Within the contentious issue of how much right God has to
choose sinners for adoption, I want to tell you about some very comforting and
encouraging phrases he uses to describe people like me (and you, if you are his
child).
While I can’t speak for anyone else, and what this might mean
to them, and all the debates about how God’s choice of children affects the
children’s choice of Father, I simply want to speak of this as what applies to
everyone who has been born again by the Spirit of the Living God.
Here is the Scripture, with a few thoughts to follow:
22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power,
has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in
order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has
prepared beforehand for glory— 24 even us whom he has called, not from the Jews
only but also from the Gentiles? 25 As indeed he says in Hosea,
“Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’
and her who was not beloved I
will call ‘beloved.’”
26 “And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my
people,’
there they will be called
‘sons of the living God.’” (Romans 9)
Here are the phrases
within this passage that speak rich comfort to the children of grace.
1. “vessels of mercy” (23)
I have been meditating on what it means in the Beatitudes
that, “Blessed are the merciful, for they
shall receive mercy.”[1] To
find this beautiful phrase, “vessels of
mercy,” gave a certain tearful affirmation to my heart this morning.
Because Jesus has taken the wrath I deserve for my sin,[2] I
am not longer “by nature children of
wrath, like the rest of mankind.”[3]
Instead of living in dread of the pouring out of God’s wrath, I am a vessel
filled with mercy. I am no longer to live as though under judgment and
condemnation,[4]
but as a beloved child who is filled and immersed in the mercies of God.
2. “to make known the riches of his glory”
(23)
What God has made known in his mercy towards sinners is the
incredible riches of his glory. His glory is glorified in both his judgment
against sin in all who do not believe, and in the riches of mercy he shows to
those who do believe. We are not to think of his mercy as some mediocre
offering of a reluctant, half-hearted deity. Instead, we are vessels of mercy
who receive the mercies of God to the degree of the riches of his glory, not to
the degree of anything good in us.
If we do not sense how richly God’s glory is revealed in his
mercies towards us, we may be holding on to either a works-based sense in which
we are earning our own standing with God and so have no sense that we need
mercy, or a works-based sense of condemnation in which we think we are too bad
for God to love us. When we understand that we are vessels of mercy to whom God
has been merciful to the measure of the riches of his glory, we will delight in
the safety, and security, and comfort there is in the mercy he expresses to his
children.
3. “which he has prepared beforehand for
glory” (23)
On one side, God wanted to show the vessels of mercy the
riches of his glory, and, on the other side, he wants to show us that he has
already prepared us ahead of time for glory. This ties back to the golden chain
of redemption in which God has foreknown his children, predestined us to
adoption as sons, called us into the salvation by which this adoption is
secured, justified us as righteous in his sight by grace through faith, and
secured our glorification as such a settled deal that it is already as good as
done.[5]
Every child of God should feel the wondering comfort of
being a vessel of mercy now, and on our way to glory in due time. God cannot
fail to do this (which is the point of Paul’s references to these things in
Romans), so we are to live in the moment as though enjoying the greatest
confidence ever, that our coming glory in the Lord Jesus Christ, fully restored
to his image and likeness as never before, was already prepared beforehand,
therefore God has done everything necessary to make it so.
4. “us whom he has called, not from the Jews
only but also from the Gentiles” (24)
The vessels of glory are those whom the Lord has called from
among both Jews and Gentiles. As Paul gloriously testifies at the beginning of
this letter:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”[6]
No one can claim secure standing with God on the basis of
their ancestry, but we can live secure in our calling when we know that God has
made his gospel known to both Jew and Gentile alike, and all who have faith in Jesus
Christ are the ones who are called, justified, and glorified.
5. “Those who are not my people I will call ‘my
people’” (25)
Now we get into some hugely comforting expressions that
magnify the contrast between what we were apart from Christ, and what we are in
Christ. There is no need to deny the experiences of life in which we have come
to understand that we were not the people of God. We Gentiles were not the
people of God in any kind of ties to the ancestry of the Jews. We may also have
personal testimonies of how we became very aware that we were not considered
the people of God by other so-called people of God.
In fact, it doesn’t matter how much any of us have ever felt
this stinging experience that we were not God’s people. It doesn’t even matter
how much we have felt unworthy to think of ourselves as God’s people. The issue
is that God takes people such as this and calls them his people. He takes sinners,
in love with wickedness, and delivers us out of the domain of darkness and
transfers us into the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom there is redemption,
the forgiveness of sins.[7]
Those who were not his people, become the children of God.[8]
6. “her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved’”
(25)
In the imagery of a discarded woman who was not loved, the
people who make up the church were once “not
beloved”. Apart from Christ we had no sense of being loved by God. We have so
many experiences of people not loving us, and churches not loving us, and family
members not loving us, that we know very well what it feels like to be the “not beloved” God speaks about here.
However, in another divine contrast in the mercies of God,
those who know that they were not the beloved of anyone, particularly of the
holy God of heaven, come to be called “beloved”.
We are now able to “be imitators of God,
as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up
for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”[9]
As strange as it may feel, God wants his children, his “vessels of mercy”, to feel beloved
because we are beloved. We are to enjoy being the beloved of God because God
chose to love us, and he set his love on us before the beginning of time, and
secured the whole work of redemption from foreknowing us all the way through to
glorifying us. Every child of God was once a sinner under the wrath of God, but
now called the beloved of God forever.
7. “’You are not my people’… “will be called
‘sons of the living God.’” (26)
Jesus told a story that is often referred to as the parable of
“the Prodigal Son”.[10]
In this story, a young man demands his inheritance, goes to a faraway country,
squanders everything on reckless living, and ends up in such poverty that he is
feeding pigs and wishing he could eat their food to satisfy his hunger. This is
a picture of the “sinners” in Israel
who were condemned by the religious elite who did not understand that they,
too, were sinners under the judgment of God.
As the story continues, Jesus describes how this young man
came to his senses, realized how wrong he had been, and how he imagines that,
if he would just go home and plead with his Father to take him in as a servant,
he would be way better off than what he was experiencing right then.
However, as the young man approached home, his Father came
running out to meet him, welcomed him with open arms, ignored his sad request
to please let him be a servant, and reinstated him with the full rights of his
sonship.
The point is that, the sinners who were coming to faith in Jesus
Christ were the ones who were “called ‘sons
of the living God’”, while the religious elite were missing out on this
sonship because they would not admit that they had failed to become God’s people
through their good works. Those who know they are not the people of God by
religious works are then open to receive the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in
which they become the very sons of God forever.
The message to me in all of this is an increased awareness
of the grace of God towards vessels of mercy like myself. The more I see that I
am what I am by the mercy and grace of God, not by any sense of being a good
Christian, the more I grow in my wonder and worship of God’s free gift of grace
through faith.
No wonder the apostle John would write,
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.[11]
God has prepared his chosen ones beforehand for glory, and
he will fulfil this plan at the return of Jesus Christ when we become like him
forever. There is no greater glory than this, that a creature made of dust
could live eternally in the image and likeness of the eternal Son of God. God
who began this good work in us will not fail to bring it to completion at the
day of Christ’s return.[12]
© 2017 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
[1]
Matthew 5:7
[2]
What the Bible refers to as “propitiation”, see: https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=propitiation&qs_version=ESV&limit=500
[3]
Ephesians 2:3
[4]
See Romans 8:1-2
[5]
Romans 8:28-30
[6]
Romans 1:16-17
[7]
Colossians 1:13-14
[8]
Cf John 1:12-13; I John 3:1-2
[9]
Ephesians 5:1-2
[10]
See Luke 15:11-32
[11]
I John 3:1-2
[12]
Philippians 1:6
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