BIAY - Saving faith
Romans 9-11, Proverbs 21:17-31
Welcome to the Bible in a Year for 2025. Intro to this series and resource links available here, plus here’s how I’m approaching this year.
Scriptures for Today:
Reflection:
Sovereign grace and human action (9:16-21, 30-33) - The themes of sovereignty, mercy, works, faith, and human free will are significant throughout the Bible. In a challenging section, Paul tackles them in relation to the Jewish people who are heirs of the covenant but who are rejecting Jesus as the Messiah and therefore salvation as well. It seems like there isn’t a tidy and uncomplicated resolution to the interplay between these big ideas. Paul affirms God’s sovereign choice about how to govern events and person, appealing to God’s right as creator: “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?” (9:21) At the same time, he also attributes the results or consequences that some face to authentic human choice: “…they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. (9:32) Paul seems able to assert both God’s sovereignty and genuine human choice. Perhaps I can live with this tension whether or not I can parse it out neatly.
How all can have righteous (10:4, 9-13) - “Christ is the culmination of the law…” Paul shows that the old covenant points to Jesus as the way to obtain righteousness, which is by faith. He boils it down to the essence. Notice that it doesn’t say, “If you receive Jesus as your Savior,” although that’s certainly an important thing that happens. The key is (1) acknowledging Him as Lord (only the true King can save) and (2) believing in His resurrection (thus affirming the power of the cross and that Jesus is the true Messiah of God).
“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)
Graft-able (11:23-24) - This chapter (and the whole section of chapters 9-11) is addressing the question, “What about the Jews, the people of the original covenant?” There are various and competing interpretations. Verses 23-24 seem to stake ground that however God’s divine sovereignty is worked out, that human response is still genuinely available and, by God’s will, operative: “And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.” The image I love is that God has grafted the Gentiles into a great family tree of salvation and that the Jewish people who believe “will be grafted in” as well.
Questions:
How have you seen God’s undeserved mercy show up in your life?
Do you believe Jesus was raised from the dead?
Have you acknowledged that He is Lord? How does that acknowledgement play out in your daily living?
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, thank you for your merciful gift of Jesus and your power in raising Him from the dead. Raise me to a new life. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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