Sermon text: Romans 9:1-13
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. Amen.
Tracing one’s ancestry through genetic analysis is a popular thing to do these days. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe and others provide detailed genetic analysis of your connection to your past. Learning about your historical and genetic connections to and stories about ancestors can be meaningful and even helpful. It can help you find lost relatives. It might alert you to inherited medical issues. It can provide answers to questions about how you came to be, where in fact you are.
For certain political demographics, ancestry might even end up paying off big bucks as politicians promise reparations if you simply vote for them. The Hebrew bloodline in the time of Jesus was sacred to the Jews of the Old and New Testament. In the minds of most Israelites, a pure-blooded Israelite Hebrew was entitled to God’s favor and eternal access to the kingdom of heaven. So Paul’s treatment of the genetic ancestry of the Israelites takes up a great deal of space in the epistle to the Romans.
In Romans chapters 9 through 11, they form a unit that deals with Israel’s rejection of Jesus as the promised Messiah. Previously in chapters 1 through 3, St. Paul taught Jews and Gentiles alike that are under the law: God’s judgment against sin is universal, and there’s no escape for Jew or Gentile who does not believe. The law of God applies to both the unbelieving Israelite and the unbelieving Gentile. In Romans chapters 4 and 5, Paul follows up the law’s condemnation with the good news, the gospel of God’s universal grace in justifying the sinner by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, for Christ’s sake alone.
In chapter six, Paul teaches that justification was earned in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and is given and present in the sacrament of holy baptism. And baptism results in our status as both sinners, fleshly creatures, and as saints, hagios, holy ones before God, which is the focus of Romans 7 and 8. Given the place of the Israelites in the history of salvation, Paul responds to two inevitable questions that always arose. Number one: why then do the Israelites not believe if they in fact are the chosen people? And two: what advantage was or is there to be an Israelite? These two questions are addressed in chapters 9 through 11. The gospel, after all, was intended, as Paul wrote in Romans 1:16, for the Jew first and then also to the Greek. And then: why do the Israelites not believe? And what advantage was there or is there to being an Israelite if the bloodline meant nothing? These are the two dominant themes of the Old and New Testaments, the themes of law and the gospel. Luther once said that the student who could rightly distinguish between law and gospel should be given a doctorate degree and put at the head of the class. He also said the law discovers the disease, sin. The gospel gives its remedy: Christ.
The law tells us what a person is to do and not to do, knowing full well that there isn’t a person alive that can keep the law. As the small catechism teaches, the law of God is a fence. It’s a mirror. It’s a guide. It’s a fence because it walls us in. It curbs our behavior. It’s a mirror: it shows us our sin — who we really are and what we really do. And as Christians, baptized holy ones before God, it teaches us what a godly life looks like, what is pleasing to God.
You know the law. You know when the law is being spoken to you, because the law almost always comes in the form of a command. “You shall have no other gods before me.” “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not murder.” “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect,” and so on. As sinners in a sinful world, we live by law. We rely on the rule of law to have an orderly society. Have you seen the news lately? Fewer and fewer people these days live by these rules. The law keeps things in line. As we continue to be reminded by the daily news, without laws and enforcement of their laws, there is no order. Society becomes a mess. Chaos takes hold. This is the first use of the law, and it’s given to bridle sinful human man — their thoughts, their words, and their deeds. The law is so much a part of our lives, it often adversely affects the way we think and speak about the gospel. It creates confusion. In such confusion, Jesus becomes not the one full of grace and truth, but the new lawgiver: What would Jesus do?
But the gospel at its core is the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ: his unmerited forgiveness, love to the loveless, and grace to the undeserved. Under the influence of sin and the law, God doesn’t make sense to people. Obeying the rules, doing good, being good, a good stock — these are the things that people think God takes into consideration when he begins to consider their final destination, heaven or hell. Think of it. Think of the law this way. We experience and make use of the law in our daily lives on a horizontal level, from one human being to another. The law governs our relationships to one another, like rules of the road and traffic laws are there to help us navigate with minimal risk to our journey from one place to another. It enables us to live with others in relative peace and safety. Laws, customs, traditions, even common courtesy help us to live together on the horizontal plane. The problem comes in when we take the horizontal application of the law, the rules that govern our conduct in society, and try to run them vertically between God and man.
Law works horizontally, coram hominibus — “before men” in Latin. But the law does not work vertically, coram Deo — “before God.” Man’s attempt to reach up to God doesn’t work. God does not deal with us with the same set of rules that we use to deal with one another, and that was the problem of the Israelites to whom Paul wrote about in chapter nine. The Israelites, like everybody else, tried to live by the law of both ancestry, the bloodline, and good works before God, rather than by grace through faith in the promised Messiah. When the promise God made to Israel came true, the Israelites’ Messiah, Jesus, came, most of the Israelites rejected him. In Jesus Christ, pure grace is found. But the Israelites did what most people do: they clung to the law even in the face of the gospel. This problem was not just a matter of precise doctrine for St. Paul. It was a matter of national honor, and more than that, God’s disposition toward — he was writing about his people, the Israelites, his brothers. Even many in his own family rejected the gospel, held fast to the law and their bloodline as the saving agents in their lives.
So thus Paul wrote, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”
So what was the advantage to the Jews? Paul lists it this way: to them belonged the adoption, the glory, the covenant, the giving of the law, the worship, the promise. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. Add to his short list the following list that he expands on a couple of verses down the way: add to this the Ten Commandments, the prophets, the promise, the covenant, the temple, the tabernacle, the liturgy, the status as God’s chosen people. Yet when the promised Messiah arrived, those who had been entrusted with all these gifts, they did not believe in him.
Paul was so troubled he was willing to be condemned in their place if that would have produced faith in his true kinsmen. But Jesus had already done that. And still they did not believe. If Jesus’s death and resurrection and the hearing of the gospel had not produced faith in the Israelites, Paul’s death certainly wouldn’t be. The failure to believe the gospel is not a failure of the word of God. In Romans 1:16, Paul wrote that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The gospel is different from the law. The gospel is what God has done for us and for our salvation. The law is God’s demand that we be perfect. Luther wrote, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done.” The gospel says, “Believe this, and everything is already done.”
See, faith is not genetic. It’s not hereditary. Faith is not in the genes. Christian parents don’t always produce church-going Christian children or adults. We do what we’re given to do. We bring them to baptism. We bring them to church. We teach them. And yet many don’t stay with it. Like the Israelites who had the gifts, but faith didn’t appear to take hold. And if it did, it withered like a seedling in shallow soil, and seeds that were choked by the weeds. Paul’s way of expressing this sad truth was to say, “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.'”
Tracking your genealogy back to Abraham doesn’t make you an Israelite in the true sense of the word. That is, Paul wrote: it is not the children of flesh who are children of God, but the children of promise are regarded as descendants. In chapter 4, verse 13, Paul wrote that the promise to Abraham and his offspring, that he would be heir of the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. So here the contrast is between works of the law and the promise of the gospel given to Abraham and Sarah.
Paul offers up two Old Testament examples of God’s election in faith. The first example is in the second half of verse 7: “Through Isaac your descendants will be named.” Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael was the legal firstborn by Hagar, Sarah’s servant. He was entitled to the inheritance of the firstborn son according to the law and custom of the day. But Ishmael was conceived outside of faith. He was conceived in unbelief. Abraham and Sarah in that moment trusted the natural law of fertility more than they did the promise that Sarah would conceive and bear a son in her old age. But the promised seed of salvation did not fall to Ishmael and his line. Instead, the promise fell to Isaac. He was the son of promise, born miraculously to Abraham and Sarah. In God’s economy of salvation, grace and faith govern God’s kingdom, not natural laws of biology.
His second example underscores the theme of faith, not works, starting with verse 10: “And not only so, but also Rebecca, who had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of his call, she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.'” In the womb, Jacob the younger was chosen over his elder twin brother, Esau. Jacob would be Isaac’s heir and forerunner of Christ. Even before one of the sons could do anything good or bad, the Lord God chose Jacob. Jacob’s place in salvation history was established by the word of God, not by any merit or worthiness on the part of Jacob. The word of God always prevails over natural laws. This is true for Jesus as well: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” And so it was, that violates everything that you’ve ever learned about the facts of life. But God doesn’t act by virtue of the law — not the moral law, not the civil law, and not the laws of nature. He acts according to the gospel. Two old women and a young virgin conceived by virtue of the word of God alone. And sinners are justified for Christ’s sake, and Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection from the grave. Ishmael and Isaac remind us that salvation is not hereditary. We must be born again by water and the word: children of the promise. Jacob and Esau show us that before the twins were born, before anything had been done, good or bad, God had already made his choice: elected Jacob by grace, not by the law.
“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” verse 13. In order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls. As for the statement, “Jacob I loved but Esau I hated,” this is the language of preference, not emotion or rejection. Paul is citing Malachi 1:2 and 3, where the reference is to Israel (parenthetically, Jacob) and Edom (parenthetically, Esau). This is not about the eternal status of Jacob and Esau, one of the promise and one of the law, but rather God’s working out of his salvation history in the lives of the patriarchs.
Jacob and Esau remind us that the election of God is by grace. It’s a gift, without any merit or worthiness of the one who receives the gift. So also for you: we are here this morning listening to the word of God and receiving the gifts of Christ as Christians because of God’s grace. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before him in love. He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.
You can no more boast of believing and being here than clay can boast of becoming a vase or a cup. The potter did this. The clay does nothing. The rule of law is meant for the sinful world. And when the people of this world ignore it, they do so in their own peril. But the law cannot bring you into the kingdom of God. That is done entirely by grace through faith in Jesus, who bore the sins of the world: the sins of Ishmael, Esau, you and me. You have been born into the right side of salvation history, not of your own doing, like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. You have been born on the gospel side of things. For your sins have been forgiven. Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.