Both things

The thing I find the most confronting about my faith is that God has not chosen to save all people. I praise him for his impartiality - that any person can be chosen, not only the middle-class, white, educated man or whatever other group is favoured in society. Crims and people with ugly disabilities and streetwomen and diseased African families living on rubbish dumps and young men dying of AIDS and people like me. There's no yardstick, because Jesus did it all. I praise him for this. But I don't understand why he didn't chose to have mercy on us all. I don't think it's injust of him, in no way do I think that - even saving just one single person would be an act of astonishingly unmerited mercy. My struggle isn't to do with injustice, it's rather that I feel like, if I were in his place I would be more merciful and more generous (which no doubt stems from a staggering lack of self-awareness). All this is in one sense made easier by the words of Romans 9 - because it teaches me what is true and right and what I'm to hold onto even in my non-understanding. But Romans 9 is hard too, because it's so blunt, so humbling.

What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
    and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. (verses 14-18)

But the apostle Paul writes this knowing his Old Testament very well. He knows what is said in Exodus about Pharaoh - ten times God is described as hardening Pharaoh's heart and ten times Pharaoh is said to harden his own heart. It was both things and still is today. God is sovereign and people do what they want to do and are responsible for it. The Bible nowhere explains how both things can be true, but shows clearly that they are. And this authority of God is not some small thing, some minor part of his character, but fundamental to who he is. Before his words to Moses quoted in the passage above, he said "I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I have mercy (etc)". I still don't understand it but I'm happy that it's complicated and I bow before my God who died for me. There is none else who should have this authority.


H/T Kirk