The Ordo Salutis

This morning, I've been mulling this over for a while. I've always had the thought of ordo salutis on my mind because it's something that, well, anybody who knows me knows that I try to be very cerebral about a lot of the things that I do, including my faith.

And so this is something that I think lends very well to thinking through your faith and thinking through why we believe what we believe and how we believe that those things came to be. So for, I think, pretty much everybody here, we have a very good understanding of sort of the macro touch points of our salvation.

We know that we are sinners. Jesus Christ came to die for us because we are the ungodly. He was risen from the dead, defeating death. And we have redemption and find our righteousness in him. And because of that, we obey him and we keep his commandments.

This is the gospel message. This is what we preach to unbelievers. This kind of analysis of Christianity, this way in which it's framed, with our kids, we're teaching the four W's at home, who is God, who is man, why did Jesus have to die, and what should our response be?

So this way of looking at this and what Jesus did is called the historia salutis. It's the historical salvation. It's the chronological analysis of what actually occurred to get us to a point where we could be saved.

So this is something that is commonly preached. This is something that we understand. It's not something that we fail to reason with. It's important for us to preach the gospel to ourselves every day.

But it's not something that when I said it five minutes ago, or two minutes ago, or 30 seconds ago, or whatever it was, it didn't blow anybody's mind, I think, in this room. Although it is something that we do need to preach to ourselves and to others as frequently as we can.

The Meaning of Ordo Salutis

So there is another way to frame our salvation that looks specifically at the individual processes or actions that kind of occur between the interplay between God and man. And I think it's very valuable for us to look at that and to understand how that really, really happens.

If we were, to use a phrase, to look down the corridors of time, if we were to step outside, you see in movies people are having a near-death experience. They kind of are outside of themselves. It's like they're seeing it from outside.

If we were to do that with the life of a Christian, what would it look like? And that is the study of something that's called the ordo salutis. Has anybody heard the phrase ordo salutis before? A couple people?

OK, good. Well, somebody went to seminary. Of course, you've heard the ordo salutis. So does anybody know what it means? I've kind of touched on it. What it's translated? It's the order of salvation, right?

It's Latin. Here's the monagism .org definition. The ordo salutis is the theological doctrine that deals with the logical sequencing of the benefits of redemption as we are united to Christ, which are applied to us by the Holy Spirit.

This first thing to remember is that we must never separate the benefits, regeneration, justification, sanctification, from the benefactor, Jesus Christ. The entire process, election, redemption, regeneration, et cetera, is the work of God in Christ and is, by grace, alone.

If you want something that's a little more easy to remember, I guess, the ordo salutis, this is the Ligonier, is the order of salvation. This focuses on the acts of God and the response of the individual in salvation.

Now, I use the term interplay, which I think is a dangerous term if you don't clarify it. Ligonier references the responses of the individual. But I think it's important to point out that by acknowledging the response of the individual in the order of salvation, that doesn't de facto mean that we're preaching an Arminian faith.

OK, so we'll look at sort of the details of that later. But there are elements to the order of salvation, as we understand it, theologically, that are responses to the work of God. But they're only enabled by the Holy Spirit.

Can anybody think of any examples that would fall into this category from scripture, from the Bible? Sure, work out your own salvation in fear and trembling. So that's a kind of a commentary on how we are to continually desire sanctification and to pursue godliness while fulfilling what God has commanded for us.

How about faith in general? Faith is something that we exhibit. It's a reaction that we have. But it is Ephesians 2 .8 .9. It is a gift from God. Monogysm also says something else that's interesting. It says that we must never separate the benefits from the benefactor.

All of the glorious things that we have obtained through our salvation must never be separated from the benefactor who is Jesus Christ. We see this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 30 and 31. It says this, and because of him, God, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

So the events of the ordo salutis are critical to the critically linked with Jesus Christ, the one who made them all possible. So if we were to look at the Bible, if we were to look at what we know about the Old Testament and New Testament text, where do you suppose the ordo salutis comes from theologically?

Thoughts, opinions, verses bubbling to the forefront of anybody's mind? OK, good, good. We will talk about Romans 8 .28 to 30. I think the ordo salutis is a lot like the Trinity. Does anybody know what I mean when I say that?

Before I continue? Anybody? Is that it? OK. So, you know, you hear people say, when we talk about Trinitarian faith, that, well, the word Trinity never appears in the Bible, right? And that's true. The word Trinity doesn't appear in the Bible.

And just like that, there's no kind of clear-cut definition in Scripture that says, OK, let's take a step back. Let's have a theological analysis of the situation. Here are the steps that occur in order for you to be saved.

So that doesn't really happen. But we do have some great verses that we can look at that will help us to put this framework together. And there's a number of different ones. But the big one is Romans 8 .29 to 30, where it says, you want to read that for me, Scott?

I'm sure you've got your Bible right there. Thank you. So that's really one of the great places where we can start to put this chain of salvation, this order of salvation together. And so we see these sort of high points in this verse.

He foreknew, he predestined, God called, God justified, and God glorified. And there's a lot of other pieces in there, 2 Thessalonians 2 .13 and 14. But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, beloved by the Lord, because God chose you first as firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit, and belief in the truth.

To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So there we see this element of sanctification, which comes after justification, before glorification.

So as we sort of look at this, this is a very sort of systematic theology topic. It's a topical thing. And we can look at Scripture and put these sort of frameworks together to understand properly what the order of salvation is.

We see other things in Scripture. We know that John 3 talks about us being born again. So there's the regeneration of the Spirit there. We know that, as I said, justified, sanctified, and then glorified.

And I have a handout here I'm going to hand out in a second. But actually, I'll just do that now. You want to help me hand these out? Thank you very much. There should be plenty. So on this, there's three different lists for the order of salvation.

One of them is the Calvinistic. The next one is the Arminian. And then the next one is the Catholic version of the order of salvation. And unsurprisingly, we would subscribe to the Calvinistic view of the order of salvation.

And one thing that I was thinking about as I was studying this and looking over it and pulling my research together this week was that this is really something that is a great prayer topic. We can pray through these.

There's 10 points. And every single one of them is a cause for us to give glory to God. And so I just thought that it was an excellent thing. Sometimes when I talk to people about prayer, they say, well, I know that I'm not supposed to only pray about me, but I don't really know how to pray or what to do or what to say.

And a lot of the times, the recommendations are pray through the Psalms or do this or that or whatever. And this is yet another one of those frameworks that we can use in our prayer life to help us to really focus our minds on the actions of God.

I got this from the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, little links at the bottom if you want to look it up. So one thing that's interesting about this, and I touched on this a little bit, is that the Ordo Salutis is very much a construct.

It's not something that is really like a fixed document. We think of catechisms, right? And they're carefully crafted, although the language is super important, and they're put together in a certain way.

And catechisms are done in this sort of question-answer format. And if you memorize a catechism, you could meet somebody from half a world away. And if you both have the Westminster catechism memorized, you both can rattle off number 75.

And assuming you're in the same language, the words are going to be exactly the same. If you ask my kids, we have a shorter catechism that we're teaching the kids. You can ask Elliot, who made you? God made me.

You can ask the older kids things like, why did God make you, I think is what it is, for his own glory. That's what a catechism is. It's this rote memorization so that the truths of God can begin to imprint themselves on us.

And the Ordo Salutis is not that. Because it's a construct, sometimes the headings here are a little bit different. Grudem's systematic theology combines faith and repentance. And he includes some additional steps like adoption and death, which are implicit in the list that Christian apologetics and research ministry put together, but they're not clearly defined in it.

And it doesn't negate what we have on this handout, but it does sort of shine a light to this fact that the Ordo Salutis is not, you don't have it and then frame it and put it on your wall and say that this is the authorized version or something like that.

And looking at this list, I thought it was remarkable that as we move further to the right, so as we move from the Calvinist column to the Arminian column and then from the Arminian column to the Catholic column, what we see is how much more progressively man-centered these things are.

And I'm not really going to tear them apart per se, but I do want to look at a couple of key differences. If you look at Calvinism and Arminianism, the first thing obviously that's missing is election and predestination.

Because the Arminian belief system would not believe that that happened, at least not as the will of God. Maybe there's the whole, you look down the corridors of time, saw who would believe and then chose them according to their belief kind of thing.

But that's not really election, so election's not on the list. But the big difference that seems subtle on this list is that if you look at column one, Calvinist, you see number four, regeneration, number five, faith.

And if you look at the Arminian list, you see number three, faith, number four, repentance, number five, regeneration. So it's a fairly subtle difference. They just kind of flipped some stuff. But what are the ramifications of that?

What are the ramifications of faith coming before regeneration? You can do it yourself. Sure. If regeneration came after faith, like this, then faith would have to be something that we would have to generate ourselves.

And so that's why we now have on here this thing, point two, under Arminian, which is prevenient grace, which is a grace from God that enables a person to believe. It's sort of like half grace. It's like, well, I guess I'll enable you to do this thing.

But I'm not a jealous God. I'm not a God of all things. I don't control everything. So I'll give you permission to make a decision on your own now that I've enabled you to do that. That's not a thing, biblically.

So that's why we would not believe that that's correct. If God needs to regenerate us before we can believe in him, true, true, then there wouldn't be a kind of grace that would need to be present to enable people to believe in him, to consider believing in him.

So he regenerates us. We respond with faith. So what I'd like to do here is start to walk through this list. The Calvinist list, starting with election, working through glorification. I'm not going to get through all of them today.

It's not going to happen. In fact, I only bothered to work through election because I knew that there was no chance that I would finish this thing today anyway. But I'll be back in a few weeks. So we'll continue going through that then.

I do want, if anybody has any questions or comments or wants to add anything, please feel free to do that. That's definitely something that I would hope would happen, so feel free to raise your hand. I promise I will call on you and hopefully not mess your name up.

Election and Predestination in Romans 8 and Ephesians 1

So we talked about Romans 8, 28 to 30, and how it gives us a great framework to begin our understanding of the Ordo Salutis. There's a few really good ones. But if you turn to Ephesians 1, Ephesians 1 and 2 are pretty tremendous passages in general when looking to understand how God works in the hearts of his children to save them.

So I'm going to start in verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven, and things on earth.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things, according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.

And so in this we see even more of these points, these steps in the Ordo Salutis. I think election and predestination are crystal clear in this passage. We also now see the calling. We are the first to hope in Christ.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, this is the calling to which this order would refer. We talked about regeneration already. This is the process by which we are born again in the spirit.

And then as a response to that, we will respond with faith, and we respond with repentance. It's also important to understand that these things happen in this order, but it's a logarithmic scale. There's no fixed amount of time between each of these steps.

And so regeneration, faith, repentance, justification, all can happen pretty close to instantly in the life of the believer, but it's important for us to understand theologically how these things work so that we can have a clear understanding.

Because as we saw with faith and regeneration, these things stack on one another. They don't exist in a vacuum. And so as we understand the order of salvation, it helps us to get a good grasp theologically on the individual points of it.

And that's why I think it's a valuable study. So we've seen faith, repentance, justification. This is not just as if I had ever sinned, but also the positive imputation of Christ's work on us. Sanctification is something that is in this particular passage, in the sense that it is the guarantee of our inheritance, and he lavished his riches and grace upon us in all of his wisdom and insight.

And certainly we could look to passages like Romans 6 through 8 in general to talk about sanctification. Perseverance and glorification also have a We see glorification in this passage. Perseverance is kind of wrapped in with sanctification.

But again, this is another one of those things where we're really building our theology of the order of salvation because of the corpus of the text, not because of an individual passage. And I think that that's actually a really helpful thing, because it gives us a good reminder that all of the Bible is relevant to us, and all of the Bible is true, and it all is internally cohesive and consistent, and that's how we're able to form and frame this kind of theology.

So for the remaining time that we have, let's talk about election and predestination. I think that when we look at election and predestination, and then we look at something like Arminianism that allows for sort of the free will of man and the ability for us to choose to believe in God, I think that a lot of us are at peace with that.

But one of the big struggles that we have, especially when we preach this, is because people, especially in America, are always wrestling with pride. Pride really gets in the way of accepting a truth like this.

And we'll see as we look at the text, it's crystal clear in the text what is being said over and over and over again. Ephesians 1, Ephesians 2. We can look at Romans. In love he predestined us. Oh, I guess they don't believe in predestination.

They don't go together. But we have this kind of, the words of God are what foolishness to the unbeliever, this unwillingness to submit ourselves, to put the text over us. And that's the function of pride.

And so it's funny, because the guy who first preached the gospel to me is an Arminian, and he and I would always get into these grand logical debates. And I would, his name's Andy. Andy, I don't know what to tell you.

Just read the Bible. And it was always this rationalization. Well, why would God do that? I mean, the whole point is that we're to glorify him. And how can we show that we're glorifying God if we're not choosing to believe in him?

It's in the text. It is plain as day. The text is above. Our reason and our rational thought is not above the Bible. And the other thing is, Adam was a better man than I was, than I am. And what happened to him?

He still fell. If the choice was ours, we would still choose the wrong choice every time. So, and I got ahead of myself, but that's OK. I'll skip that one. You're 100 right. We would be responsible for our sins.

We would have this huge weight on our shoulders of this responsibility. And that's really what the Catholic church kind of wrestles with. It's like, all right, well, if it's all about what you do, now they have responsibility.

And this is interesting. I noticed this literally last night when I was looking at this. If you look at the Catholic order of salvation, repentance is not on this list. There is no repentance for sins in the Catholic order of salvation.

There is contrition. I feel bad, but not repentance. What's the difference between contrition and repentance? Turning away from your sin. If Claire hits Asher, if my daughter hits my son, there's contrition.

But I'm not so sure there's repentance. I wish there was repentance. It would make my life a lot easier. But there is contrition, probably because she knows discipline is coming. But I know she's going to hit him again.

There is no repentance, even if there is contrition. And that actually blew me away in looking at this. I grew up in a high church, Episcopal church, but it wasn't quite over the line to Catholic. And so I never really dealt with confession and a lot of those things.

And so it is, in some ways, a black box to me. But looking at this and realizing that repentance isn't necessary in the Catholic dogma kind of blew my mind. And it made me a little sad. Because that's the action of payment.

That's the wage of sin, not what the Bible says. Can anybody think of a passage that would show both Old Testament and New Testament support for election at the same time? By definition, this is going to have to be a New Testament passage.

Romans 9, getting closer. Romans 9, 10 to 13 is the passage that I have. Pastor Bob, would you read that for us? Romans 9, verses 10 to 13. So that's a quote from the first chapter of Malachi, Old Testament.

And we see the election of God for Jacob, not Esau, even though Esau was the older. And in Jewish law, he would be the firstborn. He would be more important. He would be the one whom the entire family would lift up and serve.

But God's election was different. God's choice was for Jacob. Jacob he loved, but Esau he hated. And there's lots of examples in the New Testament, of course, Acts 13. For as many as decided to believe in God, oh sorry, for as many as were ordained to eternal life, believed.

We read Romans 8. We read Ephesians 1. Lots and lots of examples in the New Testament that talk about divine election. So I touched on one or two already, but I want to ask you, when you talk to other people about election, when you talk to people about predestination, what kinds of responses do you get?

What are the most kind of common issues that people will raise against this idea of predestination or election? Unbelievers. I mean, generally speaking, believers would say, praise me to God, one would hope.

God doesn't send people to hell. I guess it is cold. I'm putting my hands in my pockets. Anything else? And isn't it funny how quick our kids are willing to shed responsibility? But that's absolutely true, and that's kind of the flip side to hyper-Calvinism, where a hyper-Calvinist would say, well, if God has chosen who is and who isn't going to believe, then why bother wasting my time preaching the gospel to people, right?

It is super important for a lot of reasons. I mean, if you think about this, election and predestination happened before the foundation of the world. Very, very long time ago. The calling, the preaching of the gospel message, that can happen one time.

It can happen over the course of 20, 30, 40 years before any of these other things can and will happen. Who will believe that have not yet heard, right? So we need to hear the gospel preached before we can be regenerated, respond with faith.

I should step back. God can do whatever he wants. I don't want to say that God could not act if the gospel wasn't preached. But yeah, so some of these things may have a long period of time between them.

Some of them may happen functionally, instantaneously. But it helps us with our theology. And going back, Pastor Bob, to what you said before, I hesitate to use the word pragmatic. But there's a reason why we tend to teach evangelism in a historical salvation model.

Because it is critical for us to understand who we are in relation to God and what Jesus Christ did to bridge that gap more than it is the minutia, the details of something like the Ordo Salutis. I think that a lot of the time a discussion like this will happen in an example like what I had mentioned before, my friend who is also a Christian who is Armenian.

Or if you're preaching to a Catholic who actually believes in God, because there's a separation there, too. So getting back to this, are there any other common refutations or issues that people have brought up maybe that you've heard before?

So that would be the differentiation between free will and free agency. Where God changes our will, we have agency within our will to choose, but once our will is bent towards God, we will choose nothing but.

All right, I threw a couple more things in here. I've heard people say that, well, if God chooses that you're going to be saved, then you're basically just an automaton, right? You're just kind of a robot.

You're just going through the motions. And that would go exactly with what Charlie was just saying, that we have agency within our will. So God will change our will when he regenerates us, but then we do have agency within our will.

Agency. And then I touched on this earlier, this idea that, well, God looked like, oh, we have free will. God, when it talks about predestination, it talks about God looking forward in time to see what we would believe.

And then if we were going to become a believer, then those are the people that he predestined to salvation. Are there any problems with that? I mean, yes. Can anybody think of what some of those might be?

In fact, when we look at things like Romans 8 .29, which is sort of the core verse that people park on when they talk about this, it says, those whom he foreknew. It doesn't say those whom he knew what they did, right?

He knew the people, not their actions. I mean, does he know their, sure. But from a theological perspective, does he know their actions? From a religious perspective, it is talking about knowing someone intimately, not knowing, oh, you know what, I heard that Bob went to the store yesterday, which is a very, very different thing.

I touched on this already. Election means we don't have a choice. How about unbelievers never had a chance to believe, right? What about that tribe in Papua New Guinea, right? That kind of dialogue. Well, Romans 1 tells us clearly that God has made known through his creation, and nobody is without excuse.

So we're getting close to time, but I just want to ask some very quick questions. Is election conditional? And how do we know? Yes, no, how do we know? I see some big smiles. Wes, what do you think? OK, sure, all right, that's fine.

We believe in a works-based salvation. It's just not our works, it's God's works. No, if it were conditional, then we would all fail the test. This kind of goes back to some of the other stuff that we talked about already.

If election was conditional on our, what, perfect obedience, on our, what, on our good works, what is it conditional on? Then, by the way, it's not really election anymore, right? So it has to be unconditional election.

He knew everything that we would do, and he chose us according to his perfect will. Ephesians 1 .5 says that God predestined us to be his sons. Now, I have two sons. They are not always obedient. However, they are unconditionally my children.

There is nothing they could ever do, even die, to not be my children. They are my kids forever. How about this? Is election fair? No. No, election is not fair. If we operated in the world of fair, we would all have been instantly incinerated the second we were born.

So we're not really rooting for fair, even though we think that we might want to be rooting for fair for a very brief moment. Election shows a lot of things. It shows the long-suffering of God. It shows the grace of God.

It shows the love of God. Election shows that fair has already been thrown out the window even before election came into the picture, not because he didn't choose everyone, but because fair leads to condemnation for everyone.

What should our response be? What's the Christian's response, or what should be the Christian's response to election? Thankfulness, praise, right? Praise God from whom all blessings flow. In light of what we deserve, he predestined us to be his sons or daughters.

So we are now brother or sister with Christ. I mean, to think about that, to think about what that means is incredible. What else? Obedience, sure. As he has drawn us into his family, it's a comfort and it's a desire for us to want to obey him.

God knows us better than we know ourselves. And we can look, and we can even have comfort in knowing that if God has saved us, look at all of the other things that God has predestined in his plan, never mind just us.

But when we die, we will go to heaven. Like, when we look at all these things, I mean, we do want to obey him. We do want to submit to him, because he has done so much for us. How about as an encouragement to evangelism?

Not kind of this hyper-Calvinist perspective of a discouragement, but what about an encouragement? And going along with that, we can have comfort knowing that it is not our work to save people. So it's not like, oh, we preached the gospel, but we messed up, and we didn't do it right, and so now they're not going to be saved, and it's all my fault, and da-da-da-da.

We know that it is the power of God unto salvation. And so we do what we are called to do, what we are commanded to do, Great Commission, but it is the power of God. And if that calling happens 20 years before regeneration, that's God's timing.

And we just need to obey him. Going back to what you said about rest, it is so critical for us to understand that election is unconditional. And the reason why is because if we believe, like in Arminian, that God saves us because we believe in him, or if we believe, like a Catholic, that we need to show contrition, we need to show penance, and we need to do all these things, we're never resting.

If you can jump into the Father's hand, you can jump out of the Father's hand. And if you need to show penance for every single sin that you did, what if you forget one? It's an exhausting system of faith to suggest that we have to do all of these things and all of this stuff, but when we have a right understanding of election, it does, it affords us that comfort, it affords us that rest.

And then going back to evangelism, 2 Timothy 2 says, therefore, this is Paul writing to Timothy, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

So Paul is talking about his ministry, talking about all of these things that he has done. I mean, this is 2 Timothy, this is getting close to the end of Paul's ministry, and he's saying, look, I have done all of these things, acknowledging that some of the people that he has served and some of the people that he has preached to will believe, but have not yet believed.

Because he says, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation. So he's putting himself in gospel ministry and labors for the elect that they may obtain salvation.

They need to hear the gospel, because that is how God works. We're pretty much out of time. Charlie threw a bunch of big words out before. He talked about, you said double predestination, and you said something else.

I don't remember what the other word was. Asymmetrical versus symmetrical predestination. And so another way to think of this, using maybe a different word that might help us with balancing these things, is we have predestination election we look at generally in a positive light, and we also have reprobation.

So this would be, well, Grudem defines it as the sovereign decision of God before creation to pass over some persons in sorrow, deciding not to save them and to punish them for their sins, and thereby to manifest his justice.

I think that reprobation, it might be one of the most difficult theological truths to wrestle with as a Christian. I can, I can. Yeah. The definition? OK, so when we look at election and predestination, we generally look at them in a positive way.

So these are things where we talk about the election of those who would become Christians, of those whom God would save, but they're, by definition, if you're taking a subset of people and predestining them and electing them to salvation, there's by definition a different subset which you are not.

And one way to look at that is symmetrical predestination, where we kind of remove the positive or negative sort of association that we have and just say, well, they're both predestination. It's just one is one way, one is, it's like, is it negative acceleration or deceleration?

What do you want to call it? So one of them is to talk about symmetrical predestination. And another one is to say that we have election and we have reprobation. And the definition that Grudem has here, and I have it obviously written down, so if you wanted to take a look at it, it is the sovereign decision of God before creation to pass over some persons in sorrow, deciding not to save them and to punish them for their sins and thereby to manifest his justice.

So we can conclude from our understanding of election that there are some who are not chosen. And we see that in the text. Jude 4 mentions that there were some that were destined for condemnation. That is talking about reprobation.

First Peter 2, verses 7 and 8. So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.