14 Is the Gospel Too Good to Be True? (Romans 9:1-13)

Krisan Marotta: We are in Romans chapter nine and um have you ever heard this chapter taught before? Has anyone ever heard it? Oh well now I'm encouraged. I have my notes. Welcome to those of you who are new, you're just jumping right into the fire here. Actually, it's not that hard to understand. The language is very simple. The problem is we read it, we go, it can't mean that. It's gotta mean something else. Um so yes, I think Romans 9 through 11 is some of the most difficult material in the Bible in terms of what it says. So we're gonna jump right in. Um just to set the stage of where we are. One of the uh one of the most difficult times in my life was early in our marriage when we were seeking to have kids, and we've been married a few years, and we thought, okay, I guess we're ready, which we never really are, but we kind of thought we were. And we were unfortunately were not those people that say, Oh, you know, let's have a baby in the fall, and you do, you know, it took years of of trying and waiting and hoping. And if you've been on that, been through that, you know it's kind of this roller coaster every month of getting your hopes up and then being disappointed. And um through that time we had all these friends, oh my all my friends were having babies, and they'd all say, Well, when are you gonna have a baby? And and do you have an announcement? You know, and and what's taking so long, which was only made things worse. I mean, I knew they were well-meaning, but it was um just made it worse. Well, finally, after almost four years of hoping for a baby, I got pregnant, and we were so excited, and then at 20 weeks I lost that baby, and I was devastated and very angry at God, um, and thinking, oh great, it's gonna be another four years before I even get pregnant again. Well, after having one normal cycle, I learned that I was pregnant, and I couldn't believe it. My first reaction was, is this true? How could this this news is just too good to be believed? And then nine months later we had our son Brendan. And you've probably been in that situation where you finally hear some news that you've been expecting and hoping and praying for and waiting, and it you hear it and you think, it's too good to be true. It can't can this really be it? Um that's essentially the theme of what we're talking about now in Romans. Because in the first eight chapters, Paul has laid out the gospel. He's made his case that we are justified by grace, and that the tragedy was worse than we thought, we were more sinful than we could ever have imagined, our condition was worse than we thought, there was no mitigating circumstances, no way out. We were destined for hell and we deserved it. And yet, God acted graciously in Christ to uh offer him as our substitute, and there's this glorious news of the gospel that God did for us what we could never do for ourselves, more graciously than we can imagine. And then at the end of Romans 8, he goes through this wonderful section of this God is for us, who can be against us? He who didn't spare his own son but gave him up for all of us, how will we not also with him graciously give us all things and says we're conquerors? So the question is, is the gospel too good to be true? I mean, he's just laid this out and said how wonderful and and all-encompassing and how the gospel is better news than we could ever have imagined. And that raises the issue, well, how do we know? What if it's too good to be true? Aren't there, you know, other promises and other gods throughout history where you know they failed? So how do we know that our God alone is the one who won't lie, who will keep his promises? And you've probably heard, you know, you've probably known people who profess to be Christians at some point and then left and said, Well, you know, it didn't work for me. Um, it it you know, that Christianity stuff that might work for you, but it doesn't work for me. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean the gospel failed or the promises failed? So that's what Paul's gonna answer in 9 through 11. Is the good news of the gospel true? And how do we know it's true? Is it really too good to be true? And one of the ways to answer it, the way Paul's gonna answer it, is to go back and look at Israel and say, okay, before the New Testament church came into being, God made all these promises to Israel. He made a covenant with Abraham. Did he keep them? Did he keep his promises to Israel? And so you'll see in this section, has the word of God failed for Israel? Has he rejected his people? Because he's raising the issue, well, if God gave Israel these advantages and he chose them and he called them as a nation and made him their pe his people and they turned away from him, well, what does that mean for us? How do we know that he's gonna keep us in the family too? How do we know that the gospel isn't just too good to be um be believed? And Paul's gonna say, well, look at how he dealt with Israel. If he acted faithfully to Israel, then we can predict or be assured that he will act faithfully to us. So Romans 9 through 11 is really this detailed argument where he's gonna say, What is the role of the Israelites? What is the role of the Jews? What did God how did God call them and did his word fail? And the point of that is to say, is to really answer the underlying question, is the gospel too good to be true? Now, it's hard. 9 through 11, you want to really read these whole chapters as a unit, and we're gonna break them up in pieces, but try to suspend your judgment as we go through this until we've really finished the whole all three chapters, which is gonna take us the month, because he's gonna ask some really hard questions. And they're good questions to ask because it's not enough to just proclaim the gospel to people without answering the doubts of, well, does it really work? Um, has God's word ever failed before? How do you know? So, with that, that's where we are in the book. He's laid out his tap, his argument that we are justified by faith, and now he's gonna answer the question: Is the gospel too good to be true? How do we answer that? Let's look at what God, how God dealt with Israel. So, um, I'm just gonna read the first three verses, Romans 9, 1 through 3. I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that 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. Now, the for those of you that were here before Christmas, the first thing you might notice there is the shift to the first person. In Romans 8, it was all about God, and he ends Romans 8 with this incredible, you know, if God is for us, who can be against us? Neither heights nor depths, nor all of that section. And now it's all in the first person. It's I'm not lying, I have this great sorrow, it's my heart, I wish I could be accursed. And he's speaking of his own anguish. Um, and that's interesting to me. Why does he make the switch? Having spoken so profoundly of God and the grace of God, why does he now switch to the first person and speak so profoundly of his own anguish? And I think it's an appropriate question because he's basically saying, what about the people we know and love and care about that aren't saved? If God is this gracious, loving, all merciful God, and now there are these people that aren't saved, that raises the question, is the gospel too good to be true? And there it's interesting to notice that this chapter has bookends. If we start section nine with this personal anguish, the end of chapter 11, if you've looked ahead, is this incredible doxology and praise of God. So he starts with this bookend of my own, his own grief and anguish. He asks these hard questions, he goes through the answers, and he ends with how wonderful and awesome and great our God is. And that's my prayer for us, that as we go through this really difficult material, we're gonna find answers. And I hope it leads us to the same place to say, God knows what he's doing, he's wonderful, he's great, he's beyond our expectations, the way it does Paul. Now, he makes this rather remarkable station and statement in verse 3 that he wishes he could be give up his own salvation for if it would bring about the salvation of the Jews. And that's pretty amazing to me because it's for it's not unique in Scripture. Moses makes a similar claim in Exodus 32, and it's the only other place I found it. But in that instance, Moses has been up on the mountain, he's gotten the Ten Commandments, he comes down and he finds the people dancing around the golden calf and you know, conducting themselves in righteous ways, and he intervenes before God on their behalf, and he says, Lord, if it's possible, blot this sin from their lives, but if not, blot me out of your book. That's Exodus 32, 32. So you have Moses making this claim, Paul makes it, and it's also what happened to Jesus. Jesus was cut off for our sakes. So Paul's essentially saying, I wish that I myself could be cut off from the gospel for the sake of those that I love, my my fellow Israelites. Now that reaches me because that's not something I could say. I mean, uh there I I'm sure probably most of you in this room, you know, you we would gladly die for our children. We would race out in front of a car to save our child from it, and and but would you give up glory? Would you give up your salvation for someone else? That's um that's not something I think I could say. And yet Paul says it. Now, he's just said it's not possible because he's ended Romans 8 with, Who can separate us from the love of God? There's absolutely nothing that can separate us from the love of God. And now he says, but if I could, I would. So it's raising the question, why didn't Israel respond to the Messiah? If God made all these promises, if he and he's a God who keeps his word, then why would the Jews who had all these advantages that we're gonna look at in a minute reject the Messiah? The question behind that that's hanging in the air, that he doesn't really say is, well, actually he doesn't when he asks, has the word of God failed, is can we believe it? Can we believe what our God is doing? Alright. So now we're gonna jump into the hard stuff here. Verse 4 they are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises. 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 he says, look at all the advantages Israel has. And he's he lays out what made them different, what made them special. And he gives eight of them here, and we're going to run through them rather quickly. First, he says they were adopted as the people of God, and that's pretty clear from Scripture that God separated out the descendants of Abraham, and he says, the, you know, the twelve sons of Jacobs and the tribes that came from them, these will be my people. He says in Exodus, Behold, Israel is my son. He deals with them specifically, choosing them. Um and sometimes I think it's hard as a as a non-Jew, you kind of resent that. Well, why why did they get this special position? And yet Paul acknowledges their position as a nation was different than any other nation of their day. And he's going to go on to say, when we get into 10 and 11, and in the future they will have a different role to play that no other nation will play as well. So they were adopted, they were given the glory, and I think by that he means the Shekinah, the bright cloud that followed them or led them through the wilderness after the Exodus, and later came into the temple, into the Holy of Holies that marked the presence of God among his people. So he's saying they had this tangible evidence of the very presence of God that no other nation has had. And centuries later, when the temple was rebuilt by Solomon, the cloud of glory came again and filled the temple. So the people have this physical, tangible sign that God was with them. The third one is the covenants, and I think by that he means the covenant God made with Abraham and then repeated to Isaac and Jacob that he would be their God and they would be his people. He committed himself to do things for them as a nation, and he's never gone back on that. And it was a covenant he took the initiative to make. Fourth, he says they have the law, and I think by that he just means the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. And it's interesting, the Jews have always been marked by the law and by their reverence for it. There's an um a service that they have, I don't know if it's still repeated today, but it was in the past in which the men of the congregation would take the scrolls of the law and they would dance around with them to symbolize their reverence for the law and how it's their greatest treasure. The fifth one then is the temple worship. So not only did they have the law, but God had carefully designed these rituals and uh sacrifices and systems of offerings and ritual. And I think those were designed to teach them something about God, to remind them of his promises and the way he deals with them. So they have this temple itself, which is this beautiful building, and the glory of God fills it, and now they have these rituals and offerings and things to do to teach them about God. And when Paul was writing this, the temple was still there. Um the sixth one is the promises, and these are the promises found throughout the Old Testament of the time when the Jews would be uh lead the nations of the world, when there would be universal reign, a king would come who would sit on David's throne and rule over it forever, and Jerusalem would be the center of the earth. And then the patriarchs, and by that I think he means you'd expect Abraham, Moses, and David. It's interesting to me how worldwide those names are. I mean, we think, you know, of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, those are kind of our founding fathers, and everybody knows them, but they are not as widely known. It is hard to find a time in our nation that has not heard of the patriarchs of Israel. And then last, he says the supreme blessing that Jesus himself came from their line. So notice he doesn't say that Christ belonged to Israel. I think Christ belongs to the whole world, but he came from them, he came from among their race. So the question is with all these fantastic advantages and all these possibilities that they had as a nation, why were the Jews of Paul's day so anti-Christian? Why did they reject the Messiah? And it at this point there was a lot of anti-Christian bias when Paul is writing this. There was, this is was written around 62 AD, and the temple would be destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. or just a few years later. And at that point, you know, the Jews would be scattered throughout the the world for centuries. But at this point, the tensions are beginning to build, the persecutions that are coming are starting to happen as people um become kind of suspicious and annoyed with the Christians. And the Jews were part of that. They, I mean, the Romans ended up carrying out the um the leveling of the temple and the scattering of the nation, but the Jews at this point were really violently anti-Christian, as you saw, you know, one example of that is Paul himself before his conversion, how he was he was persecuting Christians. So despite all these fantastic advantages they had, um they proved faithless, and that breaks Paul's heart, and it raises the question: does that mean that God was faithless? If did God fail Israel, he made all these promises to him, and does Israel's failure to respond to them mean that God is not able to save those whom he chooses or to save those who he calls? And that's a question I think people still struggle with today. Um is God really able to save someone? What if we can throw it all away? What if we can walk away? What if we can lose our salvation? And Paul's gonna answer that, um, but in terms we struggle with. Now I have to warn you, as we get into verses six and on, I didn't write this. I just want to make this clearer. Um I'm gonna tell you what I think it means, but don't get mad at me, I didn't write Romans 9. Um, but it's in here and we have to face it, and we have to try to understand it. And just to set the stage, you know, going way back to um Isaiah's day, God said to Isaiah, My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts. And as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. So that's Isaiah 55, 8, 9. And I think that's something to keep in mind as we go through this. Um, whatever else they mean, that certainly means that there are times when God is going to act in ways we don't understand, and he's going to make statements that seem uh strange to us or contrary to the way that we think he should ask. Um and it, you know, I still struggle with this today. You a you probably are like this. You I've, you know, you you you face some situation or circumstance or problem or relationship struggle, and I have it all figured out, and I know exactly how God should act, and I tell him, you know, and I pray about it, and I say, you know, by Friday we can have this thing solved. Okay, and here's my plan, you know, this is what we're gonna do. And um God doesn't often do it that way. And it in that little way, then we're confronted with, well, okay, God didn't choose my solution. What's he gonna do? Um well we're gonna we're facing that same issue on a bigger level. So Paul's gonna answer this question, did the word of God fail? by giving us three principles about salvation, and we're gonna look at um these tomorrow. We're gonna stop at 13 and pick up the rest next week. So the first principle he says is salvation is never based on natural advantages. So this is six and seven. 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. But through Isaac your offspring shall be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. So his first point is okay, we've gone through all these blessings Israel has, all the advantages they have. That's not the basis of their salvation. There is nothing about us that requires God to save us. Uh and he's looking specifically here at their descendants, their um their heritage. So he mentions Abraham and Isaac, of course, Isaac is another name for Jacob. And I think that that's something we ought to take in mind because you know, being born into a Christian family doesn't make you a Christian. Or having this great great opportunities to study the Bible or attend seminary or go to Bible college or um sit and listen to the Word of God, just sitting and listening and having that advantage doesn't necessarily make you a Christian. There has to be there's another basis he's going to go on to say, and that is God's choice. So the privileges that come to us by natural means are not the basis for God saving us. In contrast, the basis is divine action. So look at what he says in 7 through 9. And not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac your offspring shall be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offsprings. For this is what the promise said. About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son. So he's saying, he's pointing back to Genesis to the 18th chapter where God comes to Abraham and says, Sarah's going to have a son. Now, why does he point to that? Because it was physically impossible at this point for Sarah to conceive. She was too old. Her womb had been barren all her life, and now she was past menopause, she was past the age when it was even biologically possible to have a child, and God says, She's going to have a child. What's he trying to teach? That through the biological miracle, that it is God's promise that brings about salvation. There was nothing about Sarah, there was nothing about Abraham that required God to save them, but it was his choice, his promise to do so. Now, I'm going to give you a series of names. Does anybody know who these people are? Zimron, Joachim, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shua. Ever heard of them? No, I hadn't either. Those are sons of Abraham. After Sarah died, Abraham married a woman named Katurah, and she had six sons, and those were her six sons. They are offspring of Abraham. None of you have ever heard of them. Why? Because it was through Isaac that the promise, the line of faith came. And of course, Ishmael was born before Isaac. So you had Ishmael coming before Isaac, you have these six sons coming after, and yet God said, Is it only through Isaac that the line of faith will continue? He's the child of the promise. And his point, I think, is life comes, life from God comes by miracle by miracle, by his touching, by his awakening, and by his uh bringing alive a dead heart. Now, Ishmael was thirteen years older than Isaac, and he was the firstborn. So by rights, he should have been the one to inherit the promises that God made to Abraham, but he didn't. And in some sense, I think he's kind of a symbol of the futility of expectation. Expecting God to honor our ideas of how we think he should act. Because remember how Isaac or uh Ishmael was born. Sarah says, basically, you expect God to do everything. You know, why he promised you a son, you're getting old, I'm too old, time's wasting. Uh we got to do something to bring this promise about. Don't leave it all up to him. That's not exactly a word for word, that's a paraphrase of Genesis 16. So she tells Abraham to take her Egyptian servant, which he does, and the servant conceives and bears Ishmael. And then Abraham brings Ishmael to God and says, Okay, I have a son. Here he is. Will you fulfill your promises? And God says, No, this is not the one. That's in 17. This is not the one. The son I'm going to give you will come by divine promise. And I think that's another important principle in terms of salvation. I mean, we get an idea of how we think God's going to act and what he ought to do, and we ask him to do it, and we pray about it, and we think, well, because we figured it out and we prayed about it, that now God is bound to act the way we want him to, and he doesn't. God will only do what he's promised to do, not what we think he should do necessarily. So salvation is never based on our natural advantages, it is always based on divine promise. And now we come to the third principle, which is probably the most difficult to handle. So then 10 to 13. And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather 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, and not because of works, but because of his call, she was told the older will serve the younger, as it is written, Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated. Unfortunately, that's a little too clear, isn't it? They were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, and just in case you missed it, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of his call, and then he finishes his sentence. Now, Rebecca was Isaac's wife. She was found through his servant who'd been sent to find her, and the quote, Jacob I have loved, Esau I've hated, comes from Malachi. And what's Paul saying here? The first thing he's saying is, ancestry doesn't make any difference. These boys had the same father. They were both of the line of Abraham, and they were both following through the line of Isaac. So that alone doesn't make any difference. That's not the basis of salvation, your ancestry. Second, what they will do in their lives is not the basis for salvation. The choices they make ultimately are not going to make any difference because Paul says before they had a chance to express anything, I have already made this decision that the older will serve the younger, Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated. Now, remember what we studied in the fall for those of you that were here. The first eight chapters of Romans, Paul argued that it is that we are lost. So it's not as if Jacob and Esau started out neutral, and God arbitrarily said, okay, I like this one and not that one because they were neutral. They start out lost. And Paul spent eight chapters saying that it's not that there are good people out there and therefore God chooses them. Paul argued, we are only good because God has chosen us. We start out equally bad. We start out broken, we start out lost. And what Paul's saying is before either of these kids had a chance to express their natures, God had said the older will serve the younger. By that I think he implies that not only that there would be a difference in the two men themselves, but there would be a two a difference in the nations that came from them. The descendants of these two would be different. One would have a place of honor and one wouldn't. So I think the place to start from, what gets us is we think, you know, we we have these right uh impressions and and ideas about the sanctity of life, and we think, well, God ought to save us. He ought to be obligated to save us because after all, we're human, we're made in his image. But remember from the first eight chapters, Paula said, we are all sinful. Apart from the grace of God, we all deserve to go to hell. We are all condemned, we are all uh rebellious, we are born broken, we are born lost, um, and left to ourselves. There's no way out of that predicament. The amazing fact here is not that God did not choose Esau. The amazing fact is God chose anyone at all, because he was not obligated to choose anyone in terms of justice or in terms of salvation. We all stand condemned unless God does something about it. Now, what does he mean, Jacob by or Esau have hated? I don't think by hate here he means what we think of as hate. I don't think he means contempt or disrespect or treating him evilly or the way we talk about, oh, if I hate someone, we it conjures up all these ideas of of uh feelings or or anger or bitterness. That's not what's going on. I think this is similar to when Jesus used the word hate. In um, for example, in Luke 14, he says, except a man hate his father and mother and brother and sister and wife and children and houses and land and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. I don't think Jesus would have advocated that we run out and treat our family members with disrespect or contempt. That's not what he was saying, but he was cle what he means instead is there's something else that should have preeminence for us. So hate in the sense of love less. We should love our fathers and mothers and wives and children and all the family, all of that less than our allegiance to Jesus. And I think that's what God's saying here. He didn't hate Esau in the sense of, we usually use the word of disliking him or having contempt for him. In fact, if you read the account of Esau, God blessed Esau. He made him a great nation, he gave promises to Esau, which he fulfilled to the letter. He didn't, so he didn't hate Esau in that usual sense, but what these verses imply is God had set his heart on Jacob. He had already said, Jacob will be brought to redemption, Esau will not. Just as an aside, do you know where the final confrontation is between Jacob and Esau? Two of their descendants? Jesus and Herod. And Jesus stands before Herod. Herod is an Edomite, he's a descendant of Esau. And of course, Jesus, being a descendant of David, came through the through the line of Jacob. So there you have standing face to face, descendants of these two nations. And Herod has nothing but contempt for Jesus, and Jesus doesn't open his mouth. So I don't know. I don't know what that means, but I think that's interesting that you have this strange kind of way God deals with humanity. Okay, so what Paul is teaching here, which is hard for us to grasp, is that God has a sovereign elective choice that he carries out. And the terms he carries them out on are these salvation is not based on natural advantages. So what we are by nature does not enter the picture. And this is a good thing because what we are by nature is fallen. So instead of looking at that and turning to God and shaking our fists and saying, How could you not choose everybody? What we really have to get a handle on is how lost we are. The response ought to be, thank you for choosing anybody. Thank you for solving this problem of our sin. So salvation is not based on natural advantages, it's always based on the promise of God and divine activity. And it doesn't take any notice of whether we're good or bad in that sense. Um the the children had done nothing. Esau and Jacob had done nothing yet, and yet God chose Jacob and passed over Esau. I'm going to close with some observations about this and just want to, and I'm going to give you a chance to ask questions, but I have to warn you right now I probably can't answer them, but you can ask. But there are two questions that I'm not going to answer because we're going to answer them next week. This raises the question: is that fair? How fair is it that God would choose one and not the other? Is it unjust for him to pass over one and not the other? That's the very next question Paul's going to pick up in 13 or in verse 14. So if you're struggling with that, do your homework. We'll talk about it next week. Um, but you can ask other questions. So let me just close on on this because it's I don't want to throw too much more at you. How do we respond to a passage like this? I think the first one ought to be what I just alluded to is gratitude. Um we ought to be totally overwhelmed by the fact that here we stand by the grace of God, believers in Christ, um and that we have been chosen to receive these incredible blessings and privileges. Because it that ought to produce this kind of a cross-board humility in my life as I come to grips with that. Because the thing to face is that we really have to get a grip on is we didn't deserve it. We didn't there was nothing about us that required God to choose us. In fact, if he was acting on justice, he would have condemned us all. So the first response ought to be not shaking our fists and God, how could you do that, but gratitude that he chose any of us at all. Um the second response, I don't know quite how to say yet, um, a little proverb that him who stands, take heed lest he fall. We may have privileges now. Um and it's easy to look around and say, here we are in a free country and a great church with great teaching and all these opportunities, and to start thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. Because we've been given these blessings and these privileges, we think, okay, I deserve them. Look how good I am, look how well I've responded, look at look at the good things I've done for God, look at the committees I'm on, look at the Bible studies I teach, look at the the things I've done and the ways I've served him, and start thinking subtly now, therefore, God owes me something. Um that's a that's a danger. We should never, we should, this knowledge should keep us on our knees before God, knowing that there's no substitute for genuine personal saving faith in Jesus Christ. So I don't want to start thinking about my my Christian heritage or my background or my IQ or or giftedness or any of the things that God might have blessed me with. We don't want to start looking at those as the foundation for your life. And conversely, we look at other people and we think, wow, look how good their life is going. Um that must mean they're really spiritual giants. That must mean they're, you know, God must have really blessed them. Why can't I be blessed like that? Um not the case. We don't want to conclude that success or privilege means we deserved it somehow. The advantages that come to us and continue to come to us are because of the grace of God. There's nothing about us that requires God to give them to us. So again, we have to remain in that kind of across the board humility. It's just interesting to note if you look at Abraham's children, a lot of them leave the story. The six sons of Keturah I just mentioned, you never hear from them again. And then there are other children of Abraham who become these wild antagonists to the people of God, like Esau's children, that became the nation of Edom and tormented Israel and betrayed Israel. So all of that we're going to look at in the next section when Paul talks about grafting in the olive trees and all of that. But the point for now is it ought to produce gratitude, not presumption. And I think part of what Paul is saying is to remind the Jews don't look at your special line, at these privileges of having the glory and the temple and the law and the the adoption, and consider yourselves to be special, that God is now indebted to you. Um that's the wrong response. The right response is gratitude that He's chosen us and all. Um the other implication of this is actually really incredibly good news. It's very clear that Paul believes that salvation ultimately rests on the choice of God, and that if our hearts are changed, it's because of a miracle that God has done in our lives to change our hearts to allow us to come to faith in Christ. Now, if you think about that, that is really good news because it means He loved me no matter what. I mean, you know, we think, oh, you know, what if you marry someone for their looks and then, you know, their looks change, you know, then will will you walk away? Or it's I'm sure my husband obviously must have married me for my looks, you know, so I have to worry about that. Or what if you marry someone for their money and then they lose all their money? You know, you're in that position of the thing that drew them to me now is gone, will they stay with me? We don't have that situation with God because there was nothing about us that required him to love us. There was nothing about us that said, Oh, we were special, so we have a claim to it, which means we can't lose it. There we can't unearn it. God gave us precisely what we didn't deserve, so we can't do something so horrible or so terrible or so uh awful that now God would say, Oh, that's it. You know, if you're gonna do that, you're no longer mine. Um the fact is we were all lost, and he's he loved us in spite of it. So if salvation is truly ultimately his choice, we can have absolute confidence that it will come to us, and there's nothing we can do to mess it up. And then the privileges or the blessings or the the wonderful things that follow, we can respond to God in gratitude, knowing that even if we make bad choices, even if we do stupid things or we hurt our friends or our neighbors or we the people we love, that failure, that inadequacy doesn't disqualify us. That doesn't turn God away from us. So we don't need to fear that the word of God will fail, because it's based on his word and his word is trustworthy. I mean, that's I think the great declaration of verse 6. It's not as though the word of God has failed. Okay, one more thing just to close on. Remember how we started this chapter with Paul's example of his own grief over the people he knew and loved that were not saved. Um, hang on to that, because that's a right response, I think, to have. But keep going through chapter 9 and 10 and 11, because he's gonna keep asking hard questions as we go through this section. And he's gonna end, they do have some pretty difficult implications, but he's gonna end with, look how wonderful the mercy of God is. And that's the goal, I think, through all of this. You know, when we debate with God, it's not a debate among equals. You know, it's not like he really needs us to to thrash these things out with us. The goal is for our hearts to change, for our understanding to grow, and for our faith to mature, and for us to come to a greater knowledge of him. So bear with us as we go through this. I know this is kind of tough to take. Um, but I think if we can hold this these two things together of grief over those who are lost and gratitude over the fact that God has this great mercy that he saves anyone, we will come out in a good place. Let me pray and then give you a chance to ask some questions. Father, once again we have to admit that our understanding is lacking. We're finite creatures. We don't understand how you work or the way you work, and that your thoughts are not high our thoughts and your ways are not our ways. We're certainly not God's, but we know from the scriptures that you are faithful to us and that you tell us the truth, and that it does us good to seek to understand. So I pray as we go through these next few weeks that you would continue to keep us seeking, to keep us learning, to keep us open and teachable, to learn from your word and uh and the way that you work. And we pray that we might recognize the marvelous grace that has reached out to us and found us, and that you would help us to understand what you're doing not only in our own lives, but in uh salvation history and the rest of the world. In Jesus' name. Amen.