L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity—September 26, 2004

The Unsearchable Judgment of God

“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33).

This exclamation of wonder by St. Paul at the glories of the wisdom, knowledge, and judgment of God is attached, first of all, to the historical circumstances of the conflict between the early Christian Church and the Jewish establishment. While individual Jews, such as Paul himself, had embraced in faith the truth that Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah and Savior of the world, the official Jewish establishment, as it still does to this day, rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and as the Son of God.

When the Church was still tiny and almost entirely limited to Jerusalem and and the area immediately surrounding it, the official establishment of the Jews used its relative advantage in earthly power to persecute the Church. A mob, encouraged by the high priests, stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, to death outside Jerusalem (Acts 7). St. Paul himself participated in this murder (Acts 7:58), and we learn from several places in the New Testament that before his conversion he acted as an agent for the Jewish establishment (Acts 8:1-3). He was on a mission to Damascus to persecute the Church, in fact, when Christ struck him down and raised him up a believer (Acts 9). To curry favor with the same anti-Christian establishment, King Herod killed St. James, the Apostle and brother of St. John, and he had St. Peter arrested (Acts 12:2-3).

But what was the practical effect of these and other persecutions? We read in the Acts of the Apostles of what happened to the Christian refugees from these early persecutions of the Church: “Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). In consequence, what began as a tiny local movement among Jews who had been converted to Jesus Christ took its first steps toward becoming a world-wide mission to all of mankind and to being a Church that had room for converted Jew and converted Gentile alike, as brothers in Jesus Christ and as the beloved children of God.

St. Paul understands that none of these events or outcomes is an accident because he understands that there are no accidents under the Judgment and Providence of God. We may not understand or know what God is doing, but God has from eternity and from before the creation of the world a single plan of mercy and life that cannot be overturned. God is Almighty, and his plan is so powerful, that he is free to allow the men and women who live within that place to make real choices of their own, all of which have real consequences, but none of which can overthrow his own good will.

For example, the priests and scribes of the Jewish establishment made their own choice to deny Jesus Christ, thus putting themselves at odds with the kingdom of God, no matter how well they thought that they were running the apparatus of religion. Despite their rejection of Christ, however, their actions worked to promote the Christian religion and to make that faith available to the Gentiles, thus fulfilling God’s ancient promise to Abraham that his family would be a blessing to all of the nations of the world (Gen. 22:17-18).

To try on our own to get ahead of God and to figure out all that he is doing is a colossal waste of time, and so St. Paul describes God’s judgment, his will, as “unsearchable,” as we have already heard. That God knows what we do not know, however, does not mean that God cannot reveal to us what he is doing, if he so chooses. In the Bible, a “mystery” is a truth that man cannot get unless God gives it to him, and St. Paul presents us here with one of those mysteries: “For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Romans 11:25).

God permits the rejection of his Son Jesus Christ by Jewish officialdom until the work of evangelizing the Gentiles is done. God determines that the Israelites’ purpose in preparing the world for Jesus Christ must not be confused with a national monopoly on his love for mankind or a monopoly on the eligibility of human beings to be called to eternal life in Jesus Christ. But what will happen when this clarification is accomplished? St. Paul tells us by the Holy Ghost, “And so [or, and thus] all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:26). Not just individual descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will confess Jesus Christ, but what we think of as “the Jewish religion” will confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Messiah.

St. Paul explains further, “As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes” (Romans 11:28). For the sake of the spread of the Gospel, they have been allowed as a human nation with its human establishment to err, to follow their own human fallenness to its logical conclusion, the rejection of Jesus Christ. But for the sake of the promises that God made to the ancient Patriarchs, God’s love will not abandon them as a nation. As St. Paul insists, and it should be a comfort to us all, “[T]he gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:29). God does not play games. He does not break his promises of life and salvation.

When the Jews as a nation are re-united with the Gentiles in Christ, the prophecy of Jeremiah will be fulfilled: “And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them” (Jeremiah 32:39). That “one heart” is faith in Jesus Christ, and that “one way” is not the triumph of this or that household or denomination of Christianity. That “one way” is the complete Christian religion of Jesus Christ, the Scriptures, the Apostles, and the martyrs.

We are seeing today, moreover, the same tough love and the same unsearchable judgment of God being applied to the Christian churches in our contemporary world that were applied by the Almighty to the religious establishment of first century Judea. The faithful are being driven out of church after church by religious bureaucrats who have confused the operation of religious institutions and the exercise of earthly power with the Christian life that subordinates all things to our crucified and resurrected Lord.

“Official Christianity” couldn’t be more of a mess, and it couldn’t be harder to see any day to day connection between what goes on in the various church headquarters and Gospel life of the redeemed in Jesus Christ. But consider this: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

What has God done? God has forced us out of complacency. God has forced us not to take the Christian religion and its practice for granted. God has forced us to go out into the world to spread the Gospel. God has forced us to see that the leaders of Christian churches have no more a monopoly on his love and favor that the high priests of Jerusalem did. God has forced us to face the same hard fact that who or what we are does not entitle us to salvation, so that we may feel superior to any Jew or Gentile. Rather, we are saved as refugees from a fallen and dying world, filled with fallen and dying institutions that have no power to give life to themselves, let alone to give life to us.

Only God in his mercy and strength has the power to give life or to call us to his service, whoever we are. We do not understand all of his plan because it is not our plan, but his alone. But we do know this: “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” If we turn to God in Christ with all our hearts, opening them to his grace and initiative, we will live; and we will live with all of those whom he has chosen to be his children, Jew and Gentile alike—all Christians in the love of Jesus Christ. We have a great reform and a great mission ahead of us, but God is the power of that reform and mission. They will succeed in him. We will succeed in him, but only if we believe in him and in his sovereign plan of life, and not in accidents, and not in anything that we can do for ourselves.