October 06, 2022
Daily Devotion:
"If No One Can God's Sovereign Masterplan"
Romans 9:19-24
New International Version
19 One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?”
If children do not always play fair, they certainly have an innate sense of fair play. “But it's not my fault," they protest when the finger is wrongly pointed at them. "You can't blame me!" None of us likes being blamed for something we didn't do or for events beyond our control. So Paul's hypothetical question resonates with us on a deep level. If God is in complete control, why should we be blamed for our sins? It is not unlike that often heard feeble excuse, "Hey, I Didn't ask to be born," which is as much to say that God brought my wretched self into this world, so what else can he expect? In today's text Paul is addressing that very issue. Making the case to The Jews that it is God's sovereign prerogative to do whatever he wills in blessing the Gentiles with salvation, Paul anticipates what could be a logical enough extension of his argument. “If no one can resist God's sovereign master plan," one might ask, “how can even the sin in my life not be an outworking of God's will? Why then should God blame me for spiritual rebellion that he himself has divinely orchestrated?" Where the logic breaks down, of course, is in the faulty assumption that everything that happens is God's will. That God providentially works among nations and individuals to bring about his eternal plan is not to say that God wills evil or sin into existence. What God wills is right living! So When you and I sin, we are wholly outside of God's will and solely to blame. To confuse God's sovereign will with our own willful insolence is to compound the very blame we are trying so desperately to evade.
The soul-searching question is: Even If I intellectually acknowledge that I alone am to blame for my sin, are there yet seductively subtle ways I attempt to throw the blame back on God?
