Predestination & Election

And welcome to The Dividing Line this Saturday afternoon. My name is James White, along with me Mike Beliveau, the president of Alpha Omega Ministries. And this afternoon we are addressing a subject that a lot of people have a lot of questions about, and that is the subjects of predestination and election.

What does the Bible say about those subjects? How can we understand this difficult topic? That's what we'll be talking about this afternoon. We invite you to take your Bible and a piece of paper and come along with us as we examine the subject of predestination and election.

Almost every church group that I know of has some doctrine of predestination and election. Now what it says is always a good question, but every church group has to address the subject because the terms predestination and election occur rather frequently in the New Testament.

Hence, we obviously cannot skip over them. We cannot fly by them hoping that no one will notice that they're there. We cannot delete them out of the Bible because to do so would mean to remove a great deal of Jesus' teaching in the Gospel of John and other passages like in Matthew 11.

It would be to wipe out Paul, the first chapter of Ephesians, the eighth and ninth chapters of Romans, and to do a great injustice to the entire teaching of the Scripture concerning the sovereignty of God and his role in salvation.

Unfortunately I can't think of any other topic that has been made more of a football by people than the subject of predestination and election. There are a number of reasons for this. I think one of the main reasons is the fact that we as human beings do not like the idea that God has any control in this world other than that little bit that we'd like to allow him to have.

A sovereign God is extremely far removed from the vast majority of humanity. They don't mind, as C .H. Spurgeon put it, if God is in his almonery giving out gifts and alms and things like that, or if God is in his workshop creating stars and planets.

And things like that.

But once God gets on his throne and starts acting like a sovereign ruler of the universe, which the Bible clearly says that he is, and once we as Christians start proclaiming the sovereignty of God and the fact that he has a perfect right to do with his creation what he sees fit, well then everything breaks loose and everyone starts crying, treason, treason, treason, and everything falls apart from there.

The Sovereignty of God as the Starting Point

I think that's the starting point in discussing the subject of predestination and election this afternoon and that is the subject of the sovereignty of God. I feel sorry for those who do not have a sovereign God because I believe it is a natural tenet of theism to believe that God is sovereign.

If you have a God, then he must be sovereign or he is not a God. I think you need to listen to what I just said there because it's extremely important. God in his very nature must be sovereign. He must be in control of all things or he is not God.

It is impossible to have a God who is only in control of a small portion of his universe. That is not a true deity, that's just simply like us, a man who only has limited control as God is God and God is sovereign.

In the 135th Psalm, for example, we read, I know that the Lord is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods. The Lord does whatever pleases him in the heavens and on the earth and the seas and all their depths.

It is very clear from the scriptures that God is in charge. For example, in the book of Proverbs, we read many Proverbs that would clearly show this. For example, in the 16th chapter of the Proverbs, you have a number of these, such as, for example, verse 9 of Proverbs chapter 16, in his heart, a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.

Here we see the sovereignty of God involved even in a man's life, that God is the one who knows the beginning and the end, the beginning from the end. He is the one who has sovereignly decided what will and what will not take place and he is in charge.

Now this, of course, begins a thinking about a lot of subjects, such as the subject of evil and things like that, which we will attempt to address as we go along. But I don't think that we can get into the subject of predestination and election without first letting our listeners know that the very presupposition from which we are working is that God is sovereign, God can do what God wills to do, he can work in the way that he wishes to work, and that we believe that the scriptures abundantly point out that God will work out his purpose whether man likes it or not.

And when we look at some of the passages, for example, in the 9th chapter of Romans, the Bible will directly and clearly state just that fact, that God will do what God.

Will do.

And it is not up to us to argue about it one way or another.

Arthur W. Pink in Gleaming in the Godhead said, God does as he pleases, only as he pleases, always as he pleases, none can thwart him, none can hinder him.

That's true. And if you don't have a God who does what he pleases, I feel sorry for those who have an idea of deity as a grandfather sitting up there who is just sitting there attempting, just trying to keep up with mankind, reacting to sovereign man's desires for a servant God.

And even at the same time, if we allow his sovereign rule, thereby we automatically think he's going to, you know, he sits up, ha ha ha, boy am I going to get him, and just be able to unrighteously do anything he wants.

Yet if you look at the 97th Psalm, verse 2, it says, Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne. And so his love is pure and his motives are pure. He's not up there as a wicked man thinking, what can I do to them next?

Not that kind of an attitude at all.

Certainly not.

And the God of this universe, the God of the Bible, is a merciful and just God. You cannot have one or the other, you cannot just simply be love and mercy. He must also be just and righteous and true.

And we need to remember that in looking at the nature of God and how he exists. Now part of the reason that mankind decries the sovereignty of God is the fact that we believe in the sovereignty of man.

That is, we like the idea that man is in control of his own life, that man is unhindered, unaffected by anything outside of himself, and that we are completely sovereign over what we do. That of course is not true.

Man is not sovereign. We are controlled by many things. Even in a free nation like the United States of America, neither one of us is a sovereign individual who can make any rules, go as fast as he wants down the highway, go any direction he wants on the highway, do anything he wants legally or any other way.

We are not sovereign. We are under rule, under the rule of government, under the rule of morality, ethics, many things such as this.

As R .C.

Sproul says in his book, Chosen by God, which is an excellent book that I would suggest and probably will suggest more than once during the program today for people to pick up. He says in there that God is free, I am free, God is more free than I am.

When my freedom runs into God's freedom, I lose. That is a very logical and very biblical statement, that yes, God has made man in his own image. When Adam was created, he had a free will, not an absolutely free will, for Adam could not will to fly, could not will to be outside the realm of time, could not will to create.

There are many things that were beyond his will, but he had the freedom of choice any which direction. When man fell, man fell into sin, he died spiritually, and the Bible says he came under the dominion of Satan and the power of sin, that sin and death rule as Lord over man, and it cannot be said biblically that an unregenerate man has a truly free will.

What the Bible says is that an unregenerate man is under condemnation of sin, is under the power of sin, and is spiritually dead. This we see, for example, very clearly in the second chapter of Ephesians, verses one through four, and I'm reading from the New International Version, says, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is not at work and those who are disobedient.

All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. So Paul says that before Christ, before regeneration, we were dead in sin, we were dead in our trespasses.

Now I think that this is probably one of the key elements, aside from the sovereignty of God, in understanding predestination and election. One must answer the question, is one dead in sin or is one wounded by sin?

This is a big difference. The early church believed that man was dead in sin, and it was not until Pope Gregory came along and decided that sin was a disease that afflicted man, but did not kill man, that we had Pelagius and the semi-Pelagian heresy and things like this.

And so one must ask oneself the question, do I believe that sin kills? If you don't believe that sin kills, then you're obviously not going to believe in predestination and election, because man is then spiritually alive and man can make spiritual decisions.

But if you believe, as Ephesians chapter 2 says, that man is dead in his sins, that is going to affect what you believe concerning the role of God in salvation and the role of man in salvation. For if you know anything about dead people, dead people rarely do many things.

I've talked about it before, but I'm glad I had the experience. A couple of years ago at Grand Canyon College, I gave a lot of demonstrations on the cadavers there. Grand Canyon is one of the few places that has cadavers, dead bodies laying around, you.

Might say.

And I would frequently give demonstrations of body parts and functions, anatomy and physiology, on these cadavers to high school students as they came through as I was a senior biology student. And so I could do anything I wanted to.

To those two cadavers, we had a male and a female. I could pull off the chest and I could stick my fingers through the heart and I could pull out the intestines and split open the kidneys and do all sorts of wonderful and crazy things to this body.

And you know what?

It never reacted.

Why?

Because it was dead. Dead bodies don't react to anything. They must be made alive before they can react. And this is something that we must think about when we start talking about the subject of salvation.

Are we attempting to treat unregenerate, spiritually dead people like they are actually spiritually.

Alive?

Are we placing the responsibility for choosing salvation in the hands of a spiritually dead.

Person?

I could have given that cadaver all the choices in the world about whether he wanted to come alive again. But he couldn't choose to come alive again. He was dead. He would have to be made alive before he could choose to be made alive.

And this is a very clear illustration that Paul uses of the spiritual condition of the man before Christ.

John MacArthur, I think, really summed it up quite well in his commentary on Ephesians. He says, quote, man does not become spiritually dead because he sins, he is spiritually dead because by nature he is sinful.

His condition has nothing to do with the way he lives, it has to do with the fact that he is dead while he is alive. He is spiritually dead while being physically alive. Because he is dead to God, he is dead to spiritual life, truth, righteousness, inner peace and happiness and ultimately to every other good thing.

That's true. Now, if a person accepts this idea that man is dead in sin, as the Bible clearly presents it, then the rest of the points that follow along relevant to the doctrine of salvation and pre-estimation and election will make themselves very clear.

For example, what we're going to do, and it's about 16 minutes after 3, what we're going to do is begin looking at some, not certainly all because it would take us the rest of the afternoon to do so, but some of the clearest passages in the scriptures that teach the doctrine of election and pre-destination.

And then we will deal with the many problems and questions that automatically come up in people's minds when these things are presented. So let's start with one of the clearest passages, and that is the first chapter of the book of Ephesians, which must be deleted from someone's Bible for them to reject the idea that election and pre-estimation is present within the scriptures.

But the first chapter of Ephesians, verses 3 -12, listen to what it has to say. It says, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the one He loves.

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace, He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.

In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will, in order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory.

Now, if you listen closely, you heard a number of words in there, such as chose, predestined. These things are important words that we will be looking at and seeing in many other passages. But notice that when he starts off this whole passage in the book of Ephesians about the subject of salvation, he begins with the sovereignty of God and salvation.

He begins with where we always much start when we talk about salvation, and that is the fact that God is the author of salvation. God is the active mover in salvation, and any salvation plan that does not have God as its source and as its sole foundation is not a salvation system that comes from the.

Bible.

We're going to take a break and come back and look at, for example, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. If you want to be turning there during the break, we'll be looking at that, and we'll be back on the dividing line right after this.

This afternoon, my name is James White, along with me, Mike Beliveau. We're looking at the subject of predestination and election from the basis of the scriptures. We had just looked at the first chapter of Ephesians.

We're now looking at the second chapter, the 13th verse of 2 Thessalonians, where Paul says, but we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning, God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.

Notice that God chose them to be saved from the beginning through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. Then in verse 14 says, he called you to this through our gospel. The proclamation of the gospel is the instrument by which this calling was made alive to the hearts of these individuals who had been chosen from the beginning by God to receive salvation.

One of the things, too, you must note, in fact, is that it is not for sanctification, but it is through sanctification of the Spirit. It's just so many people think that it's the other way around, through the sanctification work of the Spirit.

So it's not just simply being called to be sanctified, it's through the sanctifying work of the Spirit.

Right.

So the Spirit is the one who is involved in the actual salvation process and is sovereign.

In that.

In fact, you had just mentioned a passage in the book of Acts. It's all through the book of Acts. I couldn't believe the number of places that the book of Acts presented us. In fact, it's interesting.

Acts 2 .38 is a passage that many who believe in baptismal regeneration like to throw out. But the very next verse says, the promise is for you and your children, for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call.

Now, it's interesting that someone could believe that baptism causes regeneration because desiring to be baptized is a spiritual thing, and what they're saying is a natural person could desire a spiritual thing, which absolutely makes no sense at all.

It's the same thing with repentance. This just struck me just recently, and I like filling these things out and letting Christians think about them. That's the way I like to do things, and let them come to their own conclusions.

But the word repentance is the Greek term metanoia, which means a changing of the mind. Now, we like to say that if you'll repent, if you'll somehow put God in your debt by doing this nice spiritual thing of repenting, then God will do this, this, and this.

But of course, they presuppose that you have to do this before God will do something. The question that struck my mind was, metanoia means a change of the mind. Now, according to the eighth chapter of Romans, the mind that is according to the flesh, the unregenerate mind, the natural mind, is an enemy of God and cannot do anything that is pleasing to God.

Now, repentance would obviously be pleasing to God, but Romans 8 says the natural mind cannot please God and is an enemy to God. So obviously, before the natural mind can metanoia, can change, can repent, it must be changed from a natural mind into what kind of a mind?

A spiritual mind.

Regeneration must take place first.

Regeneration must take place, and that is the sanctifying work of the Spirit spoken of over in 2 Thessalonians 2 .13, as well as here in Acts 2, where he talks about the Lord our God will call them.

And again, notice the order of the work. God is doing it, your involvement comes in only afterwards that God has done something.

First.

It's not the other way around.

Exactly. Because it is the eternal choice of God. In the 48th verse of the 13th chapter of Acts, we read, When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord, and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.

Now listen to what it's saying. All who were appointed for eternal life believed. Now when we go out and evangelize, and a lot of people say, well, if it's a predestination election, then why should we evangelize?

I think you've got a really wild and crazy idea. If you think evangelization, you're supposed to go out there and save people. God saves people. Don't you dare try to save somebody. You'll mess it up, man.

I mean, that is bad news. I evangelize because I want to glorify my Lord Jesus Christ, I want to be obedient to him, and he's given me the glorious opportunity of being involved with it. If that's not your reason, you've got the wrong reason, biblically.

But the point, again, is when we go out and evangelize on the basis of Acts 13, 48, and numerous other passages we haven't even gotten to yet, it is very clear that when we proclaim the message, we proclaim it to all because we do not know who the elect are and who they.

Are not.

We proclaim it to all. And all will be held responsible for that decision that they make. But we also know that the only ones who are going to respond to the call of God are those whom God has chosen.

Now, why is that? This is another vital point. You're saying, this is the vital point, you know. Well, there's 12 different vital points. Why is it? Why is it that when we talk about predestination election, we say that only the elect will.

Respond?

See, this is where you get into the real nitty gritty. People like to say, well, I just think it's up to man to respond. I think God just simply makes salvation available to everybody, and it's up to you to respond one way or the other.

That's the most popular viewpoint in America right now. It is not representative of where Christianity has been since the Reformation, okay? A lot of Christians today think that's true. But they would be surprised to find out that Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Edwards and Spurgeon and Warfield and all the others would say, what are you talking about?

You've forgotten God in this whole thing.

Kind of a vital part of the salvation plan.

Very, very vital part. I say this based on Romans chapter 3 verses 10 through 11, a very, very important passage that few of those who put salvation in the hands of man can deal with. It says in Romans chapter 3 verses 10 through 11, as it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one, there is none who understands, no one who seeks God.

There is none who seeks after God,. I think it's NAS or close to St. James version. Now that's the important point. There is none who seeks after God. Now, I stand by that. If there are none who seeks after God, then obviously salvation must be God's work.

Because as you know in R .C. Sproul's book, Chosen by God, he goes through four listings of the four possibilities that are present relevant to the idea of the offering of salvation.

To man.

Four possibilities, and it goes like this. Number one is, God could decide to provide no opportunity for anyone to be saved. I mean, he's sovereign, he could do that. He'd be perfectly fine to do that because we're the ones who walked away from him.

He could decide not to save anybody. And we need to remember that was a possibility at one time. Anything beyond that is pure mercy and grace. Number two, God could provide an opportunity for all to be saved.

And this, of course, is the most popular viewpoint of people today. Third, God could intervene directly and ensure the salvation of all people. This is known as universalism. There are people who believe that God's going to save everybody.

But of course, it's not extremely biblical because you talk about things like hell and punishment and things like that. And the fourth is, God could intervene directly and ensure the salvation of some people.

And that's what I'm saying. Now, most of our audience, and I'm sure that there are some who would go both directions on number one and number three, but most of our audience will either take two or four.

Probably most will take two. So the question has to be asked, which is either biblical and which is more loving? One says God offers it to everybody. But the problem is, if that's all God does, he offers it to everybody and says, here it is, it's up to you, how many are going to accept it?

There's none that's going to choose.

The massive goose egg.

Why?

Because the natural mind is at enmity with God, cannot please God. Man is unreconcilable to God outside of God's sovereign work.

He's dead in his sin.

He's dead in his sin. A dead man cannot respond to a spiritual offer. And Romans 3, verse 11 says, there is none who seeks after God.

How many times do we hear, but what about all the people that are out there seeking after God?

I mean, my normal response to that is, I think they're seeking after the benefits of God without God. Because I don't think that an unregenerate man truly seeks after a holy, righteous God. Because man knows in his innermost being that he is a sinner.

And the last thing on earth that a sinful man is going to seek after is a holy God. Like Isaiah saw in his temple vision in the sixth chapter of Isaiah. And so obviously, I reject that idea. So this is important.

It is important that man is unable to choose without God first working in him. Because most of the people who reject the sovereignty of God in salvation reject it on the basis of, well, that means man has no freedom.

You're right.

Man doesn't have any freedom when he's dead in sin and is in slavery to sin. When we talk about the idea of free will, okay, we need to define what we're talking about there. No one believes that man is completely free to make his own choices of anything he wants.

Obviously, there are restrictions. Adam had a free will as to good and evil. When he fell, he lost that because he fell into the power of sin. Jesus Christ had a free will because he was the second Adam and he was not under the sin nature.

Christians have a free will in that we are now, again, spiritually alive. But the unregenerate person does not. Show me biblically where it says that. Now, then the question comes up. Well, that means God's forcing people to do something they don't want to do.

That's not true. That's not true. Now, I can't go through everything Jonathan Edwards said in the freedom of the will or what Luther said in the bondage of the will. And these are great Christian classics that we should all at least be somewhat familiar with.

But the point is this. The unregenerate man does not want heaven.

That's right. He only chooses what is within his realm, his desires. And his desires and his sins are not to come under the conviction and the power of an omnipotent and holy God.

Exactly.

That's the point. The will of man, our decisions are determined by our choices, our desires. Our decisions are determined by our desires. Whatever we desire more strongly at one time is what we are going to choose.

Now, a man who is in sin is going to choose what his desires drive him to choose. And that is the darkness. It is never the light. Men are free from the light because it exposes their sin. Now, when God in his sovereignty moves in regeneration and creates spiritual life in an individual, then the desires of the spiritualized individual, the regenerated individual, are different than the desires of the sinful man.

And hence the choices, the will of that individual is different than the will of the dead person, spiritually speaking. And this is how the Bible presents this idea of the sovereignty of God. You see, people like to think the idea of predestination and election is unloving and nasty and horrible and ungracious.

But the point is, if God did not elect, if God did not work in predestination, if God did not choose and God did not sovereignly move in people's lives, there would be no salvation because we would not choose it.

So the most loving thing in the world is the fact that in God's grace, he reaches down and he saves. Now you say, why doesn't he save all? I don't know why he doesn't save all. He has a purpose.

Right, and the thing is, the Bible doesn't say why he doesn't save all, and it's none of our business. That's the thing.

And people go, well, that's not fair. Again, Sproul points out that we all receive one of two things. We either receive justice. Man in his sin receives justice.

His due reward.

His due reward. Or we receive mercy. Nobody receives injustice, unfairness. If we wanted everything to be just, then we would all receive the just desserts of our sin. But nobody wants it to be just.

No, no.

No, we want mercy. But where do we get off then demanding of God that he show mercy to everyone? I mean, he does show a level of mercy to all. I mean, as the Bible says, the wage of sin is death. And the first time that every one of us sinned, we didn't die.

So obviously, God is withholding that immediate physical death. He's showing mercy to us. In the book of Luke, Jesus even said, God shows mercy to the unrighteous and the ungrateful. All mankind receives some level of mercy.

So even them, that mercy does not deserve anything else. But in the end, in the final analysis, a person either receives justice or receives mercy. And we cannot complain because of how many or how few God decides to show his mercy to.

That would be like the governor pardoning someone, and we getting all mad at him because he didn't pardon everybody on death row. That's ridiculous. I mean, he didn't have to pardon anybody. They were found guilty.

They were condemned. They were going to die. It was their just desserts. And he, in his mercy, decides to pardon a certain individual. And can you imagine riots breaking out because he doesn't pardon everybody on death row?

I mean, that's silly. But that's exactly what the objections to the sovereignty of God and salvation eventually amount to.

You hit it right on the head when you said he doesn't have to pardon or he doesn't have to forgive anyone. He could just let them go on and give what they deserve.

But we don't want to give what we deserve.

The end of that is to hell. And we think, oh, that's awful. That's kind of rough. That's a little too much the other side of justice. Yet, what is grace? Grace is a free gift of God. And if we start demanding it, that goes out the window.

It's no longer grace. It's based on works.

I stopped.

I had just started. A couple of the verses on predestination and election jumped into all those objections. Let's look at a number of other passages because we keep speaking of the sovereignty of God and election as a foregone conclusion.

But we need to look at some of these more passages so you can see it. For example, in the 11th chapter of Matthew, verse 27, Jesus says. Now, this is Jesus speaking. This is not Paul. See, people like to throw Paul out the window.

What about Jesus? Jesus said in Matthew 11, verse 27,. Now, the basis of this passage, I think I'm very safe in saying that no man can have a knowledge of God outside of the will of Jesus Christ to reveal him.

We cannot demand a knowledge of God. We cannot say, I know God, but I don't know Jesus Christ. That is a biblical impossibility. Jesus Christ wills to reveal the Father, and it's only to those whom he wills to reveal the Father that the Father is revealed.

Now, this teaching of election and the sovereignty of God and salvation is not foreign to Jesus in any way, shape, or form.

I don't think it's not.

In the 6th chapter of John, we have some excellent references to this because Jesus very clearly presents to us exactly what we're talking about in the 6th chapter of John. In John 6, verse 44, Jesus says,.

Now, it's interesting because the Greek language says no one is able, no one has the ability to come to him.

Why?

Because the whole Bible says man is dead in sin.

You call a dead man and what's he going to do? Is he going to get up and walk over to you? Most likely not.

Every time that I had to just demonstrate to cadavers, I had to go into the room where they were and cart them out. I couldn't go, yo, come over here, you know, Willie and Clara, come on over here and lay down here on the thing and we'll demonstrate to you.

Hold yourself together there so you don't fall apart. They wouldn't get up and do it. I had to go get them.

Why?

Because they were not able to. They were dead. Jesus says no one is able. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. Now, that word to draw is used normally of, for example, casting a net into the water and then drawing the net in.

Dragging it in.

Dragging it in. Now, them fishies don't want to come out of the water because they're going to be turned into filet of fish. They don't want that, okay? But the net goes out, they are taken, and they are drawn in by the Father.

And so, this is what Jesus says in John 6 .44. Then in John 6 .65, he says, he went on to say, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him, has made him able. We must be enabled by God.

So, the question then comes up, and there are some other passages to look at. In fact, that's where we're going now. Many people who I've talked to about this have said, Well, I just believe that God calls everybody.

God enables everybody. And then he leaves it up to you. Now, the enabling, I think very clearly in Scripture, is spiritual life. So, what they're saying is that God regenerates all people and then leaves it up to them.

And obviously, a regenerated individual, according to the Bible, will accept Christ. So, that doesn't make any sense. But we're going to go to the 8th chapter of Romans. We're coming up on a break here.