The Justice of Reprobation

There is a hard verse in Scripture. Not just hard, but hard.  It is Romans 9:21: "Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?" In this verse, God refers to Himself figuratively as a potter, who has made mankind from a lump of clay (Genesis 2:7). He looks at this lump as after the Fall, the mass of sinful humankind. As formed from one lump, every human is by nature equivalent to every other. Yet, as the potter, God chooses to form some lumps for honorable use, i. e., the elect, making them honorable, and some for dishonorable use, i. e., the reprobate. All men are by nature dishonorable. Yet, upon some He chooses to be merciful, and others are left condemned.

Even among Christians, this verse is blanked out, or explained away by semantic acrobatics. Why? Because there can be no greater ax laid to the pride of men than to be told that God is in absolute control, and men are absolutely without sovereignty.

One of the worse ways that men fight against this truth of God's sovereignty is by the creation of caricatures. For example, I have been told by actual opponents that this means that some men would be begging to be saved, to be forgiven, yet God will refuse them because they are not among the number of the elect.

That caricature is demonstrated to be humanistic drivel by one simple truth: it describes an impossibility. The Scriptures tell us that no man of himself seeks God: "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God" (Romans 3:10-11). We even have the words of Jesus Himself: "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him" (John 6:44). So, even the proposition of this caricature is to claim that Jesus and Paul were mistaken about the nature of men. 

Furthermore, all objections to the doctrine of reprobation erroneously assume that men deserve to be saved. They deny the sinfulness of sin. They deny that all sinners deserve the judgment of Hell. Yet these same evangelicals will quote the answer in other circumstances: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). Therefore, "it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy" (Romans 9:16). The objector to God's sovereignty has the truth reversed. It is the reprobate who receives justice. He only gets what his sins have earned him. The elect receives mercy, not what he deserves. No one ever receives injustice.

"None but a sinner can be a suitable subject of reprobation, and men are reprobated only as sinners; but one man is passed by and another elected, not because one was a greater sinner than the other, but because God saw fit to do so" (James Henley Thornwell, "Election and Reprobation").