Thought For The Week

BEAUTIFUL FEET

While solidly affirming that salvation is totally by God's mercy and God's free choice, Paul at the same time teaches the reality of human responsibility and human choice:

If someone is saved, it is because they have called on the name of the Lord (Romans 10:13,14).

If someone calls on the name of the Lord, it is because they have believed in him (10:14).

If someone believes in the Lord, it is because they heard the message (10:14).

If someone has heard the message, it is because someone preached the message (10:14,15).

If someone has preached the message, it is because someone sent them to preach it (10:15).

A clear sequence of multiple human choices is involved when a person is saved.

Faith, the faith through which a person is saved/justified, does not come out of the blue. It is the end result of a series of human choices and actions, by means of which the message of Christ is communicated to people on earth. At any point along the way human disobedience and hard-heartedness can interrupt the progress of the message, including the final point of calling on the Lord, as Paul quotes from Isaiah 65:2: 'All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and obstinate people' (Romans 10:21).

And here we are faced with a mystery, a paradox.

In Scripture we find at various points what could be called a Christological mystery: that is, a mystery or paradox of the same nature as the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is one hundred percent God and, at the same time, one hundred percent man. Not half and half, neither really one nor really the other. But true God, and true man. Without reduction. Without fusion. Without division.

Similarly in prayer: God is the sovereign Lord, who does whatever he pleases; yet he has commanded us to pray with the real expectation that our human prayer is significant in outcomes and events.

This same mystery/paradox exists in our salvation: it is one hundred percent the work of God, totally independent of and uncaused by any action or merit of ours. Yet at the same time, it is one hundred percent dependent on our personal response, our calling upon him, so much so that without this response, salvation is never ours.

These paradoxes are not contradictions, but the expression and evidence of the unavoidable and mysterious reality that is present in the person of Christ, in the practice of prayer, and in salvation.

So Paul, having written several chapters stressing that salvation is the work of God in and through Jesus Christ, now points to a list of human choices and actions involved in bringing a person to faith in Christ:

There is the church that, on God’s behalf, chooses to commission/empower/encourage the messenger.

There is the bearer of the message who chooses to communicate it to others.

There are those who hear the message about Jesus Christ.

There are those who believe in him of whom they have heard.

There are those who call upon him in whom they have believed.

It is those who call up on the name of the Lord who are saved.

Although Paul very clearly teaches the sovereignty of God in election and salvation, he also here teaches the necessary involvement of human action and human decision. Just as by faith we accept the two seemingly conflicting truths of the full deity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ, so here, by faith we embrace these two seemingly conflicting truths of divine sovereignty in election and the necessity of human action and response.

If divine election did not exist no one would be saved, but no one is saved only because of divine election. God, in his sovereign grace, has chosen to bring a person to salvation through human proclamation of the gospel, through human hearing of the gospel, through human faith, through human calling on the name of the Lord.

For this reason, Paul quotes Isaiah 52:7 – ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’

Why beautiful? Because they have brought the one message of the one way of salvation, the one message of the one way back to the one God. Had no one brought the message, no one would be saved. And it is through all of this that God’s divine sovereignty in salvation is accomplished.

Next time you tell someone the truth about Jesus Christ, take a look at your feet ... you might not think much of them when you look at them, but God says they are ‘beautiful’. God has used your human feet in accomplishing his eternal purpose.

© Rosemary Bardsley 2020