NOTES for Rom 9:19-33

¹⁹Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

²⁰Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

²¹Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

²²What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

²³And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,

²⁴Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?

²⁵As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

²⁶And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.

²⁷Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved:

²⁸For he will finish the work, and cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.

²⁹And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha.

³⁰What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith.

³¹But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness, hath not attained to the law of righteousness.

³²Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumblingstone;

³³As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.

Throughout the first half of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul reflects on different qualities of the Law: on its holiness and at the same time its oldness, on faithfulness before the Law, and on the fact that precisely by the Law "the world is guilty before God." Why is it so important for him to explain this to a community converted from the Gentiles? After all, this is not quite their story. It is the story of the people of God, the story of the Israelites, their difficult path and their relationship with God. All this seems as if it should have nothing to do with the Roman community.

In essence, Paul is trying to give the newborn Church an important warning. He sets out, for the future, a kind of set of markers, signs of danger: do not walk the path taken by the people chosen by God. Yes, you did not seek righteousness, and you received it by Grace; you accepted Christ as an unexpected and very happy gift; you are happy that you are forgiven. But do not forget that it is dangerous to seek righteousness through the law, as the Israelites did. Then one can fail to notice the Lord's gift and, in attempts to observe one's own rules, quietly reject Grace without realizing it.

How often our own hearts burn when we have just experienced an encounter with Christ. We are happy with this unexpected joy of forgiveness in God, with the miracle of His love for us. But later, and this is so natural, the sense of His presence seems to be erased within us, and we begin trying to reproduce the conditions in which that gift was received. We do this because it seems to us that only in this way can we return to God, and that is how our own rituals, rules, and a kind of Law arise. But the only way to meet Christ again and again, and this is exactly what the apostle tells us today, is faith, not the search for righteousness.

Other notes

For Rom 9:19-33