I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of God’s sovereignty in regards to a person’s conviction and salvation enabled by the Holy Spirit. The idea has presented itself in three different ways over the past couple of days. The first is very obscurely connected and not important to the ultimate point of this blog.
The second is in a book I was reading called The Explicit Gospel by Matt Chandler. In discussing God’s severity (which, he postulates, is necessary to understand God’s love), Chandler brings up the story of Isaiah’s calling by the Lord in Isaiah 6. When the Lord calls Isaiah to go be a prophet to Israel, He tells Isaiah, “Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” I’m sorry, what? Israel was set apart as God’s chosen people… why would he harden their hearts so that they could not receive His redemption? I thought long and hard about this passage and what Matt Chandler said about it, and couldn’t make it line up with what I knew about God. Chandler writes, “Receptivity and rejection are ultimately dependent upon God’s will, not ours.” I have known this to be true for a long time, but I have never thought about it in the context of the Lord intentionally hardening people’s hearts against Him. However, Chandler’s argument is definitely supported by Scripture, so it merited analysis.
Then the next day, I happened to read Romans 9, which is entitled “God’s Sovereign Choice” in the NIV version. I spent the rest of the day thinking almost non-stop about the passage. In verses 15-16, Paul writes, “For [God] 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 man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.” It goes on to say in verse 18, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”
This is really hard Scripture to swallow. However, I think in the American Christian church, we want to focus on the parts of God that are nice and sweet and try to ignore what we see as the unpleasant parts. We do this because we are generally more concerned with increasing our church attendence rate than about people actually telling them things that they don't want to hear because it's hard. This is certainly one of the aspects of God that is easier to ignore than to actually try to wrap our incredibly limited minds around.
But the Lord wouldn’t let me let it go. So, I thought. I tried reading a commentary on the passage (Romans 9), but it turned out to be Scripturally inaccurate, so that was useless. I tried to apply it to other passages, for example the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus, versus tales of remarkable mass conversion in Acts. I thought about other things that Matt Chandler had said- like that our ultimate purpose on Earth is to bring glory to our Creator, who is deserving of all of the glory possible to be given. I thought about passages where it says that God sent is Son to bring salvation to the world, that Christ died for all. But in light of the hardening of hearts, does that mean that God ultimately is the one who decides whether we can be saved or not? But I don’t believe in predestination, so how does that line up? I went to bed with no answers, no epiphany, no enlightenment. The more I thought about it, the more questions I had, and the fewer answers I had.
If you know me, you know that this did not push me away from God, but got my mind working in a way that only the Lord seems to be able to do. And I love that. I love when the Lord reminds me that I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am. None of these little details that I do or don’t understand could change the redemption and love that I have received from God. These are the things that make or break faith- things of the heart, not things of the head. It is important to wallow in the difficult parts of faith, the parts that bring up the scary doubts that we tend to feel guilty about. So, I very much enjoy the challenge that difficult passages of scripture bring up. Don’t freak out. It’s not like I’m questioning whether or not God is real by asking these questions. He’s big enough to handle my puny little questions. And yours, for that matter. What you believe and what I believe doesn’t actually change who God truly is.
The Lord did bless me with an epiphany 24 hours later. But that is for the next blog, because this one is already entirely too long according to the blogging session I attended at training camp. The point of this blog is that there will always be things about God that we aren’t able to understand. We’re humans with incredibly simple minds, even the smartest of which don’t have a hope of totally understanding everything about God. This should never be a thing that repels us from the Lord. It should be comforting. If you are honest with yourself, you know that you are limited. If it were up to you to order the universe, you know that you would do a terrible job.
So PRAISE God that His ways are above mine. Praise God that he operates on a level that is more complicated than I will ever be able to understand.
