Romans 9

The Inner Drama of Election: How Calling Shapes the Soul

Romans 9 reads as an inward drama — a fragile, intense soliloquy of the human Spirit confronting the two great kingdoms inside consciousness: the kingdom of form and the kingdom of promise. The speaker’s grief at the chapter’s opening is not a biographical lament but the voice of a soul who has tasted the truth of creative identity and now watches its brothers still bound to identity as matter. That heaviness is compassion issuing from a higher state of self-awareness. It mourns not for historical people but for ways of being: the way of literal identification with outer facts, and the way of living as the imagined, future self.

The ‘brethren according to the flesh’ represent that mode of mind which clings to ancestry, law, and visible lineage — the psychological posture that says, 'I am what my history, birth, education, and social role make me.' This is the consciousness of 'Israel' as a mind-state: a self defined by statutes, covenants, and the service of duty. It treasures promises as external regulations; it receives adoption as a social status; it hears of glory and treats it as inheritance rather than present experience. The speaker’s willingness to be 'accursed' for them is the interior desire to redeem that closed way of thinking by incarnating its limitations and transmuting them from within.

Paul’s insistence that 'not all who are of Israel are Israel' becomes a striking psychological claim: outward affiliation does not equal inner formation. You can be a member of a tradition and still be cut off from the creative power that made that tradition possible. The distinction between 'children of the flesh' and 'children of the promise' maps onto two distinct imaginal conditions. The children of the flesh are the literalizing imagination, the one that reproduces circumstances; the children of the promise are the imagining that lives in assumption, that holds the future as present and thus causes its realization.

The narrative of Isaac and Ishmael, of Jacob and Esau, is here allegory for how inner election operates. Birthright and blessing are not simply birth-order or biological accident; they are the inner elections we make when we give our attention and feeling to one identity over another. The text says that the children were not yet born and had done neither good nor evil — this is consciousness prior to conditioning. The formative decree — 'the elder shall serve the younger' — announces an interior reversal: the natural mind (the elder, the habit-bound identity) is to be served by the new consciousness (the younger, the imaginal state that claims promise). The paradox of election is psychological, not metaphysical: the mind that is called is the mind that has been assumed and dwelt in.

When the chapter quotes, 'Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated,' it is using strong language to dramatize preference — not a divine favoritism outside human experience, but the way imagination chooses. 'Love' and 'hate' in this register mean attraction and resistance: one state is embraced, another is denied. The passage forces us to see that within our own consciousness we are constantly compressing some aspects and excluding others; the creative imagination will favor certain attributes until they become the dominant pattern.

The famous potter-and-clay image then lays bare the mechanism of formation. The potter is the creative faculty — the self-aware Imagination — and the clay are the forms that thought makes. The potter’s freedom to fashion different vessels is the freedom of directed attention. The text insists that some vessels are fitted for honor and some for dishonor; read psychologically, this describes how certain imaginal states are cultivated toward exaltation, others hardened into limitation. The clay is not morally guilty; it is material. The shaping is a matter of inner workmanship: the way you attend, feel, and persist sculpts the destiny of your states of being.

Hardening and mercy are two outcomes of attention. The language of God having 'mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth' dramatizes how repeated acceptance or rejection of an imaginal assumption either softens the mind into pliability or calcifies it into stubborn fact. The Pharaoh motif is especially telling: the 'raising up' of Pharaoh that 'I might shew my power in thee' is the paradoxical truth that resistance becomes the very instrument through which the imaginal power demonstrates itself. A rigid identity, when held as a foil, reveals the creative faculty’s power to transmute and to work even within hardness. In practice, the imagination will use every contradiction — including your own resistance — to lead you back to the self you assume.

The chapter’s move to speak of 'vessels of mercy' prepared for glory is an affirmation of the imagination’s redemptive power. Those who have been emptied of rigid self-images are refilled with promise; those who learn to dwell in the inner state of 'I am' that corresponds to their desire become vessels prepared for manifestation. This is not moral selection but psychological refinement: the mind that learns to dwell in the feeling of the wish fulfilled becomes the instrument for the outer realization of that wish.

When the apostle cites prophetic reversals — 'I will call them my people which were not my people' — the language points to the creative reversal available to the one who discovers inner imagination. People who were 'not' become 'beloved' once the imagination changes the story. The 'remnant saved' becomes the part of your inner life that persists in faithful assumption despite the outer evidence. It is the kernel of felt identity that will not be moved by appearances.

Romans 9 then turns to the scandal of the 'stumblingstone.' This stone is the living assumption that offends the literal senses: Christ as the imaginal principle that requires you to accept a present identity different from current facts. Those who seek righteousness by 'works of the law' — by external effort, duty, and literal conformity — stumble because they refuse the inner reversal. The stone offends because it asks for the impossible from the natural mind: that it accept a reality that contradicts sense. But once the mind accepts the imaginal Christ — the deliberate, sustained assumption of the wished-for state — it moves beyond shame and discovers that righteousness by faith is simply the truth of imagining as causative.

Throughout the chapter the creative power is treated as sovereign within consciousness. The 'will' and 'running' are not primarily physical actions but interior choices: the will that imagines and the runner who persists in the inner state. The text’s uneasy balance between predestination and free will dissolves when we see predestination as the natural consequence of habitual imagination: the inner life predestines by repeated assumption; the creative will creates by patient occupancy of a desired state.

Practically, Romans 9 instructs in the method of inner sovereignty. Grief for those who are bound is the compassionate recognition that identity can be redeemed only by someone choosing to embody the redemption. The 'accursed' wish to bear the burden of others is the willingness to enter the limiting consciousness and, from within, imagine freedom. The way to act as potter is to assume the inner posture you desire, to feel it as present, and to persist despite the outer evidence. The 'election' is not a transcendent decree but the interior decision to dwell in a blessed state until it has changed your outer world.

This chapter therefore reframes theology into therapy: mercy is an interior disposition; hardening is the result of repeated negative attention; election is faithful imagination; the stumblingstone is the present-tense assumption of the wished-for self that shocks the literal senses. The text promises not an external favoritism but the inner sovereignty to form experience. Imagination is the potter; attention and feeling are the hands that shape clay. Those who understand this stop asking why God seemingly chooses some and not others; they learn instead to practice the creative act and become the chosen instruments by which their own new life is realized.

In the end, Romans 9 is a teaching about power: power not over others but over one’s own states of consciousness. To be 'Israel' is to inhabit the promise, to be the child of the promise is to live by assumption. The soul that takes up this method finds that 'mercy' is its own delighted consequence, and what was once rigid becomes a material for glory. The psychological drama resolves when the speaker’s longing is answered — not by altering history but by transforming the interior world so thoroughly that the outer world must conform.