Destined for Glory

Romans 9:19-24 speaks about the two destinies of all people: destruction and glory. If we are made saints by God’s grace, we are destined to glory. Because God predestinated us, we will surely arrive at our destination of glory.

Since the fall of Adam and Eve, whom God created very good, man has always questioned God about the justice of his actions. Such blame-shifting is an ancient tactic of sinful man. Adam never confessed his sin; rather, he blamed Eve, which was, in effect, blaming God. Eve blamed the serpent, which was also a way of shifting blame to God, who created the serpent. Even today people blame parents, pastors, and others for their problems. They do so because they are wicked sinners who want all constraints to be removed so that they can sin freely.

Throughout the book of Romans, Paul refers to man’s tendency to blame God. Look at some of the accusations arrogant man makes: “But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? . . . Someone might argue, ‘If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?'” (Rom. 3:5, 7); “What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all!” (Rom. 9:14); “One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?'” (Rom. 9:19).

Man is not saying, “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner!” Instead, he complains, “God is unjust. God should not blame me, since God is doing what he pleases without my permission. If God is sovereign and does whatever he pleases, I am not responsible for what I do.” In Romans 9:19-24, Paul brings up such questions, coming possibly from a Jewish objector.

In the Greek text, there are six questions. First, man asks God two questions in verse 19; then God silences him with two questions in verse 20, one in verse 21, and one in verses 22-23.

Silence, O man! God is angry at you due to your arrogant accusations. It is time that pampered modern man heard a word like that. Children today have learned to talk back to their parents, teachers, pastors, and God himself. If you are questioning God, he will silence you by these four questions.

If you are under authority, don’t talk back to those who are over you. Job had many questions for God. But when God questioned him, Job closed his mouth. “The Lord said to Job: ‘Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!’ Then Job answered the Lord: ‘I am unworthy-how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer-twice, but I will say no more'” (Job 40:1-5). Job later responds to God, “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (42:1-3). That is the right way for fallen, finite creatures to respond to the infinite God.

The point of contention in this passage is the conflict between the sovereignty of God and human responsibility. In Romans 9-11, Paul never offers a logical solution to the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, except at the conclusion of chapter 11, where he says: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (11:33-36).

Man Questions God

Sinful man does not speak to God the way Job did. So in Romans 9:19 we find two questions: “Why does God blame me? Who has resisted God’s will?” Paul’s argument of God’s freedom, especially in showing mercy to whom he wants to show mercy and hardening whom he wants to harden (Rom. 9:18), elicited these questions from the unbeliever. He was asking, “If God has such freedom, where is my freedom and responsibility? This is immoral fatalism. It is nothing but determinism. God is pulling all the strings; men are mere puppets.” That is the charge.

Paul deals with God’s freedom in Romans 9 and human responsibility in Romans 10. We are to live by the preceptive (or revealed) will of God, as it is revealed in creation, in conscience, and especially in the canon of the holy Scriptures, which reveals Jesus Christ to us. The decretive (or secret) will of God is not for man to know. All men are responsible to know and do the revealed will of God. So God told Moses, “The secret things [God’s decretive will] belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed [God’s preceptive will] belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).

God holds us responsible for our actions. Theologian Dr. Gordon Clark states, “Although the betrayal of Christ was foreordained from eternity as a means of effecting the atonement, it was Judas, not God, who betrayed Christ. The secondary causes in history are not eliminated by divine causality, but rather they are made certain. And the acts of these secondary causes, whether they be righteous acts or sinful, are to be immediately referred to the agents; and it is these agents who are responsible.¹

Professor John Murray clarifies that what the questioner is saying is, “How can God blame us when we are the victims of his irresistible decree?”. . . If God determinatively wills to harden men and put that will into effect, how can those subjected to this hardening be condemned? Are they not in that state by the will of God?”² In other words, the questioner is blaming God.

Is it fair for God to hold us accountable when he hardens whoever he wills? Yes, because we are all sinners by nature. As verse 18 stated, God shows mercy to some sinners while he hardens others. He deals with some sinners in mercy and others in his justice. But Paul is not arguing that God is making innocent people sinners. All Adam’s children are conceived in sin, born in sin, and daily practice sin. They all suppress truth and exchange the glory of God for a lie. They all are under the just wrath of God. God therefore is opposing the impenitent, God-defying attitude of sinners who want to make God answerable to them.

If you are angry with God and his legitimate delegated authorities, you are an enemy of God. If you are praising God, you are saved by his mercy. You are saints of God and children of the heavenly Father.

What characterizes you-a spirit of contention or a spirit of praise? Are you questioning God, like billions of people who say that there is no place for God in the creation of the universe? The man who dares question God is nothing more than an impotent, ignorant, peanut-brained worm of a man, characterized by impudence and imbecility. He is the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God.”

God Questions Man

After man asks his questions, God responds with four of his own. First he asks, “O man, who are you to talk back to God?” (v. 20a). He could have said, “O worm, who are you to talk back to God?” Silence! God is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silent.

Your father may have failed in his duty to teach you when to be silent, but God never fails in his duty to put us where we belong. “How dare you, little man, question God! How dare you try to make the ‘fairness doctrine’ applicable to the just and holy God!” Notice the emphatic contrast between men and God in this verse.

Do you have greater wisdom than God? Question 4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is God?” Consider the answer: “God is a spirit: infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” Mind your place! You are down here; God is up there. God is all-transcendent. God is our Creator; we are his creatures, and we must never forget this Creator/creature distinction. We exist and consist in him. Think correctly. Pride goes before a fall. God is not your equal. No man has a right to bring God to trial. But God has a right to bring us to trial and cast us into hell.

Man is always reducing God. First, he brings God down to his level. Then he makes him a little less than himself. Then he further reduces him, as Paul explains: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (1:21-23). Sinful man is an idolater. Yet he knows God and so is without excuse. We must know the Scripture well so that we can show people the utter folly of denying the infinite, personal God while pretending to be wise.

The second question is, “Will the thing formed say to the former, ‘Why did you make me thus?'” (v. 20b). Sinful man is nothing but a pot formed by the sovereign potter. The potter has all the rights. Therefore, be silent and know that you are a clay pot, and it is blasphemous for a pot to criticize its maker. As Creator, God has absolute power over us his creation. The potter never checks with the clay to find out its will. If clay can talk back to the potter, then sinful man can talk back to God.

But sinful man cannot judge God using his own sinful standard. God is not just our Creator; he is also the moral governor of the universe. Silence, you God-defying rebel! All God’s actions are in harmony with his holy nature. He is thrice-holy God and always self-consistent.

The idea of us as the pots and God as the potter is found in the Old Testament. Isaiah speaks of it: “You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘He did not make me’? Can the pot say of the potter, ‘He knows nothing’?” (Isa. 29:16); “Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground.” That is the evaluation of God of sinful man. Potsherd among potsherds. “Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘He has no hands’?” (Isa. 45:9); “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Isa. 64:8). And in Jeremiah the Lord says, “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel” (Jer. 18:6). These quotes bring us down to humility.

The third question is designed to stop the mouths of God-questioning imbeciles, “Does not the potter have authority [exousia] to make out of the same lump of clay one vessel to honor and another to shame?” What is the answer? Yes, he has the absolute right. Sinful man, know thyself. Know that you are nothing.

God is the potter, and we are the sinful clay. As such, we must know that the potter has legal authority over us. He has the absolute freedom to make whatever he pleases out of us, whether vessels of glory or vessels unto destruction. God has absolute right to deal with sinners in mercy or in justice, and his thoughts are infinitely higher than the thoughts of sinful clay. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD” (Isa. 55:8).

God has the intrinsic right to deal with sinners as the potter has absolute right to deal with his clay. So Paul asks the Corinthians, “For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Cor. 4:7). We must know who we are by nature: dead in trespasses and sins, sons of disobedience, children of wrath, directed by the devil.

Listen to the arguments of the great Jonathan Edwards: “1. That if God should for ever cast you off, it would be agreeable to your treatment of him. . . . 2. If you should forever be cast off by God, it would be agreeable to your treatment of Jesus Christ. . . . 3. If God should for ever cast you off and destroy you, it would be agreeable to your treatment of others. . . . 4. If God should eternally cast you off, it would be agreeable to your own behavior towards yourself.”³ Notice this last point. We are not our own; we belong to God. Yet how many people abuse and destroy their bodies, pretending they belong to them! And I would add this Edwards’ list: “5. If God should eternally cast you off, it would be agreeable to your treatment of the Holy Spirit.” The Hebrews writer says, “How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:29).

The fourth question is designed to close our mouths. God has the freedom to do whatever he wants with sinners, whether he saves them or judges them. That is what we see in these difficult verses (vv. 22-23). They start with an “if” clause, aprotasis, but they do not have an apodosis, a concluding, independent clause.

Since this question begins with an “if” but does not end with an independent clause, we must supply it. Professor Douglas Moo comments: “What objection, O man, can you make, if it is in fact the case, that God has tolerated with great patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction when you realize that his purpose in doing so has been to demonstrate his wrath, make known his power, and especially to make known the riches of his glory to vessels of mercy prepared beforehand for glory?”⁴Or let us summarize it this way: If God chooses to act this way, who are you, O man, to question God?

So we can translate Romans 9:22-23 as this: “But (what) if God, although he wished [1] to manifest his wrath and [2] make known his power, bore with much patience the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, . . . [doing this especially because he wished also] to make known the riches of his glory to vessels of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory.” Then we might add, “What right do you have to question God?” or, “What are you going to do about it?”

There are three purposes expressed in these two verses. The first purpose leads to the second purpose, which leads to the third purpose, which is not stated but understood. The first is to make known God’s wrath and power to all rational beings. God is committed to let all people know how angry he is and how opposed he is to sin and sinners. He is determined to make it known, as he did to Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The second is to make known the riches of his glory to us, his vessels of mercy. The third purpose is implied, that both previous purposes are for the praise of God’s glory. In other words, God is glorified when he pours out wrath upon the wicked, yet he is especially glorified when he saves some sinners. All that God does in history has these three purposes.

Vessels of Wrath

God deals with most sinners in justice. They are here called vessels of God’s wrath. God deals with them like he dealt with Pharaoh, to accomplish his first purpose of making his wrath known to all rational beings of his universe. God and sin are eternal opposites; therefore, he opposes sinners, and he will pour out his wrath on them in due time.

Paul begins, “What if God, choosing to show his wrath. . .” “To show” means “to demonstrate, to reveal.” It is God’s purpose to show his wrath. Never portray God as nice. He is angry and full of wrath that will be unleashed upon all arrogant people. His other purpose is “to make his power known.” These two purposes can be combined into one purpose because it is the way God deals with the arrogant. He puts up with “objects [or vessels] of wrath prepared for destruction,” that is, eternal destruction. Eternal destruction is the destiny of anyone who has not been subdued by Christ.

Sometimes God destroys sinners immediately, but he usually puts up with those who despise him for a long time, even for a lifetime. One reason is so that those who are elect sinners might come to repent and be saved, as Paul tells us: “Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” (Rom. 2:4). Peter also speaks of this: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. . . . Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him” (2 Pet. 3:9, 15). This has to do with elect sinners, not the non-elect in the church.

But God also shows great patience to wicked sinners for a second reason. If you are an unrepentant sinner, you should expect sudden destruction to come upon you at any time, but it may not. In fact, God may give you a long life, more money, and all the health you want. But God shows such patience with wicked sinners for a second reason: he wants to give a more dramatic display of his powerful wrath, as he did to Pharaoh and the Egyptians. (PGM) The more we sin, the greater will be our guilt and God’s wrath against us. When God’s great wrath is poured out upon the wicked, God is praised. He is glorified when he opposes sinners and wipes them out.

God dramatically displays his wrath upon the wicked for his greater glory after their sin and guilt have become great. He knows how to deal with stubborn people who will not bend the neck for the yoke of Christ. When God does not punish the sinner immediately, the sinner says, “God does not see. He does not know. God is not” (see Ezek. 8:12; 9:9).

God lets people manifest their sin in all its vileness and intensity. But finally they will come to judgment. Paul writes, “But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Rom. 2:5). The Lord told Abraham, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure” (Gen. 15:16). God was not going to immediately give his people the land because the sin of the Amorites had not yet reached its full measure. God let them sin four hundred more years until it was heaped up. Paul also declares, “For you, brothers, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last” (1 Thess. 2:14-16).

Don’t be deceived if you are sinning more and more, yet nothing happens. You can have more money, a bigger house, and newer cars. You can be promoted and called successful. But the end will come in due time. Remember the flood (Gen. 6-9). God put up with people’s arrogance and rebellion for years. Even before the flood came, Noah was preaching and warning people, but they did not listen. Finally, God unleashed his wrath, and all were destroyed except eight people. Then there was Sodom and Gomorrah, whose wickedness reached to the heavens. God destroyed all but three. Look at the exodus: Egypt defied God, and God destroyed them. He threw the horse and the rider into the sea (Exod. 15). God raised up Joshua when the iniquity of the Amorites was full, and Joshua wiped them out. In 721 BC, the northern kingdom was destroyed, and the same thing happened to the southern kingdom in 587 BC. As Jesus felt the stubbornness of the Jewish people, he prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, and it came to pass in AD 70.

We can never win against this One who declares war against us. We can say there is no God, or that God does not see; or we can agree with the deist who says God is not interested in the world anymore. No, he is the moral governor. Everything that happens in the world is by his divine decree.

God’s long-suffering toward sinners is subordinated to the purpose of demonstrating God’s powerful wrath. Sinners are here called objects of wrath, and the wrath of God is revealed against them. They are vessels of wrath, prepared for ultimate, eternal destruction. Paul tells us, “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things” (Phil. 3:19). Jesus says, “They will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).

Who prepared them for destruction? Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Professor William Hendrickson say sinners prepare themselves with the help of Satan and other wicked sinners. Professor John Murray and A. W. Pink, among others, say God himself prepared them to this reprobation. That means no special grace was ever given them. Everybody has common grace, but repentance is a special grace, as is faith. Vessels prepared for destruction never receive the special grace of repentance and faith.

Of such vessels Isaiah declared, “They are filled with the wrath of the LORD” (Isa. 51:20). Jeremiah writes, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.’ So I took the cup from the LORD’s hand and made all the nations to whom he sent me drink it. . . . Then tell them, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Drink, get drunk and vomit, and fall to rise no more because of the sword I will send among you.’ But if they refuse to take the cup from your hand and drink, tell them, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: You must drink it!'” (Jer. 25:15-17, 27-28). There is no way to wiggle out of the grip of God.

Ezekiel says, “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, this is what the Sovereign Lord says to the land of Israel: The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land . . . The end has come! The end has come! It has roused itself against you. It has come!'” (Ezek. 7:1-2, 6).

When our end comes, we will not be arrogant-the end has come! A cup filled with the foaming wine of God’s wrath will be handed to us, and we will say, “I don’t want to drink it.” But God says, “You must! I am not your father or mother to whom you talked back all your life. I am the Lord, the moral governor of the universe. I put up with you all these years in your impudence and imbecility. But the end has come.”

We may feel pretty healthy and strong now, able to stand against the authorities in our life. But John writes about what happens when the end comes: “Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?'” (Rev. 6:15-17).

Psalm 73 puts the life of the wicked into perspective: “For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (v. 3); “This is what the wicked are like-always carefree, they increase in wealth” (v. 12). The psalmist then entered the sanctuary of God and “understood their final destiny” (v. 17): “Those who are far from you will perish; you destroy all who are unfaithful to you” (v. 27).

Psalm 37 also describes how severely God will deal with the wicked in due time: “Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away” (vv. 1-2); “The wicked plot against the righteous and gnash their teeth at them; but the LORD laughs at the wicked, for he knows their day is coming” (vv. 12-13). He says that “the power of the wicked will be broken” (v. 17) and that “the wicked will perish: The Lord’s enemies will be like the beauty of the fields, they will vanish-vanish like smoke” (v. 20; see also vv. 35-36, 38).

God glorifies himself by the outpouring of his just wrath upon rebellious sinners who refuse to repent, who talk back to God, who accuse God of being unjust. This passage in Exodus 14 should help us say goodbye to such arrogance: “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. . . . I will harden the hearts of the Egyptian so that they will go in after them. And I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his army, through his chariots and his horsemen. The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I gain glory through Pharaoh, his chariots and his horsemen” (vv. 4, 17-18). God gained glory by pouring out his hot wrath upon wicked people. He puts up with them for a long time. But the end does come.

Vessels of Mercy

The second purpose is “to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared from ancient times in advance” – that is, from eternity – “for glory, even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles.” God makes known the incomparable treasure of our inheritance of his glory. Here we will taste of “the riches of God’s glory” as we are changed from glory to glory, and finally we will be glorified and live in heaven to praise God.

This is God’s second, and most important and glorious, purpose. God deals with elect sinners in mercy to display the riches, the inexhaustible wealth, the plenitude of his glory, in the vessels of mercy whom God prepared long ago in eternity for glory. Friends, if you have been subdued by Christ the king to himself, and if he is ruling you, this is your destiny.

There is no question who the agent is who prepared us. The text says God has predestinated us unto glory. We were sinners, sons of fallen Adam, sons of disobedience, children of wrath, dead in trespasses and sins, enemies of God, sinners who sinned and come short of the glory, people of shame. But from all eternity, God predestinated us unto glory. Paul writes, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (Rom. 8:28-30).

In time God effectually called us, not only the elect Jews but also many elect Gentiles. We became new creations who repented and trusted in Jesus Christ. The Father justified us, and the Spirit is sanctifying us. We have been adopted as children of our heavenly Father and are heirs of God, destined to glory. Paul writes, “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life . . . . but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile” (Rom. 2:7, 10). Elsewhere he says, “However, as it is written: ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him'” (1 Cor. 2:9).

Our destiny is glory. We are going to be like Jesus Christ, prepared in advance for glory, to live with the glorious God in eternal happiness. Paul says, “We ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:13-14).

Even now God displays his glory in his people. Isaiah says, “Sing for joy, O heavens, for the LORD has done this; shout aloud, O earth beneath. Burst into song, you mountains, you forests and all your trees, for the LORD has redeemed Jacob, he displays his glory in Israel” (Isa. 44:23). Peter says, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Paul writes, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners-of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Tim. 1:15-17).

God’s Glory

God’s display of wrath and power on vessels of wrath and his display of the riches of glory upon vessels of mercy both contribute to the ultimate purpose of God’s glory. Both hell and heaven bring glory to God. God’s wrath and God’s mercy bring praise to God. All rational creation will know God either in his justice or in his mercy and will glorify God. In Ezekiel’s prophecy, we read this refrain over sixty times: “That the people will know that I am God.”

God is committed unswervingly to his own glory, and he shall be glorified. All creation will glorify him one way or another. Even fools who deny God’s existence and refuse to be subdued by Christ will glorify him on the last day.

The wicked will be judged by God’s justice for the praise of his glory. But we are saved by grace for the praise of his glory. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones says this: “The salvation of a single soul is the most wonderful thing God has ever done.”⁵ Our salvation is the most wonderful thing God has ever done. It transcends creation, providence, and the destruction of all his enemies. That ought to make us happy.

Even now we are being prepared for glory. From all eternity God chose us and prepared us for glory even from our mothers’ wombs. He watched over us when we were living sinful unregenerate lives. Then in due time he guided our feet to a preacher, and through that preaching, God effectually called us and justified us. Even now, God is preparing us through sanctification, and soon we shall arrive at our destination of glory, to the praise of our glorious God.

Believers ought to praise God that they are not vessels of wrath fit for destruction, but vessels of mercy by eternal divine choice, prepared by God for eternal glory. God prepared them by regenerating them so that they may repent and believe in his Son Jesus. They can now sing:

Now I belong to Jesus,

Jesus belongs to me,

not for the years of time alone,

but for eternity.

Jesus is my king. He subdued me to himself, and now he rules my life and defends me at all times. He restrains and conquers all his and my enemies. So I confess, “Jesus is Lord.” Even now God is displaying his glory in me. He is changing me from glory to glory, and I am being made conformable to the image of Christ. The steps of each believer are ordained of the Lord; God himself is guiding me even now to glory.

If you are still impenitent, let me remind you that God is patient with sinners, so that elect sinners may repent. But he will not be patient forever. You may not know if you are an elect, but God invites you to cry out to him: that is our responsibility. The publican cried out, “Have mercy upon me, the sinner.” The thief cried out, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Blind Bartimaeus cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The leper cried out, “I know you are able, but I don’t know whether you are willing to heal me.” Jesus said, “I am willing,” and he touched and healed him.

My destiny is glory. I pray that will be your destiny too, so that together in heaven we will sing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever. Amen.”

¹ Quoted by Geoffrey Wilson, Romans (London: Banner of Truth, 1969), 167.

² John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 30-31.

³ Jonathan Edwards, “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,”http://www.apuritansmind.com/jonathanedwards/JonathanEdwards-Sermons-JusticeOfGod.htm

⁴ Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 1996), 605.

⁵ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans: God’s Sovereign Purpose, Exposition of Chapter 9:1-33 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991), 226.