Is God Unjust?

No sinner has the right to say with impunity, you owe me grace, because if grace is owed it's not grace. The very essence of grace is in its voluntary character. And the reality of hell and the coming judgment is simply, that's not fair. Well sometimes even those within the church can raise the question of God's fairness, especially when it comes to our text today in Romans 9.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and you're listening to a special Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. All October, what we like to call Reformation Month, we're featuring sermons preached by R.C. Sproul from the book of Romans, an epistle that was significant in the rediscovery of the Gospel during the Protestant Reformation. Today we come to Romans 9, where Paul quotes the Old Testament, where God says, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. And then Paul asks the rhetorical question, is there injustice on God's part? So is it unjust of God to sovereignly give His grace to some and not to others?

Here's R.C. Sproul to explain this often controversial and misunderstood text. This evening I'll read from chapter 9 beginning with verse 14 and reading through verse 21, though without any intention whatsoever of covering that much in the lesson this evening. So we'll be looking at Romans 9, 14 through 21, and I'll ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God?

Certainly not. For He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion. So then, it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.

For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, for this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show my power in you, and that my name may be declared in all the earth. Therefore, he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens. And you will say to me then, why does he still find fault for who has resisted his will? But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, why have you made me like this?

Does not the potter have power over the clay from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? If God in His grace and by the power of His Holy Spirit has given you ears to hear, then hear this Word of God. Please be seated. Again, O Father, as we stand before this profound mystery that reveals to us something of the depths and the riches of your mercy and grace, we look to you for help. Send help to us, O Lord, because we are fragile, and at times we stagger before the weightiness of these things. So open our eyes and our hearts tonight to the truth of your Word, for we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen. I was thinking earlier this evening about the first year of my professional teaching career, which was 41 years ago, and my first assignment as a college professor was to teach the history of philosophy. And many students, some perhaps who are in this room tonight, know that the study of the discipline of philosophy can be exceedingly difficult because the ideas that are analyzed tend to be extremely abstract and somewhat heavy. And students who were otherwise excellent students, straight A students in the sciences, for example, would stumble when they came into the arena of philosophy because I think it takes almost a certain kind of mind to track with philosophical inquiry. And so I would try to give my students some helpful hints on how to wade their way through the writings of a Hume or a Descartes or a Kant or something of that nature. And I would say, first of all, when you're reading these men, see if you can discover what problem they're trying to solve, what question they're trying to answer.

Because if you can isolate the problem and clarify in your own mind the question that they are addressing, that goes a long way to help you understand the process by which they wrestle with these questions and how they come to the various conclusions that they do. The second principle that I found important early on as a teacher was that most of the content in the history of philosophy that I was teaching to my students was content with which I disagreed and in many cases profoundly disagreed. And yet I felt that integrity in the whole scope of pedagogy demanded that I try to be as scrupulous as I knew how in setting forth the ideas that were espoused by these philosophers.

And if I would dare to give a critique of them, I had to make sure that I wasn't setting up straw men to knock over with ease but rather to be, as I say, scrupulously accurate and honest in presenting their position. And as a subset to that principle, it was my desire to state my opponent's position with as much force as I knew how. And that carried on to the next point that we dealt with, and that was how to argue over various ideas and for different positions when controversy arises. And I said the first thing you need to do is step into the shoes of your opponent. Try to think the way your opponent thinks. Track with your opponent's process. And if possible, in the context of debate, state your opponent's position even more cogently than they can themselves so that if nothing else, you communicate to them that yes, indeed, you understand their position, their argument, and you feel the weight of whatever argument that they get.

And then that gives you the opportunity to address the issues head on. Now, I give you that background not to go into personal biography for any edification for you, but to understand the master teacher whom we are reading right now in the writings of the Apostle Paul. This is the greatest theologian who ever walked the face of the earth. This was the man who had the equivalent of two PhDs by the time he was 21 years old, and it's been argued that he was the most learned man in Palestine. It's also been said of the Apostle Paul that had he not become a Christian, that he would probably be known to the ages through the power of his titanic intellect in whatever field that he endeavored. And so when we're dealing with a genius of the scope of the Apostle Paul, and we sometimes struggle with what he's saying, just like I recommend it to my students and try to understand a difficult philosopher, ask the question, what problem is he trying to solve? What question is he trying to answer? And we noticed last week that we came to that rigorously difficult portion of chapter 9 where Paul talked about Jacob and Esau, that though they had the same mother, that before either one of them had been born or had done any good or evil, that the purposes of God according to his election might stand, God decreed that the elder would serve the younger, and we ended up last week with that very troublesome declaration that the Apostle gave when he says that the Scripture indicates, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.

And that's where we left it last week as we wrestled with the difficulties inherent in that particular announcement. But note what immediately follows after that citation where the Apostle is, as any good teacher does, and particularly as anyone steeped in the rigors of debate is inclined to do, anticipates in advance the reaction of his students or the reaction of his opponents. And I want us to look carefully at what Paul anticipates will be that point of tension, that point of argument, that point of debate to what he's teaching here about the sovereignty of God in election. Here's the rhetorical question that he raises.

What then? Is there unrighteousness in God? Now, before we look at that, I want to just mention how that comes over to us from the original text. In the Greek, the word that he uses that is translated in the English here by unrighteousness is the word audechia, audechia. If you know anything about Greek, you know that when a word is prefaced with that simple letter a, that is a negation of the root.

We know that agnosticism comes from the word agnosis, without knowledge or non-knowledge. Now, the root here is the word dikaios, which means righteous or just. And when you put that little prefix of the a in front of it, that negates the root, and so Paul is using the term that would define injustice or unrighteousness. If we go to the Latin text for the same verse here, he says, what do we say then?

Is there iniquitas? Is there iniquity in God? So you get the idea of the force that Paul is raising here with this rhetorical question.

Now the question I ask you tonight is, why would he raise a question like that? Is there anything more foundational or fundamental than the revelation of the word of God than the clear manifestation that God is altogether righteous? That it is unthinkable for a second, and it is blasphemous to attribute to God any smear of iniquity, any tinge of unrighteousness, and any hint of injustice? Words like injustice, unrighteousness, iniquity are words that simply do not belong as predicates of the character of God. And so Paul now raises a rhetorical question that is unthinkable.

What then? Is there unrighteousness in God? Why does he raise it? Again, he's anticipating your response, my response, the response of his Roman readership to what he's just been setting forth beginning in chapter 8 and now into chapter 9 when he's talking about the sovereignty of God in election where God, according to the good pleasure of His will to establish His own sacred purpose, chooses Jacob and not Esau.

Not based on anything foreseen in their behavior, not based on anything that they did or would do in the future, but simply that the purposes of God according to election might stand. He makes this decree. Now as soon as he makes a radical statement like that, he can hear the hisses and the boos coming from the gallery.

You can almost hear his audience rise to their feet spontaneously screaming in anger saying, That's not what? Fair. It certainly seems like it's not fair that if for no reason found in Jacob, no reason found in Esau, God chooses one over the other.

Does that seem fair to you? The fact that it doesn't seem fair is one of the chief reasons why Christians kick against the goad on this doctrine. The two principal objections to the doctrine of election in the Christian community, never mind the pagan community, is that on the one hand it seems to dispense with any significance to the free will of man, but even more importantly, it seems to cast a shadow on the integrity of God. It seems to make God appear arbitrary, whimsical, and capricious, and even worse, that in his arbitrary selection of one person over another from all eternity, it seems to see a shadow side of God's character that indicates, well in the final analysis, even God is infected by sin, that even God is unjust, even God is unrighteous, even God behaves from time to time in an iniquitous manner. Now, if there's any portion of chapter 9 that convinces me that the Reformed understanding of predestination is the Biblical one, and is the one that Paul is teaching, is this very rhetorical question that he raises.

Let me explain that. People who do not embrace the Reformation understanding of election or predestination, and who substitute for it in the main, this prescient view that I've explained to you on several occasions, and the Arminian position that says that God chooses on the basis of his foreknowledge of what people are going to do. He knows in advance who's going to choose Christ and who isn't, and on the basis of that foreknown choice that you make or I make, God then makes his choice. But his choice is rooted and grounded in his knowledge of your choice. So in the final analysis, it's your vote for or against that gets you in or out of the kingdom of God, correct?

That's the standard version that you hear. Now, I've been defending this doctrine of election for more than 40 years in all kinds of different contexts, with all kinds of different theological perspectives being present, and I've heard the objection against predestination and election that I hold, that it represents or manifests a notion of unfairness in God without resorting to exaggeration or hyperbole at least a thousand times. Every time I teach the doctrine, I can't get the doctrine out of my mouth before somebody objects and says, that's not fair. On the other hand, my Arminian friends and some of my Lutheran friends who borrow this prescient view of predestination have had to defend their position against various objections along the way, but I trust that the one objection they have never had to address is the objection to their position that the Arminian or the semi-Pelagian view would indicate some kind of unrighteousness in God.

You get the point. Why would anybody think for a moment that it was unfair, unjust, unrighteous, or iniquitous for God to choose people on the basis of the decisions they make, either good or bad? What could be more fair than that? What could be more just than that, than the idea that God makes His choice on the basis of His knowledge of what you do or do not do? But the fact that that position never has to answer that question, and it's the very question that Paul anticipates in his teaching of the doctrine here in Romans 9, to me seals the deal, makes it clear beyond dispute that the doctrine Paul is teaching here is a doctrine that does provoke that kind of response from his listener.

The natural response, whoa, wait a minute. There must be something wrong with God if He chooses Jacob and not Esau without any consideration of their respective behavior. Now Paul, having asked the rhetorical question, what shall we say then that there's unrighteousness of God? He answers his rhetorical question with the strongest of all possible language that is offered to him in Greek, and we can translate it different ways. One way that is translated is, by no means. Another way the translators get at it is the phrase, God forbid. I think the most accurate translation of the language that he uses here is, may it never be. That is to say, the one thing that's absolutely indisputable here is that there is not any unrighteousness or injustice or iniquity in God. Though indeed at first glance it may seem that way. Then after answering his rhetorical question with such demonstrative reply, he then reminds his readers of an earlier revelation by God that came to us in the Pentateuch in the Old Testament, and he cites it where he says, for God says to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion. Let me pause there. Paul reminds us, he reminds his readers of the absolute sovereignty of grace.

Now I've mentioned this before, but let's review the bidding. That any time I ask a professing Christian, do you believe in the sovereignty of God, invariably they reply without hesitation, yes, of course. Because obviously, dear ones, that if God is not sovereign, then He's not God. To be God is to be sovereign.

And when we look at the idea of divine sovereignty, we generally look at it in three specific domains. First of all, with respect to His government over the universe, that God who makes the universe calls it into being from nothing by the sheer power of His command, exercised His sovereign authority over the stars, over the floods, over the rivers, over history, over all things. And when I ask Christians, do you believe that God is sovereign over nature, oh yes. Well, do you believe that God as our Creator has the sovereign right to legislate what He believes is the manner of behavior and response that His creatures should render to Him? Do you believe that God sovereignly has the right to impose obligations upon His creatures and to bind your consciences with His law by saying, thou shalt do this or thou shalt not do that? Does He have the authority to reign over us ethically? Now, contrary to the moral relativism that is pervasive in our culture today, if you have the slightest understanding of the Christian faith, you certainly know that God has the authority to command you to do what God says is right. So, in the first instance you, yes, I believe in sovereignty over nature. Yes, I believe in His sovereignty over law. But then when you get to the third arena, the sovereignty of God's disposition of His grace, that's when ninety percent of Christians get off the train. As soon as you say, do you believe that God sovereignly disposes His saving grace according to His good will and good pleasure only without any view to what you have done or will do? Do you believe that?

Nine out of ten will say no. They say God sovereign over nature, sovereign over law, but His grace cannot be sovereign because if God is righteous and if He gives His mercy to you and if He's really going to be righteous, then He must give the same mercy to you and to you and to you because if He gives mercy to you and withholds it from you, that's not fair. Paul reminds his readers of God's executive privilege of clemency. It's my mercy.

It's my grace. I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy. Now how can God say that and still be just? Because He's talking about having mercy upon sinners. And no sinner can shake his fist justly, and plenty of them do shake their fist, in the face of God and say, that's not fair.

You've given me a bad deal, and so on. But no sinner has the right to say with impunity, you owe me grace. Because if grace is owed, it's not grace. The very essence of grace is in its voluntary character. God reserves to Himself the sovereign absolute right to give grace to some and withhold that grace from others. Now already I've mentioned to you a distinction that we need to master with respect to this concept of justice.

I used a moment ago the Greek prefix of the a or the a-dikia, the non or injustice. Now if you've ever had a course in logic, how many of you have? Stick your hands up where I can see them.

You think I'm going to ask… call on you and ask you to give a recitation? Look at that. That's about ten percent maybe of the congregation.

Boy, does that tell us something about our educational system. But in logic, and when we make distinctions of categories, we'll take the category, for example, of theism. Theism incorporates within that broad circle of thought any type of religion that affirms the existence of any kind of god or gods. Theism is a broad concept, and any affirmation of a theos or theoi, a god or several gods, makes it inside that circle. Now the term a theism, which means non-theism, incorporates everything outside of that circle.

Am I going too fast? If you believe in any kind of god, you're in the circle of theism. If you don't believe in any kind of gods, god or gods, you're outside the circle of theism, and you're in the realm of atheism. Now, let's come to the concept of justice. We have a circle of righteousness or justice, and everything that is just or righteous fits in that circle. But where it gets a little bit confusing is if we consider the concept of non-justice. Non-justice would point to and include everything outside of our circle of justice.

Are you with me? I'm getting abstract here. Alright, so we have justice inside the circle, non-justice outside the circle. Notice that I was careful not to say injustice. Non-justice incorporates everything outside the circle of justice. Now, the next question. Put your thinking caps on. Is injustice inside the circle of justice or outside the circle?

You didn't say that with a lot of conviction. Let me ask it again. Is injustice inside the circle of justice or outside the circle of justice?

Outside, yes. Is there any doubt about it? You think I'm asking you a trick question.

You don't trust me. Injustice would be outside of the category of justice. It would be in that realm of non-justice. Now, let me ask you this. Is injustice a good thing or a bad thing? Come on.

What is this, a soliloquy up here? Is injustice a good thing? Never. Injustice is a bad thing. It's evil to commit an injustice. Now, is mercy a bad thing? No. Is mercy inside the circle of justice?

No. Mercy is non-justice. So there are two things outside the circle of justice.

One is injustice, which is evil, and the other, which is mercy, which is not evil. So Paul is saying, is there any injustice in God? No. Is there unrighteousness in God? No.

Iniquity in God? No. Is there non-justice in God?

Yes. There is, thank God, there is mercy and there is grace. But keep in mind that grace is never, never, never, never inside the circle of justice. That's why I say to my students, I used to say over the years, whenever you pray, don't ever ask God for justice.

You might get it. Because the only way we can stand before God, which is what Paul has been laboring through this whole epistle, going back at the very beginning, showed that all of us are in the category of injustice, all of us are sinful, no one of us is just in and of ourselves, and we have no hope of ever standing before the judgment of a holy and righteous God as long as we are unjust. And the wonderful grace of the gospel is that God has provided for us a justice that is not our own. It is a justice that is the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us. That's how he's been explaining the gospel all along. And what he's saying here is that we are able to be adopted into the family of God, and to receive the gift of the transfer of the righteousness of Christ to our account is from beginning to end the result of God's grace. For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourself. It is the gift of God. Now again, if God in His sovereign disposition of grace interrupts your life while you are alienated from Him, while you don't want Him in your thinking, while you are dead in sin and trespasses, the Holy Spirit comes and quickens you from spiritual death to spiritual life, changes the disposition of your heart, so that now where formerly Christ was repugnant to you, now He's the sweetest thing in all the world to you, and you rush to Him, you choose Him, you embrace Him, you trust Him.

Because God in His grace gave you the pearl of great price. Now if He does that for you, is He obligated to give it to everybody? In our own justice system, if the President of the United States exercises executive clemency and pardons somebody in prison, is He then to be fair and just, obligated to pardon everybody else? No.

No. But we have to understand that what Jacob got in all of this was grace. What Esau got was not injustice. That God withheld His mercy from Esau that Esau had no claim to was not an act of injustice on God's part. Jacob gets mercy. Esau gets justice. The elect get grace. The non-elect get justice.

Nobody gets injustice. Now that's a point that we have to hold on to with all of our might. And that's what Paul is laboring here. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.

I don't have to have it on everybody. God called Abraham out of paganism, out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and made a covenant promise to him, not because Abraham had done any good thing, as Paul labored earlier, but that the purposes of God according to His grace might stand God called Abraham. He did not do that for Hammurabi or Nebuchadnezzar. Come to the drama of the New Testament. Jesus faces His enemies all around. There's Caiaphas, the high priest.

They're the members of the Sanhedrin. He's condemned by Pontius Pilate, who speaks on behalf of the Roman Magisterium. But obviously the most vicious and hateful opponent of Jesus that we find in the pages of the New Testament, the man whose sole raison d'etre was to destroy the church of Jesus Christ, is the man who wrote these words that I've just been reading to you. And we read of the story of the Apostle Paul how that he hated Jesus more than Pilate, more than Caiaphas, more than the scribes and the Pharisees hated him.

But he was walking down the street one afternoon and he said, maybe I better think this over a little bit more clearly. Maybe I haven't been exactly just to these Christian people. And after he gave it further scrutiny, he changed his mind and then decided to exercise his free will and become a disciple of Jesus. You know why he became a disciple of Jesus? Because while he was breathing out fire, filled with animosity and hostility, Jesus knocked him off his horse, blinded him with the brilliance of his glory, and called him to be his apostle.

Jesus intervened in the life of Paul in a way he didn't do for Pontius Pilate, in a way he didn't do for Caiaphas, in a way that he did not do for the scribes and the Pharisees. If we read the Bible from Genesis 1 to the end of the Revelation, we see that God does not treat everybody the same. Thank heavens, if He treated us all the same, we'd all have the same place in hell, but that the glory of His purposes may be made known.

He exercises mercy, not to everybody. Now, if I were God, I think I'd do it differently. If I were God, I'd save everybody. But I don't have any righteousness to protect, and I think that everybody in this room can add to their prayers of thanksgiving tonight. Dear Lord, I thank You that You are God and not our sake. You wouldn't want me to be God. But God has His own reasons to show forth His own glory that He gives grace to some and not to all in exactly the same measure.

Paul goes on to say here, So then – now this is the conclusion of this section of the text – so then, that is, therefore, it is not of Him who wills, nor of Him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. You know, everybody in this room, you know this about me. You know whatever else you know about me. You know I'm not infallible.

I prove it to you every week. But I said to you that the Apostle Paul sets forth this doctrine with such clarity in chapters 8 and 9 of Romans that he leaves us without excuse. How can you look at this text closely and still be chirping and saying, Well, it really is of Him who wills, and it really is of Him who runs. It's my free will that is the basis for my salvation. No, friends, it's God's free will.

And I'll mention this again. You've heard it said that God's sovereignty ends where human free will begins. Have you heard that? Maybe you've even said it. It's blasphemy, of course, because if God's sovereignty is limited by my free will, then I'm the one who's sovereign, and you do have R.C. for God. Now, we do have free will. We do have the ability to choose what we want to be, and that freedom is true freedom. But my free will is always and everywhere limited by God's sovereignty. And any time my free will bumps up against God's free will, who wins? It's no contest, and it is God's good pleasure from all eternity to save His elect, not based on what they will, not based upon how they run, how they walk, how they behave, but that God may show forth His grace in salvation. Now, let me give a rebuke, not because I want to be mean or harsh, because I understand how difficult this doctrine can be and how much baggage we carry into the discussion about it.

I understand that. But I'm going to plead with you, if you're hanging on to your semi-Pelagian views of election, to get rid of them, because you're undermining with that theology the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of His grace, the sweetness of His mercy as we want to exalt our decisions above His. That's the very essence of sin, and we have to stop it. And we have to bow before Him and acquiesce, not only to the sovereignty of His grace, but to the goodness of the sovereignty of His grace.

Now, if we've struggled with it this far, next week when we talk about God's hardening Pharaoh's heart and creating vessels fit for destruction, and we go to the flip side of election, to the dark side, if you will, of reprobation, and talk about whether predestination is double, double toil and trouble, where we really get into the hardness of the decrees, next week, then I'll give you some room to squirm and struggle. But so far, we have nothing by which to protest against the goodness and the sweetness of God's grace. Let's pray. Father, we sing amazing grace while at the same time we despise that grace and contend against it. Father, help us to recover an awe before the sweetness of Your mercy and Your grace as we confess that we see nothing in ourselves that would make us worthy of Your mercy. Nevertheless, we thank You for that mercy that has rescued us from destruction. We thank You in Jesus' name.

Amen. I don't know if that is something that I had given much thought to before today, that the sovereignty of God's grace is not merely true, a reality taught plainly in Scripture and therefore must be believed, but that the sovereignty of His grace is also good. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul preaching from Romans 9 on the mercy and justice of God. You can spend more time in Romans 9 and other key sections of Romans when you request Dr. Sproul's expositional commentary on Romans. This hardcover volume can be yours for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to the physical copy for your desk or your bookcase, you'll also be able to read the e-book edition in the free Ligonier app as well. So visit renewingyourmind.org and give your gift today. Since God chooses whom He'll have mercy on, when did that choice happen, and how does it relate to the fall of man? That's next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation