Interlude: Does God Make People for Destruction?

Letters to an Honest Skeptic

Dear friend,

This letter steps outside the order of questions I promised you. One objection comes up so often, from skeptics and from believers alike, that it deserves a letter of its own. It is the claim that the God of the Bible creates some people for the purpose of destroying them.

The objection usually comes with a verse attached. Here it is, from Paul's letter to the Romans:

"What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory." (Romans 9:22-23)

Sometimes a second line comes with it: "God hardened Pharaoh's heart." Put the two together, and the conclusion seems to follow. God makes some people, fixes their destruction in advance, and then holds them responsible for it. If that is who God is, the objection says, He is not good, and no reasonable person should want Him.

I will grant you this much. If the God of the Bible formed people only to destroy them and then blamed them for it, that would be a serious charge against His character, and I would not ask you to overlook it. Therefore the question is not whether the charge would matter. It would. The question is whether the text makes it.

I should also be honest with you. Christians have disagreed for centuries about how Romans 9 relates to God's choosing, and I will not pretend that debate does not exist. On the specific claim that God forms people for destruction, however, the text speaks more clearly than many people assume.

What the chapter is about

Start with the question Paul is answering, because a verse read without its chapter can be made to say almost anything. Romans 9 opens with Paul grieving over his own people, Israel, most of whom had rejected Jesus as their Messiah. The question hanging over the chapter is whether God's promises to Israel had failed. Paul answers, "But it is not as though the word of God has failed" (Romans 9:6).

His argument runs toward one conclusion: God is free to extend His mercy beyond the boundaries people expected. The vessels of mercy, he says, are "even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles" (Romans 9:24). Therefore, the chapter is about the widening of God's mercy, not the narrowing of it.

Who did the preparing

Look again at how Paul writes the two halves of the passage. Of the vessels of mercy, he says God "prepared beforehand for glory." God is named. He is the one doing the preparing. Of the vessels of wrath, Paul writes only that they were "prepared for destruction." He does not say who prepared them.

The grammar of the original language permits the reading that these vessels fitted themselves for destruction. At the very least, Paul chose to name God as the maker of vessels for mercy and declined to name Him as the maker of vessels for wrath. A writer as careful as Paul does not make that kind of distinction by accident.

Why be patient?

Notice what God is doing toward the vessels of wrath in the same sentence. He "endured with much patience." That is a strange thing to say about a God who had fixed their destruction from the beginning. Patience is only meaningful where the outcome is still open. No one is patient with a result that cannot change.

Paul has already said, earlier in the same letter, what God's patience is for: "the kindness of God leads you to repentance" (Romans 2:4). Peter says the same: "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). Therefore, the patience in Romans 9 is not a delay before a fixed sentence. It is time given for a different outcome.

The potter in the prophets

The image of the potter and the clay did not begin with Paul. He drew it from the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah used it to rebuke people who argue with God: "Will the clay say to the potter, 'What are you doing?'" (Isaiah 45:9). Jeremiah gives the fullest explanation of what the image means.

God sent Jeremiah to watch a potter at work, and Jeremiah recorded what he saw: "the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make" (Jeremiah 18:4). The spoiled vessel was not thrown away. It was remade. Then God told Jeremiah what the picture meant: "if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it" (Jeremiah 18:8).

In the passage where the potter image is explained most fully, the clay's response changes what the vessel becomes. Therefore, using the potter to argue that a person's response is meaningless turns the image upside down.

What about Pharaoh?

Read the account of Pharaoh in order, and you will notice something the objection usually skips. Before the text ever says that the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart (Exodus 9:12), it says twice that Pharaoh hardened his own. "When Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart" (Exodus 8:15). And again, "Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also" (Exodus 8:32). Pharaoh chose first. God then confirmed the choice Pharaoh had already made.

Paul's last word on vessels

Paul returned to the language of vessels later, in a letter to a younger minister named Timothy. This time he addressed directly whether a vessel's status is fixed:

"Now in a large house there are not only gold and silver vessels, but also vessels of wood and of earthenware, and some to honor and some to dishonor. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work." (2 Timothy 2:20-21)

A vessel can become a vessel for honor. The same man who wrote Romans 9 says so plainly, and he extends the offer to "anyone."

What God says He wants

If the Bible taught that God creates people for the pleasure of destroying them, you would expect Him to say so somewhere. He says the opposite, and He says it repeatedly. Through the prophet Ezekiel: "As I live!" declares the Lord GOD, "I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11). Through Paul, God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). Through Peter, He is "not wishing for any to perish."

You may still conclude that you do not believe any of it. That is your verdict to render. But the God the objection describes, one who forms people in order to destroy them, is not the God these texts describe.

Knowing is not causing

There is one more form of the objection, and it is a fair one. The Bible says God forms every person: "For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). It also says God knows the end from the beginning. Therefore, the argument goes, God knowingly created people whose final end would be separation from Him.

The relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom is a deep question, and it deserves more than a paragraph in a letter. I will say only this for now. Knowing an outcome is not the same as causing it. You can know with certainty that a friend will choose the steak, and your knowledge did not make the choice. Scripture consistently holds people responsible for their own choices, and it consistently describes a God who pleads with them to choose differently.

One question

Here is the question I will leave with you. Why does this objection trouble you?

For some, it is a debating point, a way to close a conversation about God before it gets personal. For others, it is something deeper: a fear that if God is real, He has already decided against them. If that second answer is closer to yours, then hear what the text actually says. The Potter is patient. He remakes spoiled clay. He invites "anyone" to become a vessel for honor. The objection pictures a God who is unwilling. The text describes a God who waits.

Come, let us reason together.

Your friend,

Mark

Walshville Christian Church, Walshville, Illinois. These letters accompany a series our church is walking through together. You are welcome any Sunday, questions and all.