Romans
Chapter 9
Overview
Paul now faces a painful question: if many of his fellow Jews have not accepted the Messiah, has God’s promise to Israel failed? He answers by looking back at Israel’s own story—Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Moses, Pharaoh, and the prophets. The chapter moves through God’s freedom to choose and show mercy, human responsibility, and the surprising inclusion of non-Jews among God’s people. Paul’s argument does not tiptoe around hard questions; it brings them into the open, especially the tension between trust, effort, mercy, and judgment.
1I am telling the truth as someone united with the Messiah; I am not lying. My conscience, guided by God’s Holy Spirit, confirms this.
2I have great sorrow and constant pain in my heart.
3I could even wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from the Messiah for the sake of my brothers and sisters—my own people by birth.
4They are Israelites. God made them his children and revealed his glorious presence to them. He made agreements with them, gave them his law and the way to worship him, and gave them his promises.
5They are descended from Israel’s ancestors, and the Messiah, in his human ancestry, came from them. He is God over all, worthy of praise forever. Yes.
6But this does not mean that God’s promise has failed. Not everyone physically descended from Israel truly belongs to Israel.
7Nor are all Abraham’s descendants his children in this sense. Instead, God said, “It is through Isaac that your family line will be recognized.”
8This means that children born by natural descent are not automatically God’s children. Rather, the children born because of God’s promise are counted as Abraham’s descendants.
9For the promise said, “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.”
10That is not the only example. Rebekah became pregnant by one man, our ancestor Isaac.
11Before her children were born or had done anything good or bad, God acted so that his purpose in choosing would remain in force.
12His choice did not depend on their actions but on God, who calls people. God told Rebekah, “The older son will serve the younger.”
13As Scripture says, “I loved Jacob, but I hated Esau.”
14So what should we say? Is God unjust? Absolutely not!
15God says to Moses, “I will show mercy to whomever I choose to show mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I choose to have compassion.”
16So the outcome does not depend on what a person wants or how hard that person tries. It depends on God, who shows mercy.
17Scripture says to Pharaoh, “I raised you up for this very purpose: to display my power through you and to have news of me proclaimed throughout the whole earth.”
18So God shows mercy to whomever he chooses, and he makes whomever he chooses stubborn.
19Then you will say to me, “Why does God still blame anyone? Who has ever resisted what he intends to do?”
20But really, who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Will something that was shaped say to the one who shaped it, “Why did you make me like this?”
21Does a potter not have the right to use the same lump of clay to make one container for an honored purpose and another for a dishonorable purpose?
22What if God, though wanting to show his anger and make his power known, patiently endured people who were like containers meant for his anger and ready for destruction?
23What if he did this also to reveal the rich splendor of his presence to people who were like containers of mercy, whom he prepared beforehand to share that splendor?
24Those people are us. God called us not only from among the Jews but also from among the non-Jewish peoples.
25As God says in the book of Hosea, “I will call those who were not my people ‘my people,’ and the woman who was not loved ‘beloved.’”
26Hosea continues, “In the very place where they were told, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called children of the living God.”
27Isaiah cries out about Israel, “Even if the people of Israel are as numerous as the sand beside the sea, only those who remain will be saved.
28For the Lord will carry out his judgment on the earth completely and swiftly.”
29Isaiah had also said earlier, “If the Lord of Heaven’s Armies had not left us some descendants, we would have become like Sodom and ended up like Gomorrah.”
30So what should we say? Non-Jewish peoples who were not pursuing a right standing with God obtained it—the right standing that comes through trust.
31But Israel pursued a law that would lead to right standing with God, yet did not reach the law’s goal.
32Why not? Because they pursued it not through trust but as if it could come through their actions. They stumbled over the stone that makes people stumble.
33As Scripture says, “Look, I am placing in Zion a stone that people will stumble over, a rock that will trip them up, and whoever trusts in the one represented by this stone will not be put to shame.”