Once Saved, Always Saved 1 — Jacob Prasch

Once Saved, Always Saved: The Theological Divide

Once saved, always saved, with a question mark. You know, I get a lot of letters, and no matter what people may think, I would say for every negative letter we get, I get a more real guess. For every negative one, I suppose there's about a dozen good ones.

But this week, it's not unusual, and I got a few letters from people who really like the fact that we don't agree with the ecumenical movement, or they really like the fact that, you know, we will stand against certain kinds of errors and deceptions.

But then they come out that you don't read the King James Bible, or you don't believe once saved, always saved, or you don't have a high view of the Reformation and the Reformers. This becomes a barrier for them.

Now, for me, and for most of us, I don't like to think in those terms. I have a King James Bible, I read it. It's not the only one, but I read it. But for me, the Bible Scriptures are the original Greek Hebrew and Aramaic, not any translation.

I always emphasize it's probably the original language. Now, if somebody wants to read the King James, there's no problem. If somebody sees things differently on certain issues than me, that's no problem to me.

For me, baptizing babies is crazy, totally un-difficult. But I know people who love Jesus who don't think so. I'm pre-millennial. I cannot understand how anybody looking at the Scriptures from a Jewish perspective could be anything other than pre-millennial.

Yet, I know people who don't see it that way. Martin Lloyd-Jones didn't see it that way, and he was a tremendous expository preacher. These things are not problems for me. As long as the essentials of the faith are in no way impacted, I have no problems.

As I've said many times, there's four issues that we divide. One, do they have a wrong view of Jesus or the trinity of the Godhead? Two, is it irrepentant immorality? Three, is there another way of salvation other than the gospel, such as doctrine meant to familiarize us?

And four, do they have another basis of authority, doctrinal authority, other than Scripture? If it's not one of those four things, I can fellowship with them. I can even cooperate with them in the gospel.

Arminianism, Calvinism, and the Identity of Christ

But some people don't see it that way. I have something here, and I almost couldn't believe it was sent to me by one of these people who otherwise liked me. The Christ of Arminianism. Freewillism. Listen to this.

The Christ of Arminianism. Arminianism means that you don't believe in an unconditional once-saved-always-saved, that you don't believe that Jesus only died for certain people, that he's willing to receive all.

That's Arminianism in a nutshell. The Christ of Arminianism loved every individual person in the world and sincerely desired their salvation. That's true. I believe that Christ loved every single person in the world and he sincerely desired their salvation.

The Christ of the Bible loves and desires the salvation of only those whom God has unconditionally chosen, citing the verses which would support that, but ignoring the verses which would balance it. The Christ of Arminianism offers salvation to every sinner and does all in his power to bring them to salvation.

I believe that. His offer and work are often frustrated, for many refuse to come. That sounds scriptural to me. But the Christ of the Bible, he says, especially calls to himself only the elect and sovereignly brings them to salvation.

None of them will be lost. And again, he suits the verses which support his point of view, but not the ones which balance it. The Christ of Arminianism cannot regenerate and save a sinner who does not first choose Christ with his own free will by which they can accept or reject Christ.

That free will may not be violated by Christ. Well, Arminianists, true Arminianists, don't believe that. We believe he can accept Christ. He has to give us the power to do it. But, so we think. The Christ of the Bible, however, sovereignly regenerates the elect sinner apart from his choice.

He has no choice. The Christ of Arminianism died on the cross for every individual person, and therefore made it possible for everyone to be saved. The Christ of the Bible died only for God's elect people.

In other words, the others were created to go to hell forever, despite some overstated fantasy destination. Now, the Bible does say God created all things for a purpose, even the wicked for the day of judgment.

But he'd rather they be saved. The Christ of Arminianism loses many who he has saved, which even said many would fall away. Even if he does give them eternal security in some state, that security is not based on his will or his work, but the choices of sinners.

The Christ of the Bible preserves his chosen people. And I conclude by saying that people like most Pentecostals, people like John Wesley, people like... have a different Jesus. We don't have the same Jesus as the Calvinists.

Now, George Whitfield was a Calvinist. John Wesley was not. But they never had this kind of recrimination where they said each other had a separate Jesus, two different Jesus types. This is only one Jesus.

Actually, it goes so far as to say, if you believe that Jesus died for everybody and this woman can receive everybody, that you have a different Jesus. That's how far some people will go. This is known as extreme Calvinism.

Hyper-Calvinism. And these people can go so far with it that if you don't go along with it, there can be no fellowship. Very often, they're the same kinds of people given to other such things about the Authorized Version, if you read another version, it's the same thing, there can be no fellowship.

And these groups tend to be very into this, and they get into something the Bible calls party spirit. We've got it right, and others got it wrong. Now, I get accused of that, but in fact, it's not true.

Again, I always stand by the basis of seeing basic things in the Bible. If you depart from the basic truth, if you look to things the Word of God says are right, are wrong, well, okay, I'll take the stand.

But to divide over these other issues, I think, is wrong. Nonetheless, let's understand the nature of the division. Not personal division, but division by theological... ...that's it on this wall. ...to take grace from now.

Pelagianism, Phineasism, and Wesleyan Arminianism

On this extreme, we have something known as Hellasianism. Hellasius was a pious monk who actually lived in Britain in the early centuries of the Church, and he was opposed by all the king of Nippon. What did Hellasius believe?

He denied the fact that man was fallen. Hellasius said, We can choose God or ourselves. We don't have a fallen nation. Now, the Bible says that's not true. The Bible says that because of the fall of man and the sin of Adam and Eve, we have a fallen nation.

We are born with sin, therefore we must be born again. We're born with sin, therefore we must be born again. Hellasianism is a total heresy. Now, you will find extreme chauvinists—you'll find a lot of them in Scotland and Northern Ireland—they will say that Arminianism is simply another form of Hellasianism, or a diluted form of Hellasianism.

Just to the left of Hellasianism is something called Phineasim, named after the North American evangelist Charles Phineas. I do not deny that many people would say that Charles Phineas believed things that were deemed to be supernatural manifestations of God's power are associated with Phineasism.

However, we need to be very clear about this. Charles Phineas and the North Americans. Charles Phineas also denied that man had a fallen nation. The Bible says, because we're born with a fallen nation, we must be born again.

Phineas denied that. However, he admitted, we all have sin anyway. So, before that kind of thing, he was always obsessed with Christmas. In the middle, there is something known as Westernian Arminianism.

This Arminianism was a believer in God who had sinned. His ideas were taken up in this country and other countries under the influences of the Great Revivalists, particularly God's brethren. So today, we normally call Westernian Arminianism in countries like Great Britain, or America, or Canada, or somewhere.

This view believed that we are all short of the glory of God. This view also believed we cannot save ourselves. As a matter of fact, this view also believed we cannot even choose Jesus of ourselves. Now, there are shades of it.

Wesley had one shade, others would have another shade. When I say Westernian Arminianism, I use the generic word. There are shades of it. We cannot save ourselves, and we cannot choose Christ, Jesus that I chose you.

However, what happens is this, in this particular view, which I believe in, and which classical Pentecostalism believes. We are dead because of sin. We cannot choose the Lord Jesus. We cannot choose to be born again, because our spirit cannot communicate with God's spirit because we're dead in our sin.

God's spirit in Pentecost puts just enough life back in us to communicate with him. And he gives us just enough, just enough, of the original faith that we have to make a choice. He put these two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the world, the knowledge of good and evil.

He made the wrong choice. Jesus came as the second Adam. All these two trees are our choice, Jesus and Adam. The seed of our choice has to be faith in temptation of Jesus. It's hard to be afraid of temptation of Adam.

We are on the right path. We're in the twilight of the temptation of Jesus, and Jesus is a wild animal. It's hard to show that you're an animal, but it's hard to show that you're the second Adam. And the same thing is the love of the eye of Christ, and that's the same thing that Pentecost is.

Adam is the son of Jesus. Before Jesus had went to the cross and died, now he has his way out of it. In a sense, he has to earn the right to go to the cross, even though he was challenged. He identified as us.

He came to identify as us. Adam had a choice. Jesus had a choice. We know it. What God does when he convicts somebody of sin, if he allows him to turn his arms and fight him, is he makes it possible for us to make a choice of being in Mount Sinai.

We can't choose him, he has to choose us, but he makes it possible for us to be far from his grave. Calvinists and writers. Calvinism, in its classical form, says, "...free will is never restored, and anything with it.".

The difference between a foreign-based Christian and an unfaithful person is this. An unfaithful person has no choice about sinning. They must sin because they're under the law of sin and death, which is much of the law of gravity.

The most an unfaithful person can choose about sinning is when, where, how, but they cannot choose it. They have no choice. We, as believers, because God's Spirit is in us, have a choice. We do not have to sin.

We have a choice. God gives us back our free will. We can choose to walk after the Spirit or the flesh. Calvinism, in effect, denies the restoring work of Jesus Christ in the God of Moses and David of the new nation.

God does give us back free will when we're born again. We have no free will before we're born, and we can't choose to be born again until God should be. That is what we need. Then, you have a more moderate form of Calvinism to the west of that.

This moderate form of Calvinism is known as four-point Calvinism, and then, beyond that, is a five-point Calvinism, which, similar to Athenianism, on the opposite extreme borders on the heretical. Let me explain what I mean about four-point and five-point.

The Five Points of Calvinism and Total Depravity

There's debate among Church historians. Was Calvin a Calvinist? Calvinism, as we know it, was formulated not by Calvin or from Calvin's institute, but by something known as the Remonstrance of Doris. There were Calvin followers like Caesar and others, and later people like John Knox and Scotland, who began to define Calvinism in the sense we know it.

The same as you have to make something of a distinction between Wesley's own personal beliefs and Wesleyan Arminianism, you have to make something of a distinction between Calvin's personal beliefs and what comes to be known as Calvinism.

Classical Calvinism, which came out of the Remonstrance of Doris, we call the Tulips. Tulips, each one thought of an anachronism or an acrostic. He is total depravity. Calvinism and Arminianism believe we are totally depraved.

What does that mean? It does not mean we are as bad as we are capable of being. It doesn't mean we couldn't get any worse. It just means we are totally fallen. We're fallen in body, mind, and spirit, okay?

That's what it means. We're totally fallen. Man is so fallen spiritually, he's fallen psychologically, even his bodily members are tainted with sin. He's totally depraved. It's like an omelet, a six-egg omelet, and if one of the eggs is good, the one is bad.

You have a whole lot of contaminants. Calvinists and Arminianists both believe in total depravity. We can't save ourselves, we are fallen. The next is the use of undeserved grace. Well, I totally agree, and Wesley would have totally agreed.

We all agree that God's grace is undeserved. Christ died for the ungodly. While we are sinners, Christ died for us. We can't do anything to earn salvation. It is a sin to think we even can. This is the rudiment of Calvinistic thought, which I'll explain more in a moment.

It was reacting to the heresy and corruption of medieval Roman Catholicism. John Calvin was a humanist scholar. None of his ideas were really original. He was a dynamic personality, and he was a capable writer.

But his ideas all came from Erasmus of Rotterdam, from Martin Luther, from Pharrell, from Martin Luther, and from others of the first generation Reformers and the humanists before them. It is in some way man-centric.

Now, he was a Christian humanist, but he was still a humanist. What happened in the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, was a heresy known as, well, Calvinism. It was known as medieval scholasticism.

Francis Schaefer explained it very well. What it virtually came to mean in the Renaissance was that, although man is fallen, his intellect wasn't. You see how man-centric he gets? After all this religious art begins revolving around man, his intellect does not form, only his spirit.

Now, even the Reformers never totally rejected scholasticism, but the humanist scholars who influenced Calvin—and Calvin himself was a humanist scholar—set out to correct this error in medieval scholarship.

And they got into all this monstrous hermeneutics and all this other stuff. So, he was reacting against Roman Catholicism in the Renaissance and in the Middle Ages, which said man was not totally the same.

Secondly, with undeserved praise, the Roman Catholic Church is teaching sacramentalism and selling indulgences. That's how St. Peter's Nevada King was built. That's what triggered the Reformation, the abuses.

Luther reacted against Tesco, the Dominican, on a coin into a box arranged to fall from charge of only three. You can somehow earn your salvation by buying it or by good work, and today you go to places like Italy and you'll find terrible old ladies, elderly women, trying to go up the stairs scala sancta on their knees, praying with rosary beads, trying to get their mother out of purgatory or something like this.

You can earn your salvation. Calvin was reacting very rightly against the depravity of Roman Catholicism. The teen and the youth, we both agree on this. But then Calvin gets into the errors, limited atonement, particular redemption, and lastly on this day he's been told to say, "...behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.".

Jesus said, "...if I'm lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.". Calvinism says, well, maybe he's drawing, but he's not intending to save the people he's drawing. Only the elect. Only the predestined.

Only those who will live. God is omniscient. He's all-knowing. He's omniscient. It's impossible to describe God with human influence. Of course he knows the future. Of course he knows who will be saved.

Of course he knows the one who will react to him greatly. His four elections, he chooses the one he knew would respond. Says Romanians. Calvinists say no. The ones whose names were written in the Book of Life and the foundation of the world, that's all there is to it.

Nobody else is going to be saved, and if your name's not in the book, you're bound to hell, and that's it, and there's nothing anybody's going to do to get your name taken off the hell book and in the Book of Life.

It's just the way you were born. Now, this is quite sad, isn't it? And quite upsetting. You will find two versions of Christianity that cause the most mental illness, perhaps. Well, of course, the Jehovah's Witnesses have a higher mental illness rate than the general society.

I'm not talking about the cults. I'm talking about the mainstreamers. What is wrong with Catholicism?

Take a country like Ireland. The very high instances of alcohol abuse, the high instances of child abuse and homosexual pedophilia, all of that kind of stuff is built up with the psyche, a social psychology that is influenced by the Roman Church.

It's the oedipacy because of Mary, the sexual repression because of the influences of Augustine's Manxianism, and these things begin to manifest in different ways. Roman Catholic countries have a lot of mental illness and a lot of alcoholism.

But now, let's look at the other countries. I went to Bible college with people who grew up in strict Presbyterian backgrounds in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, and they went from one extreme to another.

Roman Catholicism teaches you get saved by your works or by the sacraments, and so there are all these works that you get saved driving themselves neurotic and carrying a guilt trip. Because faith without works is dead, and our works are members of our faith, extreme forms of Catholicism say we have to do these works to prove we're saved.

Look at me, I must be saved. Look what I'm doing, look what I'm doing, look what I'm doing. Neither one of them seems to give a real assurance of salvation. Neither extreme seems to give the people, psychologically, an assurance of salvation really.

Now, the moderate forms of Catholicism don't drive people crazy. Having a mother who's Irish Catholic, I can tell you that Irish Catholicism is a form of mental illness. And so is Hasidic Judaism. I've seen both, both of them.

If you don't know our own background, my family's a combination of Jewish and Catholic, and I've seen both of them. So let's look further. Limited atonement. The only guide for certain people. Full stop.

Praise the Calvinists. Not so. Praise the Indonesians. But then there's irresistible grace. The I-Q-U-L-I-T, irresistible grace. What is irresistible grace? You don't have a choice. If God put your name in the book of life before the foundation of the world, you have to be.

Saved, you must be saved, and you will be saved.

You have no capacity to choose Jesus. That's it. God's chosen you. You haven't chosen him. So therefore, you can't even respond to it, except that he's ordained you're responding to it. And finally, there's perseverance.

Once saved, unconditionally, all we save. Now, notice I said unconditionally. I believe in once saved, all we save. But it's conditional. It's not unconditional. That is Calvinism. The moderate Calvinist will hold to totally poverty, undeserved grace, irresistible grace, and perseverance.

Even moderate Calvinists will not hold to limited atonement, that Jesus only died for certain people, and the others were created for other people. Five-point Calvinist would hold to all of that. Now, even going further, there's a form of Calvinism which is heretical.

Evangelism, Perseverance, and Works

It's as heretical on one extreme as Pelagianism is on the other. It's hyper-Calvinism in its ten problems. Not just being five-point, but by saying, because God is already foreordained the elect, the church does not have to witness or evangelize.

We laugh at an error. That was the predominant thinking among the Baptists in this country, until William Carey stood up and challenged it in the Baptist Convention. He wanted to send missionaries to the East to convert the heathen, the pagan, and he was told, Brother Carey, sit down and be quiet.

If God elects, the heathen will do it without your help or mine. Another form of heretical King Calvinism is life-sacrificing, because somebody went out and made a procession of faith at some point, or they went up on a hilly ground some state and put their hand up in a meeting, or said the prayer on a document plaque.

They're unconditionally one faith, always saved, and now they can go out and teach sinning. Now, most Calvinists would say, well, if they're going to do that, that proves they were never saved to begin with.

But there are others who would say, even if somebody baptized to that degree, if they really made the procession, it doesn't matter. You're still going to be saved, even if just the works will be burned up.

This is heretical. It's not what your works being burned up means at all. Our works being burned up means that the things we do in the flesh are not ordained by God, but the things that we do not because we've been saved, not to get saved, but because we've been saved.

When a Christian is saved, we don't work to get saved. We work because we've been saved.

Christians do work because they've been saved, not to get saved.

The Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc., do it to get saved. Evangelicals do it because they've been saved. But a lot of the works we do are, of course, in the flesh, and a lot of us do a lot more worldly and temporal things than we do the things of the Lord, and those things will be burned up.

These extreme forms of Calvinism can be quite brutal. This idea of election was taken to such extremes that it resulted in social injustice. Now, any time you had a hyper-Calvinistic society of that extreme, you found its hallmark was not only terrible social injustice, but the social injustice was perpetrated in the name of Christ and the Church.

Let's look at the three big examples of a hyper-Calvinistic Church that most of us will be familiar with. One being the American South, the extreme Southern Baptists. They believe in slavery. The Baptist Church split between the American and Southern Baptists over the issue of slavery.

God elected us. We're foreordained. Black people are inferior. God elected them to be that way, and they take this one verse in Genesis out of context because it was a curse on the sons of Ham, and so on, to justify what happened to the black people.

It's a wreck. It's supposed to be that way. Northern Ireland. Nobody hates the Roman Catholic Church in its heresy more than I do. It is from hell. I despise Roman Catholicism, but I love Roman Catholic people.

If I did not love Roman Catholic people so much, I would not hate the Church that's leading them to hell as much as I do. However, hatred of Catholicism is one thing, oppression of Catholics is another.

If you look what the strict Presbyterians did to the Roman Catholics in Ireland for centuries, it's unspeakable. Obviously, I have no time or love for the IRA or anything like it. I think they'll pack us up.

However, there is still a whole history, in fact, of what's going on there that most people in this country don't even know about and wouldn't want to have anything to do with. And it was, again, perpetrated in the name of an extreme form of Calvinism.

In the Plantation Period and so on, all kinds of things happened. Calvinism was used to justify, in the aftermath of the Plantation Period, in the aftermath of it, what was going to be now to do with social injustice against Catholic people.

Certainly, the apartheid in South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church, hyper-Calvinism. Whenever you find an extreme form of Calvinism, you find oppression. Calvin had a virtual police state, which he theologically designed in Geneva.

People were burned alive for heresy. Some of them were heretics. You have a Reformed Church in Zurich, founded by a woman, and they drowned Baptists. They actually took the Baptists. Do you believe in being baptized as a believer?

Well, baptize, and they cut a hole in the ice and they drowned them. Oppression. In this country, there was a terrible war between the Puritans and the Presbyterians, Calvinists killing other Calvinists.

In Massachusetts, they burned people as witches. Whenever you find an extreme Calvinism, an extreme, you have injustice and oppression. I know of no exceptions. Now, the more moderate forms of Calvinism, even some of the five-point ones like the Puritans in this country, did other things that were good.

The establishment of parliamentary democracy, and so on, based on biblical principles. I'm only speaking against the extremes. I will speak against the extremes of Calvinism on this side of the equation, but I will also speak co-equally against the extremes of Eliminism and what's beyond it, such as the ideas of Finney and Pelagius on the other.

The truth is in the middle. That's the basic situation. Now, let's begin looking at some of the arguments from God's Word. Open with me, please, to the Book of Romans, chapter 9. Let's begin in verse 1.

I am telling the truth in Christ and the Messiah. I'm not lying. My conscience betting me witness in the Holy Spirit. But I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from the Messiah for the sake of my brethren and my kinsmen, according to the flesh.

This introduces the section of Romans, chapters 9, 10, and 11, dealing with the theological, the salvistic, and prophetic purposes of God for Israel and the Jews. That's the purpose. God's continuing love for Israel, despite their popular rejection of the Messiah by what became the majority of them.

Who are Israelite? To whom belong present continuous actives, not God's finish with the Jews. In the Greek tense, it's present continuous actives. Who belongs to them? The adoption of sons in the glory of the covenant, and the giving of the law, and the temple service, and the promises.

Indicating that it was written before 70 A .D., of course. Who are the fathers, and from whom is the Messiah, according to the flesh? Who is over all God, blessed forever. Amen. Deity of the Messiah. But it is not as though the word of God has failed, meaning the Torah, for they are not all Israel, who are descended from Israel.

In other words, being a physical Jew is useless.

Unless you're a symptom of fire.

Neither are they all children, because they are Abraham's children. To Isaac your descendants will be named. Now he begins doing a Midrashic exposition of the book of Genesis. That is, not of the children of the flesh, who are children of God, but the children of promise are regarded as descendants.

For this is a word of promise. At this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son. And not only this, but there was Rebekah, Rebekah also, when she was conceived by one man, our father Isaac. Although the twins were not yet born, and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose, according to His choice, might stand, not because of works, but because of him who called, it was said to her, the older will serve the younger.

Just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, and there may it never be. For he says to Moses, I will have mercy in whom I will have mercy, and will have compassion in whom I will have compassion.

So then, it does not depend on the man who wills, or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, for this very purpose, I raise you up to demonstrate my power in you, that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.

So then, he has mercy on whom he desires, and hardens whom he desires. He will say then to me, why does he still find fault? Who can resist 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? Does the potter not have the right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for commons?

What if God, although willing to demonstrate his wrath and make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And he did so in order that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy which he prepared beforehand.

Based on this, Calvinists will say, God is the potter, we are the clay, who are we to argue with God? He chooses who's going to go to heaven, he chooses who's left, the others are going to go to hell, that's it.

Jacob I loved, Esau I hated, and of course they've even taken us in some cases. The white people I loved, the black people I hated, the Protestant people I loved, the Catholic people I hated, etc. In fact, we lived to that.

Remember, John Wesley's revivals were an Arminian reaction against the social injustices bred by a dead church that was permeated with Calvinistic thoughts and much of its inception. And that's when people began coming out of the coal mines and the sweatshops to their lives for the Lord and the thousands, but let's look further, tens of thousands.

So they say then, therefore, how can we argue with God? You can't argue with God. He can do what he wants, he's sovereign, he makes one son this way and one son that way. Well, the first mistake these people are making is a text out of its context becomes a pretext.

Romans 9–11: Nations, Election, and Corporate Solidarity

The context of Romans 9, 10, and 11 is predominantly dealing with nations, not individuals. It's dealing with nations, not individuals. It's dealing with the Jews and the Gentiles. He quotes about the two twins.

Let's read what he's commenting on in Genesis 25, 23. The Lord said to her, two nations are in your womb, and two people shall be separated from your body. And one people shall be stronger than the other, and the oldest serves the younger.

What these people do is take something talking about nations and apply it to people. Now, there is a principle in Midrash called kalahomer, like the heavy. You can say that what applies in a specific situation also applies in a heavy.

But before you do that, you first have to look at the context. It's not talking about God creating some people to this purpose and others to that purpose. It's talking about his election of nations. Moreover, we have something called corporate solidarity in Scripture.

Corporate solidarity means when one person represents a nation or a larger group of people. Esau and Jacob respectively represent what become the Israelites and the Arab nations. And God goes on, and Esau is reconciled to Jacob, and God has prophetic purposes in Genesis for the Arab people, the same as he does the Jews.

His election here had to do with his calling for service, not to do with salvation in the primary sense that these people are making it. This is the same in the book of Obadiah. The name of the patriarch becomes a metaphor or a general term for the nation descended from him.

So, before we go any further, we have to realize that these people are taking something talking about nations and applying it to individuals when that is not mainly what the text is even talking about.

Now, it can apply to individuals in some degree, as the text goes on to describe about Pharaoh. But when the New Testament interprets the Old Testament, you have to go back to read the Old Testament context.

Hardened his own heart, didn't he? Repeatedly hardened his own heart. Only after he repeatedly hardened his own heart did God harden his heart. God raised him up and used him. He let the guy get away with murder, he let the guy get away with this, that, the other thing, thinking he was the big cheese.

He was deified, of course, by the Egyptians, worshipped as God, and God used him for his purpose only to bring him down. But it does not say God hardened Pharaoh's heart until he repeatedly hardened his own.

Look very briefly at John, chapter 12. I don't want to go into this much. It's on a different page. But in verse 37, Though he performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing, would not.

Verse 38, That the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled which he spoke, Lord, whose belief thou report, to whom of the arm of the Lord been revealed? Has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For this cause they could not, would not, could not.

For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah also said, He blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart and be converted, and I heal them.

Would not, could not, should not. God's hardening of the heart is always in response to their own hardening. It was not something God just hardened their heart. Their own actions. Even Calvin admitted that.

That it worked that particular way according to that kind of dynamic. Now, what this does is it does not quote from the Hebrew text. It quotes from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, where the mood is subjunctive.

The subjunctive mood in Greek implies doubt, yet allows for the possibility, lest, lest they see with their eyes and perceive with their ears and turn to me and be converted. The possibility of their repentance still exists in the Greek subjunctive.

More than that, the idea of be converted. Again, the Septuagint takes Hebrew and translates it into Greek. Converted in Hebrew is teshuvah. The Hebrew word for repent and convert is the same thing. It means to turn away from sin towards God.

This idea that he just arbitrarily, or in his own sovereign grace, or his own sovereign will, arbitrarily decides who's going to do this or that, they're only giving one side of the story. But the Bible shows something very different.

When he hardened part, it's because he's repeatedly hardened their own. How many times did he send Moses back to Pharaoh? But now let's look even further. God is the father, we are the clay. This comes from the book of Jeremiah, Yirmeyahu Hamadi, chapter 18 and 19.

Let's read the Old Testament text in its context to see what Paul is talking about. The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying... Now, when you see the word of the Lord, it's devada in Hebrew.