The Divine Sovereignty in Judgment.
Romans 9:19 f. The hard saying just enunciated provokes the question, Why does He blame, if the hardening is His doing and none may resist His will? Paul forgoes the obvious retort, that God's hardening is a judgment on hardness of heart (cf. Romans 2:5, etc.), that Pharaoh (and Israel now) did resist God (cf. Acts 7:51, etc.); he assails the spirit of contradiction: Nay, surely, O man, who art thou who repliest against God the thing formed saying to its fashioner, Why didst thou make me so? (see Isaiah 45:9). Such questions cast on God the responsibility for our miscarriages: whoever is to blame, He is not. The forming of Romans 9:20 is the shaping, not the creation, of the instrument.
Romans 9:21. The potter has a right over the clay, to make a vessel for honourable or ignoble use, from any part of the lump he chooses. He has his reasons, but those reasons are for himself. What right, says the Jew, has God to cast away sons of Abraham? The right, answers Paul, of the potter, from which there is no appeal.
Romans 9:22 recalls Romans 9:17: Supposing God, resolved to make an example of His punitive wrath, has borne long with evil-doers, rendering their doom in the end more terrible, who will gainsay Him in Pharaoh's case, or (to read between the lines) in Israel's?
Romans 9:23 f. And supposing He did this of purpose to make known His glorious wealth of mercy. in us, for example, whom He has called from amongst both Jews and Gentiles? The suggestion is that God's punitive judgments have mercy, somewhere, somehow, for their aim (Romans 11:30 ff.). The vessels of anger were chosen suitably, as well as sovereignly: God's displeasure found, not made, them fitted for destruction. The antithetic clause, which He prepared beforehand for glory (cf. Romans 8:30, Ephesians 2:10), associates God with all that leads to the happier choice, without denying man's co-operation (cf. Php_2:12 f.). Throughout Paul asserts the challenged right of God to deal judicially with Israel; he is not denying man's freedom in order to safeguard God's sovereignty, but maintaining God's freedom against Jewish presumption. The sayings drawn from Hosea and Isaiah in Romans 9:25-29 reveal the disregard of previous status with which God calls into favour the once rejected and selects a remnant while rejecting the mass. Isaiah 10:22 f. and Isaiah 10:19 remind Israel how summary God's ancient judgments had been yet leaving a seed to revive out of the waste.