Read: Romans 9:10-17 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
Sometimes God’s way of working seems deeply puzzling. A lot of the time he seems thoroughly arbitrary in his choices. When Isaac and Rebecca had two sons (see Genesis chapter 25), God opted to work through the younger (Jacob, later called Israel) and quite deliberately not through the elder (Esau).
There was, frankly, no good reason for God to have decided to do it that way round. There was no good reason for God to have preferred Jacob to Esau. It can be awfully tempting to try and retrospectively interpret God’s actions as responses to something we have or haven’t done to anger or please him. But St Paul is having none of that: God, he says, purposely made his decision for Jacob over Esau when they were both in the womb (Genesis 25:23) before either of them had done anything at all; and he made his decision so early precisely so that you and I couldn’t interpret God’s preference for Jacob as a reward for anything Jacob had done or a punishment for anything Esau had done. God picked Jacob (and Isaac before him) purely for his own purposes. We don’t know why; our job is just to accept that God is allowed to choose for reasons he may not reveal to us. The point Paul wants to make is that God is thoroughly free to do as he pleases for his own purposes, and we should hardly be surprised if the way he goes about making his choices and decisions doesn’t always make sense to us mere mortals.
That would be a terrifying thought, were it not for the fact that the same God who can appear at times arbitrary in his choices is also the God who loves us utterly and from whom nothing can separate us. Trying to make sense of what God does with us and with others (why me? why her? why not me?) is a fool’s errand. We just don’t know; and we are not supposed to know. What we do know is that God is good, and that he loves us. And because he is good and he loves us, the fact that he is all-powerful and his choices are beyond our understanding need not be so scary after all.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.