Romans 9:1-18
Few today venture into the recesses of chapters 9-11 of Paul’s letter to Romans, preferring to dodge the issues raised there; and maybe I am going where Christians fear to tread. But no scripture is without blessing to those who seek, as we shall see.
First there is the apparently failed promise that Paul writes about in Romans 9 v6
I am not saying that the promise of God has failed; for not all the people of are the people of God. [GNB]
If you read the beginning of the chapter 9 you will find a gloomy discussion about the fate of after the birth of Christendom and where God’s promise to the Jews fits, now that the Gospel has been received by non-Jews.
I will let Paul speak for himself about the fate of the Jews, but did you note the tone of that verse? We are quick to blame God when things don’t appear to go the way that we expect or want, and we tend to follow a path that Paul follows, first trying to rationalise what has happened, then beginning to doubt God’s fairness, and finally coming up against the rock of God’s apparent arbitrariness.
I was recently at a conference where the speaker spoke of the heartbreak of his daughter being killed in an accident, and how he went through that same cycle of asking why, why, why. As I write this we are still trying to understand why a man in should suddenly go mad and wantonly gun down and kill 12 people. We naturally ask why. But in the end we come up against the same thing... Stuff Happens. We live in an imperfect world and it is often so because of human failing. We know that is the case, but don’t accept its side-effects when they hit us.
Although we cannot explain why things happen to us, the thing that Paul comes back to is that God’s promises are like his character, full of love and integrity. However much it may seem that those promises are vain, in the end we shall see they are not. Paul wrestled with this particular promise, we may wrestle with others, but the outcome must be the same: to believe God is true to himself, regardless of what happens, and so in some way he will be true to this promise.
And therein lies the secret of faith: it is built on a hope that will never let us down.
So today, if you are asking why, it could just be that God is gently asking you to look on what is happening from his point of view. Jesus suffers with you even as he suffered on the cross, for the greater aim of defeating evil and redeeming humanity. Even Jesus asked his father why he had been forsaken – but we know, don’t we?
