April 17, 2018 Show with Scott Christensen on “Light Pouring Out of Darkness: How God’s Glory is Magnified in the Face of Evil”

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on the 17th day of April 2018.

I'm delighted to have back as a returning guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Scott Christensen, and he is pastor of Summit Lake Community Church of Mancos, Colorado, and the author of What About Free Will, which was the topic that we addressed the last time

Pastor Scott was on the program with us. Today we are going to be addressing the theme of a yet -to -be -published book by Pastor Scott Christensen, God Willing to be

Published by P &R Publishing, and the theme is, Light Pouring Out of Darkness, How God's Glory is

Magnified in the Face of Evil. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Scott Christensen.

Well, thanks for having me, it's my pleasure to be with you again. And I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away in the event that they'd like to join us on the air with a question about how

God's glory is magnified in the face of evil. Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Well, Pastor Scott, it's been a while since you've been on the show, and our audience, according to my webmaster, has doubled since last year.

And that is not even including the live listeners, it's judging from the number of people downloading the

MP3s off of our website. So there are no doubt going to be a number of people that have never heard of Summit Lake Community Church of Mancos, Colorado before.

So why don't you let our listeners know about that? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if anyone knew that much about us.

We are in a rural part of southwest Colorado near Mesa Verde National Park, and we have a very small congregation, about 60 to 70 people.

And I've been the pastor here for the last 14 years, and it's a great little church.

We're actually growing and seeing people come to faith in Christ, and it's just a great place to live.

Great. What can you tell us about the church theologically? Well, when

I first came to the church, of course, it was quite immature.

There was not a lot of strong expository kind of preaching and teaching.

And so I had a little bit of a struggle the first few years that we were here, but over the course of time,

I have just been preaching through books of the Bible, verse by verse.

I was trained to do that at the Master Seminary where I graduated.

And through that, we've seen our people grow, not only in terms of maturity, but we've seen a number of people come to faith in Christ.

I'm beginning to wrap up a series of messages in the

Book of Romans. I've been in that book for about two and a half years, and we're in chapter 13.

So we've got a few more months ahead of us, working our way through Paul's great epistle to the

Romans. Great. And even though we already addressed this the last time you were on, why don't you give us a summary of what about free will is all about?

Yes. You know, this is obviously a perennial question that Christians of all stripes have asked, you know, what is free will?

Do we have free will? And, you know, I began addressing this question for myself many years ago when

I was a young Christian. I had a friend that began explaining to me how

God chooses believers for salvation. That was a completely strange and foreign idea to me.

I'd never been in a church that had preached that, and so my immediate reaction was, that's not what the

Bible teaches. And, you know, so he really challenged me to think about some passages of Scripture, and it disturbed me for a long, long time.

And then I remember one day I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of Union County College in Cranfield, New Jersey, and I was reading

Romans 9. And nobody can read that passage seriously without being confronted with the reality of God's sovereignty both in judgment and mercy, and it kind of just struck me like a bolt of lightning.

And I said, this has to be true. God is truly sovereign. But from that point on,

I wrestled, well, what does that mean for my choices? And, you know,

I could not abide by the standard definition of free will, which is largely that espoused by Armenians and opentheists, which is known—technically it's known as libertarian free will.

In fact, opentheists often call themselves consistent

Armenians. Yes. In fact, I believe that if you are going to hold to a consistent definition of libertarian free will, it naturally leads to an opentheist position.

I believe that that is the more consistent position to hold to if you're going to hold to libertarian free will.

I agree. That's a huge conundrum for Armenians, because most Armenians do not accept opentheism, and so they have kind of a problem there.

In fact, most Armenians also claim today, in any way, to believe in substitutionary atonement, and they really could not possibly believe in substitutionary atonement unless they were full -blown universalists, believing that everyone would be saved.

Right. Because if Christ died as a substitute for everybody, everybody's going to heaven. That's correct.

Yes, there's a lot of inconsistencies in Armenian theology. I think, on the one hand, they want to hold to things that clearly the

Bible teaches, such as substitutionary atonement, but they cannot hold to those things consistently without denying some other clear teachings of Scripture.

But yes, over the course of the years, you know, as I began to read Calvin and Luther and especially

Jonathan Edwards and those who gave me great help in interpreting those erudite men,

I was able, I think, to be able to kind of distill some of the biblical teaching there in a way that hopefully has been helpful, and so I put all those thoughts together in the book,

What About Free Will?, and PNR was gracious enough to publish that, and it's been pretty successful over the last couple of years since it's been published, and just very pleased with that.

And so my editor asked me, since I deal with this topic of the problem of evil, or the odyssey as it's sometimes called, you know,

I touched on that topic in a significant way in the book, What About Free Will?,

and so they asked me, my publisher asked me to write a full book just on the whole topic of the odyssey and the whole problem of evil, and so that's kind of where I'm at right now.

Great. Well, why don't you explain what the word theodyssey means?

Well, theodyssey is a word that combines the word justice or justification with the word theo, which is theos, which is

God, and so it literally means the justification of God.

But the term arose in the 1700s, or actually the late 1600s, as a way to justify the ways of God in the face of evil.

How can you justify the existence of God if God is primarily the way that the question or the problem is framed, is if you have a

God who is all -powerful and all -good, then why would there be evil in the world?

And so a theodyssey is an attempt to justify that God is, in fact, all -powerful and all -good while there yet exists evil in the world.

So that's where the term originally came from, and so typically it is connected to how do you explain the problem of evil in light of what the

Bible says about who God is. Now, I know that PNR Publishing requested that you write this new book.

Was there a specific reason that they asked you regarding something that has occurred in your life, or did they just enjoy your book?

What about free will so much that they asked you, or how did this come to be put into place here?

Yeah, my editor that I worked with at PNR, who's just a wonderful man, his name is

John Hughes, and just I have built a fantastic friendship with John.

And, you know, he really liked my writing style and my ability to think through some of these issues, and he was particularly impressed with what

I say about the problem of evil in the free will book, which of course is, you know, a central issue when talking about this question of free will, because part of the whole problem with discussions about free will is in what way do we assign moral responsibility, not only to human beings for our actions, but also to God as well.

And so can God be morally culpable for evil in the world if he is sovereign over everything that takes place, which of course

Reformed theologians and biblical scholars have, you know, consistently argued that the

Bible is very clear that God is sovereign over everything. And so does that then mean that he is morally culpable?

How are humans morally culpable for their actions if they don't have libertarian free will?

And so that's one of the key questions when dealing with that whole issue.

And so my editor liked what I had to say about that, and I don't think it's a topic that is commonly addressed in a lot of books.

Of course, there are not a lot of real careful books written about the question of free will.

You find a lot of cursory treatments in it, in different books, but very few books that try to tackle that whole topic head on as I tried to do.

But also what is interesting is that in my research I have found that there really are a lot of Reformed treatments of the question of evil.

And, you know, most of what is standard in terms of the response to the problem of evil among evangelicals and conservative

Bible -believing Christians tends to be the Arminian response to the problem of evil which embraces free will, the libertarian notion of free will.

And so I find that problematic, and so part of my attempt to address this question is to give a

Reformed perspective on how to handle this thorny issue of God and evil.

Well, why don't you lay out the Arminian view first? And of course, we can't cookie -cut

Arminians, we can't broad -brush them, or we shouldn't, I should say, because they're not all identical.

In fact, not all Calvinists are identical either. That's correct. But the thing that is interesting to me is that Arminians find it repugnant that God would be directly involved, in fact, would ordain some of the most monstrous suffering that has ever been experienced by human beings.

And so they rail against Calvinism as having this monstrous God. And yet, they are really not out from the same problem that they think that we have, because there's a reason that their

God in their mind is allowing things to happen. And while in other cases he delivers people or prevents people from actually entering into that depth of suffering.

So they really don't have a place to hide from the same accusations that they hurl against us.

Yes. You know, one of the perhaps most prominent and articulate spokesmen for Arminianism would be a man by the name of Roger Olson, who's written a couple of books on the topic of Arminian theology, and is probably its most faithful articulator in the present day.

And one of the things that he points out with classical Arminianism, going all the way back to Jacob Arminius in the late 16th century, is that Arminianism does not deny that God is fully sovereign in the way that Calvinists would typically define the sovereignty of God.

What classic Arminians say is that God has purposely chosen to limit his sovereignty in order to uphold what

God regards as an important feature of human existence, which is free will.

And the Arminian position on free will basically says that you have a capacity to make an alternative choice to the choice which you made.

So, for example, if a person is confronted with the opportunity to make a good choice, in order for him to have free will, he must have equal opportunity to make the opposite choice.

And so, even in classical Arminianism, even though they affirm a

Calvinistic doctrine of depravity, that all humans are born under the bondage of sin, the way that they typically get around that problem is that they have come up with a doctrine called

Provenient Grace. And the Arminian doctrine of Provenient Grace is

God mitigates the impact of human depravity by giving us this free will.

And so free will basically means that we now have this power that has been granted to us by God in order to make alternative choices.

So that, in essence, our will is not in bondage to sin.

We have the capacity to act in faith in response to the gospel, for example.

And that faith is not really a gift of God, it is a gift of free will.

And, but... Yeah, the irony is that I have heard over and over and over again, those who are opposed to Calvinism, they will say on occasion that, yes, faith is a gift, but you need to accept it.

So, in other words, you need faith to accept faith? Ultimately, what it comes down to, in the way that Arminians would frame this, is that grace,

God's grace is necessary for salvation. And this is why it's important to make sure that we understand the

Arminian position. Because some Calvinists will malign an Arminian and say, well,

Arminians don't believe that salvation is by grace. Well, yes, they do. They believe that grace is necessary for salvation.

In other words, a person cannot exercise saving faith unless God has granted them grace.

But here's the problem. The problem is that the Arminian position says that although God's grace is necessary, it's not sufficient.

What does that mean? It means that in order for us to take advantage of God's grace, we must cooperate with our free will.

Right, and the Roman Catholic takes it a step further. This free will and cooperate with that grace so that salvation becomes synergistic.

What is synergistic? Synergistic is two powers operating together.

So God does His part. He supplies the grace, but then we must do our part through the use of our free will, which has been granted to us by God.

We must do our part to exercise our free will and thereby exercise faith in order to take advantage of this grace.

And so ultimately, salvation depends upon the person who chooses to cooperate with God's grace.

Whereas in the Calvinist position, that is simply not true.

The Bible is clear that apart from the full, sufficient grace of God, no one would ever choose

Christ for salvation because we are dead in our trespasses and sins and incapable of doing anything that pleases

God, according to Paul, Romans 8. And so grace is not only necessary in the biblical definition of grace, it is also sufficient.

It is God's grace that supplies us with the necessary transformation, what we call regeneration, before a person is even capable of exercising faith.

So this is why the Calvinist position often says that regeneration precedes faith. There has to be a change.

There has to be an absolute change that takes place in the heart of an individual before he is capable of making a choice that's pleasing to God, such as exercising saving faith.

And so what this means is that our salvation is ultimately dependent upon God's grace.

God's grace is sufficient for our salvation. Whereas in the

Arminian position, grace is not sufficient. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. We must cooperate with it by exercising our free will.

Now the Arminian will immediately say, well, what are you talking about? Are you saying that men are not responsible for either embracing

Christ and His sacrifice or rejecting Him? Aren't they responsible? How does the biblically knowledgeable Calvinist respond?

Yes, this is an important point, and this is where you get into this question of evil.

How are we moral? You know, if God is ultimately responsible for our salvation and it didn't originate within ourselves, how can we be responsible for that?

And likewise, how can we be responsible for sinful acts that we commit? So the

Arminian position says that moral responsibility or moral culpability is located in the fact that we could have acted differently.

So some people frame the question, ought implies can.

In other words, if we ought to act in a certain way because God commands us to act in a certain way, so we would say that the

Bible commands us to exercise faith in Christ or we cannot be saved. That's true.

We know that that's what the Bible says. Jesus said many times, believe upon me for one's salvation.

So if we ought to do that and yet we cannot do that, well then can we be held responsible?

But that's kind of like saying, suppose that somebody has incurred, say you borrow,

Mary borrows $500 from Jerry and Mary can't pay back the $500 to Jerry.

Does that mean that she's not morally responsible for it? Of course not.

Just because she can't pay a debt doesn't mean that we negate her responsibility to do so.

The fact is that the Bible never locates our moral culpability or our moral responsibility with the fact that we could have acted opposite or with an alternative choice.

Rather, here is where the Bible locates our responsibility. It locates our responsibility in the motives and intentions of our hearts.

For example, Proverbs 16, 2 says, The Lord weighs the motives.

Jeremiah 17, 10 says, I search the heart, I test the mind. If you go back to the flood, why did

God destroy the world with a massive worldwide flood?

Back in Genesis 6, it says, Because every intention of the thoughts of the hearts of men were evil continually.

The Bible consistently locates our moral culpability and the intentions of our hearts.

Not whether or not we could have acted differently. The question is not whether we could have acted differently.

The question is, what did we intend with the actions that we did act with?

In other words, we praise someone not because they could have...

Imagine somebody standing on the side of a swimming pool, and they see someone drowning.

And they jump in and they save that person. Nobody's going to say, well, we praise this guy for saving this drowning person because he could have acted differently.

He could have stood by the side of the swimming pool and not acted.

That isn't how we talk. We say, look at that courage. Look at how much love that person had for this other person who was drowning, and they were willing to jump in to the pool and save them.

We praise them because they did a good deed. They had a good intention there.

Likewise, if they didn't jump in the pool, we blame them because they acted with a poor intention.

And, of course, our whole justice system is based on intent. If you look at questions of murder, is it first -degree murder?

Is it second -degree murder? Third -degree murder? All these things are based on what was the intention of that person who committed the crime.

And that's exactly where the Bible locates our moral culpability, not in whether or not we could have acted otherwise.

And so that's an important distinction, I think, for people to understand. The Bible nowhere locates our culpability in libertarian free will.

It locates our culpability in the intentions of the heart. And because, as people under the curse of Adam's sin, our intentions are only always and ever corrupted when it comes to moral choices.

And as long as we lie under that corruption, all of our intentions are evil.

And therefore, God judges us based on that. 1

Corinthians 4 -5 says that when God brings about judgment, it says He will bring light upon things hidden in darkness and disclose the purposes of the heart.

Right? So what is God judging human beings for? He's judging them based on the purposes of their heart.

What is their desires? What are their intentions? It's the same thing behind Jesus' teaching when

He says, only a bad tree produces bad fruit. Make the tree good and it will produce good fruit.

Well, what does the tree mean? He's talking about the heart. Only a heart that is corrupted is going to produce poisonous fruit.

But if a heart has been changed, if a heart has been transformed, then it's going to no longer produce bad fruit, it's going to produce good fruit.

And so, you know, it also explains why Jesus says that if you have lusted after a woman in your heart, it's as if you've committed adultery, because He locates sin not in our actions, but in our intentions in our heart.

And this is consistently where the Bible locates our culpability. And that totally corresponds with what the

Bible teaches in terms of moral depravity and the necessity for a heart change to take place.

In order for us to truly place our faith in Christ, something has to change within us.

You know, a heart transformation has to take place, and the Bible consistently says that it's the work of regeneration.

That's what it means to be born again. It's to have this seed of new life planted within by the

Holy Spirit that reorients our hearts, reorients our minds.

Whereas before, we were, you know, haters of God, haters of good, slaves to unrighteousness, and now we've become slaves to Christ, Romans 6.

Why? How? Because we have been transformed. We have been made alive together with Christ.

And that speaks of being born again. It speaks of a new nature that has been planted within us.

And so our actions always come from our nature, who we are as human beings.

Out of that nature comes forth the types of intentions that we have for the choices that we make.

In fact, we have to go to a break right now, Scott. So pick up right where you left off about that we act upon the desires of our heart.

And if anybody would like to join us, we do have a couple of people waiting to have their questions asked and answered. In fact,

I forwarded a question to you by Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and he asked,

What are some key verses you would recommend as to God being glorified in the face of evil when communicating with unbelievers?

You could pick up with that question after you finish your thought that you just started here about humans acting upon the desires of their heart.

If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Pastor Scott Christensen.

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We are now back to our discussion with Pastor Scott Christensen and we are discussing a very important theme, a theme that has divided believers for centuries, a theme that has really left many just completely boggled in their minds and trying to comprehend a

God who is all good, all holy, all righteous, perfect, and at the same time,

His glory is magnified in the face of evil. And that's what we're talking about today, the light pouring out of darkness, how

God's glory is magnified in the face of evil. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is ChrisOrnson at gmail .com

if you have a question. And please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

USA and you may remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. And before we go to your answer to Gordy's question in Mechanicsburg, finish that thought that you had there that you were in the middle of when

I had to interrupt you for the commercial break. There are a lot of Arminians, in fact, probably most

Arminians, who think that we as Reformed Christians do not believe that man's will has any freedom at all, and therefore, they think that we are saying that God forces us against our will to sin.

Or, if we're of the elect, He forces us against our will to follow Him. And obviously, that is not true.

We are acting according to our nature, we are acting according to what our desires are, and the only way that a man who is dead in his trespasses and sins can desire to follow

Christ, to repent and cry out upon the name of the Lord and follow Him and become a disciple, the only way that can happen is if he has a heart transplant.

That's correct. Yes, many people assume that, well, if you don't believe in free will, you must not believe that man makes any kind of choices that we're not involved in choosing at all, and nothing could be further from the truth.

You know, often Arminians paint the Calvinistic view as similar to fatalism, and fatalism is a pagan notion, it is not a scriptural notion.

Fatalism basically says, what will be will be, and it doesn't matter what we do.

And that is simply not true. We would not have commands in scripture if God did not expect us to act, to make choices, and the question is, what is the source of those choices?

And when it comes to moral and spiritual choices, you know, our hearts are in bondage, we are in bondage to sin, and, you know, one of the most important things discoveries that I made in trying to sort these issues out for myself is reading

Jonathan Edwards, and essentially he distilled our choices down to the fact that we always choose what we most want to choose.

In other words, we never make a choice that we don't want to choose, we don't want to make.

So, now does that involve coercion? Of course not. There's nothing in scripture that would suggest that though God is sovereign over our choices, that he coerces us against our will to make choices that we don't want to make.

You know, some people even use this sort of language, you know, I came kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God.

You'll hear people say that. A lot of times we understand what that means. People resisted the gospel for many years, and they kicked against the goads, if you will, you know, the language

Paul uses in his conversion. And, you know, but something happened.

You know, a person didn't really come kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God. They may have been kicking and screaming prior to their coming into the kingdom of God, but there came a point where a radical transformation took place in their hearts and their minds, and suddenly they moved from, you know, not desiring

Christ, hating God, loving their sin, to suddenly seeing the beauty and the glory and the wonder of Christ and what he did, and as a result of that, they suddenly now embraced what prior they rejected.

And so they acted fully in accordance with their desires. But the question is, where did those desires come from?

They came as a result of the gracious intervention of God through the work of the Holy Spirit, drawing them to himself.

As Jesus says in John 6, no one comes to the Father lest he be drawn by the

Father. And so there's a work that has to happen. God must graciously intervene in what is otherwise a recalcitrant heart, a rebellious heart, that has no desire for Christ, no desire for salvation, who loves his sin, and who will not seek the glory of God, but will only seek his own glory.

And I think that's one way of defining sin. Sin is seeking our own glory instead of God's glory.

I think that's what Paul means when he says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. God's glory,

God's magnificent, glorious perfections are not in view at all when we are steeped in sin.

Our own glory is what we desire. We desire autonomy, right?

We do not desire to be under God, under his grace, under his demands upon our lives.

And so this change must take place before that can happen. And so the view that I espoused in my book,

What About Free Will, and what I will espouse in this new book, is known as compatibilism.

And compatibilism says that God is sovereign over every choice that humans make, but this does not negate their participation in what happens.

And so you can say that every decision that a human makes has a dual explanation.

God not only ordained or decreed that that choice would happen, but they themselves also made that choice.

Not in some libertarian free will sense, but in the sense that we always choose according to our desires, and our desires are always in accordance with our nature.

And so until our nature has been transformed, we cannot act in any other way.

It's not possible to act against what you desire to do, and what you desire to do is always in accordance with what your base nature is as a human being.

And so that has to be changed. Now people ask the question, how does this get

God off the hook then for evil? Yeah, especially when we have, like for instance in James 1, verse 13, let no one being tempted say,

I am being tempted by God, for God is unable to be tempted by evils, and he himself tempts no one.

So one might think, if they are not familiar with the whole counsel of God, that the only way that God can be sovereign over evil acts of evil men is that he tempts them to do these things.

But obviously we have in the case with Judas, we see that the devil entered him.

It wasn't God that tempted him. But at the same time, God foreordained what

Judas did, because without what Judas did, the redemption of his people could not have occurred.

Yes, yes. The redemption of Christ's people could not have occurred. So going back to the

James passage, it is clear from James that God cannot be tempted by sin, because there is no character in God that would compel him to act in any evil way.

Right? The baseline that every Christian agrees with, every Orthodox Christian is going to agree that God is completely holy and righteous.

There is no sin within him. Both Calvinists and Arminians, we can agree on that. And that's what

James is saying. The reason why God cannot be tempted, he cannot tempt the divine nature. Now, Jesus was tempted in his human nature, but not in his divine nature.

In his divine nature, he cannot be tempted, because God cannot be tempted. And I think that it's probably important to clarify what that means, because there are people, in fact,

I've heard very famous, at least one very famous, highly respected

Christian author and radio personality, I could not believe that this person said this, but he actually said that Jesus wanted to sin, but he never yielded to that temptation.

Well, wanting to sin is sin. Yes, that's where some of this confusion comes in.

The word tempt. Some people think that means you're mulling it over in your mind, and you're like, hmm, maybe

I should do that. Because that's our modern usage of the word tempt. Yeah, and there certainly may be some level of mystery in trying to understand what it meant for Jesus in his human nature to be tempted, but it certainly did not mean that he wanted to do something and then resisted that.

If you've come to that place, then you've already sinned. Because if you want to sleep with a woman who is not your wife, you have already committed adultery with her in your mind.

And so Jesus would refute that very notion by his teaching. And so however we define what it looks like for Jesus to be tempted, we know that in his divine nature that was not possible.

You know, because God being pure in his holy character simply cannot entertain evil thoughts.

It's impossible. And therefore if God cannot entertain evil thoughts, it's not possible for God to tempt other people to entertain evil thoughts.

However, that is far different than saying that God can decree that evil takes place.

And we know that from Scripture. I mean, Isaiah 45, 7 says, I form light and create darkness.

I make well -being and create calamity. It's interesting, the words that Isaiah uses in that passage, the word create is in fact the word bara, which is only used of God in the

Old Testament. It's the same word that's used in Genesis 1 -1, which is God, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The word calamity is a standard Hebrew word for evil. Lamentations 3, 37 -38 says,

Who has spoken and it has not come to pass unless the Lord has commanded it. Is not from the mouth of the

Most High, that which goes forth from the mouth of the Most High both good and bad?

Good, obviously, and bad being the word for evil. You know,

Job, when he was confronted by his wife, after having experienced all the calamity in his life, she says, why don't you just curse

God and die, right? She obviously had the gift of encouragement. There are different interpretations of that.

I've heard some people say that she was being merciful or compassionate,

I should say, toward him. To put him out of his misery, he should curse God so that he would be killed.

Obviously, that's not a unified interpretation. Right, but to me what's interesting, we can certainly debate what her motive was and what she said, but Job's response to her,

I think, is absolutely fascinating. He says, shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?

Now here's the thing. If somebody reads that and they're thinking, wait a minute, what is Job saying there?

Is he saying that somehow God caused this evil to come upon him? That doesn't seem right.

Boy, he's attributing moral culpability to God. Job is, boy, he needs to get right.

He's saying something wrong there. But then you notice, after he makes that statement, the inspired author of Job says this, in all of this,

Job did not sin. I find that fascinating because it indicates to us that our natural reaction to that kind of a statement is, oh, that can't be,

Job is attributing evil to God. So we have these, you know, all these passages in Scripture, we could multiply these passages.

But they point to a real tension. And I think

Job captures that tension. You know, that God is sovereign over evil, and yet how could that be if God himself is not evil?

And I believe one of the passages that really unlocks this for us comes from Genesis and the story of Joseph and his brothers.

And you recall the story. You know, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers.

In fact, pick up right where you left off, because we have to get another break again. And then, Gordy, be patient. We will get to the actual theme of how

God's glory is magnified in the face of evil and provide some Scripture verses for you. But we will have our guest,

Pastor Scott Christensen, finish his train of thought, and then we'll go to your question, Gordy. And if anybody else wants to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside the

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Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back with Pastor Scott Christensen. This is an elongated break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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We were made for so much more than ordinary life

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We were made to thrive Welcome back.

This is Chris Sorensen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Pastor Scott Christensen.

And Pastor Scott Christensen is a returning guest here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

Today we are discussing Light Pouring Out of Darkness, How God's Glory is Magnified in the

Face of Evil. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrissorensen at gmail .com C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com

And please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence, unless you are asking about a personal and private matter.

But before we return to our discussion, I just have some important announcements to make. The Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology is being held

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I plan to be there, and I hope to see many of you in the Iron Trip and Zion listening audience there.

Speakers include Daniel Aiken, Richard Gaffin, Daniel Hyde, my favorite preacher of all time, a man

I believe is the most powerful preacher on the planet Earth today, Conrad M. Bayway, pastor of Kabwatha Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, Richard Phillips of the

Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, another friend of mine who's been a guest on this program,

Jonathan Master has been here on Iron Trip and Zion, and so has David Murray of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

In fact, Scott Oliphant is the only one out of the roster that I have not yet interviewed, and I hope

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So, you were talking about Joseph in the Old Testament, and how he was sold into slavery, and there is a line in that whole story that is,

I think, the perfect text to support what we are talking about today.

Yes, you know, the question is, okay, is God sovereign over all things, over including evil, and we know that he is.

You know, Paul says in Ephesians 1, 11, that God works all things after the counsel of his will.

All things would be comprehensively, all things that take place in the world. It's not as if, you know,

God is sitting in heaven, and he sees these evil things happening in the world, and he's shaking his hands and thinking to himself, boy,

I didn't see this coming. What in the world is going on here? That is not the

God of the Bible. God has a comprehensive plan for all of the unfolding of history, and that includes evil that takes place in the world.

And you see this in the story of Joseph and his brothers when they are reunited after many years of separation, and they thought he was dead.

His father certainly thought he was dead because his brothers lied to his father.

They're reunited after this famine, and Joseph is now the prime minister of Egypt, and they have this confrontation, and they, of course, are shaking in their boots.

And if you back up in Genesis 45, in this initial confrontation,

Joseph says to them, he says, I don't want you to be grieved or angry because you sold me here into slavery.

He's acknowledging that they did this action. And then right after that, he says,

For God sent me before you to preserve life. Later on, that's in verse 5.

Later on in verse 7, he says, God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth and to keep you alive by great deliverance in connection to this famine.

So then to make an exclamation point, in verse 8, he says,

Therefore does not you who sent me here but God. And so that's a very interesting thing because, you know, obviously, you know, we read the story.

We know that his brothers sold him into slavery, and yet here is Joseph saying, it wasn't you that sent me here.

It was God that did this. And so the question arises, well, then are they even held responsible?

Are they even culpable for their actions? You know, is

God the one that's culpable? Well, if you move to Genesis 50, again, he has another confrontation with them or another meeting with them.

And in verse 15, it says they are speaking among themselves and they're concerned, again, about Joseph and whether or not he will pay us back in full for all the wrong which we did him.

So they acknowledge their own culpability in the actions that they performed.

And then as they speak to them, they say in verse 17, Please forgive the transgression of your servants.

You know, so again, they're acknowledging their culpability. But then Joseph, in his response to them, makes this amazing statement, and it comes in verse 20.

He says, As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result.

In other words, what Joseph is saying is that there is a dual explanation for what happened, for them selling him into slavery, this evil action.

Right? And that dual explanation is that clearly Joseph's brothers did it.

They did so willfully. They did so sinfully. And yet at the same time,

God did it. But there is a radical difference between the two explanations.

The one explanation, from the perspective of the brothers, is that their intentions, again, notice culpability is connected to intentions.

They did it for evil intentions. But God did it with good intentions.

And I believe what that tells us is that God can be sovereign over evil.

He can ordain evil. He clearly ordained the selling of Joseph into slavery in order to bring about this great end, which was to restore the family, the patriarchal family, from this famine and continue the promises that God had made to Abraham, to Isaac, and Jacob, and so forth.

And he used this event in order to advance God's greater purpose.

And what I believe this whole narrative of Joseph's life tells us, and this is really the climax of the whole story, is that God is sovereignly orchestrating everything in the world, including evil, that takes place.

And the difference is that where human beings have evil intentions for the evil acts that they do,

God at the same time ordains those evil actions, but always has a good intention because God could never have an evil intention.

That's hard for us to get our arms around that. I admit that. Everyone needs to admit that.

But I believe this is the clear testimony of Scripture. And if we ignore that,

I believe we ignore it at our peril because we see that God has many manifold purposes for evil in the world, but they're always good.

And that's hard to get our arms around, but I think that is the only right conclusion we can come to.

And wouldn't you say, though, to clarify what you just said, that just as in Romans 8 .28

we have a promise that all things work together for the good for those who love

God and are called, or some translations say, the called, according to His purpose, when you say that whatever

God does, He does it for good, it's His good that is also only good for those who love

Him. And there is no guarantee that everything God does, even though God never makes an evil decision, and everything that takes place was ordained before the foundations of the world, but the goodness that...

I mean, I know that the mercies of God fall upon the righteous and the unrighteous alike, but at the same time, people cannot take hold of a promise that whatever happens is for their good if they don't love

God. Yes, that's correct. And that's an important distinction to make, what you just said.

But it also gets to a broader question, and this is where, you know, perhaps you're the person that emailed you the question about the

Odyssey, where this is a good... Gordian Mechanicsburg. ...answer to that question. Ultimately, God does everything for His glory, and that includes the judgment of sinners and the mercy that He extends to other sinners.

And, you know, one of the problems with the

Odyssey, again, when we're talking about the Odyssey, we're talking about what is God's purpose for even ordaining evil in the first place.

And many people want to avoid that question. Even Calvinists want to avoid that question because they think that it is fraught with too many problems.

But I don't really think that it is. You know, one of the reasons why we struggle so much with this problem of the

Odyssey is because we think that God created this world for our sakes, and that is simply not true.

Let me lay out for you what the argument of my forthcoming book is in terms of trying to understand this broader question.

Why did God ordain evil? If God is sovereign, He did not have to allow the

Fall to happen. He did not have to place that forbidden tree in the garden.

He did not have to allow Satan in the form of the serpent to slither into the garden and tempt

Adam and Eve. He didn't have to have any of that in there. He could have set up conditions in the

Garden of Eden so that Adam and Eve would never sin. He could have set up conditions so that they could have been living in eternal bliss, and all of their progeny would be born into a perfect state without sin, with total righteousness.

God could have created the world. He has the freedom to do that. He could have created us all in Heaven. What's that?

He could have created us all in Heaven if He chose to. Exactly. So the question is, why did

He create conditions in which the Fall took place?

That's really the ultimate question when we're dealing with this problem of evil. And I realize for most people, it comes home at a more personal level.

Why did my daughter die in a strange accident when she was three years old?

Why did my wife have to die of cancer? Why did

I lose my job? All these questions of suffering that we deal with. But it goes back to an even broader question, and that is, why did

God bring about evil in the world in the first place? And so, here's the way

I frame the issue, and I frame it as an argument with a series of premises that draws a logical conclusion.

And the first premise is this, that God created the world, freely created the world, in order to supremely magnify

His glory to us as His creatures. Jonathan Edwards says that God did not create the world for manifold purposes ultimately, but for one purpose only, and that is to bring glory to Himself.

John Frame in, I forget which book it is, one of his books, I think it's on apologetics, dealing with the problem of evil, says that too many people frame the problem of evil as if God has some obligation to create conditions for our gratification, as it were, our benefit as we define that for ourselves.

And what that does is it shifts the burden of theodicy to a very man -centered answer that God is just supposed to create a trouble -free world for us, and He hasn't done that, so obviously

God is not doing His job. And if that was the goal of God, then why didn't

He just start over again? And we even have an example of that in Scripture itself, with the

Flood. God started over again, as it were, with Noah, and if it was His goal just to completely eliminate evil in the world, well then you would have to say

He failed. But that begs the question, well why do we even expect that that should be the case?

Is it because we think that God created the world for us, or did He create it for Himself?

And if we understand that God created the world for His own glory, to magnify

His own glory, then we have to look at, well what does that mean? You know, what is the purpose of God's glory?

And so that's the first premise of the argument. God created the world to magnify

His glory. The second question then is, well where is God's glory most supremely magnified in this world?

And I think as a Christian, you draw one conclusion, and that is the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

In other words, the incarnation, death, resurrection, exaltation, and ultimate consummation of Christ's kingdom in redemption is the locus of God's glory.

And where is that most magnified? It's most magnified in His death and resurrection. And we all can agree on that as Christians.

In other words, where in the history of the world has God magnified

His glory more than in the atoning death and resurrection of Christ? So that's the second premise.

And the third premise is, what is the atonement? What is this atoning work of Christ?

Well, it's the sole means by which God redeems human beings.

So there's no other way for God to redeem human beings except through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.

So what that tells us is that what is God's purpose to magnify

His glory? God's purpose in magnifying His glory is in the work of redemption. Redemption, via the atoning death and resurrection of Christ, is the supreme means by which

God magnifies His glory. But then that raises an important question. The question is simply this.

Redemption, or a statement really, redemption would be completely unnecessary unless human beings had fallen into sin.

In other words, Christ's incarnation, His death, His resurrection, the thing that brings God the greatest glory, would be completely unnecessary unless God had purpose that we would fall into sin.

And therefore, given God's ultimate purpose in creating the world, which is to magnify

His glory, it makes the fall necessary to that purpose. Not that the fall is intrinsically necessary.

This is where people might get confused. God didn't have to create the world that way.

He could have freely chosen to make a world of heaven right off the bat. But I believe that God is more magnified through redemption than if He had not done that.

In other words, God is more magnified in fallen creatures who need redemption than perfect creatures who don't need redemption.

That's a lot to get your arms around, but I believe that the whole flow of Scripture is really a theodicy.

What is it? Reformed theologians consistently frame the narrative of the

Bible as creation, fall, and redemption. Redemption being the high point of God's work in this world.

But redemption becomes completely unnecessary if you don't have the fall.

And redemption brings God no glory or doesn't magnify His glory supremely unless Christ is incarnated and offers

Himself as an atoning sacrifice upon the cross and rises from the dead, thereby defeating sin and death and evil.

And thus magnifying the glory of God. To me, it's mind -boggling to think that this is

God's broad plan for the world. Amen.

Yes, and as we read in 1 Timothy, those precious words spoken of the

Apostle Paul, the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom

I am the foremost. And the fact that even before His gruesome death, the very fact that God humbled

Himself, humiliated Himself by becoming man, entering into this world and having to deal with all of the heartache and trials and tribulations that we go through and to have to be at the whim of evil men.

Now, of course, they thought that they were in charge of His death, but He laid

His life down freely and voluntarily. But that is,

I think, as you're saying, is the perfect example, above any example in the

Scriptures, of how God's glory is magnified in the face of evil. In Ephesians 1,

Paul, on three different occasions, says that the whole work of God's sovereign work of election and predestination and the establishment of the gospel through the death and resurrection of Christ is all to the praise of His glory.

Three times we read that in one of the most powerful sections of Scripture that looks at this broad, redemptive plan of God from before the foundation of the world.

And it's all to the praise of His glory, of His glorious grace. And, you know, without the fall, you have no opportunity for God to display

His justice and judgment. You have no opportunity for God to display the magnificence of His mercy and His grace to fallen sinners.

And it's not as if these characteristics of God were not part of His character from all eternity, right?

Because His justice is an expression of His righteousness. His mercy and His grace are a unique expression of His love, which is eternal.

And yet He had no opportunity to express His justice and judgment nor His mercy in salvation unless He had created the conditions for a world that would fall into sin and thereby magnify

His glory through the expression of these attributes of God. We have to go to our final break right now and then we'll pick up where you left off there.

In fact, Gordy in Mechanicsburg has another question. He says,

Why do you think Arminians are so compelled to argue for human free will they don't seem terribly concerned with God's sovereignty?

Is it a fear of God appearing unjust in spite of what we read in Romans 9?

And you could also, after you finish your thought, address Gordy's question.

And if anybody else wants to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com

We'll be right back after this very brief station break, so don't go away. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,

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Pastor Scott Christensen. This is the final 20 minutes of our discussion today.

And if you could, Pastor Scott, pick up where you left off. And then we have

Gordy's question on why do you think Arminians are so compelled to argue for human free will?

Yeah, so, you know, the question that I think theodicy poses is broadly why has

God allowed evil into this world? That would be more the way

Arminian might pose the question. From a Calvinist perspective, we would say because God is sovereign over everything, why did he ordain evil to enter into his creation and thereby spoil the goodness that he created?

And I believe the ultimate answer to that question is so that he would magnify his glory through the redemptive work of Christ in which he is given this incredible, has allowed himself this incredible opportunity to manifest his grace and his mercy to vessels of mercy, as Romans 9 tells us, in contrast to the manifestation of his wrath and the contrast between those two realities, both as a result of the fall, demonstrates

God's power, God's justice, God's righteousness, and especially God's grace and his mercy.

And without the fall, without evil, God does not have the opportunity to do that.

And I believe in doing that, that he created the conditions for a redeemed world, which will find its full consummation at Christ's return and the new heavens and the new earth, that that redeemed state will be far better because of us standing over the abyss looking backwards at the fall and all of the evil and all of the horrendous suffering and pain that that caused.

And we'll have a deeper appreciation for who God is and what he did when he brought about redemption from that.

It's a view that Ab and Eve could have never had in the prelapsarian state of Eden, if you will.

And I believe that, in a nutshell, captures what

God has been doing with the whole flow of history and creation, fall, and redemption.

And so to answer the question, the question I believe from your emailer was, you know, why are

Arminians so concerned with free will and they seem to downplay God's sovereignty and this sort of thing?

And, you know, I always want to be careful about assigning motives to someone's theology.

You know, and I have Arminian brothers and sisters in Christ and, you know, though we disagree,

I don't want to impute motives for why people may hold positions that I find wanting in Scripture, but I could make a very broad statement that I think is very true to Scripture, and it is this.

I believe because of sin, because of our depravity, because of original sin, because of what happened in the

Garden, that man is naturally predisposed to living his life in a very autonomous fashion.

In other words, sinful human beings seek to place themselves at the center of their world, and God is only on the periphery of that world and only serves them in their worldview to the extent that He magnifies their own autonomous glory.

And I believe that is the default position of human beings. I believe by nature we tend toward Pelagianism, and I think that even when people come to a saving knowledge of Christ, it is often very difficult to purge this sort of very man -centered perspective that is just part of our sinful depravity.

And to place God fully at the center of our universe is difficult, and there's no question that there are very hard things that we have to grapple with when we see a very

God -centered world. You know, for example, why is there evil in the world?

And those are questions that everyone deals with, whether you're a

Calvinist or an Arminian, and they cause equal pain and suffering for both.

But I don't believe that the Arminian or Arminian theology has the resources to handle issues like pain and suffering and evil the way that Calvinism does because it so magnifies the glory of God that He becomes so worthy of worship by virtue of His sovereign control over this world, and having that knowledge that He ultimately does have a good purpose for us as Christians in all that He does, so that there is no evil in this world that will thwart

God's purpose to achieve His good ends, as Romans 8 .28 tells us, and thereby magnify

His glory beyond all that we could ever imagine. And to me, that is the only

God who is truly worthy of worship. Yeah, it's interesting that the

Apostle Paul, who was speaking out

God's own breath in Romans 9, in verse 18, when he starts off by saying,

God has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then,

Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will? On the contrary,

Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, Why did you make me like this?

Will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?

What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?

And it is a guaranteed response when the issue is brought up on God's sovereignty over election and over reprobation.

It's interesting how many times I have heard Armenians almost word for word, unconsciously quote

Paul's quoting of the man who responds in protest.

Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will? I've heard this over and over and over again and the

Armenians saying it forget that was the very words of the one that Paul knew would protest his teachings about divine election and reprobation.

And in fact, when my friend James White was debating an anti -Calvinist minister a number of years ago, the minister almost verbatim quoted

Paul and he said, Dr. White wants us to believe that God's in control over everything.

Well, how can He find fault with us because who can resist His will then? And James said,

Well, do you realize that you just quoted what the Apostle Paul knew that the natural man would say in protest to God's divine election?

And the guy wasn't thinking clearly and he said, Exactly! Yeah, unfortunately this is nothing new.

This has been around ever since the fall took place.

And if your interpretation of Romans 9 does not automatically evoke that response,

Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will? You're not interpreting it correctly. That's exactly right.

Paul is anticipating this sort of objection to what he is saying.

And why would that objection be raised unless what he is saying is plainly what he has said, which is that God will have mercy on whom

He desires and He will harden whom He desires. You know, if you look back in earlier in that passage, well, just one verse earlier, you know, he quotes from the book of Exodus when, you know, the whole, you know, confrontation with Moses and Pharaoh and God speaking through Moses, you know, says to him, you know,

I raised you up for this purpose to demonstrate my power in you that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.

In other words, you know, why did God harden Pharaoh's heart continually, you know, after plague, after plague, after plague?

He could have relented, in fact, in Exodus 9, he says, by now

I could have wiped you out, you know, but I raised you up in order to make my name proclaimed throughout all the earth.

In other words, to magnify my glory through your judgment. And then I believe what

Paul is doing in Romans 9 is he's contrasting that magnification of God's glory and judgment with even greater magnification of His glory and mercy to these vessels of mercy.

So God's glory is magnified in both, right? He has the freedom to harden whom

He desires to harden as is in the case of Pharaoh and bring judgment upon such people. And on the other hand,

He has complete freedom to extend mercy to whomever He chooses. And who are we to say, well,

God, you know, you're unfair. No one can say that because we all have willfully sinned and rebelled against God and that is where our culpability lies.

We assume that God has some sort of obligation to extend mercy. He has no obligation to extend

His mercy. By the way, I don't know if you've seen the movie, and I'm not recommending the movie to our listeners because it promotes a very dangerous and heretical theology.

But there is, I should say, a very well -known

Pentecostal minister, Carlton Pearson. Have you heard of Carlton Pearson?

No, I have not. Okay, he was an Oral Roberts graduate and he was a very prominent

African -American Pentecostal pastor in Oklahoma.

And he was driven to first accept the idea that the only people who are going to hell are those who consciously reject

Christ. In other words, the quote -unquote poor native in Africa who had never heard about Christ will not go to hell.

He'll be in heaven because he didn't have a chance to hear the gospel. And then he drifted from that to believing that everyone is going to heaven.

In fact, it's interesting that he is being consistent in his hermeneutic as an

Arminian where he takes every text that refers to Christ's death being for the world and he takes it like the

Arminians take it but do not draw the same conclusion that that's every single person. Well, he logically said, well, if Christ died and took upon himself the punishment and paid the debt in full for the sins of every human being that ever has lived and ever will live, then everybody is going to heaven.

And then he even came to a place where he accepted homosexuality as a valid lifestyle for Christians.

But it shows you the danger of that whole mindset, that hermeneutic of Arminianism because if you are going to be logically consistent that's where it should lead you but it's by God's grace and mercy that it doesn't lead everybody to that.

Yeah, I think Arminians are remarkably inconsistent in their theology and I think they go so far as they possibly can pressing the envelope of a wrong hermeneutic before they recognize that it takes them down that wrong path and as we said before, the natural logical end of Arminianism is both open theism and universalism and there's really no other way you can get around that unless you put a stop on your theology because there's so much in Scripture that obviously points against those things.

Now I think that Gordy rightly asked if we think that Arminians are trying to defend the character of God.

I think many of them are, if not most of them, if not all of them, but like we both were saying in the beginning of the program, they cannot point the finger at the

Calvinist as having a tyrant for a god because in one way or another they are left with the same dilemma that God is sending people to hell that he does not rescue from whatever actions they are participating in or ways of thinking and so on and that even goes beyond sin and it even goes on, you could talk about all kinds of calamities that take place in the world, cancer and all kinds of disease and famine and what they would call natural disasters.

God obviously is not rescuing everybody from the fate of all of those things.

Yeah, free will can't save them when it comes to natural disasters. Why doesn't God prevent that?

That has nothing to do with someone's free will. The problem with the Arminian theology in terms of its theodicy and its dealing with the problem of evil is that they regard free will as a greater virtue than God's sovereign power to stop evil from happening in the first place.

And so they see no good purpose for evil at all. It just happens to be a risk that God takes by granting

His creature free will. Whereas Calvinism says we may not fully understand all of God's purposes in ordaining evil, but we know that they ultimately have a good purpose and we know that ultimately they bring

Him glory and that's far greater than what an Arminian can say. Amen, and let us not forget

Rabbi Kushner who wrote Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. He so wanted to defend the character of God that his only conclusion that he felt he could draw was that God is not omnipotent, that there are things

He cannot stop from happening. And obviously that is a heresy and a very sad and horrifying notion that there's a

God up there who cannot stop things because He's powerless to do so. Yeah, essentially he tried to elevate the love of God as the prime attribute of God, which is what a lot of Arminians do.

And they allow this kind of distorted view of God's love to be the driving characteristic of God under which everything else must be subservient.

And that really does serious damage to the biblical teaching on God's character.

But when you do that, then you're going to have a distorted view of these things.

But yes, essentially Kushner wanted to picture

God as having such great love for people and sympathy for people, but yet was completely helpless to stop evil from destroying their lives.

And we are out of time, brother. We're out of time, and I just want to make sure that we give our listeners all of your contact information.

I know that the website for the

Summit Lake Community Church, I just had it in front of me and it disappeared.

What is it? Summit Lake Community Church of Bancos, Colorado. Summitlakechurch .org.

Summitlakechurch .org. Do you have any other contact information? Yes, that is correct.

Summitlakechurch .org is our church website. My book is

What About Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with God's Sovereignty. My forthcoming book is called

Light Pouring Out of Darkness, How God's Glory is Magnified in the Face of Evil. That should be coming out in the next year or so.

I don't know exactly when, but I'm still working on that. Well, if you want to get updates on that book, go to prpbooks .com.

That's the website of PNR Publishing. And you can always order any of the books, or at least 99 % of the books that we talk about on Iron Trip and Zion Radio from cvbbs .com.

cvbbs .com. Thank you so much, Pastor Christensen, for being our guest today. I want to thank everybody for listening today.

I want to thank Gordy for writing in some very compelling questions. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater