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As part of Bug #1246380, a check was introduced to ensure restorecon was available. The check that has been introduced assumes restorecon is available at /bin/restorecon. See lines 32-33 of /usr/libexec/iptables/iptables.init:

RESTORECON=/bin/restorecon
[ ! -x "$RESTORECON" ] && RESTORECON=/bin/true

This means for systems with restorecon at a different location (such as /sbin/restorecon), restorecon is never ran against stored iptables data, resulting in an error when starting iptables if data had previously been stored with an incorrect context: "iptables: Applying firewall rules: Can't open /etc/sysconfig/iptables: Permission denied"

This was introduced in iptables-services-1.4.21-17.el7.x86_64

# rpm -q iptables-services
iptables-services-1.4.21-17.el7.x86_64

OK, so my proposed solution is to use which:

RESTORECON=$(which restorecon)

This works fine, but only after adjusting selinux policies. After loading the following module into the kernel, everything works fine:

module iptables.init_restorecon 1.0;

require {
	type setfiles_exec_t;
	type iptables_t;
	class file { execute getattr };
}

#============= iptables_t ==============
allow iptables_t setfiles_exec_t:file { execute getattr };

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2018:0715