NOTES for Rom 9:15-16

The apostle's words that God shows mercy and compassion to those to whom He chooses to show it, and not to those who deserve it or need it, may seem like ordinary arbitrariness, unrelated to justice and mercy even in the sense in which any normal person understands them. And perhaps it would be so if God's compassion and mercy were the same as human compassion and mercy.

In fact, however, there is a substantial difference between God and humanity in this respect. The point is not only that God's compassion and mercy have no boundaries or limits, while human compassion and mercy are limited by definition. The point is also that in God both mercy and compassion are not simply sympathy and understanding, as they often are with us. In God they are always effective; they are always a relationship that changes the person.

They change him so that in the end, when the person has been completely changed, he will be capable of full love and will need God's love, not His compassion and mercy. God's compassion and mercy are His spiritual tools, which He uses to pull a person out of the pit in which we all found ourselves after the fall. And since these are His tools and His work, He alone can know how, when, and toward whom they should be applied at a given moment.

And our ideas here may well fail to coincide with His plan. After all, one would have to know as much about another person as God knows about him in order to judge who at the moment most needs compassion and mercy. The same applies to who among the many in need requires direct help right here and now. Paul proposes leaving all this to God's discretion. In any case God sees better, and besides, one can be sure that He will succeed.