Apostol § 102

Brethren, He has mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardens. You will say then unto me, “Why does He yet find fault? For who has resisted His will?” But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, “Why hast thou made me like this?” Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand unto glory, even us whom He has called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? As He says also in Hosea: “I will call them My people, which were not My people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, ‘You are not My people,’ there shall they be called the children of the living God.” Isaiah also cries concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant shall be saved. For He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.” And as Isaiah said before: “Except that the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodom, and been made like unto Gomorrah.” What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith; but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone. As it is written: “Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense: and whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.”