… ²⁴ even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.

Keeping the Jewish question in mind, our passage points out that they are not the only chosen people of God. They had forgotten that their special status as God’s chosen people had nothing to do with anything inherent in them about which they could boast. God made that clear from the earliest times:

“The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deut 7:7-8)

Repeatedly, they had proven themselves unworthy of this chosen-ness by God. They were, in the words of Romans 9:23, “vessels of mercy.” The point of this passage in Romans 9 is not primarily about whether or not God is just in NOT choosing to be merciful to some people—which is what most popular theological debate focuses on. But rather, it focuses on the unworthiness of anyone, in particular the Jews, to be shown mercy. The very phrase “vessels of mercy” speaks to the unworthiness of the vessels. If a person were worthy or entitled, it wouldn’t be mercy but entitlement, or obligation, or wages. We have already seen that what all are entitled to: the wages that our sin earned for us is “death” (Rom 6:23). Neither Jews nor non-Jews are entitled to anything. None of us is entitled to mercy—and therefore none of us is in a position to argue whether God is fair in showing mercy to some and not to others.

If fairness were the issue, then God would be fair in consigning all to the consequences we deserve: death and eternal, spiritual separation from His presence. How can it possibly be charged then that He is unfair, if He shows mercy to some and not to others? We humans have a faulty human perspective that is hard to shake—that the reason one person is saved and not another has something to do with an inherent merit in one over the other, that faith somehow merits for us salvation. Faith, however, is not something that merits us anything. Rather the merit is with God who saves, and does so mercifully.

Lord, I don’t fully understand these things, but I rest assured that I am a blessed recipient of Your unmerited mercy. It is nothing of me, but all of You.