Friday DIVE – April 18, 2025 – Romans 9:19-33

WELCOME . . . and THANKS for joining us for another dive into the Bible.

 

TONIGHT’S TEXT

Romans 9:19-33  NKJV   

 

 

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GOING DEEPER

1.  The CONTEXT … A summary, as per The Enduring Word Commentary … 

A.  In Romans 9, Paul shifts the focus … from us as believers to Israelites who did not believe.

 

Back to our text for tonight …    

Romans 9:19-33  NKJV   

¹⁹ You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault?  For who has resisted His will?”  ²⁰ But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God?  Will the thing formed say to him who formed it,  “Why have you made me like this?”   ²¹ Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?  

²² What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,  ²³ and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory,  ²⁴ even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?  

²⁵ As He says also in Hosea:  

²⁷ Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel:  

²⁹ And as Isaiah said before:  

Present Condition of Israel  

³⁰ What shall we say then?  That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith; ³¹ but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law ^[d]of righteousness.   ³² Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, ^[e]by the works of the law.  For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.  ³³ As it is written:  

 

 

 

 

What, in that passage, stands out for you?

• For me …
• For William Barclay …

 

Before we dive in …

 

THE PROBLEM OF THE JEWS

In Romans 9-11, Paul tries to deal with one of the most bewildering problems that the Church has to solve — the problem of the Jews.  They were God’s chosen people; they had had a unique place in God’s purposes; and yet when God’s Son had come into the world they had rejected him and crucified him.  How is this tragic paradox to be explained?  That is the problem with which Paul seeks to deal in these chapters.  They are complicated and difficult, and, before we begin to study them in detail, it will be well to set out the broad lines of the solution which Paul presented.

What was the fundamental mistake of the Jews?  This may seem a curious question to ask in view of what we have just said.  But, paradoxically, Paul holds that though the rejection of the Jews was the work of God, it need never have happened.  He cannot get rid of the eternal paradox — nor does he desire to — that at one and the same time all is of God and man has free-will.  The fundamental mistake of the Jews was that they tried to get into a right relationship with God through their own efforts.  They tried to earn salvation; whereas the Gentiles simply accepted the offer of God in perfect trust.  

The Jews should have known that the only way to God was the way of faith and that human achievement led nowhere.  Did not Isaiah say: “No one who believes in him will be put to shame”? (Isa.28:16; Rom.10:11.)  Did not Joel say: “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved”? (Joel2:32; Rom.10:13.)  True, no man can have faith until he hears the offer of God; but to the Jews that offer was made.  They clung to the way of human achievement through obedience to the law; they staked everything on works, but they should have known that the way to God was the way of faith, for the prophets had told them so.

Once again it is to be stressed that all this was God’s arrangement; and that it was  so arranged  to allow the Gentiles  to come in.  Paul therefore turns to the Gentiles.  He orders them to have no pride.  They are in the position of wild olive shoots which have been grafted into a garden olive tree.  They did not achieve their own salvation any more than the Jews did; in point of fact they are dependent on the Jews; they are only engrafted branches; the root and the stem are still the chosen people.  The fact of their own election  and the fact of the rejection of the Jews are not  to produce pride in Gentile hearts.  If that happens, rejection can and will happen to them.

Is this the end?  Far from it.  It is God’s purpose that the Jews will be moved to envy at the relationship of the Gentiles to him and that they will ask to be admitted to it themselves.  Did not Moses say: “I make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation I will make you angry”? (Deut.32:21; Rom.10:19.)   In the end the Gentiles will be the very instrument by which the Jews will be saved. “And so all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26).

So Paul comes to the end of the argument.  We may summarily set out its steps.

(i)  Israel is the chosen people.

(ii)  To be a member of Israel means more than racial descent.  There has always been election within the nation; and the best of the nation has always been the remnant who were faithful.

(iii)  This selection by God is not unfair, for he has the right to do what he likes.

(iv)  God did harden the hearts of the Jews, but only to open the door to the Gentiles.

(v)  Israel’s mistake was dependence on human achievement founded on the law; the necessary approach to God is that of the totally trusting heart.

(vi)  The Gentiles must have no pride for they are only wild olives grafted into the true olive stock.  They must remember that.

(vii)  This is not the end; the Jews will be so moved to wondering envy at the privilege that the Gentiles have received that in the end they will be brought in by them.

(viii)  So in the very end all, Jew and Gentile, will be saved.

The glory is in the end of Paul’s argument. He began by saying that some were elected to reception and some to rejection. In the end he comes to say that it is God’s will that all men should be saved.

 

 

 

Let’s dive in …  

 

¹⁹ You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault?  For who has resisted His will?” 

• NLT …  ¹⁹ Well then, you might say, “Why does God blame people for not responding?  Haven’t they simply done what he makes them do?”  

 

In the previous passage Paul had been showing that all through the history of Israel there had been going on a process of election and selection by God.  A very natural objection arises — if at the back of the whole process there is the selection and rejection of God, how can God possibly blame the men who have rejected him?  Surely the fault is not theirs at all, but God’s.  Paul’s answer is blunt almost to the point of crudity.  He says that no man has any right to argue with God.  When a potter makes a vessel, it cannot talk back to him; he has absolute power over it; out of the one lump of clay he can make one vessel for an honourable purpose and another for a menial purpose, and the clay has nothing to do with it and has no right whatever to protest.  In point of fact Paul took this picture from Jeremiah (Jer.18:1-6).  There are two things to be said about it.

1. 1.  It is a bad analogy.  One great New Testament commentator has said that this is one of the very few passages which we wish Paul had not written.  There is a difference between a human being and a lump of clay.  A human being is a person and a lump of clay is a thing.  Maybe you can do what you like with a thing, but you cannot do what you like with a person.  Clay does not desire to answer back; does not desire to question; cannot think and feel; cannot bc bewildered and tortured.  If someone has inexplicably suffered some tremendous sorrow, it will not help much to tell him that he has no right to complain, because God can do what he likes.  That is the mark of a tyrant and not of a loving Father.  It is the basic fact of the gospel that God does not treat men as a potter treats a lump of clay; he treats them as a loving father treats his child.
   2.  But when we have said that we must remember one thing — it was out of anguish of heart that Paul wrote this passage.  He was faced with the bewildering fact that God’s own people, his own kinsmen, had rejected and crucified God’s own Son.  It was not that Paul wished to say this; he was driven to say it.  The only possible explanation he could see was that, for his own purposes, God had somehow blinded his people.

In any event, Paul does not leave the argument there.  He goes on to say that this rejection by the Jews had happened in order that the door might be opened to the Gentiles.  (Barclay)

 

²⁰ But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God?  Will the thing formed say to him who formed it,  “Why have you made me like this?”   ²¹ Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?  

• NLT … ²⁰ No, don’t say that. Who are you, a mere human being, to argue with God? Should the thing that was created say to the one who created it, “Why have you made me like this?” ²¹ When a potter makes jars out of clay, doesn’t he have a right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for decoration and another to throw garbage into?

 

 

²² What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,  

• NLT … ²² In the same way, even though God has the right to show his anger and his power, he is very patient with those on whom his anger falls, who are destined for destruction.

 

²³ and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory,  ²⁴ even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?  

• NLT …  23 He does this to make the riches of his glory shine even brighter on those to whom he shows mercy, who were prepared in advance for glory. 24 And we are among those whom he selected, both from the Jews and from the Gentiles.

 

 

His argument is not good.  It is one thing to say that God used an evil situation to bring good out of it; it is quite another thing to say that he created it to produce good in the end.  Paul is saying that God deliberately darkened the minds and blinded the eyes and hardened the hearts of the mass of the Jewish people in order that the way might open for the Gentiles to come in.  We must remember that this is not the argument of a theologian sitting quietly in a study thinking things out; it is the argument of a man whose heart was in despair to find some reason for a completely incomprehensible situation.  In the end the only answer Paul can find is that God did it. (Barclay)

 

²⁵ As He says also in Hosea:  

• NLT …  ²⁵ Concerning the Gentiles, God says in the prophecy of Hosea,

²⁶ And, “Then, at the place where they were told, ‘You are not my people,’ there they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”[l]

 

²⁷ Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel:  

• NLT …  ²⁷ And concerning Israel, Isaiah the prophet cried out,

 

 

 

²⁹ And as Isaiah said before:  

• NLT …  ²⁹ And Isaiah said the same thing in another place:

  “If the Lord of Heaven’s Armies had not spared a few of our children, we would have been wiped out like Sodom, destroyed like Gomorrah.”^[n]

 

Now Paul was arguing with Jews, and he knew that the only way he could buttress his argument was with quotations from their own scriptures.  So he goes on to cite texts to prove that this rejection of the Jews and acceptance of the Gentiles had actually been foretold in the prophets.  Hosea had said that God would make a people his people who were not his people (Hos.2:23). He said that a people who were not God’s people would be called the sons of God (Hos.1:10). He showed how Isaiah had foreseen a situation when Israel would have been obliterated had not a remnant been left (Isa. 10:22-23; Isa. 37:32).  It is his argument that Israel could have foreseen her doom had she only understood.

It is easy in this passage to criticize him, but the one thing that must be remembered is that Paul, in his despairing anguish for his own people, clung to the fact that somehow everything was God’s work. For him there was nothing left to say but that.

 

Present Condition of Israel  

³⁰ What shall we say then?  That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith; ³¹ but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law ^[d]of righteousness.   

• NLT …  ³⁰ What does all this mean? Even though the Gentiles were not trying to follow God’s standards, they were made right with God. And it was by faith that this took place. ³¹ But the people of Israel, who tried so hard to get right with God by keeping the law, never succeeded.

 

 

Here Paul draws a contrast between two ways of feeling towards God.  There was the Jewish way.  The aim of the Jew was to set himself right with God and he regarded a right relationship with God as something which could be earned.  There is another way to put that which will show really what it means.  Fundamentally, the Jewish idea was that a man, by strict obedience to the law, could pile up a credit balance.  The result would be that God was in his debt and owed him salvation.  But it was obviously a losing battle, because man’s imperfection could never satisfy God’s perfection; nothing that man could do could even begin to repay what God has done for him.

That is precisely what Paul found.  As he said, the Jew spent his life searching for a law, obedience to which would put him right with God, and he never found it because there was no such law to be found.  The Gentile had never engaged upon this search; but when he suddenly was confronted with the incredible love of God in Jesus Christ, he simply cast himself upon that love in total trust.  It was as if the Gentile saw the Cross and said, “If God loves me like that I can trust him with my life and with my soul.”

The Jew sought to put God in his debt; the Gentile was content to be in God’s debt.  The Jew believed he could win salvation by doing things for God; the Gentile was lost in amazement at what God had done for him.  The Jew sought to find the way to God by works; the Gentile came by the way of trust.

“Not the labours of my hands Can fulfil thy law’s demands; Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone: Thou must save, and thou alone.”

Paul would have said “Amen” to that.

 

³² Why?  Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, ^[e]by the works of the law.  For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.  ³³ As it is written:  

The stone is one of the characteristic references of the early Christian writers.  In the Old Testament there is a series of rather mysterious references to the stone.

• • In Isa. 8:14 it is said that God shall be for a stone of offence and a rock of stumbling to the houses of Israel.
  • In Isa. 28:16 God says that he will lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation.
  • In Dn. 2:34-35, Dn. 2:44-45, there is a reference to a mysterious stone.
  • In Ps. 118:22 the Psalmist writes: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.”

When the Christians began to search the Old Testament for forecasts of Christ they came across these references to this wonderful stone; and they identified Jesus with it.  Their warrant was that the gospel story shows Jesus himself making that identification and taking the verse in Ps. 118:22 and applying it to himself (Matt. 21:42).  The Christians thought of the stone which was the sure foundation, the stone which was the corner stone binding the whole building together, the stone which had been rejected and had then become the chief of all the stones, as pictures of Christ himself.

The actual quotation which Paul uses here is a combination of Isa.8:14 and Isa.28:16.  The Christians, including Paul, took it to mean this — God had intended his Son to be the foundation of every man’s life, but when he came the Jews rejected him, and because they rejected him that gift of God which had been meant for their salvation became the reason for their condemnatio n. This picture of the stone fascinated the Christians.  We get it again and again in the New Testament (Acts 4:11; Eph. 2:20; 1 Pet. 2:4-6).

The eternal truth behind this thought is this.  Jesus was sent into this world to be the Saviour of men; but he is also the touch-stone by which all men are judged.  If a man’s heart goes out in love and submission to him, Jesus is for him salvation.  If a man’s heart is entirely unmoved or angrily rebellious, Jesus is for him condemnation.  Jesus came into the world for our salvation, but by his attitude to him a man can either gain salvation or merit condemnation.  (Barclay)

 

 

Conclusion

WHAT CAN WE TAKE AWAY?

• For William Barclay …

So Paul comes to the end of the argument.  We may summarily set out its steps.

(i)  Israel is the chosen people.

(ii)  To be a member of Israel means more than racial descent.  There has always been election within the nation; and the best of the nation has always been the remnant who were faithful.

(iii)  This selection by God is not unfair, for he has the right to do what he likes.

(iv)  God did harden the hearts of the Jews, but only to open the door to the Gentiles.

(v)  Israel’s mistake was dependence on human achievement founded on the law; the necessary approach to God is that of the totally trusting heart.  

• For me …

 

 

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CLOSING PRAYER

 

 

 

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THE POTTER AND THE CLAY

Romans 9:19-29

But, then, you may ask, “If this is so how can God go on blaming men if they do not take his way? Who can withstand God’s purpose?” Fellow! Who are you to be arguing with God? Surely the thing that is molded into shape cannot say to the man who molds it, “Why did you make me like this?”  Has not the potter complete authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for an honourable use and another for a menial service?  What if God, although it was his will to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, did nonetheless treat with long patience the objects of his wrath, although they were ripe and ready for destruction? Yes, and what if he did it because it is his will to make known the wealth of his glory to the objects of his mercy, which he had prepared beforehand for glory — I mean us whom he called not only from among the Jews but also from among the Gentiles?  Just as he says in Hosea:

“A people which was not mine I will call my people; and her who was not beloved I will call beloved.”

And as he says in that same place where it was said to them:

“You are not my people; there they shall be called the sons of the living God.”

And Isaiah cries about Israel:

“Even though the number of the sons of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth completely and summarily.”

And even as Isaiah foretold:

“Unless the Lord of Hosts had left us some descendants, we would have become as Sodom, and we would have been like Gomorrah.” 

In the previous passage Paul had been showing that all through the history of Israel there had been going on a process of election and selection by God.  A very natural objection arises — if at the back of the whole process there is the selection and rejection of God, how can God possibly blame the men who have rejected him?  Surely the fault is not theirs at all, but God’s.  Paul’s answer is blunt almost to the point of crudity.  He says that no man has any right to argue with God.  When a potter makes a vessel, it cannot talk back to him; he has absolute power over it; out of the one lump of clay he can make one vessel for an honourable purpose and another for a menial purpose, and the clay has nothing to do with it and has no right whatever to protest.  In point of fact Paul took this picture from Jeremiah (Jer.18:1-6).  There are two things to be said about it.

1. 1.  It is a bad analogy.  One great New Testament commentator has said that this is one of the very few passages which we wish Paul had not written.  There is a difference between a human being and a lump of clay.  A human being is a person and a lump of clay is a thing.  Maybe you can do what you like with a thing, but you cannot do what you like with a person.  Clay does not desire to answer back; does not desire to question; cannot think and feel; cannot bc bewildered and tortured.  If someone has inexplicably suffered some tremendous sorrow, it will not help much to tell him that he has no right to complain, because God can do what he likes.  That is the mark of a tyrant and not of a loving Father.  It is the basic fact of the gospel that God does not treat men as a potter treats a lump of clay; he treats them as a loving father treats his child.
   2.  But when we have said that we must remember one thing — it was out of anguish of heart that Paul wrote this passage.  He was faced with the bewildering fact that God’s own people, his own kinsmen, had rejected and crucified God’s own Son.  It was not that Paul wished to say this; he was driven to say it.  The only possible explanation he could see was that, for his own purposes, God had somehow blinded his people.

In any event, Paul does not leave the argument there.  He goes on to say that this rejection by the Jews had happened in order that the door might be opened to the Gentiles.  His argument is not good.  It is one thing to say that God used an evil situation to bring good out of it; it is quite another thing to say that he created it to produce good in the end.  Paul is saying that God deliberately darkened the minds and blinded the eyes and hardened the hearts of the mass of the Jewish people in order that the way might open for the Gentiles to come in.  We must remember that this is not the argument of a theologian sitting quietly in a study thinking things out; it is the argument of a man whose heart was in despair to find some reason for a completely incomprehensible situation.  In the end the only answer Paul can find is that God did it.

Now Paul was arguing with Jews, and he knew that the only way he could buttress his argument was with quotations from their own scriptures. So he goes on to cite texts to prove that this rejection of the Jews and acceptance of the Gentiles had actually been foretold in the prophets. Hosea had said that God would make a people his people who were not his people (Hos.2:23). He said that a people who were not God’s people would be called the sons of God (Hos.1:10). He showed how Isaiah had foreseen a situation when Israel would have been obliterated had not a remnant been left (Isa. 10:22-23; Isa. 37:32). It is his argument that Israel could have foreseen her doom had she only understood.

It is easy in this passage to criticize him, but the one thing that must be remembered is that Paul, in his despairing anguish for his own people, clung to the fact that somehow everything was God’s work. For him there was nothing left to say but that.

THE JEWISH MISTAKE

Romans 9:30-33

What shall we then say? The Gentiles who were not looking for a right relationship with God received such a relationship, but it was a relationship which was the result of faith, while Israel which was looking for a law which would produce a right relationship with God never succeeded in finding such a law. Why? Because they tried to get into a right relationship with God, not by trusting God, but by depending on their own human achievements. They stumbled over the stone which makes men stumble, even as it stands written: “I have set in Zion a stone which makes men stumble, and a rock which makes them trip. And he who believes in him will not be put to shame.”

Here Paul draws a contrast between two ways of feeling towards God.  There was the Jewish way.  The aim of the Jew was to set himself right with God and he regarded a right relationship with God as something which could be earned.  There is another way to put that which will show really what it means.  Fundamentally, the Jewish idea was that a man, by strict obedience to the law, could pile up a credit balance.  The result would be that God was in his debt and owed him salvation.  But it was obviously a losing battle, because man’s imperfection could never satisfy God’s perfection; nothing that man could do could even begin to repay what God has done for him.

That is precisely what Paul found.  As he said, the Jew spent his life searching for a law, obedience to which would put him right with God, and he never found it because there was no such law to be found.  The Gentile had never engaged upon this search; but when he suddenly was confronted with the incredible love of God in Jesus Christ, he simply cast himself upon that love in total trust.  It was as if the Gentile saw the Cross and said, “If God loves me like that I can trust him with my life and with my soul.”

The Jew sought to put God in his debt; the Gentile was content to be in God’s debt.  The Jew believed he could win salvation by doing things for God; the Gentile was lost in amazement at what God had done for him.  The Jew sought to find the way to God by works; the Gentile came by the way of trust.

“Not the labours of my hands Can fulfil thy law’s demands; Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone: Thou must save, and thou alone.”

Paul would have said “Amen” to that.

The stone is one of the characteristic references of the early Christian writers.  In the Old Testament there is a series of rather mysterious references to the stone.

• In Isa. 8:14 it is said that God shall be for a stone of offence and a rock of stumbling to the houses of Israel.
• In Isa. 28:16 God says that he will lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation.
• In Dn. 2:34-35, Dn. 2:44-45, there is a reference to a mysterious stone.
• In Ps. 118:22 the Psalmist writes: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.”

When the Christians began to search the Old Testament for forecasts of Christ they came across these references to this wonderful stone; and they identified Jesus with it.  Their warrant was that the gospel story shows Jesus himself making that identification and taking the verse in Ps. 118:22 and applying it to himself (Matt. 21:42).  The Christians thought of the stone which was the sure foundation, the stone which was the corner stone binding the whole building together, the stone which had been rejected and had then become the chief of all the stones, as pictures of Christ himself.

The actual quotation which Paul uses here is a combination of Isa.8:14 and Isa.28:16.  The Christians, including Paul, took it to mean this — God had intended his Son to be the foundation of every man’s life, but when he came the Jews rejected him, and because they rejected him that gift of God which had been meant for their salvation became the reason for their condemnatio n. This picture of the stone fascinated the Christians.  We get it again and again in the New Testament (Acts 4:11; Eph. 2:20; 1 Pet. 2:4-6).

The eternal truth behind this thought is this.  Jesus was sent into this world to be the Saviour of men; but he is also the touch-stone by which all men are judged.  If a man’s heart goes out in love and submission to him, Jesus is for him salvation.  If a man’s heart is entirely unmoved or angrily rebellious, Jesus is for him condemnation.  Jesus came into the world for our salvation, but by his attitude to him a man can either gain salvation or merit condemnation.