Romans 9:14-16

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We're again in Romans 9, verses 14 through 16.
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I was originally going to go through 18, but that goes quite a lot better with the next section. So as we normally do, starting in verse 1,
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I am speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscience bears witness in the
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Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.
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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.
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They are 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.
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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 will have a son.
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And not only so, but also Rebekah, but also when Rebekah 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.
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She was told, The older will serve the younger. As it is written,
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Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated. What shall we say then?
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Is there injustice on God's part? By no means. For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom
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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.
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At the end of what we covered last week, Paul has made a very radical and controversial statement at the end.
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Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated. And we went over last week what he means by that.
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While everyone gets to share the common grace that God gives us, God gives everyone who is alive on the earth, the radical difference between that and the love that he shows the elect makes the common grace look like hatred.
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But he follows this up. Where he's quoting that from is
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Hosea. And this doctrine that we have been discussing, the objective fact of God's sovereignty in election, he continues to hammer on in this section.
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There's one, unfortunately, that never mind pagans having an issue with it, but the vast majority of the evangelical church has an issue with it.
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The beginning of that is the fact that we don't like to recognize that sin affects everything and everyone.
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When you don't see the truth that everyone is sinful and therefore deserving of God's righteous judgment, it then reasons that you would come to the conclusion that it is unjust for God to pick one over another because no one has done anything wrong.
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So when you start to pick out doctrine that you don't like, it tends to have a domino effect.
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But he anticipates this in part, not necessarily Pelagianism, which we'll get to in a minute because Pelagian hadn't been born yet, but people were having the same issue.
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And he anticipates this in verse 14 saying, What then shall we say? Is there injustice on God's part?
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By no means, or may it never be. If you notice,
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Paul continually does this throughout Romans and his epistles. He asks rhetorical questions and gives the answer for them.
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This at the very least shows the amount of experience and expertise that Paul has.
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Paul in and of himself was a Pharisee even before becoming an apostle.
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He's a very, very smart man. But you can see in these questions that he asks and gives answers to how much he has exposited these truths and how much he has argued for them, both with Jews and Gentiles.
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And he's able to think ahead to know,
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If I say this, this is the question that's coming up. I don't really anticipate that there's anything that you could probably get past Paul.
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But what gets me is our tendency not only to prefer one scripture over the other, which we do even as Christians.
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We tend to lean more towards certain scriptures that we like, that we favor, even when we're in the right, when we don't have any sort of wrong understanding of them.
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But what really gets me is that we as a church, as the evangelical church even, tend to think that we have a better understanding of God's Word than Paul did.
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That's our orthopraxy. That's how we tend to teach and to worship, that we know better than the person who wrote the majority of the
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New Testament. One of the big things here is that we have to understand, even as saints, that no one is ever in a state of neutrality with God.
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You are not in a neutral situation. Every person born in the flesh is born in a state of enmity with God.
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Natural man hates God. We as saints are not in a neutral state with God.
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We are in bondage to Christ. So we love the things that Christ loves, and we hate the things that are of sin.
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There's no neutral state. In Psalm 143, verse 2, it says,
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Do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one alive is righteous before you.
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1 John 1 .8, If we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
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There's holiness doctrine out the window. Romans 3, verses 10 and 11.
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I hope you remember these. It was at least eight or nine months ago.
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As it is written, no one is righteous. No, not one. No one understands.
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No one seeks for God. In our natural state, what every man deserves is justice.
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That is, the only thing that you deserve is justice. That is exactly what the majority of human beings who have lived, are living, and will live, will get is justice.
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And that is a good thing. It is a righteous thing. What is justice, though?
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What is that? Over the past decade, or at least over the past several decades, especially in Western culture, we've made a very serious attempt to try to change the definition of that.
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We stick adjectives on the front of it to try to change it.
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We have a skewed legal system that doesn't really give us a good example of justice.
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At its base, it's equal and fair treatment, broadly speaking. Legally, which is what humans are confronted with at the judgment seat, is the equal and fair punishment of a criminal.
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Now, the best place that I think probably some of the best people to understand this are people who are in prison.
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The one thing that you should fear above all else as a criminal, standing in court, is an unbiased judge, a fair judge, that cannot be bribed, that cannot be swayed.
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That is God, and His justice is perfect.
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And while we might want to change the definition of it here and try to apply a subjective standard here, it doesn't really matter what we do.
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He sets the standard, and that standard is objective, so it doesn't change. What we receive as the elect is mercy.
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Similar to when a governor decides to pardon a convict one over the other.
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The difference being that convicts appeal for clemency.
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The governor doesn't go around looking for people to pardon. You have to send an appeal to him.
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This is most notable when someone is on death row in a state that actually still practices capital punishment, and they get that last -minute phone call of, did the governor pardon or did he not pardon?
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But the governor has that power to pardon a criminal. Man, on the other hand, mankind, never asks for clemency from God.
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We lack the ability. Natural man cannot and will not ask for clemency.
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And while we, as human beings, are very good at exemplifying injustice, just look at our legal system and how fallen apart that is,
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God isn't. He is incapable of injustice. He shows
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His elect mercy in having had His Son take upon Himself the just punishment and condemnation that the elect deserve for their sins, and the
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Son covering them with His own righteousness. We've been taken out of this category of justice, deserving justice and condemnation.
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We have been removed. And the category that we move into isn't injustice. It's mercy.
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In 15, He says to Moses, He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom
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I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. The verse here,
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I'm not quoting, but if you're wondering, it's Exodus 33, 19. It is where Moses has asked
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God to reveal Himself to him. God explains to him that you need to get into the cleft of the rock, and I will do this.
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And He says this in the midst of that conversation. Last week, we talked about God's divine choice of Isaac over that of Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau.
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But also in Exodus, if you think about it, this display of God's sovereignty in election, in choosing who
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He wants to choose is also on display in the Exodus. How?
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Well, God demonstrates this through His choice of the
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Hebrew people. But the promise.
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Yes, the Hebrews were slaves. They were not mighty.
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They were not a mighty kingdom. That wouldn't come until later. And it would be very short -lived.
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But rather slaves to the Egyptians. And God made that choice before they even ever existed.
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Part of that was Him going to a pagan from the land of Ur. And through him and his children and his children and Joseph and that whole story, they become the
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Hebrew people and are eventually put into captivity. God saves slaves out of the land of Egypt.
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Not Egypt, the mighty kingdom. But we'll get into that next week.
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But even among them who He chose to deliver out of the hands of slavery, even among them,
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He didn't give salvation to everyone. You notice when they come out of the land of Egypt and they finally get to Canaan, they send spies into Canaan to look around and see how difficult it's going to be.
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And they all come back, and only two of them are faithful in believing that God will deliver the
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Canaanites into their hands. The punishment for this is another 40 years so that that generation will be gone.
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You see, if our salvation were predicated on anything, on anything at all, then it would not be mercy, would it?
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It wouldn't be mercy. It wouldn't be a gift. It would be merit. I'd also like to point out that it's also merit when you have to work to keep it.
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If you don't earn your salvation through merit, you don't keep it through merit, it's a gift that is given and sustained by God.
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Let me point to this. You don't have to turn there. This is Genesis 1 -1.
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We should all know it. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the
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Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. That's the short explanation.
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I think it's in verse 2, and the rest of those verses gets into a deeper explanation of those things.
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So what we've established here in the beginning, in the beginning of the universe, God created the heavens and the earth.
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So God has eternally existed. He is the uncaused cause of existence, of our existence, of the universe.
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Now this next verse might shine some light on that subject. Verse 2, it says,
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And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God said,
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Let there be light, and there was light. And every day after that, how does he do it? And God said, and it was.
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And God said, and God said, and God said. So if God has the power and glory to speak everything into existence that is within our universe, he is the cause of creation with his words, and he has the control of everything that he spoke into existence.
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Do you really think that he isn't in control of himself and who he shows mercy to?
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Seems a little logically inconsistent there. Does it not? This point is also demonstrated in Job, which we read earlier.
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Later in chapter 42, verses 1 through 6, Job says this,
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It says, Then Job answered the Lord and said, I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
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Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered what
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I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know. Hear, and I will speak.
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I will question you, and you make it known to me. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you.
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Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.
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We should all feel the same way. The Scripture is revealed to us as we come to know
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God more. One of the things that I am incredibly grateful for is not only that God chose to save me from His wrath, from my sinful ways, but He chose to have me born in a place where I can openly say that Jesus is
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Lord, and I don't really have to worry all that much about being killed for it.
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Yet, I am truly grateful for that.
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But one of the things that we should note about living in this country, not
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Western culture, in this country specifically, one of the most unfortunate things, because we have strayed so far from God, one of the most difficult things to get over that this country teaches.
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This is something that is apparent in our founding documents. It is something that even as conservatives we hold very dear.
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It's not pluralism. It's not moralistic relativism.
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It is autonomy. Autonomy is one of the things that you, as an
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American, hold very dear to your heart, that you are the master of your own life, that we can alienate our labor to ourselves, that we are in control of that.
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Every man is created equal. We have the 14th Amendment and the amendments after that establishing that that applies to everyone.
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We fought a war over autonomy. The issue is, nowadays, that we don't leave any room for sovereignty in that, do we?
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Now, they did when they wrote it. It was blatantly obvious to them.
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But we don't teach it with any sort of opening for God's sovereignty anymore.
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Because if you think about it, no one is autonomous, like we said before. You're either in bondage to sin or you're in bondage to Christ.
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There is no autonomy. There is no free will. The people that Paul is talking to in Romans have a much greater understanding of sovereignty than we do.
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Much greater. Take, for instance, the emperor.
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When the emperor of Rome said such and such is law, it was law. Period. He literally had the power to wipe entire cities off the map.
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And Roman emperors did do that. Look at Jerusalem in 70
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AD. They rose up. What did
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Rome do? They destroyed the entire city, including the temple. Melted the gold off the walls and stripped it.
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And carried all of their plunder back to Rome. And it stayed that way until rather recently in history.
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Claudius, like we discussed last week, Emperor Claudius, had the power to ban all ethnic
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Jews from Rome. And he did. He said, no more ethnic
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Jews in Rome. And guess what? They all left. Because he had that amount of sovereign authority over his empire.
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So the people that Paul is talking to in Romans, they understand sovereignty.
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They understand, even in a human perspective, the amount of power that one can have.
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But unfortunately, we have no reference for this. Because the closest thing that we could think of to compare it to, or at least
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I could think of to compare it to in today's age, would be a presidential executive order.
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However, those are still within the confines of the Constitution and Congress.
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So even those aren't sovereign orders. But even greater than our president, even greater than the
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Roman emperor, God's sovereignty over his creation is not bound by anything.
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Because you could kill an emperor as Claudius dies in 54, like we talked about last week.
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Once he died, that order ceased to be effective. God cannot die.
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God is eternal. So how much more is his sovereignty?
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How much more is his sovereignty over all of creation? Because we enjoy a situation here where we pick our representatives and we get to pick the guy who's in charge, we have lost this sense of sovereignty in our lives.
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We have nothing to compare it to. So it's a lot harder for us to accept when we talk about it.
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So much so that as evangelicals, we can agree that he's sovereign over the world.
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We can agree that God is sovereign over his law.
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He created the world. He gets to pick the rules, right? The way that it operates and the way that we should be.
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But when it comes to discussing, to reading in Scripture how he is sovereign over who gets mercy and who gets justice, the answer that you most often get is how dare you say such a thing.
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How dare you. How dare we suggest for a moment that the
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God who has ultimate authority over the entire universe and everything in it would somehow be authoritative over himself that he would have authority in his own choice.
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Oh! What a terrible thing to think that God would have authority in his own choice.
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Luckily, Paul is destroying this argument. He says in 16,
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So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.
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He says something similar in Ephesians 1, 4 -6. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his will to the praise of his grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved, speaking of Christ.
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The mercy that we receive is a wonderful, wonderful thing that we should give thanks for every single day.
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I think that we can all agree on that. Don't worry,
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Paul is not letting this point go. It continues. He will continue to hammer it on home again and again, which you might wonder why.
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Why? Well, it's just as pervasive then as it is now. So, why would he not be?
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But he's been doing this through all of chapter 8 and all of chapter 9. He points to it in the earlier chapters.
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Sovereignty of God and election. To the point that when we come to chapter 9, the only thing that you can do when you read the text is either ignore it or give it a cent.
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It's the only thing that you can do. You can either just flat out ignore it, or you can agree with Scripture.
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And to that point, Christians are used to getting accused of being black and white on most things.
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It either is or it isn't. And we get accused of that quite a bit. Even on things that we're not.
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But this issue here, the issue of God's sovereignty, it is black and white.
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There's no gray area. Either all of Scripture is authoritative or none of it is.
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It is either sufficient or it isn't. It is either God -breathed or it is not.
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There is no in -between. We can either trust it or we can't.
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If any one part of this book is wrong, then the whole book is wrong.
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God, who wrote the book, also is either sovereign or He isn't.
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He's either sovereign over everything, period, or He's not sovereign at all. There's no half mark here.
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And if He isn't sovereign, then He isn't God. He isn't who
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He says He is. But with both
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God, the Holy Spirit, and Paul, our saying here is that He is sovereign over absolutely everything, including our salvation.
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And there is no logical reasoning that can conclude anything else from this text.
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Matthew Poole says of Romans 9 that it wounds Pelagianism under the fifth rib.
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You get that reference? It's a mortal wound. If we as the church ever had a malignancy, it is
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Pelagianism. And if we ever had a reference for it, it was at the recent
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SBC convention when a man, I do not remember his name, decided to stand up in front of everyone as a messenger of a
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Baptist church and make a motion at the microphone that Reformed theology be investigated and once the investigation concluded, it be removed from the
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Southern Baptist convention along with any church who held to it. I want to point something out.
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Reformed theology is Christian theology. There was the
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Roman Catholic church. Then there was the Reformation which was a movement against the
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Catholic church to reclaim actual Biblical theology. Those great men said, oh, the
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Roman church isn't the actual church. It's a false church because if it was the real church, they would agree with Scripture and they don't.
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So we had a reclamation of Biblical theology and that is known as the Reformation and therefore
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Biblical theology is Reformed theology and if the
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Catholic church is not the church then the Protestant church is. We're Christians.
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That's why you're here now because you're a Christian coming to church. If you remove
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Reformed theology from the Baptist church, you're left with no theology at all.
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But this is the ignorance of the modern church.
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Helped along in many an area by a lack of reverence for the sovereignty of God.
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And while this is true, everything I just said is true, thanks be to God that it is the
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Gospel that is the power of God into salvation, not this doctrine or that doctrine or this over here or that over there, but the
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Gospel itself. The fact that we were all sinners in need of judgment, deserving of righteous judgment and condemnation and before the foundation of the earth
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He chose a people out for His Son and sent
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His Son to take their punishment unto Himself.
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Thanks be to God for this. Thanks be to His sovereignty because without Him, without it, there would be no hope for anyone.