God's Sovereignty: Acceptance and Understanding

Romans 9:22-23

The Forest and the Trees
Studying Romans is like hiking through a forest full of fascinating trees. We’ve been studying individual trees one-by-one for weeks in chapter nine: God chose Isaac, not Ishmael; God chose Jacob, not Esau; God has mercy on whomever he wills and hardens whomever he wills, etc. Before looking at another tree, lets step back and remember the forest.

Paul is writing to the Christians in Rome who are composed of Jews and Gentiles, two very different groups of people. He hopes to unite them with a thorough teaching of the gospel. The gospel is the good news that Jesus was God in the flesh. He lived the life we’ve failed to live, died the death we deserved and rose again to give his people new and eternal life.

In the gospel, God is up to something BIG. Bigger than saving Israel. Bigger than saving people who try to be good. He’s up to something that flexes the muscles of his sovereignty.

Before we inspect these two difficult verses, we must remember that God is not explaining himself, he’s asserting himself. Paul is not explaining predestination, free will, and election. He’s relentlessly hammering the nail of God’s sovereignty until it holds firm to our hearts. (For more on how I came to this conclusion, click here.)

So the question to ask yourself as you study these verses isn’t, does all this make sense and fit neatly into my world view? The question is, will I accept the Sovereign’s sovereignty? Will I accept the Divine’s divinity? Will I accept the Lord’s lordship?

I believe this is why he begins verse 22 with: What if God…

What If?
There is much debate over the proper translation of Romans 9:22-23, including these opening words. Most experts seem to agree that ‘what if God’ is pretty accurate. However, there is no such consensus about why he begins this way. Here is my theory:

I think Paul believes what he’s about to write is true; but his purpose here isn’t to explain it. So he presents it hypothetically to make his point: ‘So what if the hardest edges of God’s sovereignty are true?’

In other words, these verses do not fill out our understanding of God’s sovereignty. They challenge our acceptance of it.

Acceptance and Understanding
We usually like understanding before we’ll accept something. But with the deepest things in life, acceptance precedes understanding.

Is it customary for a child to understand his parents’ reasons before accepting their authority? No, a child must accept his parents’ authority first, and understanding comes over time. Do a bride and groom comb through their vows to make sure they understand them and how they’ll apply to various situations before accepting them? No, they accept the vows and then find out what they mean in real life as a married couple in the years that follow.

You might like: Three Reasons Election is Good

In the deep things of life, acceptance is the doorway to understanding. Perhaps this is why many of us will never come to a comfortable understanding of God’s sovereignty. We won’t accept it. We insist on understanding it first.

Yet, the apostle Peter himself said that some of Paul’s writings “are hard to understand.” When preaching through Romans 9, John Piper said,

How God renders certain the belief and unbelief of men without undermining our accountability I do not fully understand. If this stretches your mind to the breaking point, better that your minds be broken than that the scriptures be broken. And even better yet would be to let your mind and heart be enlarged rather than broken, so that they can contain all that the scriptures teach.

Similarly, John MacArthur said during his Romans 9 sermons,

I’m not real comfortable with this in my human mind. But I’m sure clear what it says. And the rest I take by faith… [A]nd you’re still scratching your head and you’re saying, “I don’t understand that” and my friend, I’m scratching my head with you. But, I’m believing…

To put flesh on this idea of acceptance first, note the following story shared by Ligon Duncan. After preaching on a similar text as ours, a pastor named Benjamin Morgan Palmer was confronted by an angry young man from the congregation:

“You preachers are the most contradictory men in the world,” he said. “Why, you said in your sermon that sinners were perfectly helpless in themselves, utterly unable to repent or believe, and then you turned around and said we would be damned if did not.” Palmer sensed that his visitor was wrestling with the great issues of life and death, and to make sure that the man really dealt with the gospel, he gave him an indifferent response. “Well, my dear sir, there is no use in quarreling; either you can or you can’t. If you can repent and believe, all I have to say is, ‘I just hope you go and do it.’” Palmer then describes what happened next. “As I did not raise my eyes from writing, I had no means of marking the effect of these words on the gentleman until after a moment’s silence, with a choking utterance, the reply came back, ‘I have been trying my best for three whole days and I can not.’” “Ah,” I responded, “that puts a different face upon it. We will go and tell this difficulty straight to God. We knelt down and I prayed as though this was the first time in human history that this trouble had ever arisen, and that here was a soul in the most desperate extremity who must believe or perish, and hopelessly unable of it self to do it, and consequently that it was just a case of divine interposition. Upon rising I offered not one single word of comfort or advice. And so I left my friend, in his powerlessness, in the hands of God as his only helper. In a short time he came through the struggle rejoicing in the hope of eternal life.”

So, with all this in mind, let’s walk through these two verses and take in Paul’s four suggestions. What if God is this way? Will you accept it?