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Gentiles now included in God’s Israel
Romans 9 began with Paul telling of his tremendous love for his Jewish brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh. His great desire was that they might know Christ and salvation from sin and death. Despite their many advantages that might have led them to a ready acceptance of Jesus the Messiah, the Jewish people for the greater part had soundly rejected God’s Son and sinfully shut themselves out of His kingdom. Paul so powerfully wished for their salvation.
But then he explained that natural descent from Jacob/Israel did not make a person a member of God’s covenant people in the spiritual sense. Paul shows that among the old covenant people Israel, God’s sovereign election can be easily seen by anyone who will open his eyes. Not every natural Israelite is among God’s elect, spiritually speaking. Appealing to well-known history, Paul refers to Jacob and Esau, the twin sons of Isaac, both equally grandsons of Abraham. Yet God loved and chose one, while hating and rejecting the other. Both were natural Israelites and both deserved God’s wrath, but only one of them was chosen to inherit salvation.
Paul knew that some of his readers would complain that this simply could not be true and that, if it were, God would be unjust. However, for that to be so Jacob and Esau would have had to deserve God’s favor and salvation, which they did not. God’s saving grace was His to give as He pleased—and it still is. This reality bothers a great many people, for God to be truly God in every sense.
Romans 9:19-21 contains Paul’s assertion of God’s rights—to do what He pleases and all that He pleases. Sinful men who are like clay in His hand have no “right” to complain. If we all perished in our sin under the just judgment of God, it would be only what we deserve. But because of His great love, God has chosen to save some by grace alone for His glory alone: they are called “vessels of mercy … afore prepared unto glory.”
Now Paul identifies these divinely chosen “vessels of mercy” as those who become believers in Jesus Christ. Those whom God has chosen to be “vessels of mercy” are those whom He effectually calls to Himself by Jesus Christ through the Word and the Holy Spirit; “even us whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.”
Are you among the “vessels of mercy?” How would you know? You would know because you have come to Jesus Christ in true faith and repentance under the mighty influence of the Spirit’s effectual calling and in glad obedience to the gospel. All who savingly believe, Jew or Gentile, are included in the covenant people of God; that chosen people to whom God has made promises that He will surely keep without fail through Jesus Christ. –TSA