God’s Patience with the Vessels of Wrath :: Desiring God Christian Resource Library.

Reviewing John Piper’s argument here is really reinforcing to my mind that Paul is talking about something much different.  While I have no problem with the theology, if that was Paul’s point than Romans 11 is a virtual a reversal of direction.

Piper’s appeal to intertestamental Jewish literature strikes me as ironic, given his reaction to N. T. Wright–but I’m not sure I am being entirely fair.

But his quotation from Second Maccabees reminds me of what God told Abraham in Genesis 15.16: “And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”  This used to sound to my calvinistic mind like God wanted them to sin more to punish them more.

But while God’s sovereignty cannot eliminate that perspective, the point was something with better implications:

God doesn’t simply destroy cultures because they are made up of sinners.

In fact, originally, he did not judge at all.  Cain got away with murder–literally–and was permitted to create a thriving culture until all the godly one’s were seduced and only Noah was left.  God intervened at the last possible moment.

After the flood, God promised to never destroy the world again.  What people seem to not realize is that God was promising to judge cultures sooner than he had before. God’s justice demanded that he eventually act.  By promising to not destroy the world he was promising to not let the earth get so wicked that he was obligated to do so.

Thus the contrast between Cain’s city and the Tower of Babel.  Cain goes east and builds a city and increases wickedness.  Nimrod goes east and builds a city and it is scattered.  God will now intervene more quickly.

But it is still not random (even though we can’t know his criteria and timing).  So the fact that God won’t judge the Amorites yet, when he speaks to Abraham, is because they don’t deserve it yet.  We know this is the case because, in the case of the exceeding wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, God refuses to wait.  He judges them with fire from heaven in that generation.

And so if God is enduring unbelieving Israel, he is giving people time to switch sides, just like Tamar switched sides and many others joined with Abraham’s clan as servants–becoming Israelites rather than Canaanites.

The difference is that only a minority of Canaanites did this, whereas Paul predicts that the majority of Israel will turn, that they have only received “a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved”