Ah, what agonies have been felt in human souls, as men have looked at that gate, and pondered the unknown interior! The Eternal knows, with infinite kindness and sympathy, the pain unspeakable which can beset the creature when it wrestles with His Eternity, and tries to clasp it with both hands, and to say that "that is all!" We do not find in Scripture, surely, anything like an anathema for that awful sense of the unknown which can gather on the soul drawn—irresistibly as it sometimes seems to be—into the problems of the Choice of God, and oppressed as with "the weight of all the seas upon it," by the very questions stated presently here by the Apostle. The Lord knoweth, not only His will, but our heart, in these matters. And where He entirely declines to explain (surely because we are not yet of age to understand Him if He did) He yet shews us Jesus, and bids us meet the silence of the mystery with the silence of a personal trust in the personal Character revealed in Him.
In something of such stillness shall we approach the paragraph now to follow? Shall we listen, not to explain away, not even over much to explain, but to submit, with a submission which is not a suppressed resentment but an entire reliance? We shall find that the whole matter, in its practical aspect, has a voice articulate enough for the soul which sees Christ, and believes on Him. It says to that soul, "Who maketh thee to differ? Who hath fashioned thee to honour? Why art thou not now, as once, guiltily rejecting Christ, or, what is the same, postponing Him? Thank Him who has 'compelled thee,' yet without violation of thyself, 'to come in.' See in thy choice of Him His mercy on thee. And now, fall at His feet, to bless Him, to serve Him, and to trust Him. Think ill of thyself. Think reverently of others. And remember (the Infinite, who has chosen thee, says it), He willeth not the death of a sinner, He loved the world, He bids thee to tell it that He loves it, to tell it that He is Love."
Now we listen. With a look which speaks awe, but not misgiving, disclosing past tempests of doubt, but now a rest of faith, the Apostle dictates again:
Ver. 14.
What therefore shall we say? Is there injustice at God's bar (παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ)? Away with the thought. The thing is, in the deepest sense, unthinkable. God, the God of Revelation, the God of Christ, is a Being who, if unjust—ceases to be, "denies Himself." But the thought that His reasons for some given action should be, at least to us now, absolute mystery, He being the Infinite Personality, is not unthinkable at all. And in such a case it is not unreasonable, but the deepest reason, to ask for no more than His articulate guarantee, so to speak, that the mystery is fact; that He is conscious of it, alive to it (speaking humanly); and that He avows it as His will. For when God, the God of Christ, bids us "take His will for it," it is a different thing from an attempt, however powerful, to frighten us into silence. It is a reminder Who He is who speaks; the Being who is kindred to us, who is in relations with us, who loved us, but who also has absolutely made us, and cannot (because we are sheer products of His will) make us so much His equals as to tell us all. So the Apostle proceeds with a "for" whose bearing we have thus already indicated:|Ver. 15.
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Ver. 17.| For to Moses he says (Exod. xxxiv. 19), in the dark sanctuary of Sinai, "I shall pity whomsoever I do pity, and compassionate whomsoever I do compassionate"; My account of My saving action shall stop there. It appears (ἄρα) therefore that it, the ultimate account of salvation, is not of (as the effect is "of" the first cause) the willer, nor of the runner, the carrier of willing into work, but of the Pitier—God. For the Scripture[154] says (Exod. x. 16) to Pharaoh, that large example of defiant human sin, real and guilty, but also, concurrently, of the sovereign Choice which sentenced him to go his own way, and used him as a beacon at its end, "For this very purpose I raised thee up, made thee stand, even beneath the Plagues, that I might display in thee My power, and that My Name, as of the just God who strikes down the proud, might be told far and wide (διαγγελῇ) in all the earth."
Pharaoh's was a case of concurrent phenomena. A man was there on the one hand, willingly, deliberately, and most guiltily, battling with right, and rightly bringing ruin on his own head, wholly of himself. God was there on the other hand, making that man a monument not of grace but of judgment. And that side, that line, is isolated here, and treated as if it were all.
Ver. 18.
It appears then that whom He pleases, He pities, and whom He pleases, He hardens, in that sense in which He "hardened Pharaoh's heart," "made it stiff" (חזק), "made it heavy" (כבד), "made it harsh" (קשׁה)—by sentencing it to have its own way. Yes,[155] thus "it appears." And beyond that inference we can take no step of thought but this—that the Subject of that mysterious "will," He who thus "pleases," and "pities," and "hardens," is no other than the God of Jesus Christ. He may be, not only submitted to, but trusted, in that unknowable sovereignty of His will. Yet listen to the question which speaks out the problem of all hearts:|Ver. 19.
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Ver. 22.| You will say to me therefore, Why does He still, after such an avowal of His sovereignty, softening this heart, hardening that, why does He still find fault? Ah why? For His act of will who has withstood? (Nay, you have withstood His will, and so have I. Not one word of the argument has contradicted the primary fact of our will, nor therefore our responsibility. But this he does not bring in here.) Nay rather, rather than take such an attitude of narrow and helpless logic, think deeper; Nay rather, O man, O mere human being (ὦ ἄνθρωπε), you—who are you, who are answering back to your (τῷ) God? Shall the thing formed say to its Former, Why did you make me like this? Has not the potter authority over his (τοῦ) clay, out of the same kneaded mass to make this vessel for honour but that for dishonour? But if God, being pleased to demonstrate His (τὴν) wrath, and to evidence what He can do—what will St Paul go on to say? That the Eternal, being thus "pleased," created responsible beings on purpose to destroy them, gave them personality, and then compelled them to transgress? No, he does not say so. The sternly simple illustration, in itself one of the least relieved utterances in the whole Scripture—that dread Potter and his kneaded Clay!—gives way, in its application, to a statement of the work of God on man full of significance in its variation. Here are indeed the "vessels" still; and the vessels "for honour" are such because of "mercy," and His own hand has "prepared them for glory." And there are the vessels "for dishonour," and in a sense of awful mystery they are such because of "wrath." But the "wrath" of the Holy One can fall only upon demerit; so these "vessels" have merited His displeasure of themselves. And they are "prepared for ruin"; but where is any mention of His hand preparing them? And meanwhile He "bears them in much longsuffering." The mystery is there, impenetrable as ever, when we try to pierce behind "His will." But on every side it is limited and qualified by facts which witness to the compassions of the Infinite Sovereign even in His judgments, and remind us that sin is altogether "of" the creature. So we take up the words where we dropped them above: What if He bore, (the tense throws us forward into eternity, to look back thence on His ways in time,) in much longsuffering, vessels of wrath, adjusted for ruin? And acted otherwise with others,|Ver. 23.
Ver. 24.| that He might evidence the wealth of His glory, the resources of His inmost Character, poured upon vessels of pity, which He prepared in advance for glory, by the processes of justifying and hallowing grace—whom in fact (καὶ) He called, effectually, in their conversion, even us, not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles? For while the lineal Israel, with its privilege and its apparent failure, is here first in view, there lies behind it the phenomenon of "the Israel of God," the heaven-born heirs of the Fathers, a race not of blood but of the Spirit. The great Promise, all the while, had set towards that Israel as its final scope; and now he gives proof from the Prophets that this intention was at least half revealed all along the line of revelation.
Ver. 25.
Ver. 26.
As actually (καὶ) in our (τῷ) Hosea (ii. 23, Heb., 25) in the book we know as such, He says, "I will call what was not My people, My people; and the not-beloved one, beloved.[156] And (another Hosean oracle,[157] in line with the first) it shall be, in the place where it was said to them, Not My people are ye, there they shall be called sons of the living God." In both places the first incidence of the words is on the restoration of the Ten Tribes to covenant blessings. But the Apostle, in the Spirit, sees an ultimate and satisfying reference to a vaster application of the same principle; the bringing of the rebelling and banished ones of all mankind into covenant and blessing.