Clarifying Calvinism (Part 4)
January 15th, 2009
(By Phil Johnson)
Part IV: One more recommendation, and an explanation of why this issue is important to me
Here’s a recommendation for your iPod: If you are someone who is resistant to Calvinism, or you don’t feel you fully understand enough about it, and you want a single, simple overview of the substance and the history of Calvinism, I gave a message to our college students almost two years ago titled “The Story of Calvinism,” where I did my best to cover all that ground in one shot. It’s on the internet with the rest of my sermons, and you can download it for free. The web address is swordandtrowel.org, and look for the title “The Story of Calvinism.”
In that message, I explained that I have not always been a Calvinist. I grew up in a family that had been Wesleyan Methodists for generations — and even after I became a Christian, it was several years before I finally came to the point where I could affirm the biblical doctrine of election without trying to explain it away.
One of the things that first got me thinking seriously about the sovereignty of God was an incident in a college Sunday School class, in a Southern Baptist Church, in Durant, OK, where I had a Sunday school teacher who hated Calvinism with a passion and wasted no opportunity to make an argument against the sovereignty of God. And his continual emphasis on the subject got me thinking about it a lot.
Then one Sunday, while this guy was taking prayer requests, a girl in the class raised her hand and asked, “Should we really be praying for our lost relatives? It seems like it’s a wasted effort to pray to God for their salvation if He can’t do any more than He has already done to save them.”
I vividly remember the look on the face of this Sunday School teacher. This was clearly a question that had never occurred to him. So he thought about it for a moment, and you could see the wheels in his head turning while he tried to think of a good reason to pray for the salvation of the lost. And finally, he said, “Well, yeah, I guess you’re right.” From that Sunday on, he never accepted any more prayer requests for people’s lost loved-ones.
That just didn’t seem quite right to me. I had just done a Bible study in Romans 10:1, where Paul says, “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.” Not only that, I began to wonder why we should pray about anything in the realm of human relationships if God never intrudes on the sanctity of human free will. You know: Why should I pray for God to move my English teacher to look favorably on my work when she graded my paper if she is ultimately sovereign over her own heart? Those were questions I couldn’t answer, and I really struggled with questions like that.
But the more I studied the Bible, the more it seemed to challenge my ideas about free will and the sovereignty of God. One by one over a period of more than 10 years, the doctrines of election, and God’s sovereignty, and the total depravity of sinners became more and more clear to me from Scripture.
Every time one of my arguments against Calvinist doctrines would fall, and I would embrace some doctrine that I was desperately trying to argue against, it never felt like I was undergoing any major paradigm shift. It was more like I was resolving a nagging conflict in my mind. Because I kept discovering that the major ideas underlying the doctrines of grace were truths that I had always affirmed: God is sovereign, Christ died for me, God loved me before I loved Him, He sought me and drew me and initiated my reconciliation while I was still His enemy. Those were truths I believed even when I was a rank Arminian. Embracing Calvinism was natural — and inevitable — because all I was doing was ridding my mind of wrong ideas and faulty assumptions about human free will and other notions like that, which are not even taught in the Bible — so that I could wholeheartedly affirm what I really believed anyway: That God is God, and He does all His good pleasure, and no one can make Him do otherwise, and He is in control and in charge no matter how much noise evildoers try to make. And not only is He in charge, He is working all things out for my good and His glory.
Of course the other question is:
If God is sovereign (And He is), then why bother preaching?
BECAUSE HE ordained the MEANS (Preaching the Law and Gospel of grace), as well as the METHOD (Conviction by the Spirit, granting True Repentance and Faith).
Therefore the Both are going in the same dirrection and are indeed intertwined and not opposite, as our Armenian and Pelagian friends would suggest.
And YES, this does NOT make ANY sense to a Natural (UNREGENRATED) Man. Nor will it, I mean go and tell people in your Street Evangelism that they MUST repent and Trust in Jesus and that the Law of God requires that the MUST LOve Him and ALL their fellow human beings… You will be surprised to find that few people wil respond favourably.
Just think about it, UNREGENERATED? What does that mean?
And as we know, when the Scripture speaks of Free Will, it has only limitations placed upon it; it does not glorify our HUMAN ABILITY or CAPACITY, contrary it condemns our human will and makes it clear in all cases that we are INCAPABLE of godliness apart from the Spirit’s rebirth and making the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. I mean how do WE make a heart of stone into flesh? HOW?
Free will is ONLY as free as much as it is LIMITED by the nature of SIN within us and we know this from:
1) Forensic personal evidence and experience; that the heart is deceiptful above ALL ELSE; and DESPERATELY WICKED, and that the thoughts and intents thereof are ONLY evil CONTINUALLY (Go on be honest and let us humble ourselves as mere mortal sinners).
2) Since our desires and lusts are so strong that we are rightly said to be in BONDAGE and ENSALVED to our OWN passions and sins. We honestly cannot be seriously thinking that we do NOT DESERVE the WRATH of God, or that we can cliam to PURELY and PROPERLY BE WORSHIPPING and SERVING HIM; WITH ALL OUR HEART, SOUL, MIND and STRENGTH CONTINUALLY; as is the charge of the Law both in Christ and from the start of the revelation of YAHWEH in His chosen people of old, even in Adam and Eve.
3) What shall we be saved from, IF WE CAN HELP OURSELVES?
A drowning man who is incapable of swimming and needs someone to SAVE him, surely can make it to shore or a lifeboy himself, he does not need a saviour, he just needs sone help (Arminianism). But we who have lost the ability to move our limbs (Dead in sins and trespasses of our own), need Someone to come into the waters of death, to snatch us up out of the waters, to intervene and swim for us… (This Saviour is the Anointed of YAHWEH) and His power is with the Helper, the Spirit who intervenes for us, awhich He continues to intervene for us as High Priest, Advocate and Mediator.
What use would we have of such offices IF we would be able to get out of such a dreadful state of death?
Therfore reading the Scriptures in it’s complete and whole context as One Unit is very important, as it cuts of reasoning and brings forth the godness and power of God in salvation.
Just think about it; if you COULD deny Christ and have the power to deny Him SIMPLY by your mere will; YOU HAVE BECOME MORE POWERFUL than Him, which is what Satan proposed he would do… O foolish Lucifer.
I am glad that He sees fit to do JUSTICE and MERCY not denying the one for the other.
“Simply to Thy Cross I cling”
-Rock of Ages (Augustus Montague Toplady)
The problem with the Sunday School teacher was not primarily a question of arminianism or calvanism. THE PROBLEM WAS HE DID NOT KNOW HIS BIBLE AND ANSWERED A QUESTION BASED UPON HIS OWN LOGIC. If he had been a calvanist and someone would have asked “Why pray for someone to be saved if God has predestinated those who will be saved?” and he in his own logic had answered and said you are right (as many, many do) and he never took prayer requests for the unsaved souls again he would have been just as wrong.
We pray for lost souls and we witness to lost souls because we are commanded to do so in the word of God. The scripture you referred to, Romans 10:1, is a perfect example of this.
I have found that many times people who take a stand against arminianism or calvanism they usually take that stand based upon faulty conclusions they draw from their own faulty logic.
“One of the things that first got me thinking seriously about the sovereignty of God was an incident in a college Sunday School class, in a Southern Baptist Church, in Durant, OK…”
This explains a whole lot. Living in Durant will turn anyone into a Calvinist! You have to believe that “God will work all to good”, otherwise, you’ll end up in deep depression, or, even worse, migrating to Texas.
I’m thankful God chose to redeem you from a faulty theology before either of those things occurred…
Shawn,
Many of us in Texas think that the Border Patrol has been guarding the wrong river lo these many years
Morris
Morris,
spoken like a true Texan.
Bill Toothman – yes, exactly what I was thinking.