Except from Taylor Brown on his series “Why I Am a Free-Will Theist”:

1. Romans 9 is About the Corporate Nation of Israel, NOT the Salvation or Damnation of Individuals

The background context of Romans is that a rift occurred between the Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Roman church. The Gentiles were claiming that God had abandoned the Jews since so few of them had come to believe in Jesus as Messiah. This understandably made the Jewish Christians a little angry. As a result, Paul took it upon himself to write a letter to the church in Rome to help settle the dispute. The section of his letter we now know as Romans 9 was meant specifically to address the claim that God had abandoned Israel in favor of the Gentiles. The whole section of Romans 9-11 is Paul’s emphatic argument against such a notion.

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