Part Two
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY
"NOT OF WORKS." Not occasioned by effort, physical or mental.
Not purchased by deed of hand or heart. Not to be won by a nod of the head or a movement
of the will. Not conditioned by the taking of an attitude. Not subject to the saying of a
word, or the thinking of a thought. Channelled thru the will, the emotions, the
mind, if you like, but not conditioned by them. In God's economies these creature
powers act as operating means, though none of them may ever be an effecting cause.
"Not of works"--good, bad, or indifferent. Not of attempt,
effort, or intention. How can a deaf man "hear?" How can a paralyzed man
"come?" How can a dead man "will?" Human sweat can never earn divine
salvation. Human agony can never earn divine repose. Humanity cannot raise itself by
tugging at its religious bootstraps.
"Not of works" would sour the sweetness of Heaven itself to a
legal soul, and transform Paradise into a Hell to every Pharisee. Much rather would such
an one spend an eternity lauding the excellence of one meritorious act of his own than a
single moment in self-forgetful wonder at the marvels of the Omnipotent's handiwork!
"Not of works" constitutes Heaven's highest glory to the humble soul. It adds
melody to its music, and increases the rapture of its joys. If the glory of the Lord so
fills the house that the priests may not stand to minister in the Presence, much less may
the Pharisees strut and plume themselves where sinless angels veil their faces and adore.
"Where then does the action of my will come in?" Read it
again (Rom.9:11). Note how it says nothing whatever of your thinking, your
intending, your willing, or your purpose, but "that the purpose of God
according to election might stand, not of works." "Oh, then it is a
matter of what God wills?" Yes, now you have it. It is God's intention, God's
will, and God's purpose, not yours at all. "Then it is not of me at
all?" Read it once more, "not of works, but of Him that calleth." It is not
"of him that listeneth," as if the "listening" to the call was a
purely human thing entirely "free" and under no determination whatever. The
calling includes the listening. The "will to listen" is "of Him that
calleth." "He maketh the deaf to hear." Thus it is that when He
works He at once places a negative between His working and all fancied human
ability-- "not of works."
"Not of works . . . Jacob." That proves it, doesn't it? We
have already considered the marvel of God's love to Jacob. We should not, however, be
guilty of the grave error that has disgraced so much of our thought on this subject, by
thinking that God went out of His way to specially hate Esau. Nor, on the other hand,
should we imagine for a moment that He had to force Himself to love Jacob. Humanity does
that. Deity never. There is no compulsion in His love. There is no venom in His hate. The
simple difference between God's relation to Jacob and to Esau was that He looked upon Esau
as He was, and He looked upon Jacob as He was to be. He regarded Jacob in the future
tense, whereas for the time then being He chose to regard Esau in the present tense alone.
It was not a mechanical love in the one case, and a mechanical hatred in the other. His
love to Jacob and His hatred to Esau both flowed freely and naturally from the perfections
of His Being. His love was not weakness, nor was His hatred wickedness. His love for
Jacob, and His hatred for Esau were both of them exhibitions of His justice. He did
not lower the laws of His righteousness in order to love Jacob, nor did He make them more
drastic so that He might hate Esau the more intensely. He hated Esau because He was a
loving God! Nor would He be a God of love except He hated everything that was
not good for Esau, and as long as Esau, was allowed to cling to those hateful, hurtful
things, so long did he thrust himself into the sphere in which God's anger burned. Love
must hate all that which challenges its authority. And all this is really anticipated by
Paul when he queries, "Is there unrighteousness with God?" "Far be
it," cries the great apostle as he flings the base suggestion aside. "No,
no," he would say, "He is righteous when He loves, He is righteous when He
hates, in all that He does He is the God all holy. God may have hated Esau, but He did not
make him hateful. This on the principle that while you have to grow roses, orchids, and
other flowers of fragrant bloom, weeds grow themselves. No one has ever had the
slightest trouble in growing weeds. But before God could love Jacob He had to do a lot of
gardening.
Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fact that if it is not our
listening but God's calling, not our working but God's willing, then why He should choose
to give this one and not that the listening ear, or work His will in one and not another
is an enigma which human reason is not able to solve, and which divine revelation does not
offer to explain. So we are prepared for the way that Paul gives mere prying curiosity a
stinging slap in the face. Nor, indeed, was this Paul's, but God's rebuff to mere idle
questioning. Why I, should have been born in the nineteenth century and not in the first;
why I should have been born in America and not in the wild mountains of Afghanistan; why I
should have been nursed by a Christian mother instead of a cannibal one; these are alike
the workings of that "purpose of God according to election." "It is not of
him that willeth." I chose neither the twentieth century, the American continent, nor
the Christian mother. I didn't will them. I didn't work for them. God
willed them, and I'm here. The same God who wills generation wills regeneration; and my
being in Christ is no more a matter of my willing than my being born in America is, or
was, a matter of my choosing.
We should not think that any one moment of time can tell all that may
be told of God. The full scroll of all the ages alone will suffice to reveal the eonian
God. The volume of a solitary era can never reveal what takes the whole library of the
eons to make plain. So if we read in an introductory chapter that God hated Esau, we learn
in a later, fuller one, that He loved the world, and so He must have loved the man He
hated. Though the waves may roar on its surface, the ocean is untroubled in its
unfathomed depth. Nor could Esau, nor Pharoah, nor Nero, nor Judas work or will themselves
out of that cosmic love, any more than they could either work or will themselves into
it. God hates, but He is not hatred. He both loves, and is Love. We may attempt to state
the difference between His love and His hatred thus: His hatred is dispensational, His
love is eternal; His hatred is as temporary as is the sin that calls it forth, and on
which it rests; His love is as eternal as the righteousness on which it feeds. Hatred is a
passing phase: Love an eternal revelation. Jacob have I loved for ever, but Esau have I
hated for a time.
But if Jacob was a vessel of mercy and Esau a vessel of wrath we have
the same vivid contrast shown in God's word to Moses, and His message to Pharaoh. He
speaks of mercy to the one, and of wrath to the other. Here Moses is the vessel of mercy
and Pharaoh the vessel of wrath. What Moses willed is not of sufficient consequence to
have passing mention in this fifteenth verse. Four times over God says "I will."
"I will have mercy...I will have mercy; I will have compassion...I will have
compassion." You can't squeeze man into it sideways. Its language is foolproof. It
locks my willing and my listening outside. It evicts everything except myself as the
passive, inert recipient of undiluted grace.
It would seem as if the main purpose of our institutions for training
theologians was to impart an ability to dilute scriptures like the seventeenth verse with
a stream of apology and equivocation. They cannot be said to justify their existence. But,
theologians notwithstanding, let us note that God's will is just as prominent here as it
is in the case of Moses. "For this cause I have raised thee up, that I might shew my
power in thee, that my name might be declared." And the absolute control of
the All-Ruler is shown by the kind of illustration chosen by Him to illustrate His
supremacy in the sphere of will. As clay in the hand of a potter so is man in the purposes
of his Maker. Does the illustration prove more than our creeds allow us to think, or
teach? The solution of the difficulty is simple. Either cut out God's illustration, or
man's creed. One must go.
But while we note the variety and difference that exists here, we
should not overlook the fact that, vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy though they be,
both vessels are made by the Potter "out of the same lump." Thus Esau and
Jacob, one "loved" and the other "hated," were "out of the same
lump." Moses before the throne, a servant of God, and Pharaoh upon the throne an
enemy of God were, both of them, despite the differences that lay like yawning chasms
between them, "out of the same lump." A certain unity lay back of, and beyond,
the differences which were developed in the two kinds of vessel. How such a simple phrase
can puncture the bombast of human pride!
In the verses that follow, where the contrasting divisions of the human
race into Jew and Gentile, are referred to, it is well to remember that such distinctions
can be traced back, past their differences, to a common source and a common humanity in
Adam. Both Jew and Gentile, though one be nationally a vessel of mercy and the other a
vessel of wrath, are ultimately "out of the same lump." And not only so but the
vessels of wrath at one time become vessels of mercy at another; and those who were
vessels of mercy then become vessels of wrath now. This seems to be purposely shown in the
fact that whereas in chapter nine the Gentile Pharaoh's heart is hardened, in chapter
eleven (v.25) the position is reversed and while the Gentiles become vessels of mercy it
is now Israel's lot to be "hardened." That God's final purpose in His universal
pottery is not to make some "vessels of mercy" and some
"vessels of wrath" is clear in 11:32 where His declared will is not to have
mercy on some but on ALL.
In chapter ten (v.12) Paul reverts, it would seem, to the same thought.
All national and moral difference between Jew and Gentile is brushed aside. "For
there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek." Why? Because they are
"out of the same lump." That, too, is the lesson of this epistle's earlier
chapters where, as regards sin, as here in regard to grace, the same phrase
summarizes the historical lessons of racial degradation.
"There is no difference" (Rom.3:22). Man is levelled as
concerns both guilt and grace. Social class, intellectual attainment, and national
distinction are alike annihilated by the "no difference" of holy writ. The very
figure of the clay from which the potter molds his vessels suggests to us the truth of
man's earthly origin. "Dust thou art." Potter's mold! Yes, and in that handful
of red earth which the mighty Potter moulded into human form, in that "same
lump" lay, dormant and potential, the myriad varieties of saint and sinner alike.
Moses and Samuel and David the king were there. There also Isaiah, Daniel and Jeremiah.
There the Twelve, with the heroes and martyrs of the early church. The fools and the
philosophers of all earthly time were there. The heroes and the cowards, the noble and the
base, monks and martyrs, pirates and priests lay waiting the moment when they would be
molded into the part they were destined to play in the drama of the ages.
And thus is there "no difference." But if all have come
"out of the same lump," this involves the added thought that the vessels,
however much they differ, are all made by the same Master Potter. "For the SAME LORD
over all is rich unto all that call upon Him." The Potter is the Lord of the Clay. At
least in Scripture He is; but in theology the clay is the lord of the Potter, if
indeed it needs a Potter at all when it becomes what it wills and wishes to become! The
vessels are out of "the same lump," and they have the "same Lord."
Glory to His Name!
Is not this idea also in the background of chapter eleven? There we
have two trees; one "good" and the other "wild;" one a "tree of
mercy" and the other a "tree of wrath;" nevertheless, as both vessels are
out of the same lump so also are both trees, despite their difference, olive trees.
One is a "good" olive tree which we presume, like all good olives, has become so
through cultivation; the other has simply been left to itself. So was Israel in Egypt no
different physically, morally or spiritually from their Egyptian masters, and we can find
as little reason for loving whining, murmuring, and rebellious Israel, as we can for
loving their father Jacob in an earlier day. But God put Israel under
"cultivation." This was the Master Gardener's pleasure as making one vessel a
vessel of mercy was the pleasure of the Master Potter.
Just one more scripture in the eleventh chapter which reminds us of the
Potter in the ninth. "For if the firstfruits be holy so ALSO IS THE LUMP." Not
some of the lump but "THE LUMP." Vessels of wrath do not constitute the
"firstfruits." Pharaoh is not a specimen of the art of God. "Christ
the firstfruits." Is He holy? Then "if the firstfruit be holy, the lump
also is holy." But did He enter into and become part of that same lump?"
"As the children are partakers of flesh and blood he also himself took part of the
same." The art of the Master Potter is shown in the firstfruits Christ, and in
Him is exhibited the goal and the destiny of the human race.
Beyond the mystery of "the lump," we have the still deeper
mystery and truth of man's origin as sketched in that miniature Bible of Romans 11:36.
"Out of the same lump" may humble us in the dust. "Out of the same
God"--we bow in adoration before our heavenly Source. We are not merely one with the
clay, one with our fellow-creatures that the same Artist-Lord has formed from the same
material as ourselves but--surpassing wonder of wonders--we are one with the heavenly
Potter Himself. |