But the obvious reply of the Jewish objector to St. Paul's assertion of the absolute and apparently arbitrary freedom of God's election is that it is unfair. It convicts God of unrighteousness. To this objection (ver. 14), which St. Paul deprecates with horror, he replies not by any large consideration of divine justice, but still by keeping the Jew to his own scriptures. The God revealed in scripture must be to the objector still the just God. He cannot call God unjust if His method as it now appears is that to which He called attention long ago. Look back, then, at the past records. Did God disclose Himself as bound to show mercy on Moses the Israelite, or to harden and judicially condemn Pharaoh the Egyptian? No, He declares to Moses His unrestricted freedom to exhibit His {32} compassion on whom He will (Exod. xxxiii. 19). Men cannot by any choice or efforts of their own produce an exhibition of divine favour such as was shown to Moses the leader of Israel: the absolute initiative must come from God, and in taking that initiative He declares Himself absolutely free. In the same way God implicitly asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings Pharaoh out upon the stage of history as an example of the way in which He hardens men's hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to overthrow, that men all over the world may see and tremble at the divine power. It is not because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is hardened. He is hardened, as Moses has compassion shown him, simply because it is the will of God so to do in his case. But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19): 'If this is the arbitrary method of God--if we are simply powerless puppets in the hands of an absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be destroyed--at any rate He has no reason to complain of us. If all the power is His, so is the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his hand to show that there remains to man a very real power to retain his position, and consequently a very real responsibility and room for {33} being blamed or praised: for if we cannot create our vocation, we can and we are required to correspond with it in a reverent and docile faith; and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed, in spite of all their prophets had taught them. But he keeps back this answer awhile, because he finds the attitude of such an objector toward God in itself so reprehensible. Such an one has not given consideration to what the relation of man to God really is--the creature to the creator. His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better than foolish.