What About Free Will? | Apologia Radio Highlight

The Impossibility of Salvation Apart from God’s Sovereignty

Luke 1 37, for nothing will be impossible with God. It's in one of his verses that we all go, yay, name into that verse.

Yeah.

And then we...

It's kind of a Christian cliche almost.

It becomes a cliche, yeah, where we'll say that's true, but then we don't actually believe it with our soteriology. We're like, well, you know, God can't mess with his free will. Like, you know, God could really just want so badly to save him, but he just can't.

Yeah.

Why?

Because he's got all these restrictions of the will of man and like man's ability to thwart his purpose is like, nothing's impossible with him.

Right.

Nothing's impossible.

God’s Sovereignty Over Evil, Joseph, and the Preservation of the Messiah

Um, Lamentations 3 37, who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord has commanded it, is it not from the mouth of the most high that good and bad come? Or Acts 4 27, for truly in this city, there were gathered together against your holy servant, Jesus, whom you anointed both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

So even the plan of redemption, the murder of Jesus.

The murder of Jesus.

God is sovereign.

Talk about that. Cause that's, that's a key one. Cause we talk about the sovereignty of God with the will of man, good and evil. That's what trips people up, but scripture deals with it.

It holds it together, um, without eliminating the will and responsibility of man, cause you read that text and you have different characters present there. You have Herod, you have Pontius Pilate, you have the Gentiles along with the people of Israel.

Those are all different parties. Those are all different groups. Those are all different motivations. Those are all different people making different choices. And then over the top of that, underneath the blanket of God's overruling power, he takes all of that, allows it to play out of course, but his hand is upon it to accomplish exactly what he intended to occur and you see the same idea at present in the story of Joseph, the narrative in Genesis 50.

Joseph says to his brothers, you know, you meant this for evil against me, but God meant it for good.

And what was the, what was, what was, this is good to talk about this, flesh this out for everybody, cause that's a key issue of the sovereignty of God, even over the evil that happens in the world. What kind of evil was meant, was, was, was in the life of Joseph and his experience that they did, that God had decreed to allow for his purposes, which were good, what, what kind of evil things?

So there was malice in their hearts towards him. They disrobed him, threw him in a pit. And then his brother, one of them, I think it was Ruben comes to a sense of say, wait, no, let's, let's not kill him.

So even the restraining hand of God upon his heart, that moment, his emotions is just like, you know what? No, let's not do this.

He's our brother.

Yeah.

Let's sell them into slavery. Even the restraint again, that's maybe what's not talked about enough with the sovereignty of God is his actually his restraint of man, not just rushing headlong into evil, but God actually holding man back from his, from the evil that he could demonstrate the evil, the lengths of depravity that he could sink into God, holding him back from that restraining his hand so that Joseph would survive, go on to be mistreated, put in prison, put in a dungeon, and then end up as the second most powerful man in Egypt.

So that the seed of the Messiah could be preserved in the preservation of the people of Israel and Joseph's lineage.

He says, God sent me here to preserve many people alive.

Yes.

And so he doesn't just save his people, but Egypt as well.

Right.

There's blessings even in all that.

They benefited from that.

Because Joseph was there.

And from that salvation comes, you know, in Genesis 49, the, the line of the tribe of Judah, right?

Jesus.

And so I say that to bring it back to Acts 4 .27, because what do we have in Acts 4 .27? The apostles marveling at the reality that the nations, the rulers of this earth took counsel together, they conspired against the Lord and against his anointed, and he applies that to this passage, Acts 4, where he's saying, Herod, Pontius Pilate, the nation of Israel, the Gentiles, everybody had different motivations, all these conspiring forces working together, and what did that accomplish?

What they meant for evil, God meant for the ultimate good, which was the murder of Jesus on the cross, so that God would preserve his people.

Right.

It's a, it's a beautiful story, but it's his overarching purpose.

And I think the important thing about that particular reference that you bring up is all those people that you mentioned that have all those different motivations gathered together against Jesus. They wanted to kill Jesus.

Yeah.

They weren't being made to do it.

And a matter of fact, you mentioned the restraining hand of God.

Yeah.

It says the peoples of Israel, right? They were involved in having the Messiah crucified. I mean, they say, crucify him, crucify him. We have no King, but Caesar, blah, blah, blah.

His blood be on us and our children.

His blood be on us and our children. They just asked for it. Right.

Yeah.

But you mentioned the restraining hand of God, there the hand of God wasn't restrained. They were able to get the son of man because Jesus says, I'm going willingly. No one takes my life from me. I give, I laid down a mail and a cord.

This is why I came.

But before that in the life and ministry of Jesus, you see the instances where they were trying to kill him. They pick up stones to kill him. There's times where he even has escapes from their midst because they want him.

Dead.

Like they are desperate to take his life before the crucifixion and each and every single time the sovereign hand of God stops them, doesn't allow it.

Why?

Because Jesus says, it's not my time.

Yeah.

Right.

No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord. It's when I say you will be permitted to do evil to me when I say, when it's my time, my purpose. And that's exactly what took place in the life of Jesus is that God restrains their evil, holds them back.

And then he goes, okay, for my purpose, I'll unleash it now. Now you can do it for my purpose. But the point is, is those, those covenant breaking Jews, because the followers of.

Jesus are all Jewish, right?

And the authors of their new Testament, they're Jewish. But those covenant breaking Jews that killed Jesus, they really wanted him dead long before the crucifixion. They hated Jesus. They conspire and pull together false witnesses against him in court.

How, how awful is that? Like to literally go, Hey, will you lie in court against this guy?

These guys are desperate.

We hate him so badly.

I mean, everybody should be looking around going, this is getting kind of nuts, guys. Like we're supposed to be Torah, Torah abiding Jews here. And you're pulling together false witnesses.

It's malice.

You're supposed to be leaders.

Yeah.

And, but you know, one more interesting thing. Think about this. Have you thought about this? Cause this is compelling to me. So you have the example of like the restraining hand of God. In the story of Joseph that you just brought up where like Reuben comes to his senses and goes, let's not kill him.

He's our own flesh.

Like he's our brother.

And God restrains, but he only restrains like to get Joseph into slavery. He's like, restrain him so I can get him into slavery where now the wife is going to say he tries to rape her and he'll be thrown into a dungeon.

It just gets worse from there. But you see the restraining hand of God. And then that Joseph says like, you meant evil against me. God meant it for good. But have you ever thought about this? That in the conflict with Pharaoh, Pharaoh's told to let my people go.

And he says like, who is this? Who's Yahweh?

Who's Yahweh?

That I should listen to him kind of a thing. And what's interesting is that now the plagues start coming in and they're like demonstrating that God's a true God and the Egyptian gods are all false gods.

That he's sovereign, which is another way of expressing his rulership, right? He's king.

Yeah.

The frog God.

Pharaoh's not God. Pharaoh's not the king.

All the Egyptian frog God stuff is not keeping the frogs out. The God over the waters can't stop the blood, all that stuff. But here's an interesting thought. There's a restraining hand of God where God restrains people from the evil that they really want to do, right?

No, he's like, no, you're not going to do that only for my purposes. And then there's a moment where actually it says God hardens Pharaoh's heart.

Yeah.

And you're like, but Pharaoh is already kind of hard, right? He's already a pagan. He's already like enslaving the people of God. He's already saying no. And then it says that God actually adds a judicial hardening to Pharaoh.

He hardens his heart so that God would display his power over the Egyptian gods. But it's interesting because in a moment like that, Pharaoh is such a defiant, rebellious creature set on even saving his own skin that with the plagues of Egypt coming in, he would have let Israel go to save his own skin, but God hardens his heart so he'll continue to be stubborn so that God can display his glory.

And so even if Pharaoh would have tried to save his own skin, God's like, no, you're going to be, I'm going to let, I'm going to unleash you. I'm going to make you, I'm going to make you as hard as you need to be for my purposes and my power.

So there's times where God will actually harden someone's heart against their own self-preservation because he's like, I'm going to display my power and glory over your sinful rebellion. I'm going to let it get as bad as it really is.

I'm going to harden you judicially so that my power will be shown in you.

How offensive to the sensibilities of natural man. I mean, it is, it's a, it's a, it's offensive.