This week we come face to face with one of the most difficult questions in Romans 9: If God chooses some for salvation then how can He blame the other folks who do not believe? How do you reconcile the sovereignty of God with the responsibility of man?

One of the fundamental differences between those who have been able to accept what the Bible teaches about God’s sovereignty and those who have not comes at this point: those who accept what the Bible teaches about God’s sovereignty have come to understand that God’s sovereignty is compatible with man’s responsibility. In other words, they have come to accept that it is simultaneously true that God is sovereign and man is responsible. And those who have rejected what the Bible says about God sovereignty have almost uniformly come to the conclusion that if God is sovereign, then man cannot be responsible, that if God chooses then man’s choice is irrelevant and meaningless. In other words, they see an opposition between those two things and so they choose to believe one or the other, but not both at the same time.

That is, of course, precisely the struggle that is going on here in Romans 9:19. "Paul," the objector says, "you have just said that ultimately the difference between Moses and Pharaoh was the choice of God. This raises a pointed question: How can God condemn Pharaoh, how can God condemn anybody since you’ve just asserted that it all boils down to the choice of God? If God is sovereign, how can our choices mean anything?"

That’s the question that the Apostle Paul is going to tackle in this passage. And if you believe that God’s choice and our choice are fundamentally opposed and incompatible, you will have a tendency to react with strong emotion and come to some very faulty conclusions about God. To us it might sound like God is just a big bully burning ants in the sand with a magnifying glass. Before you conclude that this is what Paul is saying, consider this perspective: What if God is not actually mean or harsh but patient? What if God is patiently enduring the sin of the reprobate? He "endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction" (v. 22). Think of Jezebel. How many of God’s men would she slaughter before God put an end to her? Revelation 2:21 says, “I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality…."

Calvin offers some interesting comments on John 13 when the Lord Jesus kneels to wash the feet of the disciples, including Judas. As the savior knelt to wash Judas, His betrayer's feet, "He was once more opening the gate of repentance." That’s Calvin talking. The Savior is opening the gate of repentance to a reprobate. Paul is drawing your attention to the graciousness in the long suffering of God with the wicked. Don’t miss that.