9:17-18. The same
point is made graphically with another scene from the exodus narrative that of
Moses before Pharaoh. Again Paul first quotes the passage (in this case, Exod
9:16) and then draws the implication. As with Israel after the golden calf,
Pharaoh is guilty; God could have punished him at once, God has, instead, “made
him to stand,” “raised him up” in this sense, rather than cutting him off
instantly. The reason is so that God’s power might be displayed in him, and
that God’s name might be made known in all the world. The moral Paul draws in
the next verse shows that he regards God’s “making Pharaoh to stand” as the
equivalent of “hardening”; Exod 9:16, that is, picks up 9:12 (“the LORD
hardened Pharaoh’s hart”), itself part of a longer sequence (Exod 4:21; 7:3,
13, 22; 8:15, 32; 9:35; 10:1; 14:8; cf. Deut 2:30; Josh 11:20; Isa 63:17). What
God has done to Pharaoh is not arbitrary. Pharaoh has already enslaved God’s
people and resisted the call to set them free. God has in view not the
protracted punishment of Pharaoh for its own sake, but the worldwide
proclamation of God’s power and name. This is how the language of “hardening”
works in at least one strand of Second Temple Jewish thinking. (See the
suggestive 2 Macc 6:12-16: God’s suspension of judgment means that the pagan
nations will thereby reach the full measure of their sins, v. 14; cf. Gen
15:16; Wis 19:4. Israel, meanwhile, though chastened, is eventually granted
mercy.) We ought at this point to hear echoes of earlier statements regarding
Israel’s disobedience (1:18-23; 2:1-11, 17:24), and to detect a line of thought
that runs from those passages, through the present one, on to the decisive
11:25-26.
Paul is not, then, using the example of Pharaoh to
explain that God has the right o show mercy, or to harden someone’s heart, out
of mere caprice. Nor is it simply that God has the right to do this sort of
thing when someone is standing in the way of the glorious purpose that has been
promised. The sense of this passage is gained form its place within the larger
story line from 9:6-10:21—that is, as part of the story of Israel itself, told
to explain what is now happening to Paul’s “Kinsfolk according to the flesh.”
God’s action upon Pharaoh was part of the means, not only of rescuing Israel
from slavery, but of declaring God’s name to the world. IN much the same way,
as Paul will explain in 11:11-14, God’s action at the present time upon Israel
“according to the flesh” is part of the means of brining the gospel to the
nations, of declaring God’s name—and, now, the name of the Lord, the name of
Jesus Christ!—to the nations (10:9-13). This in turn precipitates the questions
of 11:1 and 11, which deal with the problem that remains at the end of it all.
Reading this part of Romans is like riding a bicycle: If you stand still for
more than a moment, forgetting the onward movement both of the story of 9:6-10:21
and of the letter as a whole, you are liable to lose your balance—or, perhaps,
to accuse Paul of losing his. (N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The
New Interpreter’s Bible, 12 vols. [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002], 10:639)
