(NOTE: This paper is a bit longer than the others, but I feel the things discussed are of such importance that they need to be carefully examined. This is not a commentary on chapter 9, but some basic principles which must be understood as you read this difficult chapter.)
Perhaps the biggest mistake people make in their concept of God is that He is a super man. The second of the Ten Commandments cautions against creating any image to represent God. Any image or characteristic we might conceive must, of
necessity, be limited to the world of space and time in which we live. We know no other world, and our vocabulary must be limited to what we know.
This is especially important when we approach the very difficult 9th chapter of Romans. If Paul had been describing a great man in this chapter, that man would have seemed very arbitrary and unfair. To choose Isaac over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau, before they were born, given man's limitations of mind and heart, would be unjust. To say that a super man had raised up Pharaoh to be like he was just to prove the super man's power would fail any ethics test.
Even in Paul's case, for God to convert him on the Damascus road by a miracle, seems unjust to those who did not have such a divine opportunity to learn the truth.
There are two things we must understand at the very beginning of this study. The first is that God, who is not bound in time and space, created the universe for His own purposes, and placed man here by His divine will and for His own particular reasons, which are beyond man's comprehension. He gave man a free will...the power of choice...but that was to be exercised within the framework of God's design, and for His own purposes. Israel was a chosen people, but even from the beginning He predicted through the prophets, that only a remnant of them would remain within His designed framework, and fulfill His purposes.
While the purposes of God are beyond our comprehension, He has revealed one very fundamental thing about them, i.e., that it is men of faith that He will accept and bless. Your free will is not violated by God, but you must choose to have faith in Him, or you do not fit into the framework of his purposes. When He said, "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy", the recipients of that mercy...the predestined ones...are always men of faith.
The second thing we must realize is that God does not have to wait to see what kind of character a man will have. For God, outside the limitations of time, there is no waiting. Hence, He knew in advance the kind of man Paul would choose to
be, and His intervention only opened the way for him to become what he earnestly desired to be...one who was faithful to God in the absolute.
We also see this in the case of Pharaoh. Pharaoh chose to be imperious and to do evil things. God softened him by the plagues and used him to show His power. Then He "hardened" his heart. How? By removing the softening power and allowing him to revert to what he was before, and what he really chose to be.
God does not interrupt man's free will. He only uses men to carry out His purposes, as they have prepared themselves to be used. It is not the goodness or evil that men do that determines their place in God's scheme of things, but their faith, or lack of faith in God, that makes the difference. Paul was a persecutor of Christians, but his faith was in God. Abraham was weak in many ways and lied multiple times, but his faith was in God, and that made the difference. Isaac and Jacob were not arbitrarily chosen in advance because they were going to be good men, but because they each would place their faith in God, contrary to their brothers, who had no such faith.
We, who sit in this limited box of space and time, should never question the
judgment of God, nor His justice or righteousness. To what court would we bring our case, if we wanted to indict God? His purposes are beyond our comprehension, and all we have is what He has given to us. If we stand isolated from Him and condemned, it is not because He has arbitrarily dismissed us, but because we have refused to place our complete trust and faith in Him, and thus make ourselves available to be used in His glorious plan.
