"What if God...?"

[jaxxen]

For all who might be perusing our threads, Johnny PM’ed me early this morning (California time) and said he may need a day or two away from the forums due to his work schedule. I can certainly empathize. If he does not reply quickly like he normally does, please do not take that as a weakness or a forfeiture of our debate. We all need time to tend to our responsibilities and needs.

Hey Johnny, as I noted in the last thread, here is my next question:
“What if God, desiring to show His wrath and to make known His power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand for glory-even us whom He has called, not from the Jews only, but also the Gentiles?”
I know I don’t get originality points for asking a 2,000 year old question, but I still find it worthwhile to ask

Matt

[Username1]

Hello Matt

Hope all is good in your hood.

Sorry not to have replied sooner to this *very *interesting question. I didn’t want to go off half-cocked and give you a weak answer that satisfied nobody.

Now straightaway I have to confess that I have always found Romans 9 to 11, from which your question quotation comes, one of the most difficult and perplexing passages in the whole Bible. Because throughout it, Paul seems to waver between a Universalist stance – “all Israel will be saved” and a predestinatory stance – “objects of wrath prepared for destruction".

Clearly, both cannot be true. So what do we do with this apparent contradiction?

Well, as is so often the case, I think Dr Thomas Talbott has the answer. In his fantastic book The Inescapable Love of God, he devotes a whole chapter to Paul’s Universalism, including a section on this very question. Basically Talbott’s answer to how we are to reconcile Paul’s apparently contradictory statements is to realise that -

… those who are vessels of wrath, no less than those who are vessels of mercy, are objects of God’s mercy; it is just that, for a person’s own good, God’s purifying love sometimes takes the form of wrath.

He explains this as follows –

God’s severity towards the disobedient, his judgment of sin, even his willingness to blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the disobedient, are expressions of a more fundamental quality, that of mercy, which is itself an expression of his purifying love.

And then goes on to argue – very convincingly in my opinion that –

God blinded the eyes and hardened the hearts of the unbelieving Jews, we discover, as a means by which all of Israel might be saved (Romans 11:25-26) – all of Israel including those who were blinded and hardened. There is simply no way, so far as I can tell, to escape the universalistic implication here. The specific point that Paul makes in Romans 11 is this: Though the unbelieving Jews were in some sense “enemies of God” (11:28), they nonetheless became “disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy” (11:31-NIV). But the general principle (of which the specific point is but an instance) is even more glor¬ious: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (11:32 – my emphasis).
According to Paul, therefore, God is always and everywhere merciful, but we sometimes experience his mercy (or purifying love) as severity, judgment, punishment. When we live a life of obedience, we experience his mercy as kindness; when we live a life of disobedience, we experience it as severity (see 11:22). Paul himself calls this a mystery (11:25) and admits that God’s ways are, in just this respect, “inscrutable” and “unsearchable” (11:33), but nothing could be clearer than his own glorious summation of the whole thing in 11:32.

Now Talbott also makes the important point that Romans 9-11 must be read *as a whole *– as is the case with a lot of ‘difficult’ Bible passages, in my opinion.

So, to sum up, my answer to your question – following Thomas Talbott (a far, far better thinker and exegete than I could ever hope to be) – is that God does indeed prepare vessels for destruction – eg Saul – but this ‘destruction’ is the means of their ultimate salvation.

Interestingly, there is a thread going in Dr Richard Beck’s section of the forum which explores this very issue. It’s well worth a read:

[Reading All of the Bible: UR as More Biblical than ECT)

Also, chapter 5 of *The Inescapable Love of God *can be downloaded free from Tom Talbott’s website, here:

thomastalbott.com

If you have time, Matt, you might wish to have a read. Indeed, if you really want to understand what Evangelical Universalism is all about, and how strongly Biblical it is, you might want to read the whole book.

And I might add, just in conclusion, the following quotation from CS Lewis (used by Talbott as part of the epigraph to his book):

“Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.”

Anyway, hope this answers your question. And once again, sorry for taking so long to reply.

Have asked you a new question in another thread.

All the best

Shalom

Johnny

[jaxxen]

thanks for being honest about the difficulty. I’ve just skimmed through and haven’t linked any of the references you’ve noted. Off the top of my head though, I’ll say that any attempts to reconcile Romans 9 with universalism are frankly unsatisfying at best. It’d be more honorable to take the Wesleyan route and just say, “Whatever it means, it doesn’t mean THAT.” To say Romans 9 compliments universalism is like saying 1 Timothy 4:10 is quite supportive of Calvinism if only read the proper way.