How big is your God?

I have been wrestling with Romans 9 to 11 recently. If you are a preacher, you will no doubt relate to my problem.

Having preached through Romans a couple of times, I always want to stop at chapter 8, not just for the glory of that ‘no separation’ finish, but also because I want to avoid Romans 9 and all the pastoral complications it brings.

It’s not that I want to duck any part of Scripture. But I confess it sometimes feels like a ‘no win’ situation when you face the hard edges of predestination, double, single or otherwise. But this time has been different.

As I was praying about how to handle the ‘objects of wrath…objects of mercy’ section, it was as if the Spirit was shining His light on verse 21, and the image, stretching back to Jeremiah, of the potter and the clay. ‘Has the potter no right over the clay?’ If we truly understand this potter and clay analogy, we start to reframe questions about predestination, and get lost in the ‘bigness’ of God, which is precisely where Paul wants us to go.

Let’s remind ourselves of the context. Paul has just made the argument that God hardens some hearts, as He did with Pharaoh’s, so that God might display His glory (Rom.9:14-18). Paul then asks the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Who can resist his will?’ (v.19). And you are waiting for Paul to say something like: ‘Oh no, you have the wrong end of the stick. We have freewill, and God would never be so cruel as to predestine people to judgment.’ But that is not where Paul goes.

Instead, he says, quite abruptly: ‘Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?’ (v.20), and sets up the potter and clay imagery. Paul’s answer to the question ‘who can resist God’s will?’ is not to teach us how predestination fits in with concepts of human justice, but to expand our horizons of the vastness of a God who we are in no place to judge.

God is not a slightly bigger version of ourselves. He is in another stratosphere. For me to be able to adequately assess His sense of justice, I would need to be on His level, or at least significantly closer to His level than I really am. I am a mortal, sinful man. He is the uncreated Creator of all things, the One who invented the very concept of justice that we try and hold over Him. I am not even in the right ballpark to make any kind of assessment of how God can be just, while hardening some hearts, and softening others, as He orchestrates His glorious plan of salvation from eternity to eternity.

Paul takes us to a place very similar to Job. The questions are different, but the God we are dealing with remains the same. Job’s counsellors spend 37 chapters trying to give Job ‘human justice’ type answers to his intense suffering. Their answers are made to look flimsy when the LORD finally appears.

God confronts Job’s ‘empty words without knowledge.’ ‘Can you tell me, Job, how I made the starry constellations, where I gather snow or how I put together the vast diversity of life on earth?’ Job is speechless, as we should be, staring at the immensity of God’s grasp of past, present and future, His grand orchestration of the universe and human history. God has His reasons for allowing suffering in Job’s life, but He makes His decisions from such a lofty perspective that Job could not possibly understand, even if God explained it to him.

Back to Romans 9, and all the questions we have begin to melt away as we consider the One who is making these decisions. Who are we to answer back to God? He is the potter, we are the clay. He has promised us that He is just in all His ways, that He does not delight in the death of the wicked, that He is patient, not wanting any to perish, that the judge of all the earth will do right, and He has demonstrated the full wonder of His love and grace through the cross.

I can trust a God like that to predestine, harden and soften, in a way that is utterly consistent with His perfect character, yet beyond my limited frames of reference. I am out of my depth in trying to assess a God whose ways are higher than mine. Romans 9, far from making me shake my fist up at heaven, makes me fall on my face in worship, which is exactly where clay should be before such a marvellous Potter.