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For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth."
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Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens.
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You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?"
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But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, "Why have you made me like this?"
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Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?
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What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,
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and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory,
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even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?
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As He says also in Hosea: "I will call them My people, who were not My people, And her beloved, who was not beloved."
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"And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, 'You are not My people,' There they shall be called sons of the living God."
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Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel: "Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, The remnant will be saved.
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For He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, Because the Lord will make a short work upon the earth."
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And as Isaiah said before: "Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, We would have become like Sodom, And we would have been made like Gomorrah."
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What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith;
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but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness.
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Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.
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As it is written: "Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, And whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame."