“In Romans 9, we read the unpalatable truth that God himself had caused the Jews to be hardened in their hearts, but we must realize here that this was not by causing or working evil in them, or by tempting them to sin: it was the gospel of Jesus Christ...That was the stumbling block and offense; that’s what they could not handle, because he was saying to them, ‘Your works are not pure enough to merit entry into the kingdom of God.’ This infuriated the Jews because the doctrine of justification by faith alone is a violent assault upon human pride. ‘Instead of allowing Jesus to lift them up, they tripped over him.’…Romans 10 is a vital section for understanding that Paul viewed divine sovereignty and human responsibility as complementary rather than contradictory truths…”

“Paul is not saying that humans have no free will, only that, in the clearest possible terms, free will is not the fundamental factor in divine election; it depends only ‘on God, who has mercy.’…It is important, as we speak the truth about human inability to save ourselves, that we accurately portray that our weakness is not physical, or even fundamentally intellectual, but moral.  It is not as though God has commanded anything of us which we are totally incapable of, only that we will never want to do it.  The weakness is in your will…Who of us, by our own free will, would claim to be able to choose absolute and eternal submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.  Who of us, by our own choosing, could practice perfect and perpetual obedience?  But this is exactly what is promised to us in salvation.  And this is exactly what God does in his mercy; he makes us fit for heaven.  This salvation is not of ourselves, ‘it is the gift of God… so that no one may boast.’”

“Welcome, this morning if you are visiting. We are in the most difficult part of the Bible. Not the most difficult part to understand, mind you. But the most difficult part to be comfortable with…Any attempt to explain the election of Jacob over Esau on the basis of God’s foresight of Jacob’s good works or Jacob’s choice is to reverse everything Paul is saying here and to turn the text here on its head. Paul very carefully and specifically explains that it was not Jacob’s choice or Jacob’s works that saved him only the sovereign choice of God who chooses. To come up with some apologetic that makes this make no sense doesn’t help us. We just must hear the word of God and it’s us that needs to change if we don’t like it…”

“Whenever we are studying in Romans there is a danger, especially as we work slowly through a couple verses at a time, that we miss the forest for the trees. This is Romans. There are some magnificent sequoias in here, some towering cedars. We’ve got predestination, we’ve got the sovereignty of God, we’ve got the state of ethnic Israel and the promises being granted to Israel….but we don’t want to miss the big picture…(T)he central issue in these chapters is not predestination, nor even the salvation of Israel, but the question: “Are we in the church able to fully trust the promises we have just received in chapters 5-8?”  At the forefront of Paul’s thinking is God’s faithfulness to his promises…(F)or God to be truly ‘good’ he must also be fully in control.  For God to consistently give such amazing promises to his people, as we have just seen in abundance throughout chapter 8, he must be fully willing and capable to carry them out.  Anything less is not ‘ good’, well meaning though it might be...”