"Jacob I've Loved but Esau I've Hated"

The following is a quote from Adam Clarke's commentaries on Roman 9 where he soundly defeats the idea of individual and unconditional election being supported in this passage. I beg my Calvinistic brethern to wade through it with a teachable heart lest they continue to lead others astray from the clear teaching of the text.

 

I don't know everything that Clarke wrote. But at this point I cannot disagree, can you?

 

Whom is plural. So I will say a group.

 

I believe God at that time had hardened certain individuals and had mercy on others. It just so happens that those he hardened were Jews and those he was showing mercy were Gentiles. That is the issue Paul is addressing.

I know it is difficult to see a passage from a different perspective when you have become so accustom to reading it from your own perspective so lets take a different situation and maybe that will help:

Pretend with me that we live before the Civil War and we are all slave owners. We have been taught wrongly that blacks are not real people, just property. We therefore have concluded that God has no place for them in His plan or in heaven. In our minds they are no different than animals. (Of couse this thinking today is abhorent and rightly so but many held to this belief in that day so go along with me.)

Now, you, Newton, are a respect pastor in the community and all of your pastor friends and mentors all believe as you do that blacks are not apart of God's covenant. In fact, you think they are not worthy of God's attention whatsoever, just as everyone else does around you. It has been this way for years.

One day, God blinds you while walking down the road (like He did Paul) or speaks to you in a vivid dream (like He did Peter) and tells you that your views on blacks are wrong and that God loves them and wants them to be a part of His covenant just like whites. At first your flesh object saying, "What not those dirty slaves, surely not, you have chosen us Lord." But God convinces you that his love for them is as real as his love for you.

Then God calls you to preach to blacks and while your doing that you'll have to convince the whites that your ministry is really from God. Tuff job. Now you can relate to Paul's dilema.

You become know as the "preacher to the blacks" and you are not very popular at all. In fact, the whites argue that black aren't deserving of entrance into God's coventant and they beat you and even throw you in prison many times. But you argue, "God can show mercy on whom ever he wants!" And when you write to the black churches that you started you say things like, "I thank God that He has chosen you."

Lets take this even one step further. What if God also revealed to you that He was going to blind the eyes of the white people so that for a time they would continue to reject your teachings. God does this to make a path for the blacks to come into the church. You write, "God can show mercy to whom he desires and he can harden whom he desires. Then one of you white people will say to me, 'Then why does God still blame us for who can resist his will to harden us?' Who are you oh man to talk back to God. Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of white clay some of you for noble purposes and some for common use?

Do you see that the objections Paul is anticipating is not from a non-elect reprobate, they are the rejections of a hardened Jew. He is debating Jews, not Arminians. I know this is just an analogy but maybe it will help you see the biblical perspective.

 

"Elect" deals with the corporate body, the confusion comes in the fact that God is making a non-elect people his people.

Sometime biblical authors refer to Jewish people as "elect" because that is how they were refered to being of God's elect nation.

The problem you are having is that you are attempting to apply election to individuals instead of to groups. Israel was elect, but not every individual in Israel was of the seed linage of Christ. Paul shows that in the first part of Romans 9. His reference to Jacob and Esau is often applied as being a proof text for individual election but as Clarke clearly explains that cannot be the case.