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“Merciful
to All”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
“For God has imprisoned all in
disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”
Dear Sisters and Brothers, every single human being who has lived on
this Earth, except Jesus of Nazareth, has sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God. You and I,
and all of us have experienced times when the reality of God’s being
with us, in us, and for us, was not leading us in our thoughts,
feelings, and decisions. And even now as Christians, we still have those same kinds of
times.
God does not ever hate us because of our sins. God does hate sin and
evil. However, the primary reason God has wrath over sin and evil is not
because it’s against God. The very main reason God took and won the
Divine Eternal War against Satan is because the devil was trying to use
evil to take us away from God and put an end to our lives.
God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have a wonderful passion and a
beautiful choice they made because of the love in their heart. God did not create the heavens and the universe so that God
would own and be glorified by a glamorous creation.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have such love in their
relationship that God decided first and foremost to create a world for
the human creatures. Then
the Son of God was going to become one of us so that He could take us
back with Him to live in God’s loving relationships forever.
This was God’s passionate choice even before the devil, evil, and the
presence of sin appeared in this world. The coming of the Son into our
world was not a plan B for God. It
is the ultimate desire, passion, and eternal choice of God.
With the devil bringing evil into this world and manipulating us into
sin, God knew that as the Son became a human, He would have to live in
our worst kind of suffering times without sin.
He would then need to be killed by evil and sin, because this is
the devils’ strongest power. So
then, when Christ was raised from the dead, we were all included in His
victory. God is merciful to us all.
God knows what we need as revelations of Jesus’ victory for, with, and
in us. He chose and led
Abraham to be the beginning person, by faith, of an evolved race of
human beings through whom the Son of God would be born into our world,
and spiritually into all our hearts.
The Israelites, their recorded revelations from God, their religious
history, and their crucifixion of Christ—which is a picture of what is
in us all—have had, figuratively, the pregnancy and birth of the
Spiritually anointed Son of God and Son of Man.
It was through their disobedience to God that we were led to believe in
Jesus Christ and start to experience God’s mercy for us all.
There is a sense in which God really high-lighted their self
serving religion, their manipulated political authority, and their
beliefs to legally persecute and even possibly to put to death those
considered seriously guilty of trying to destroy their religious
politics.
These are human sinful beliefs and activities that are in us all.
So God really has allowed us to see this, learn to truly hate
this kind of stuff, and then turn to Christ Jesus, our way, truth, and
life. God has used Israel, in its sinfulness, to minister to us, so we
would see God’s mercy, love, and salvation for us.
This makes me feel a little sad and sorry for Israel, in a certain way.
God used their disobedience to lead us to Christ and for us to
start to say no to our own disobediences.
After this, I then feel a little thankful to them for what they did and
went through, that helped us come to Christ.
They didn’t know what they were doing.
And God could have chosen any race of people, even Caucasians, to
be used in the same way to help other people have the revelation of
God’s mercy for all of us. But
God elected the Israelites for this.
When Jesus was here his first time, He taught and showed us
that his Lordship did not have to do with politics in this world. I
certainly cannot be prophetic about what will happen between Israel and
Iran.
God does have mercy and love for them all in Jesus Christ.
I hope we will see and even share in His revelation to them.
Let us pray …
Amen.
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