Romans 9 - Scripture Explanation
Link to Romans 9
Much of Romans 9 may already be difficult to digest. It doesn’t help that Paul’s argument includes lots of Old Testament passages, the contexts for which aren’t made clear by his explanations. The following is a brief description of each of the ten references that Paul quotes in this chapter. As you’re reading their summaries, please read back through Romans 9 to get a better understanding of how the argument is clarified by these Old Testament citations. If you prefer, you can just read the chapters the stories come from instead of their summaries here.
V. 7 - “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named;” and v. 9 - “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.”
Last week we read the stories of Genesis 15, where God makes a covenant with Abraham to grant him innumerable offspring; Genesis 16, where Abraham effectively tries to force a resolution of this promise by his own power; and Genesis 17, where God establishes a sign of the covenant he made in chapter 15. In the few chapters after that, there is more explanation of the promise and how it will first be fulfilled; and interactions leading up to the birth of Abraham’s son. The quotes here in Romans 9:7 and 9:9 come from Genesis 21, when Abraham’s son is finally born; and Genesis 18, respectively.
Romans 9:7 says, “through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This is a quote from Genesis 21:12. Isaac is the name of the son whom Abraham has by Sarah, who, as you’ll recall from Genesis 16, was Abraham’s wife. Likewise in chapter 16, he “goes into” Hagar, a female servant of his wife’s, who conceives and gives birth to a child. This is technically Abraham’s firstborn, but he is not born of Sarah through their marriage, as God promised. The verse quoted here, in Romans 9:7, is originally saying that Sarah’s son Isaac (not Hagar’s son) is “heir to the promise” given to Abraham in chapter 15. (Yet God is still merciful to protect Hagar and her son.) In the context of Romans, then, Paul is saying that literal, biological, physical descendancy is not what automatically makes someone an heir to God’s promises. The fact that I was born into a Christian home does not automatically make me a born-again Christian.
Likewise, Romans 9:9 says, “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.” This is a quotation from Genesis 18:10 and/or 14. Slightly before all the action from the above paragraph, God speaks to Abraham again and gives a more concrete promise. In chapter 15, he stated that Abraham would have offspring as numerous as the stars. This is a huge promise, but not very specific. To start that process, in chapter 18, God starts small by promising a son to Sarah. This will be Isaac, who is also mentioned in verse 7, as we’ve seen.
V. 12 - “The older will serve the younger.”
Romans 9:12 is a quotation from Genesis 25:23. After Isaac (Abraham’s son) is grown, he marries a woman named Rebekah; they are unable to have children. However, Isaac prays and God gives Rebekah the ability to conceive, and as part of the proof to them that he has done this, God tells them, “Two nations are in your womb, / and two peoples from within you shall be divided; / the one shall be stronger than the other, / the older shall serve the younger.” Because he tells her this beforehand, when she later has twins and their lives play out, they will understand that the pregnancy was from the Lord since he foretold those events.
Later, Rebekah does indeed give birth to twins, as God told her. Once they’ve grown up, the older son (Esau) gives his birthright to his younger brother (Jacob) in exchange for food, and the younger goes and takes it from their father Isaac. Therefore the younger brother is given the father’s blessing which should have gone to the older brother. Culturally, the oldest son would take over leadership of the household after the father died; but here, the younger son was given that position. That’s why it says “the older shall serve the younger.” You can read Genesis 25 and 27 for that whole story.
In the context of Romans, Paul is making the point that God promised that this would happen before either Jacob or Esau had done anything good or bad. At the most foundational level, it was not because of their own works, or even because of the faith they end up having, that God put the one in authority over the other. It was simply because God had chosen it to be so.
V. 13 - “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
Romans 9:13 quotes Malachi 1:2-3. Later in his life, Jacob’s name was changed to “Israel.” He had twelve sons who became the fathers of the twelve tribes of the nation-state Israel, and so Jacob/Israel is credited as the father of that country and it takes his name. There are many times when God expresses his love for that nation in the Old Testament, and in some of those he specifically says that he loves them simply because it was his will to do so, not because of any virtue of their own (e.g., Deuteronomy 7:7-9).
Malachi, a prophet, picks up on that language in his writing. Much of his writing is focused on calling out Israel (the nation) for their later disobedience to God, even though he had loved them more than the other peoples who descended ultimately from Abraham. By using this quote in Romans, Paul is again pointing out that it is not on the basis of our works, either good or bad, that God allows us to become part of his people; but only on the basis of his will. This is accomplished through repentance from sin, which God desires for all of us (see 1 Timothy 2:3-4).
V. 15 - “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
Jacob was renamed Israel and had twelve sons. Among these sons was Joseph, whom his brothers got angry with. They sent him away. He ended up in slavery in Egypt, but eventually worked his way up and became a leader there. When there was a famine in the land, his family eventually came to him for help because he had worked with the Pharaoh to stockpile resources in Egypt. Eventually he forgave his family and they came to live in Egypt; but after a few generations the Israelites were too numerous and the Egyptians subjected them to slavery again, because they were afraid of the Israelites. Eventually, God raised up a man named Moses who, by amazing works of God’s power, liberated the Israelites and brought them out of Egypt into the wilderness before they came to the land which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had originally lived in before coming down to Egypt.
There in the wilderness, Moses was the nation’s leader, and he communicated God’s commands to them. It’s even written, “The LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). Romans 9:15 is a quotation of Exodus 33:19, where Moses was speaking to God and asking that God go before the nation of Israel in their travels, and be with them and protect them. In verse 17, the LORD says, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Yet in the verse quoted, he is quick to clarify that this is not on the basis of something Moses himself has done, just as we’ve seen in the previous paragraphs: “...I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” This quote from Exodus, along with the others above, shows that God chooses not only specific people but also whole groups. In that situation, God chose the nation of Israel as a whole for his purposes.
V. 17 - “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”
Before the quotation from verse 15, near the beginning of the book of Exodus, God is working miracles through Moses, to convince the Pharaoh of Egypt to release his people from slavery. This begins with a series of entreaties and warnings. Yet when Pharaoh will not free them, miraculous “plagues” show God’s power and disrupt the Egyptians’ way of life--even up to the destruction of crops/food, and eventually human death.
Romans 9:17 quotes Exodus 9:16. Between each plague, Moses goes to Pharaoh and tells him to release the Israelites from slavery, or else the plagues will continue until they’re freed. An additional purpose for the plagues, though, is that God would be known and glorified: God says to Pharaoh (vv. 14-16),
“For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself, and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth. For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.”
God is powerful and could just have destroyed the Egyptians immediately, if he wanted. He could have not allowed Egypt to exist in the first place, so that the Israelites would not have been enslaved by them. However, this additional purpose is given: God has allowed the events to take place in order that people might know his power and that his name might be proclaimed. We can see in our present day that this succeeded! To this day, most of the world’s population for all time has known something of the narrative of Exodus. In Romans, this ties into the argument of the next paragraph; that God can and does save some (and effectively harden others) in order that his glory might be magnified.
Vv. 25-26 - “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’...”
Hosea is a beautiful story about God still loving his people faithfully, even while they are unfaithful to him. This is portrayed through the metaphor of a man, Hosea, marrying a prostitute, caring for her, and repeatedly getting her out of trouble, even though she is unfaithful to him. Hosea is meant to represent God, continually loving his bride despite her rejection of him; and the prostitute to represent Israel, repeatedly unfaithful to her husband and valuing sinfulness more highly than relationship with him. Early in the book, Hosea has children with the prostitute, and as part of the metaphor God has Hosea name one of them “No Mercy” (1:6), and another “Not My People” (1:9), to represent how far Israel had strayed from relationship with him.
In the beginning of chapter 2, he discloses a punishment for Israel for their unfaithfulness; but further on, he still promises mercy and steadfast love to them. Romans 9:25-26 quotes Hosea 2:23, where God promises, “I will have mercy on No Mercy, / and I will say to Not My People, ‘You are my people’; / and he shall say, ‘You are my God.’” In Romans, this could be used to talk about Israel specifically (see chs. 10-11 for explanation of how some of Israel has turned away from God, as in Hosea). However, in this context Paul is also talking about Gentiles, so “Not My People” here could be those originally outside of God’s covenant people, whom he is bringing in with the believing Jews.
Vv. 27-28 - “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant…”
Each of the remaining quotes comes from somewhere in the writings of Isaiah the prophet. Later in Israel’s/Judah’s history, Isaiah was a prophet who spoke and wrote to the nation shortly before and during the time when other nations came in and conquered them, carrying many of their people away. The prophets unanimously presented this as a judgment from God, against the nation’s unfaithfulness. They would be restored eventually, but this discipline served as a reminder that they should repent and turn back to God.
Romans 9:27-28 quotes Isaiah 10:22. That section is a prophecy about how Assyria (the conquering nation) would eventually be torn down and the survivors out of Israel would be restored to their land. In the book of Isaiah, he is mostly speaking of a literal, geographical place where the nation of Israel would be saved from Assyria and brought back to. In Paul’s context, he is speaking of a greater salvation: that is, eternal salvation from sin through faith in Christ. The conclusion from this is, again, that not all of the Israelites/Jews will be saved simply because they are physically descended from Abraham. Rather, they must have faith, which is given by God.
V. 29 - “If the Lord of hosts had not left us offspring, / we would have been like Sodom / and become like Gomorrah.”
Romans 9:29 quotes Isaiah 1:9. This is from the very beginning of Isaiah’s account. He starts by giving account of Israel’s sinfulness as a nation: “They have forsaken the LORD, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged” (v. 4b). Other places that were well-known in the biblical account for having turned away from God were the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 19, God destroys those cities with “sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven,” because their sin was so extreme. Other places in the Bible use the fate of those cities as a metaphor for the eternal judgment of God against sin; and in Isaiah 1:9, the comparison serves to illustrate how incredibly sinful Israel had become in Isaiah’s time.
The “offspring” in the beginning of the verse could represent the continuation of God’s covenant promises to Abraham (that he would have innumerable offspring), and therefore also to the nation of Israel. So this verse as a whole could be a way of saying, “If God wasn’t faithful to his promises to us, we would have been entirely condemned.”
V. 33 - “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; / and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
Romans 9:33 quotes Isaiah 28:16. The “stone” is both a point of foundation and of conflict, hence “stone of stumbling,” i.e. an obstacle that causes someone to trip. In Isaiah, it illustrates that God still has a solid and immovable standard of righteousness, which the people in Israel have stumbled over, or turned away from. In the Gospels, this “stone of stumbling” is Jesus, in whom we believe for salvation, and so are not put to shame. Jesus is both the cornerstone of the Christian faith and a point of conflict or controversy for those who don’t believe.
This standard is the same as it was originally for Abraham in Genesis 15, or for Isaac in Genesis 25, or for anywhere else in the Bible, or even for us today. It is not through our own righteous works that we are saved, but through faith in Jesus and the promises of God. In Romans 9, Paul is using the quote to illustrate how many Israelites have inadvertently turned away from God by trying to draw near to him through their own righteousness, instead of accepting the gift of faith freely given by him.