One of the great challenges of the Christian life is that often when we look around us, we don’t see evidence that God is gracious. Instead, if anything it feels like we see evidence that God is not good.

We might find ourselves feeling that way as we read the news. The unthinkable awfulness of terrorism, war, genocide: if God is allowing this, how can he possibly be good? We might find ourselves feeling this way as we interact with others, as we see friends whose families are torn apart divorce or a child dying of cancer. How can God possibly be gracious if this is happening? Even more personally, sometimes it’s just a matter of feeling. Life feels dark and alone and hopeless. Sometimes it simply does not feel like God is there and that he is acting with love. 

William Cowper was a man who for all of his life dealt with those very feelings. He grew up amidst great tragedy: his mom died when he was young, and his father remained remote. As an adult he was plagued by deep, overwhelming bouts of depression, so that on multiple occasions he sought to commit suicide. Around the age of 30, he became a Christian, and the truth of God’s mercy came like a bright light in the midst of this despair. And yet even after coming to faith, again and again he came back to that same depression and sense of hopelessness. Despite what he read in the Bible and what he professed to be true, it simply did not feel like God was there and that God loved him. 

Cowper was a poet, and in one of his most famous hymns, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” you see him wrestling with the tension between what is true and what feels true. What he writes is profound. “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face.” When I rely on what I see and how things feel, Cowper was saying, I get it wrong. His providence—that is, how he is governing the world, how he is governing my life: it looks to me like he’s frowning. But my senses are feeble, and my eyes are not able to see clearly. “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.” 

So in the passage we’ve been studying, Romans 9-11, Paul is addressing a situation where it seems like we God is not gracious; that God is not good. Because the Jews, the people of Israel, seem to have fallen away from God. God promised Abraham that he would love and bless Abraham’s descendants. God said through his prophets that after experiencing a time of difficulty, God would do extraordinary things for them because he loves them. But now, Jesus has come, the fulfillment of God’s promises. And God’s people have rejected Jesus, they have fallen away from God. What happened? What happened to God blessing his people? If this is what God has allowed to happen to Israel… how can he be good?

Paul has sought to help us navigate this question. First, he has sought to reorient us, because to understand these things truly, we need first to see differently. “Be ready to accept mystery,” Paul has said. God is so far beyond us; his thinking is so far beyond ours. And so whenever we ask questions like this, we need to be prepared to accept the fact that there are always going to be things that God does that we cannot, that we will not understand. Because he’s God, and we’re not.

What’s more, Paul tells us, be on the lookout for God’s grace. As long as you think you’re the hero of the story, battling to achieve great things, as long as you think good things will come to you because you deserve them, you’ll miss what’s really happening. The reality is that you and I are horribly compromised by sin; we cannot achieve or earn the good things we want. The reality is that every good thing comes to us, not by our earning, but simply through the goodness of God. Once you accept that, you begin to see God’s grace everywhere.

In other words, in chapters 9 and 10, Paul has basically said, “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace.” 

And now, in chapter 11, he returns to the question. “I ask then, has God rejected his people?” It seems like God isn’t good here. How do we understand this? And what Paul will show us is that the way things seem is not how they are. “Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.” God has not rejected his people. What actually is happening, both in the present and in the future is God showing his mercy.

Present: An Elect Remnant

To help us to understand this, Paul first reminds us of the past.  “Do you remember,” he asks in verse 2, “When Elijah was being hunted by the king and queen of Israel who wanted to kill him because he was speaking for God? Elijah tells God, “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” It felt to Elijah like all of Israel had rejected God, that Israel’s story was over. 

And what does God say to Elijah? Verse 4 “I have kept for myself seven thousand men that have not bowed to Baal.” You might think it’s all over, Elijah, but that’s only because you don’t see that even now in hidden ways I am at work in many people, giving them strength to trust me and love me. You don’t see it, but I am preserving within the nation of Israel a group—what in the Old Testament is referred to as a “remnant” who remain faithful to me.” 

God’s people needed to be humbled. They arrogantly believed they could live however they wanted, and still, God would bless them. They needed to recognize their sin and need for God. And so God handed them over to their sinfulness. This is why in Isaiah 29, which Paul quotes here in verse 8, God says he will give his people “a spirit of stupor” eyes that won’t see and ears that won’t hear: he’s handing them over to their sin and allowing them to experience its consequences in order to humble them.

And yet even amidst this, God also was not going to give up on them. Even in the darkest times, God still always kept for himself a smaller group of faithful believers among the people of Israel: a remnant.

And so also today. Verse 5, “So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace.” Yes, he says, many have turned away. But if you look around you see that God still has preserved a remnant of Jews who have received Jesus. If you want any proof, Paul says, just look at me. I am one of them.” 

In our day, it  might look like the Jewish people have completely rejected Jesus. But that’s not the case. If you’re paying attention, you will see that throughout the world there are some Jews who have come to believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of their faith, the Jewish Messiah God has promised them. Paul says, look, there continues to be a remnant today. God has not forsaken his people. He continues to be gracious.   

Future

And yet, there’s still a problem. As Paul puts it in verse 7, Israel has failed. Yes, there is a faithful remnant, but this still falls short of the great blessings God promised to Abraham and then later in the prophets. If you keep reading Isaiah 29, after it speaks of eyes not seeing and ears not hearing, it goes on to speak of a day that will come when the deaf shall hear and the eyes of the blind shall see, when the people of Israel shall take “fresh joy in the Lord.” It says one day “the people of Israel will “honor the Holy One of Jacob and stand in awe of the God of Israel.” Yes, Isaiah says, there will be a time when most of Israel is hardened so that they do not see. But after that time of hardening, they will be restored. 

So what about that? Has God given up on that part of his promise? As Paul asks in verse 11, “Did they stumble in order that they might fall?” Is that the destination, is Israel’s hardening their final outcome? No. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense: you’re not seeing the big picture. The story isn’t over. After the present hardening there will be a restoration. 

In the following verse we have something that I find extraordinary. The Bible doesn’t tell us much about what we can expect to happen between Jesus’ first and second coming. Contrary to what some think, we can’t make up charts to figure out the date of Jesus’ return. The Bible only tells us those things that will help us follow Christ, and we don’t need such detailed information. But here in this verse, we see a rare exception, where God pulls back the veil and tells us something about what is going on and what will happen in human history. 

Paul says, “through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous.” 

Let me explain. Right now, in the present, God is working through Israel’s rejection to save the world. “Through their trespass—that is through the rejection of Jesus by the majority of Jews—salvation has come to the Gentiles.”

Now what does he mean by that? Well, if you study Acts and look especially at the question of how the gospel goes to the Gentiles, you might notice something surprising. The Israelites are not especially excited to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles. For all of their lives, the God of Jacob has been their God. And their instinct is to keep this good news of Jesus to themselves, and, maybe like Jonah, leave their enemies to experiencing God’s judgment. 

Do you know what eventually really pushed Christians to speak to Gentiles? Jewish rejection and persecution. It was when Stephen was killed for his faith and the church in Jerusalem began to experience deep opposition that Christians began to be scattered—and where they went, the gospel of Jesus spread. On Paul’s missionary journeys, they began in the synagogues, but then, he would meet resistance again and again. And so he went from there to tell the good news to the Gentiles. Paul says to them ““It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles.” Do you hear that? In the very act of their rejection, the gospel then was turned toward the Gentiles. Paul says here that in the mysterious work of God, “Through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles.” Through their sin, billions have come to salvation in Christ. Even in rejection of Jesus, we see the working of God’s mercy.

But then there’s another plot twist: through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. In song of Moses in Deuteronomy, God tells his people that after they fail and reject him, “I will make you jealous of those who are not a people.” He tells them that, in order to bring Israel back, he will do something among the nations that will cause Israel to long for what they have lost.

Paul says, “That’s the stage of history we’re in right now—we’re in the making Israel jealous stage.” He says about his own missionary work: “Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry 14 in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them.” His goal is that as Gentiles come to Jesus and experience blessing that something so good and beautiful would happen among them that Jews who have rejected Jesus would recognize their mistake and say, “I want that. I want Jesus.”

Again, we see this progression in verse 25: “I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel—that’s what we’ve been focusing on—this idea of the remnant—a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved.” 

A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of Gentiles has come in. The time of Israel’s partial hardening, when there is only a remnant of Jews who trust Jesus, will last until the Gentile mission is over. Until people throughout the world have heard the gospel and people from every nation are drawn to Christ. Until the church becomes so clearly filled with the grace of God in Jesus that the people of Israel who until this point have rejected Jesus will see that Jesus is real, that he is where God’s righteousness is found, and will turn to him. And this is how, Paul says, Israel will once again return to God. 

Which says something significant about our calling, doesn’t it? God is leading us to be communities, to be churches where the work of Jesus is so active and powerful that the beauty of God’s grace is unmistakable. So that people, and especially those who belong to the people of Israel, would look and see and say, “I want that.”  

If that sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider the fact that in small ways, this is already happening. Let me give just one example.

The writer David Brooks grew up steeped in Jewish culture: “In my semi-secular world of Jewish New York, we put peoplehood before faith. We were living in the shadow of the Holocaust, so survival was not taken for granted. We celebrated effort, work, smarts, discipline, accomplishment, achievement. In the rabbinic tradition, the Messiah was associated with poverty, righteousness associated with the poor and the miserable. But that is not how Judaism is lived out in American culture. We were pointing toward accomplishment.” And this was what oriented him in his life. He want to U Chicago and then eventually became a NY Times columnist. He had accomplished.

But as an adult, he began having encounters with believers that began, you might say, to destabilize this life. He met a preacher named John Stott. “We’re used to looking down on [certain fundamentalist types], but it’s unnerving to encounter a Christian you would, on balance, very much like to be.” He was struck by the joyful intelligence and the humble confidence of Stott in Jesus. Over lunch, Stott asked him some penetrating questions. “What did I think of the Gospel? What did I think of Judaism? He told me he sensed something in me, some motion toward God. I thought we were there to talk about him, but he was interested only in me. I was unnerved.”

He speaks of other moments of being destabilized: encountering the stories of Christians like Dorothy Day and Augustine. “Even if you have no faith at all, there is something moving about seeing a person who acts like Jesus. My heart and soul were clenched, but occasionally moral beauty loosened the grip.”

And then, he went through a time of great personal failure. It was in his weakness, as he was reading an old Puritan prayer, that God opened his heart to recognize God’s greatness and his mercy. “I had a sensation of things clicking into place, like the sound of a really nice car door gently closing. It was a sensation of deep harmony and membership, that creation is a living thing, a good thing, that we are still being created and we are accepted in it. Knowledge crept across my skin. The universe bends toward our goodness.” 

This once secular Jew came to find his hope and identity in Christ and believed. And though it was clearly in the end God breaking through, what God used throughout Brooks’ life were believers whose connections to Jesus were so good and beautiful that Brooks didn’t know what to do with it. And our calling is to seek this very thing: to allow Jesus to do his work in us, in this church, with the prayer that he would use us to lead others, including God’s Old Testament people, to himself.

When we, the church of God, have fulfilled our calling, will see many Jews turn to Jesus. “All Israel will be saved.” And then, the end will come.

For look at verse 15: “If their rejection means the reconciliation of the world—all nations being reconciled to God, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead.”

Do you see that? It’s a brief glimpse into the plans of God. Right now the gospel is going to all nations, calling people to Jesus. Right now God in Jesus is building his church, making it beautiful, so that others, and especially the Jews, might be provoked to see the goodness of God that they until this point have rejected. And a time will come when this work will lead to many, many of God’s Old Testament people returning to him, when the people of Israel turn to Christ. Once that happens, God’s rescue plan of the whole world will have come to its completion, and Jesus will return, and the dead will be raised, and his eternal kingdom will be here. 

And in the end, we will see what has always been: that behind what seems sometimes is a frowning providence is God’s smiling, loving face. In the scope of human history, what is easiest for us to see is tragedy. It’s easy for us to see human disobedience and rejection. What is far harder for us to see, but what is true and what will be clear on the last day, is the constant, unfailing mercy of God. 

“30 For just as you (Gentiles) were at one time disobedient to God (by rejecting him) but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, 31 so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. 32 For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” While there are things we can’t understand in this, here’s what is clear: in the end we will see that God has brought this world through difficulties precisely so that he can be merciful; in the end, his grace will prevail.

“Judge not the Lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face.” 

Listen. If you follow Jesus, there will be times, likely many times when it will not seem to you like God is there or like God is gracious. It can be excruciatingly hard. And yet, in those moments, what you and I need to understand is that how things feel is not telling us about how things are. 

When the people of Israel had come out of Egypt but were now trapped with the Red Sea on one hand and a massive Egyptian army charging at them on the other hand, it would have felt like God wasn’t there. But that’s only because one cannot judge the Lord by feeble sense. When the followers of Jesus stared at his broken body, crucified and dead on the cross, it would have felt like God was not gracious. But that’s only because one cannot judge the Lord by feeble sense. And in Paul’s day and ours, when it appears that God’s people have permanently abandoned Jesus, it can feel like God is not good. But that’s only because we can’t judge the Lord by feeble sense. In each of those situations, there’s always something extraordinary that is happening and that our senses can’t possibly. We can’t see that a massive sea will soon be parted, that a dead and broken body will be resurrected, that a tragically mistaken people will one day be restored. 

If you follow Jesus, there will be times when it will not seem to you like God is there or like God is gracious. Perhaps that’s how it is right now for you. But I want you to understand that what you can’t see right now, what you can’t feel right now is even so no less real. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face. The God who is mysterious, who is far beyond us, is unceasingly, unfailingly good. And even now, this gracious God invites us to turn to him, to bring our needs to him, and to trust him with our lives.