Romans 9:6-13

 

So, as we've established, there was a problem for the Jews. The problem was simply that God had made so many promises to the Jews, He had given so much to the Jews, and yet now, under the gospel, the Jews had nothing special and many of the Jews were seemingly left out.  The day which should have been the hope of the Jews seemed to bring only judgment. This didn't make sense. To many of the Jews, it must have seemed as if God had broken His promises, as if God had changed His mind.

But Paul—as passionate and burdened as he was for the sake of his people—did not feel that way. And to explain why, he uses several stories from the Old Testament to illustrate the concept of God's choice or election. The idea is that God, acting as a supreme king, had made certain decisions, decisions which the Jews had not understood and which provide the key to understanding this mystery.

The first half of verse 6 forms the heading for this entire section and could be seen as one of the key verses for the chapter. “Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect.” The NET Bible translates it: “It is not as though the word of God had failed.” This is the issue: had God's promises to the Jews failed? Had God broken His word and changed his mind? 

No. And the reason Paul gives is, in essence, that there is a distinction, a choice, a calling that runs through Israel. God did not promise—and the Jews themselves never understood God to have promised—any special privilege to every single person who was biologically descendant from Abraham.

You remember that Abraham had received a promise from God, a promise that he would be the father of a great nation that would possess the land of Canaan and would ultimately be a means of blessing for the entire world. And because Abraham and Sarah did not have a child, Abraham took Sarah's slave Hagar as a concubine and fathered a son named Ishmael. Thirteen years later God appeared to Abraham and repeated the promise that he would be the father of a great nation who would possess Canaan—and that this would be through Sarah. Abraham pointed out that Sarah was too old to have a child and that he already had a son in the person of Ishmael.

And this was God's answer: “And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.” (Genesis 17:19-21)

A few years later, after Isaac had been born, conflict erupted within the household—which is usually what happens in polygamous households—and Sarah insisted that Abraham expel Ishmael and his mother from the household. Abraham, who seems to have genuinely loved his first son, went to God and this was God's answer: “And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed.” (Genesis 21:12-13)

Ishmael was every bit a son of Abraham as Isaac was. Both had their father's DNA within them; both began life in the tents of Abraham, and both of them were loved by Abraham. But only one of them was the recipient of the promises which God had given to Abraham. Both were the children of Abraham, but only Isaac was the child of God in the sense of receiving the promises and the adoption that God had given to Abraham.

And this is something every Jew would have known and would have recognized. Every Jew would have known that the promises of God, the Abrahamic covenant, were not for Ishmael and his descents; they were not for Abraham's other sons by Keturah—God had called Isaac, not Ishmael. God had chosen Isaac, not Ishmael for his purpose.

That doesn't mean that God didn't care about Ishmael or that Ishmael was lost spiritually. We don't know anything about Ishmael's actual spiritual state, but we do know that God made promises to him and to his descents—different from the promises to Isaac, but still promises. God seems to have loved Ishmael just as Abraham did. Many people act as if God cursed Ishmael because he wasn't the chosen seed, but in fact, God blessed him, physically, anyway. (And trying to blame Ishmael for all problems in modern middle eastern politics is a little unfair.) 

In other words, this call, this choice is not that God chose one son to be saved and another to be lost. At least, there is nothing either here or in the Old Testament to suggest that. What we have is that God chose one to be used in his plan.

And this choice is what really matters. Verse 8 makes a distinction between the children of the flesh and the children of promise. Ishmael was the child of flesh—that is, the natural, biological child. He was a true son of Abraham, but that did not give him anything special or unusual. Abraham might have fathered fifty children, and none of them would have been anything special or unusual. Because what mattered was not Abraham's DNA. There was nothing very special about Abraham humanly considered. He wasn't a superman whose bloodline contained superhuman abilities. Why Abraham was special was because God had given him a promise. And that was why Isaac was special--because he was the fruit of that promise. 

Ishmael may have been a good man; he seems to have been unusual and special from a human perspective. He carved a name for himself. But he was not the heir of the promises that God gave to Abraham. Isaac was the son of promise.

So this is the point we have to grasp. The Jews' boast was that they were the sons of Abraham. But Paul reminds them of a fact which they themselves knew, that mere biological descendance from Abraham was not enough: Ishmael and his descendants were all the children of Abraham and yet were not included in the promises God made to Abraham.

And this point becomes clearer as look at the next link in the genealogical chain. The story of Jacob and Esau is very similar to Isaac and Ishmael in several ways. But it also has one very important difference. Isaac and Ishmael were half-brothers. They had one father but different mothers and mothers who were in different social positions in the family. But Jacob and Esau were full brothers. They had one father and one mother and—since they were twins—one conception and one birth. So far as the circumstances of their birth and background were concerned, there was nothing to set them apart.

Remember how the story of Jacob and Esau goes. Isaac and Rebekah had gone several years without a child so Isaac prayed and finally, Rebekah became pregnant. But the pregnancy did not go smoothly and things reached a point where Rebekah went to God to find out what was going on. And this was God's answer: “And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.” (Genesis 25:23)

Once again we have a similarity to Isaac and Ishmael as these two boys are seen as the father of great nations. And once again we have a choice. Esau, the elder, would end up in a subordinate position to Jacob, the younger. Esau would say, though not willingly, “He must increase and I must decrease.” The bottom line is that, just as between Isaac and Ishmael, we have two children who shared the same DNA but only one of which was the recipient of the promise. Only one of the two carried on the covenant God gave to Abraham. 

But the issue here isn't just the two boys. Notice that Rebekah's prophecy primarily refers to the people that would descend from the two boys. This is more clear in the other scripture Paul quotes. “I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.” (Malachi 1:2-3) This is generations after the initial prophecy and we see its fulfillment. The land of Esau's descendants, the Edomites, was destroyed and laid waste, while Israel, though it had been through a deal of turmoil and was smaller and less powerful than it had been before, was standing. 

But what is interesting is that both Israel and Edom had experienced God's judgment—even both specifically having seen Nebuchadnezzar as the instrument of God's judgment. Malachi 1:4 speaks more of God's judgment against Edom for its wickedness. And then Malachi goes on to speak of God's condemnation of the sin of Israel and the punishment that would come upon them. Both Israel and Edom had been guilty of sin. Both had been punished and destroyed. But Israel (or specifically Judah) had been restored after its destruction. It would be restored again in the twentieth century. Edom has never been restored. Israel is still in a position of superiority as compared to Edom.

So we have this choice, this decision. The elder would serve the younger. Jacob and Esau were both sons of Isaac and, therefore, Abraham, but only one of them was chosen to carry on the covenant. And what is important about God's word to Rebekah is the fact that it was spoken before the boys were even born. They had yet to do anything worthwhile or dishonorable. You can't say that Jacob was given the covenant as a reward or that Esau was denied it as a punishment. 

Initially, I was puzzled by Paul's argument here; at first glance, it doesn't make sense. Given that God knows the future, He obviously what Jacob and Esau would do and would be like. So why does it matter that the decision was made before their birth?

And it may be that the significance is more symbolic than anything else, but as I was thinking about it, something struck me. The one thing we know about Isaac's household while the family was still together was that it was somewhat divided; Jacob, particularly, was very ambitious and tried to gain superiority over his brother by means of aggressive sales tactics and then cosplay—in the latter case, at least, being encouraged by his mother. Why? What caused this division? Why were Jacob and Rebekah so determined to gain ascendency? I think it's extremely likely that it was because of the message which God gave Rebekah. Jacob knew it was prophesied that he and his descendants would be in the superior position and so he tried to gain that superior position. And, if I'm right, then that was the driving force behind the life of Jacob up until the point where God appeared to Him to establish a personal covenant.

It was the fact that God chose Jacob which led to Jacob being the person he was. That doesn't mean that it was God's will that Jacob attempt to scam his brother or his father; it is possible that Jacob's actions were because he lacked the faith to believe God could fulfill His promises without a little help. But the point is that God's promise, rather than being the effect of Jacob's actions, was actually the cause of those actions. We have no idea what Jacob and Esau's life or relationship would have been like if God had not given this message to Rebekah.

So the primary fact here is God and God's work. Specifically “The purpose of God according to election.” What is an election? Even in a polticial context, what do we mean when we speak of electing someone? It means the voters are making a choice, a choice about who will hold a particular office. That is the root meaning of the word election, both in English and in Greek. Thayer defines the Greek word as: “Election, choice... the act of picking out, choosing.”

God made a choice. That choice was from God and had nothing to do with the merit or deserving of Jacob and that choice would determine the course of Jacob's life and of his bloodline all the way to today.

Now, once again, we must remember that this choice had to do with the role or mission Jacob was to fulfill. This has nothing to do with the spiritual state of either one. We have no evidence to say that Esau was ultimately lost. We know that at one point he was a deficient character (like Jacob) and specifically was plotting murder against his brother. When Jacob and Esau met again years later, both had changed, and Esau seems to have been genuinely willing to be reconciled to his brother. And that is about all we can say about Esau. Certainly, there is no concrete evidence to say that he was a bad man all his life or that he was lost in the end and none of that is mentioned here. The point here has only to do with the mission of carrying on the covenant and promises which God gave to Abraham.

So the main takeaway from this story is the same as that of Ishmael. The Jews questioned how God could desert the sons of Abraham. Paul reminds them of the fact that they themselves knew--not all the sons of Abraham were ever included in the covenant. No orthodox Jew would have been surprised by the fact that Ishmael and Esau, though the son and grandson of Abraham, were not included in the covenant. 

But we also have to keep in mind what makes the difference. Isaac was chosen, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau. Why? What was the difference? It was the promise of God, the call of God, the purpose of God—in short, election. This is a concept Paul will develop more in the next section.