show his power,
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God's power. And that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.
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Now, just at the time of the Exodus, there were other nations that wrote about this event.
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Now, they embellished it to benefit themselves, as humans naturally do. I didn't reference any of them here, because I don't know if they're actually true.
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But there are other references to the Exodus. Everyone in the ancient world watched
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Egypt as it fell, because this didn't take place overnight. The philology of Egypt and the
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Exodus of the Hebrew people took a very long time.
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And to watch one of the richest and most powerful nations in the ancient world fall, because of God, because of these inexplicable things that he was doing.
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So much so, that the whole world still talks about it. God raised up Pharaoh so that it would be known that God was the one who removed him.
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Have you also noticed that in the plagues, God not only displays his power through Pharaoh, but also through the plagues themselves, in that each plague corresponds to a false religious belief that the
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Egyptians held. Not only is he tearing down Pharaoh, but he's tearing down their false gods in this, so that they have no hope.
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That they understand that the God that they are dealing with is ultimate. This happens, what happens here in the plague of Hell, happens over and over and over throughout all of the plagues.
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The plague comes, God sends the plague, Pharaoh relents,
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God removes the plague, and Pharaoh's heart is hardened, and he will not let the people go, till the end.
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And then, even after letting the people go, he still does what? He chases them. Ultimately, either himself included, or ordering his army to follow them into a parted sea.
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How hard does a man's heart have to be, one, to think that you're
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God, and two, to send your entire army into a parted sea.
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And whether you believe that it was 30 feet, or 3 feet, doesn't matter. Parted is parted.
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And on that note, which is the bigger miracle? That God killed an entire army with 3 feet of water, or that he parted 90 feet worth of sea water to let the
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Israelites pass through, and then did it. It's a miracle either way.
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But we see the hardening of people's hearts throughout Scripture. In verse 18, continuing, it says,
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So then he has mercy on whom he wills, and he hardens whom he wills.
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So this is not a matter of something that the Pharaoh necessarily did himself.
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It says right here, And he hardens whom he wills.
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So obviously, God is involved in the hardening of the heart. And we see this many times in Scripture.
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In Exodus 7, right? We just read,
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But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you.
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So preemptive to the plague, God is telling Moses exactly what's going to happen, and exactly what he's going to do.
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I will harden Pharaoh's heart. Joshua, chapter 11, verses 18 and 20, it says,
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Joshua made war for a long time with all those kings. There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel, except the
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Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. They took them all in battle.
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For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction, and should receive no mercy, but be destroyed, just as the
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Lord commanded Moses. Referring back to Exodus 7.
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So when Israel finally comes into the land, being led by Joshua, and they lay siege to all of the city -states in Canaan, and these people see all of this, and they hear all of this happening, these mighty kingdoms, these mighty city -states, like Jericho, which is impenetrable, its walls fall, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and yet, what do they do?
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They don't fear and run away. They don't plead for leniency. Their hearts are hardened, and they come up against them.
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In John 12. John chapter 12, verse 40.
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Therefore, they could not believe, for again, Isaiah said, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.
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2 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 14 and 16.
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But their minds were hardened, for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.
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Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts, but when one turns to the
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Lord, the veil is removed. And this is also speaking to the work of the
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Holy Spirit in the human heart and mind. God is in control of all things, all things, including the hardening of human hearts.
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How, though? How does this work? How does God harden men, and harden them in such a way that they deny the blatant truth in front of their eyes, such as Pharaoh, such as the
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Canaanites? That is a level of hardness that we as saints, by the grace of God, will ever have a hard time understanding, especially if we're not, on a personal level, individually, as saints.
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We see it, though. So, I'm going to give you two opposing views, and then the truth, as to how
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God hardens the hearts of men. And I'm doing this on purpose, so that you know the arguments.
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The first one comes from an article that I found, this is verbatim, word for word, on the
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Society of Evangelical Armenians. I have the author of the article listed, if you want it later.
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But this is an excerpt from the article. God hardens people, listen very carefully,
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God hardens people's hearts when He uses the circumstances of their life to similarly strengthen their resolve, so that by their increased stubbornness, a matter may be advanced to its final conclusion.
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Okay, we're not off so far. As such, it is purely a contingent action, meaning that it may not reflect
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God's original intentions. Divine hardening is not necessarily efficacious either, since a person can crack under pressure and repent, which
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God gladly welcomes, since He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but would rather have it that they turn from their wicked ways and live.
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Now, the amount of doctrine and truth that is denied in that very short paragraph, we don't have the time to cover, at least not today.
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Basically, what he is saying in the article is that God uses circumstance to cause men to be more stubborn so that they resist more and more and more until what
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God wants is completed. However, it might not turn out exactly how He wanted.
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Or it might not happen at all because that natural man, you know, the one that can't please
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God, can't repent without the work of the Holy Spirit until he cracks and repents, doing the very thing that Scripture says that he can't do.
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What this article says is that God is bumbling and ineffective in His work, that He is not sovereign, and He is without justice or love.
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Because it says here that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.
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Why wouldn't He? It's justice. Who does not take pleasure in justice being served?
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When you see a murderer on television get his just desserts according to even our flawed legal system, who in their right mind is not in applause?
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Apparently God, according to this man. And it is not loving to God's elect to not punish the wicked.
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So He is a God who is without love also. When you have that same murderer and you let them off, even with sufficient evidence, are you showing love to the victim?
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No. This is a God without love also. We know and we see all that this particular view denies, the sovereignty of God, His righteous judgment, doctrines of grace.
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We see that this particular view is not in line or congruent with the rest of Scripture. So obviously it is not correct.
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So what's the next one? Well, the next one is on the very other extreme, is the
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Hyper -Calvinist view. The Hyper -Calvinist view teaches that as God inserts righteousness into the hearts of men,
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He also inserts sin to harden them. Well, that's a problem because that would make
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God responsible for the sin that men commit. Would it not? God is putting evil into the heart of the man and God is responsible for the evil that He commits.
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We know that that can't be true either because God is sinless.
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Well, we also say that God uses sin sinlessly. Well, what does that mean?
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Exactly what He's done with Pharaoh and exactly what He does with unbelievers.
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So how does this work? Well, if we're consistent with the text and allow
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Scripture to interpret Scripture and not insert what we want to be there into it, not try to hold on to this small vistage of free will that we never had and never will, we see the truth.
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We see that we are conceived in sin, that because we are conceived in sin, that our minds and our flesh and our thoughts as natural men are corrupted by sin all the time, that we are in bondage to it, that our will is in bondage to sin, that the only way that a natural man ever makes a good decision or a decision that can be perceived as good is by grace, even when they are not elect.
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When you stop denying biblical truths such as the doctrines of grace, you stop skirting around them in Scripture, you can actually understand everything that Paul is talking about.
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The doctrine that I'm hinting to here we call total depravity. Now, this doesn't mean that we are as evil as we could be.
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That is, in fact, exactly what we're going to talk about here. But it means that every part of the natural man from conception, from Adam, is corrupted by sin.
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And once you understand that, it's a bit easier to understand how God hardens them, as he did
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Pharaoh. Understand that the people that even the world deems evil, the world, not the church, the world deems evil.
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Those people, like the serial killers that you watch on TV shows that you probably shouldn't be watching, and Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Marx, the guy who created the idea that led all of them to do the things that they did, were not as evil as they could have been.
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The reason that they weren't is because of grace. The reason that we are able to have jobs and go to work and live in a world that even unsaved, unrepentant haters of God operate in is because of restraining grace.
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It is God restraining men and women from being as evil as they could be.
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Could you imagine, before you were saved,
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I know you remember that part of your life because it's a grace that God allows you to remember it, giving in to absolutely every single sinful thought that came into your mind.
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Every single one. And every preceding one was worse than the last.
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The reason that you didn't is because God kept you from doing it. When you thought about stealing that candy bar as a kid in the gas station, and you didn't do it, that was
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God keeping you from doing it. When you did that other thing that you don't want to talk about, when you didn't do that, that was
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God keeping you from doing it. This is why even unsaved people know what a conscience is.
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Part of that restraining grace, it also restrains individuals and it restrains people groups from being as bad as they could be.
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We see this over and over in Scripture, the judgment of God turning a person or a people over to their sin.
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We see it in Canaan when Abraham is passing through Canaan, and God says, this is the land
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I'm going to give you, but the people there are not ripe for judgment yet. And over the next several hundred years,
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God removes His restraining grace from that people so that they will continue to get worse and worse and worse and fall deeper and deeper and deeper into their sin until at God's appointed time,
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He judges them with the Israelites. Sodom and Gomorrah.
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They didn't start off the way they were. They ended up there, ripe for judgment. What God does is
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He removes that restraining grace from a person and allows them to fall deeper and deeper into their own sin.
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It's not a matter of Him making them more sinful. They want to be more sinful.
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He's just removing the restraints. The removing of those restraints is absolutely effective.
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We see it over and over again in Scripture. And rest assured, it is just.
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It is justice when God turns a person over to their sin and then punishes them for it.
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Now, if you look at Genesis chapter 20, we can see this restraining grace in the story of Abraham and Sarah and their sin in lying to Abimelech.
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From there... See, this is how you know also Paul is affirmed, obviously, because the
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Scripture is Paul. Abraham was not sinless. He lied all the time.
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Constantly. This is the second time he's told this lie. From there, Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the
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Negev and lived between Kadesh and Shur, and he sojourned in Gerar.
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And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister. And Abimelech, king of Gerar, sent and took
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Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him,
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Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man's wife.
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Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, Lord, will you kill an innocent man?
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Did he not himself say to me, She is my sister? And she herself said,
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He is my brother. In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands,
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I have done this. Then God said to him in the dream, Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart.
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And it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.
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Now then, return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live.
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But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.
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Absolute, unarguable scriptural evidence of the restraining of a man's sin.
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Abimelech absolutely wanted to touch Sarah. Otherwise he wouldn't have took her.
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But God here is saying, I kept you from doing it. So how does
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God keep us from sinning? How does this restraining grace work? We know that it does.
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We know that it's effectual, because when he removes it, we see the outcome. He does this in several ways.
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He does it through his self -revelation, the revealing of himself to man through creation.
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In the case of Abimelech, through divine self -revelation by way of dream, which we see many times in scripture.
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This doesn't occur any longer, in case you were wondering. He does so by his word.
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God reveals himself through his word, through the scriptures, given and preserved throughout the ages that we may know him and his will.
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He does so by his providence, by the way he has arranged and foreordained all things to come to pass.
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In our lives, this might be defined as, hey, I want to go do this thing that I ought not be doing, and you go outside to your car to go do the thing that you ought not be doing, and you have a flat tire.
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That's just an idea. That's providence. God's in control of all things, right?
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So part of the way that he restrains you from sinning is by the providential means of orchestrating events to his will.
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In 1689, in chapter 5, paragraph 1, it says, God, the good creator of all things and his infinite power and wisdom, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things from the greatest even to the least by his most wise and holy providence to the end for which they were created according unto his available foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of his will to the praise and the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness, and mercy.
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He also restrains us by our consciences.
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Like I said before, even unsaved haters of God know what that is. He does so through a call to repentance.
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Now, this is more known in some nations than it is in others, but God has a call to every man to repent.
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When God removes these restraints from natural men, they harden themselves, as we said before.
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They harden themselves through their desire for sin. We see this displayed in kings and people groups when
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God gives them over. We see the removal of that throughout history.
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We see that in recent history. 50 years ago, were we dealing with the same things that we're dealing with today?
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Yeah, you had people who rejected the gospel and rejected gospel truth and things like that. You didn't have people arguing over whether gender or not was actually a thing.
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You didn't have that. You didn't have people arguing over obvious truths.
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The removal of that grace, we see.
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And because we have social media and things like that and people on one side of the country can instantly communicate with those on the other side, in a massive public forum, we see the progression of it even over the past five years.
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Not necessarily our minds, not the saints, but as a nation, the mind of this country has become more and more and more depraved than it ever has been.
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We started out 300 years ago founding a country based on biblical truths, leaving the
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Roman church and coming here. And now we are so far removed from where we started.
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Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theological mind that the
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United States has ever produced, says this. If we have seen others do things that we never did, and if they have done worse than we, this is owing to restraining grace.
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If we have not done as bad as Pharaoh is owing to divine restraints.
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If we have not done as bad as Judas or as the scribes and Pharisees or as bad as Herod or Simon Magus, Simon the magician, it is because God has restrained our corruption.
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If we have either heard or read of any that have done worse than we, if we have not gone the length of sinning that the most wicked pirates and carnal persecutors have gone, it is owing to restraining grace.
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Even the unsaved owe their lack of wickedness in the moment to God, because He disallows them from being as evil as they could be.