“Awesome God!”(Rom.11:33-36).
One of my Cameroonian Old Testament Lecturer wondered, “Who are we Africans to pray for the salvation of the Jews? We embrace a people’s religion and turn around to lecture them on what their religion is all about, then we start praying for their salvation. This is not an issue of apostacy, unbelief or heresy, rather, it is a worry of a “faith seeking understanding.”
We Gentiles are branches cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature and grafted into a cultivated olive tree. For this grafting to be done, the farmer had to cut off some braches from the cultivated olive tree. And if he could do this to the cultivated branches, how much more can he do to us wild ingrafted branches!
This is a mystery which we must not be ignorant about. “All Israel will be saved,” because “as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs.” They have been disobedient to God so that they too can receive God’s mercy. “For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all”(Read Rom.9:1-11:32).
My friend, these things baffle us and are always subjects for theological argumentation, but to the writer of the letter to the Romans it is a mystery for which we should praise God.
The wisdom and knowledge of God is too deep, his judgments are unsearchable and his paths are beyond tracing out! No-one knows the mind of the Lord and none has been his counselor. Nobody has ever given to God such that he should repay the person. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.”
When Dora Greenwell came to this understanding of our human limitation concerning the workings of God she put it down in poetry:
1.”I am not skilled to understand what God hath willed, what God had planned; I only know at his right hand stands one who is my Saviour.
- I take God at his word and deed; ‘Christ died to save me’, this I read; And in my heart I find a need of him to be my Saviour.
- And was there then no other way For God to take? – I cannot say; I only bless him day by day, Who saved me through my Saviour…. Yea, living, dying, let me bring, My strength, my solace, from this spring, That he who lives to be my King, Once died to be my Saviour.”
Yes, the things of God we cannot understand but our belief in his plan makes all things understandable because Christ is all that we need to know.
Prayer: Praise, glory and honour be to you, Great Jehovah, Three Persons in One God. Amen!
Have a blessed day! Peace be with you!
Rev Babila Fochang.