A Reading from Romans 9:19-33
19 You will say to me then, “Why then does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 20 But who indeed are you, a human, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? 22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction, 23 and what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory — 24 including us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the gentiles? 25 As he also says in Hosea,
“Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’
and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ ”
26 “And in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’
there they shall be called children of the living God.”
27 And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, “Though the number of the children of Israel were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved, 28 for the Lord will execute his sentence on the earth quickly and decisively.” 29 And as Isaiah predicted,
“If the Lord of hosts had not left descendants to us,
we would have fared like Sodom
and been made like Gomorrah.”
30 What then are we to say? Gentiles, who did not strive for righteousness, have attained it, that is, righteousness through faith, 31 but Israel, who did strive for the law of righteousness, did not attain that law. 32 Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone,33 as it is written,
“See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall,
and whoever trusts in him will not be put to shame.”
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Meditation
There are great and glorious things to be sure of in the book of Romans. Statements like “there is therefore now no condemnation,” “nothing can separate us from the love of God,” and “the gift is greater than the trespass” leave us unquestioning before unshakable truth. And then there is Romans 9. A moment of what we might call speculative theology — what if, what if, what if — echoes through the lesson. “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction, and what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?” What if indeed.
Much ink has been spilled over what Paul writes in Romans 9 — much doctrine has been crafted from its ambiguous formulations. And yet we know so little. What we do know is that God is a potter crafting something more beautiful and more difficult to comprehend than our limited perspective can surmise. We also know the potter is making something we have no right to question. Throughout the Bible, God is likened to a potter. If you’ve ever seen a potter work, you know it is surprising work — shapes dance out of lumps of indeterminate clay. Vases, cups, and bowls emerge from lifeless material in ways an observer cannot fully comprehend.
What can we be sure of? The potter is good, and he is kind, and he is using skilled hands to make all of humankind something we cannot now know. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
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Hannah Howland lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Curtis. She is in her final semester at Duke Divinity School and worships at All Saints Anglican Church.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist, Wausau, Wisconsin
The Diocese of Rupert’s Land – The Anglican Church of Canada
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