An Ancient Objection

“All right,” someone might say at this point in reaction to Paul’s argument in Romans 9. “If God has the sovereign right to save some people while letting others perish, how can He possibly find fault with any sinner? No one can resist His will. So if He has the power to save a lost person and refuses to use it, it’s His fault that that sinner violates His law!” This is the objection Paul now confronts, though objection might be the wrong word. In truth, this is nothing more than an attempt to evade responsibility for sin by assigning the blame to God. Human beings have been doing this since the fall of the race. Eve blamed the Serpent for tempting her to eat the forbidden fruit, and Adam blamed “the woman whom You gave me,” simultaneously casting responsibility on both Eve and God (Gen. 3:11–13).

Paul refuses to stand for this. Through a series of rhetorical questions, he powerfully contrasts man and God, then provides an illustration of the relationship. By so doing, he shows how inappropriate it is for man to raise any objection to God’s sovereignty in salvation.

Verse 20 gives us the contrast. “But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ ” Simply put, man has no right whatsoever to question God. “It is ludicrous for creatures as small, ignorant, impotent, and sinful as we are to question the propriety of God’s moral acts,” Dr. James M. Boice writes in his Romans commentary. “We may not understand what God is doing in any particular case. . . But for us to suggest that He is wrong in what He does is patently absurd.” The key reason for this is that God is the self-existent Creator who brought human beings into existence by His wise counsel and sustains them by the exercise of His power. By definition, no created thing can be wiser or greater than the Creator, so it has no right to question its Maker’s methods.

Paul offers us a powerful metaphor for this relationship, comparing God to a potter who, from a single lump of clay, fashions pots for every use imaginable. The potter does not ask the clay what it wishes to be, and the pots express no joy or regret over what they become. It is the potter’s prerogative to use the clay as he sees fit, for he is sovereign over it, just as God is sovereign over us.