Based on Romans 9 (New King James Version)
“I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen. 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.’ What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.’ So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.’ Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens. You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?’ But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? As He says also in Hosea: ‘I will call them My people, who were not My people, and her beloved, who was not beloved.’ ‘And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ there they shall be called sons of the living God.’ Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant will be saved. For He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because the Lord will make a short work upon the earth.’ And as Isaiah said before: ‘Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah.’ What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith; but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone. As it is written: ‘Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, and whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”
Blaise Pascal said this once: “Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He (God) exists.” In today’s passage, it can be misunderstood that God supposedly is the One that creates people with predetermined feelings, and from a certain point of view, that can be possible, but in very select cases, not in general. It is necessary to take the Bible in its entirety to be able to get many answers, and not base or fabricate an ideology on a few verses only. For in doing so, it is both an irresponsibility and a great injustice. And moreover, if the things of God are taken out of context of the Scriptures as a whole, God is not the one being affected (under any circumstance), but rather, the people that dedicate themselves to do it and those that listen to and read what these people fabricate. That’s why I cannot emphasize enough that each person should read and study the Word of God, not as an intellectual discipline, but rather, through the faith and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit that only comes through a new birth in Christ. Faith ultimately justifies God’s actions and opens the door to the fulness of God’s grace.
To start, we need to try to understand faith and its great value. God has always subjected His things to faith, and not to human intellect, and far less, to carnal capacities. Quite the contrary, everyone that obtained great rewards and promises in the Old Testament did so based on faith, starting with the father of faith: Abraham. Why subject everything to faith? Because it is something that is within every human being’s reach. To be able to have faith, you don’t need to be highly educated, nor rich, nor powerful, nor anything this world establishes as a requirement. Every human being has the capacity of faith and they exercise it at every moment, consciously or unconsciously, by taking many things for granted because of that same faith they exercise. Even small children have the capacity for faith. And even more so, God counsels us in that we should have faith like that of a child. For example, do you know what happens with your fruits and vegetables before you bought and eat them? Impossible for most. Nonetheless, you maintain a job to pay for them, and you go to the market to buy them, and you eat them without much question or doubt. The same thing is done with medicine. There aren’t that many questions, and they are simply just taken. There is an incredible amount of trust on things that people hardly know anything about. So then, if you have that capacity, then you have the capacity to be able to understand, comprehend, and accept God and what He teaches; you have absolute access to the grace of God with the faith ability you possess and exercise. You are not part of the group of people that possibly were made for other things. The issue then is, “What do you do with your faith? What do you put it on then?” That is the issue.
God has given a small push (per se) to compliment Israel’s hardened heart of not wanting to accept Jesus as the Messiah, so that we the gentiles, those of us that did not have access before for similar reasons to the things of God (because of the incredible hardened heart in our ancestors), can now enjoy the dispensation of God’s grace through faith in Christ. But, we cannot take for granted that the door will remain open much longer, because the opportunity will close at a determined moment when the Scriptures are fulfilled and Israel begins to turn their eyes to the true Messiah, and that is already happening, the fig tree has begun to blossom. We are getting closer and closer to the end, and everything that we are seeing is pointing towards that. The Word exhorts us in this manner: “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” Hebrews 11:6. So then, are you exercising the faith you have on taking advantage of the dispensation of God’s grace, or on other things that are not worth very much? Lord bless! John