Salvation is not passed on genetically, therefore just because you are a Jew does not mean you are chosen Israel. This sets up the direct relationship of the visible and invisible church. Dr. Sproul investigates the doctrine of unconditional election and how some use this section of scripture to apply to the selection of nations, but it is pointed out that this section specifically talks of one individual being selected over another.

We continue now with our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans. We are at present in chapter 9, and I will be reading Romans 9:6–13. I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham; but, “In Isaac your seed shall be called.” That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted as the seed. For this is the word of promise: “At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.”

And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father Isaac (for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls), it was said to her, “The older shall serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.”

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Let us pray, shall we?

Our Father, as we give our attention to this weighty matter of Your sovereign grace in election that raises so many difficult and troubling questions in our minds, we ask that You would give us ears to hear what has been set down in this text for our instruction and for our edification. Give us humble minds and hearts, that we may be willing to submit to Your Word rather than to fight against it with our own. Grant us in Your mercy now the assistance of Your Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth, as we grapple with these things. For we ask it in the name of Christ. Amen.

Christ over All Things

Before we look at the text I have just read, I want to finish up briefly with the last portion of the final verse we treated last week. Earlier in chapter 9, Paul had given his solemn affirmation of his profound love and concern for his kinsmen according to the flesh, the Israelites, and gave something of a panegyric, or a testimonial, in which he celebrated all of those things for which the church is indebted to the Israelites, for they were the ones to whom pertained the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, and those things we looked at last week.

That section was concluded by these words in verse 5: “Of whom are the Fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came.” Paul indicates here that our Lord came in His incarnation out of the seed of David and, touching His human nature, He came kata sarka, according to the flesh, out of the ancestry of the Jews. That segment of that sentence calls attention to the human nature of Jesus, but the final clause is one that we dare not skip over lightly.

Paul concludes this statement by saying: “Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen.” On the one hand, when Paul affirms the human ancestry of Jesus, the human nature of Jesus that is manifest in His incarnation, he does not stop there but gives one of the most clear and decisive affirmations of the deity of Christ that we find anywhere in Scripture.

In the last portion of this text, Paul refers to Jesus saying, “Christ came, who is over all.” He is over all things, referring to the entire universe. A Greek phrase commonly used by the Jews to refer to the dominion of God over the entire creation was panta tauta. It is synonymous virtually with the expression that God is the Most High God. In this text, it is Christ who is said to be over all things. Then the final clause reads, “The eternally blessed God.”

There are some who would attack the biblical concept of the deity of Christ and try to change the syntax of that last verse. They attempt to interpret or translate the text in terms referring to Christ who is over all, Christ who is blessed eternally by God—that is, they would have this referring to Jesus’ lordship over the earth that is given to Him by God, and this lordship is a gift and a manifestation of divine blessing upon Jesus. This would not require Him to be divine Himself to be the recipient of a blessing that goes on forever. This could be said of any one of you who is a believer in Christ, that you are blessed of God and the blessing that you have received from God in terms of your salvation is a blessing that will go on for all eternity. But again, that is a torturous approach to the syntax of this particular passage, where the Apostle is referring to Jesus as the eternally blessed God.

After Paul makes this profound affirmation of the full deity of Christ, he pauses in his writing and interjects the word “Amen.” That is the word the Jews used to affirm the truth of a statement. When people in our churches today respond to the preaching of the Word by calling out from the congregation—an experience that you have rarely heard in this staid assembly of God’s frozen chosen—but when somebody does say “Amen,” they are saying, “I agree with that; that is true.”

“Amen” is the term Jesus used when He prefaced His teaching to His disciples that we see translated, “Truly, truly, I say to you,” or in other translations, “Verily, verily, I say to you.” Jesus was actually saying, “Amen, amen, I say to you.” This comes from the word emet, which means “truth.” Paul, after making this profound affirmation of the divine nature of Christ, punctuates it with this word, which every Jew understood to be a clear affirmation of truth. Paul says about his own writings, “Amen.”

The Effective Word of God

Let us now turn our attention to the text that I read earlier: “But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect.” I want you to follow closely the reasoning of the Apostle. He has already lamented the situation and fate of his fellow Jews, his kinsmen according to the flesh, who, even though they had the covenants, the promises, and so on, had missed out on the redemption brought to them by the Messiah. It would seem that all these promises and all these covenants that God had made with His people in antiquity were to no avail.

We read that Jesus came to His own and they received Him not. His very people were the ones who turned against Him. That raised the question, Does this mean that all the promises of salvation that God made through the centuries have come to naught, that the Jews have failed to understand those promises, have missed their Messiah, and that whole plan of redemption that God was unfolding through the ages through Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and down through the ages has ended in destruction? Paul says: “No, no, no. It’s not as if the word of God has taken no effect.”

Recently, I joked with the congregation. I referred to a statement that I had made several weeks—if not months ago—and asked if anyone remembered it, and only one or two people indicated that they had. I jokingly said: “What am I doing here? Why do I bother to expound the Word of God when people can’t remember it for three weeks?” Here is the truth of that matter: I do not remember what I preached on three weeks ago, and most of you do not either. In a very real sense, that does not bother me at all, because my job is to open the Scriptures to you, to expound them as carefully, accurately, and persuasively as I know how. The efficacy of that preaching, the power of that exposition, thank God, never lies with me. That is not on my shoulders. I am not responsible for the effect that the Word of God has upon the hearer.

God is the one who takes His Word and applies it to people. The Spirit of God is the one who works with the Word of God to pierce your souls. It is impossible for the Word of God to be without effect. If you forget something I say or the whole sermon, it does not bother me. I know that God the Holy Spirit is going to take that Word where He wants to take it and He will hide it in your heart, and you may not even know that it is hidden there. You may not even be able to remember. But you are different because you have been affected, because that is the power of the Word.

Paul essentially says, “Do not think for a minute that just because the Jews of this particular generation or those who rejected the prophets throughout history make the Word of God of no effect. God will not permit His Word to return unto Him void.”

True Israel

Paul reminds his readers of what he said earlier in this epistle, saying in verse 6, “For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham.” He has to work against the idea that salvation is passed on biologically or through the visible community of the nation of Israel.

In the Christian church, following Saint Augustine, we distinguish between the visible church and the invisible church. The point of that distinction is that not everyone who is a member of a visible church—who stands up and says, “I believe,” or enlists their membership in a local congregation—is saved. Not everyone in the visible church is numbered among the elect. Only those who are saved are in the invisible church, and it is called “invisible” because we cannot read the hearts of the congregation.

I do not know whether those who have made professions of faith in Christ have made a true profession. Maybe that profession was made by your lips while your heart was far from Him. I cannot read your heart. I can hear your words. You cannot read my heart. But God can. The invisible church is absolutely manifest to the scrutiny of the almighty God, who knows His own. Though we may seek to fool our fellow citizens about our state of grace, no one has ever fooled God about the state of his or her heart.

We make that distinction between the visible and invisible church, and that is the same distinction Paul makes in this text. Just because someone is an ethnic Jew, just because he is a member of the commonwealth of Israel, does not mean that person is saved. The Pharisees fell into that trap. They said, “We’re the children of Abraham,” as if that automatically guaranteed them entrance into the kingdom of God.

Paul says, “No, not all Israel is of Israel, the true Israel. Not every Jew is a child of promise.” He looks to the Old Testament itself. Just because someone is the seed of Abraham is no guarantee that he is in the kingdom of God. Ishmael was a child of Abraham, but Ishmael was not the child of promise.

Paul reminds his readers: “‘In Isaac your seed shall be called.’ That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted as the seed. For this is the word of promise: ‘At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.’”

Unconditional Election Denied

Before we go onto the rest of this text, let me go back to what I told you was at stake in the reading of chapters 8 and 9 of Romans. I have already declared to you that my opinion—and I think the opinion of church history—is that even though the Bible from Genesis to Revelation teaches the unconditional election of God in His sovereign grace, there is no portion of Scripture that teaches it more clearly, persuasively, and compellingly than Romans 9.

The doctrine of unconditional election is so clear and so compellingly present in this text that I wonder often how any Christian person can read this chapter closely and not come away utterly convinced once and for all of the unconditional character of our election, that our salvation rests ultimately on the grace of God and on the grace of God alone, not based on anything we have ever done or will do.

Yet, in spite of the perspicuity of the text, in spite of its clarity, there are people—in fact, the majority of professing evangelicals in our day—who deny the doctrine of unconditional election. I raised the question before and said I would address it later: How do people get around this? Basically, there are four ways.

Avoidance

The first and most common way to get around what Romans 9 says is by systematic avoidance of the text. People do not want to have to deal with it. You almost have to take them by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in it to make them take it seriously. I do not know how many times I have been engaged with this discussion and seen the same thing.

I had a radio interview not too long ago with a radio host who was absolutely allergic to anything regarding the sovereignty of God in election, and every time I tried to take him to chapter 9 of Romans, he steadfastly refused to go there. Instead, the host did what was common: He kept reciting text after text in the rest of the Bible that tell us that people have to choose Christ and believe in Jesus in order to be saved. All the texts he quoted ad nauseam were an attempt to refute what was taught here in Romans 9.

I said, “I have no quarrel with all those texts in the Bible that say you have to choose Jesus, that you have to believe in Jesus.” The one I hear every day is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This radio host recited that text to me at least ten times, as if I had never heard of it in my life.

I said, “I not only am aware of John 3:16, but I see it in every golf tournament when someone holds up a placard. But what does that verse teach? It teaches that whoever believes in Christ, whosoever believes in Jesus, won’t perish but have everlasting life. Let’s reduce it to logical propositions: Whoever does A will not have B and will have C. It’s very clear that is what this text teaches. If you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you will not perish, and you will have everlasting life. I believe that.”

Then I asked the man, “Now tell me what this text says about who will believe or even who can believe.” He answered, “Obviously, if all who believe will be saved, that must mean everyone has the ability to believe.”

I said: “No, it does not necessarily mean that, particularly when, in this same chapter, John 3, our Lord has just told Nicodemus that unless a man is born again, he can’t even see the kingdom of God, let alone enter it. In John 6, in this same gospel, Jesus labors the point that no one in the flesh can come to Him, that left to ourselves, our hearts are so corrupt that we’re in a state of spiritual death, that unless God the Holy Spirit opens our eyes and ears, we will never choose Jesus or believe in Jesus.” All of the texts that say, “If you believe, you will be saved,” do nothing to undercut the clear teaching that Paul gives in Romans 9.

National Blessings

The second way in which people get around the text is by arguing that Romans 9 is not talking about individuals but about nations. The Arabs came from Ishmael, and the Jewish people came from Isaac. Then again, further Arabs came from Esau, where the purity of Israel came through Jacob. So, they say, Paul is not talking about the election of individuals to eternal salvation, but he is talking about God’s sovereign merciful selection of nations, whom He sets apart for a particular blessing. Through Abraham, all the rest of the nations of the world will be blessed, but chiefly He chooses the Jews as the conduit, the vehicle through which He will bring blessing to the rest of the world. So, according to this way of thinking, the text has nothing to do with individual election.

Strange, is it not, that when Paul makes his point about election, he mentions individuals, Jacob and Esau? How can you ignore that in the case Paul is setting forth, where he specifically discusses the selection of one individual over another, Jacob over Esau? We will explore that more in a moment, God willing. That argument falls by its own weight. I do not know any serious New Testament scholar who really tries to advocate this, at least not for very long.

Temporal Blessings

Closely related to the above is the third argument to get around the text, which says that what is really in view in Romans 9 is the electing of individuals for temporal blessings—that is, what is in view is the inheriting of land, possessions, herds, goats, and those sort of things that God will give to His people, but the blessing in view here is not the blessing of individual salvation.

I cannot imagine a more astonishing interpretation of this text than that one. In order to interpret Romans 9 in that manner, you have to absolutely pull it out of all its connection to what has gone before it for the first eight chapters. It is in chapter 8 that Paul introduces the doctrine of predestination, and we have looked at that. The predestination that he develops in chapter 8 is unto what? “Those whom He foreknew did He also predestine, those whom He predestined did He also call, those that He called did He also give oxen, geese, and maids all according.” No, those “whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified” (Rom. 8:29–30).

In Romans 8, Paul clearly puts the idea of predestination in the context of personal salvation, which he has been developing from chapter 1, where he is explaining the gospel to people who are unjust and in need of justification before the tribunal of God. It is clutching at straws to try to see the Apostle talking about anything other than real salvation in the ultimate sense of the word in Romans 9.

The Doctrine of Prescience

Finally, the fourth attempt to escape the teaching of Romans 9 is the one I have already talked to you about on several occasions. The most popular view is the doctrine of prescience, which says that yes, God does elect individuals to ultimate salvation, but the ground of that election is rooted in God’s foreknowledge, His prescience, His prior awareness of what people will do when they are given the gospel. From all eternity, God knows who will choose Christ and who will not, and on the basis of His knowledge of the free decisions and free will responses of human beings, God from all eternity predestines those whom He knows who will respond properly unto salvation.

We have looked at that popular idea again and again through our study of Romans. It says that God looks down the corridor of time, knowing in advance who will say yes and who will say no, and on the basis of that divine foreknowledge, He chooses the “yes” sayers and rejects the “no” sayers.

Called to God’s Purpose

Let us listen to what Paul says in the text: “And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father Isaac (for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls), it was said to her, ‘The older shall serve the younger.’”

In this text, the doctrine of prescience or the foreknowledge view of predestination is not only denied, dear friends, it is demolished. The Apostle dusts off the spot where it stood, because he addresses unambiguously the very concept at the heart of the prescient view of predestination. That is why I told you the first time that the doctrine of prescience does not explain the biblical doctrine of predestination; it denies it.

To make this clear, the Apostle says, “Let us look at these two individuals. They were not only brothers, they were twins. They were wombmates. They had exactly the same environmental background, the same mother, the same father, the same birthday.” He says, “The children not yet being born”—that is, he reminds the reader that God’s decree that the elder should serve the younger was made before either of the boys had been born.

The prescient advocate would stop me at this point and say: “Yes, that’s right. That’s right, Dr. Sproul. We agree that God’s choice of Jacob over Esau took place before either one of them was born. We’ve always agreed that election is rooted in eternity. Obviously, the decree that favors Jacob over Esau was made before either one of them had been born. So, what’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that we have to ask, Why would the Apostle bother to even bring this subject up of the time of their choosing? It would be manifestly obvious that if these two individuals were the subject of divine election that their election was settled before they were born. Why even mention it? What is the point that Paul makes here? These “children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil,” for what reason? Here we have a subjunctive clause in the text that indicates, without ambiguity, purpose. The very word “purpose” is used here: “. . . that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls.”

The other word for “call” is of the One who elects. The reason for the decree, the reason that it came before these boys were born, before they had done any good or evil, was to make certain that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not on the basis of anything these human beings did or would do, but that we may understand that it is based not on what we do, but on what God does. It is according to the purpose of God, that His purpose may be exalted, that His purpose may be established, that His purpose and His purpose alone, dear friends, would be the ground of our election. The ground of our election is never found in us.

God’s Free Will

If it is not clear there, I will jump ahead of myself and we will come back to it next week, God willing. In verse 16, Paul says, “So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.”

The prescient advocates, in the final analysis, say that our election is rooted and grounded in our will: It is of him who wills. They say that it is some work we do that is the grounds of divine selection and predestination. This is why we say that would be conditional election, that you would have to meet a condition in order for God to elect you, which flies in the face of the very point that the Apostle is laboring to overcome here in this portion of the text, that God’s purpose might stand.

In all the discussions of predestination, it is inevitable that the issue comes down to free will, particularly to the free will of the creature. As I have mentioned to you before, the notion of free will that we bring to this text is a humanistic one. The idea of a will that is not enslaved by sin, that does not need to be liberated by the Holy Ghost, is an unbiblical understanding of the human will.

But at the heart of this text that I have just read is a profound affirmation of free will. It profoundly teaches in the subjunctive clause I have mentioned already that your salvation rests ultimately and eternally on free will, but it is not your free will; it is His. It is the free will of the Creator, the free will of the Redeemer, who, in His sovereign grace, pours His mercy out upon those whom He is pleased to be merciful.

Jacob Loved, Esau Hated

As the text continues, God distinguishes between Jacob and Esau, the younger and the elder. Normally in Jewish inheritance, the elder would receive the inheritance and the blessing, but to make it absolutely certain that the blessing to be received here is not according to human works or human convention, that the purposes of God according to his election might stand, God turns it upside down and says that the elder will serve the younger.

“Jacob I have loved.” This is Jacob the supplanter, Jacob the liar, the Jacob who has very little to commend himself for divine purposes in the record of his life in the Old Testament. But God declares, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.”

Some people read that and say: “That’s it. Now you’re saying that God hates people. My minister told me that God loves everybody unconditionally.” Your preacher may have, but not this preacher.

God’s Extraordinary Love

How do we deal with this? I have written a whole book on just this verse, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.” When we talk about the love of God, we have to be careful to distinguish among various ways in which the Bible speaks of the love of God.

Love of Benevolence and Beneficence

There are two ways in which the Bible speaks of the love of God universally, regarding the love that He has for all people. The first is with respect to God’s love of benevolence. If you look at that word benevolence, you see that it has a prefix, bene, which means “good” or “well,” and the word for will, from which we are called voluntary people or volitional creatures. Benevolence means “goodwill.” God has a basic attitude of goodwill toward all His creatures in the world.

That posture or attitude of goodwill that God displays to the whole of humanity is shown by His love of beneficence. The love of beneficence has to do with God’s giving good gifts to people indiscriminately. It is what Jesus meant when He said that the Lord gives His rain to the just as well as to the unjust. God pours out gifts and benefits to people of every race, creed, and disposition on this planet. So, with respect to benevolence and with respect to beneficence, God loves everyone.

Love of Complacency

But there is a special dimension of love of which the Scriptures speak for which God reserves to Himself the sovereign right of selection. That is what we call the love of complacency. This is not complacency in the modern use of the term when we identify it with an attitude of smugness. What is meant originally with this term complacency is a love that takes delight in the object of one’s affection. It is the love by which the Father loves the Son. It is Christ who supremely in Scripture is the Beloved.

The Father, in pouring out His love of complacency upon His only begotten Son, extends that love of complacency to all who are in Christ Jesus. Part of our adoption means that we are now included in that special redemptive love of God in a way that those who are outside the fellowship of Christ, those who are outside the adoption, those who are outside personal communion with Jesus do not share. That is an extraordinary type of love.

Degrees of Love Set in Contrast

When Paul recites the book of Genesis in Romans 9:6–13, when he repeats the words, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated,” we cannot understand the meaning of the term hatred to indicate that God has a malicious sense of odium or contempt within His being against this poor wretch by the name of Esau. It is not that God is filled with loathing toward him, although there are times in the Old Testament where that kind of loathing is attributed to God against evildoers and impenitent people. Here, we are seeing a love and hate contrast such that these two poles are understood in relationship to each other. Those who do not receive the special love of complacency, which I have already explained, compared to that kind of love, the other love that they receive of beneficence and benevolence may as well be called hatred because it is such a lower degree of love.

Jesus spoke this way when He said, “If you want to follow Me, you have to hate your father and your mother, your brother and your sister.” Jesus was not commending to his disciples that they have an attitude of hostility towards their earthly parents. Jesus knew that those people were called to honor their father and mother, and they are certainly not honoring their parents if they despise them. Jesus was saying, comparatively speaking, as a manner of speaking: “If you are going to love Me, you must love Me first of all. The love that you have for Me must so exceed the love you have for your friends, your spouses, your mother, your father, your children, that by comparison, the love you have for them would be seen as hatred.”

We see this early on in the Old Testament when Leah complained about Jacob’s love for her because Jacob’s deepest affection was for Rachel. Rachel was the apple of his eye, yet he was married first to Leah through the chicanery of Leah’s father. It was not as if Jacob was cruel to Leah, but Leah said, “I am hated by my husband.” If you look at the context, she was saying: “I am second in terms of his preference. Compared to the affection that pours out on my sister Rachel, his feelings for me may be called hatred.”

If there remains any doubt that Paul is talking about sovereign election, if there still is some wiggle room left for those who find a way around Romans 9, just wait till next week, because Paul is just now beginning to get warmed up to his subject, and he really drives it home in the final manner in what comes next, which, God willing, we will consider together next week. Let us pray.

With the Apostle, O God, we ask what manner of love is this that we should be called Your children. We come to You with nothing in our hand. We have no merit of our own, no righteousness that would incline You to choose us. Our only hope, dear Father, is in Your mercy, in Your grace, and in the kindness You extend to us because of Your love for Your Son. We thank You for that in His name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.