My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 2)

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My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 3)

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the Word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the Word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Today is August the 4th, 2020.

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And if you're following along in our daily Bible reading at Sovereign Grace Family Church, today you should be reading Acts chapter 9.

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And if you are reading along with that reading and you would like to have a Bible study or two to go along with your reading, you can go to Sermon Audio.

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You can look up our series on the book of Acts and you can find where I preached for a couple of years on the book of Acts and you can go find what I did on Acts chapter 9.

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And always remember if you have questions about today's reading, you can leave those in the comments below or you can simply send me an email and I'd be happy to answer your email questions if you have any.

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Well, today we are continuing what we began yesterday.

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And I'm calling this short series on our podcast, My Pathway to Calvinism.

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As I said, during the month of August, I was going to take our podcast into a different format instead of following along with our daily readings.

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I'm going to be taking a little different direction, a little different pathway.

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And if you'll remember yesterday, if you listened to the program, I began to tell you a little bit of my own testimony of how I became a Calvinist.

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And I do think this is an important subject for several reasons.

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First, I know many people in our church are already firmly committed to the Reform position.

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And many people have talked to me in our church about how they became Reformed and how I became Reformed in my theology.

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Some people have always been Reformed.

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They grew up in Calvinistic churches.

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And other people like me had a moment in time where we were exposed to the doctrines of grace and those things at first were opposed to what we had understood before.

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And there was a work of God in our lives to bring us to a better understanding of Scripture and ultimately to the Reformed understanding.

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And that's what I'm sharing with you.

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Like I said, I know some of you have heard this story before, some of you haven't.

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And I know many people that are visiting our church have never heard this before.

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So I want people to know how I became a Calvinist because I want people to understand, first of all, this is not something that we are simply just trying to go with the latest popular trend or something like that, but this is because there has been a rise in Calvinistic thinking in churches in the last generation.

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There was even a movie about this.

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It was called Calvinist by Les Lamphere.

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And if you haven't seen the movie Calvinist, I would encourage you watch it because it does talk about the rise in Reformed thinking in churches in the last generation and why that is.

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And it gives you a little bit of insight into the reasons for it.

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But I wanted to simply, like I said, tell my story and share that.

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And I would love to talk to anyone who has questions about it.

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If you want to send me a message or leave me a comment and I'll get back to you.

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But today we're going to continue the story.

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As I said yesterday, my pathway to Calvinism, I wasn't a Calvinist when I became a Christian.

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I'd never even heard that term.

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Maybe in passing, I'd heard someone say it, but never really understood it or tried to do any research on it.

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When I was in seminary, I was told Calvinism kills churches.

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There was a class that was opposing Calvinism.

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And so I always sort of had a negative attitude toward it.

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The way I saw Calvinism was it was anti-evangelism.

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It was anti-freedom.

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It was not something that I wanted to believe in.

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And then, as I said in the last podcast, I had a friend who challenged me.

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And if I remember correctly, his statement to me was simple.

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He was saying, what do you think about predestination? And I gave him the typical Arminian response.

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God looks down the corridor of time.

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God sees what we're going to do.

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And God ultimately sort of proactively responds to our faith.

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And he said, I used to believe that, but I don't believe it anymore.

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And he challenged me with scripture.

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And that's what I want to do today.

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I want to look at the scriptures that I was primarily challenged by.

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First of all, I want to mention that the first scriptures that he pointed out were probably the most obvious, but maybe not.

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He simply pointed out the fact that the word predestination is in the Bible.

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The word predestined comes up several times in the Bible.

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In fact, the word predestined is in the ESV Bible.

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The word predestined is translated five times in four scriptures.

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So if you want to write these down and look them up, or if you're a quick person who's quick at opening up your Bible, the first one is in the book of Acts chapter four, verse 28.

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So this is the gospel writer, Luke, who also wrote Acts.

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And he spoke about how what happened to Jesus was predestined by God.

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He says that what happened to Jesus was done to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

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So it's referring to Jesus going to the cross.

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And I don't think any one of us would deny that what happened to Jesus was planned by God from the foundation of the world.

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It was certainly predestined to take place.

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And we know this because the Bible says Jesus is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

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So Acts 4, 28 is the first time we see the word predestined in scripture.

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The next time we see it is in the book of Romans, and we see it in Romans 8, 29 and 30.

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And so it's really one long sentence, and later I would learn that this was actually referred to as the golden chain of redemption.

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It says, For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

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And those whom he predestined, he also called.

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And those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified.

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So we see the word predestined there twice, one in verse 29, one in verse 30.

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Then we see the word predestined come up again in the book of Ephesians, chapter 1, verse 5.

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It says, He, being God, predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.

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So not only do we see the word predestined in Ephesians 1, 5, but we also see the word purpose, referring to the purpose of God and the purpose of his will, and that became important later on as I began to understand how and why God predestined.

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And then Ephesians chapter 1, verse 11.

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So the same book, same chapter, just later in the chapter, he says in verse 11, 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.

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That is, again, uses not only the word predestined, but the word purpose.

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And these are words that were sort of flying off the page at me.

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And even though I had been a student of the word for several years and had been in seminary for several years, by this point, these words seemingly were coming out of nowhere.

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Seeing the word predestined, seeing the word purposed, seeing those things together in the word of God, and really understanding that there's a relationship here between how God interacts with man.

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And these were some of the first verses.

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And again, he pointed me to these, and he says, you know, if you look at these, you know, start considering what this means in the larger context of Scripture and how God dealt with people in the Old Testament, how God deals with people in the New Testament.

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And I did.

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And I began to read and study these scriptures and began to look deeper into them.

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And I came to a realization, I remember the moment I came to this realization.

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I said, what really distinguishes the Calvinist and the Arminian, and this is, again, I was already beginning to see that language come up.

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The Calvinists believed in predestination.

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The Arminians believed in prescience, which means that God sees that you're going to believe and therefore he chooses you.

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That's how they believe predestination works, and that's what I was before all of this happened.

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That's the way I would have defined it.

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And I realized it came down to how we understood the word foreno, or foreknew.

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And the big passage that I was going to have to deal with was Romans 8, 29 and 30.

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For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son.

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For those whom he foreknew.

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And again, up until this point, my answer would have been, well, the word foreknew there means God looked down the corridor of time.

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He saw what I was going to do based upon him seeing my free will choice.

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That's why he chose me.

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And because God knows the future, he knows whether or not I'm going to choose him.

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And therefore, that's why God chose me.

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And that would have been my answer up until this point.

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But what I began to realize was that understanding doesn't fit into the passage, because he goes on to say those whom he foreknew, he predestined, and those whom he predestined, he called.

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And I said, wait a minute.

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If the calling follows the predestination in this order, what I would learn later, this is actually referred to as the golden chain of redemption.

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If the calling comes after the predestination, how is it that God saw me respond to a call that I only received because I was predestined? How is it that God saw me do something that required him doing something first? And then I began to ask this question, does foreknow mean that God looks down the corridor of time and sees what I'm going to do? And the more I studied that word, and the more I realized how it was used in the Bible, the more I came to realize that the word foreknow does not mean that God looks down the corridor of time and sees what I'm going to do and responds to it.

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When the Bible uses the word know from the perspective of God knowing someone, it's always in the context of a relationship.

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The Bible says in Amos chapter 3 that God said to Israel, you have I known of all the nations of the world.

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And he was speaking to Israel.

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And what did that mean? It means that God had a special relationship with Israel, and it was a type of knowledge.

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And the word know there can be translated love, because it says you have I loved, you have I set my affection upon, you have I known of all the nations of the world.

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Then we look at Matthew chapter 7, when Jesus is talking about the people who come to him at the end of the age and say, Lord, Lord, did we not do this? Did we not do this? Matthew 7, 21, 23.

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And Jesus will say, depart from me, I never knew you.

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Again, doesn't mean that he doesn't know them anymore than Amos 3, 2 means that God doesn't know the other nations.

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God knows all nations, but God loves Israel.

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He has a special relationship with Israel.

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And you go to Matthew 7.

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God knows everything about the false teacher, but he has not entered into a relationship with that person.

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And therefore, when it says I never knew you, it's in the context of a relationship.

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And so when I began to see that the word know doesn't mean God learning something, because God knows everything.

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So I remember a guy said that, a pastor said that.

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He said, God never learns anything.

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And that was like a light bulb moment for me, because the Arminian position is that God looks down the corridor of time, sees what you're going to do, and he responds to it as if he needs to know what you're going to do, as in he needs to learn something.

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But that's not the case at all, because God knows everything in the sense of knowledge.

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He is omniscient.

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He has all knowledge.

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But when it talks about knowing, it's talking about relationship.

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And we know that that's used throughout the scripture.

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We go back to Adam and Eve.

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Adam knew Eve, and they conceived and bore a child.

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The word know is an important word referring to relationships, sometimes the most intimate of relationships, which is the way it's used in that passage.

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So the real light bulb moment for me began to happen as I began to look at Romans 8, where again, the word predestined is used twice in a row, and it's used in conjunction with other important theological words, such as calling, justification, glorification, and foreknow, foreknew.

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And it just dawned on me, it says, it was as if I, sort of the scales fell off my eyes.

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It says foreknow in this passage, he foreknew cannot mean that he looked down the corridor of time, because it doesn't fit with the context of the passage, and it doesn't fit with what we know about the word foreknew.

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And so I said, well, what does it mean then that those whom he foreknew, well, what it means is those whom he chose to enter into a relationship with, he predestined.

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Those who before he created them, he chose to enter into a relationship with them.

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If you want to make it simple, those whom he foreloved, he also predestined.

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And that was like a light bulb moment for me.

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And that was when I began to really identify myself more with Reformed teaching and Calvinism, because that's really the abandonship moment, when you realize that God didn't choose you because he saw that you were going to do something.

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And in the days ahead, I'm going to look at some other passages that bear that out.

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But really, it was Romans 8, 29, and 30 that were very, very formative.

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It was the hurdle that I had to get over, because it was as much as all of these words predestined was coming up, and what I didn't mention earlier, and I wanted to, not only was the word predestined used multiple times in the Bible, but the word elect was used all throughout the Bible, especially in the New Testament.

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We see in the ESV Bible, the word elect is translated 15 times.

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The word, the underlying Greek word is actually in the Greek New Testament 22 times.

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And so we see, and the word election is in the Bible, the ESV Bible, three times.

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And so we see not only the word predestined, but we see elect, which means chosen, and we see the word election, and we see these all over the New Testament.

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And I want to end today by telling a quick story.

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I was, one of the pastors that I began listening to, because again, I was researching this, I was, the whole year after I was first challenged with looking up the concept of predestination, the whole year after that, I must have spent all of my free study time investigating this particular subject.

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I was preaching at that time, probably preaching through the gospel of Luke.

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And so it wasn't as if it was my only thing that I was studying.

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I was working on my, maybe I think my master's degree at that point.

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So it wasn't the only thing I was studying.

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But in all of my spare time, if I had any, I was studying Calvinism.

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I was studying what this meant because I was challenged.

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And when I went to the word of God, it seemed like this could be a real, this could be really true.

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And one of the persons that I listened to was a pastor by the name of Roy Hargrave.

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He was the pastor of River Bend Community Church, which is in Ormond Beach, so not too far away from me.

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Roy, if you have a chance to look up Pastor Hargrave, Roy Hargrave, H-A-R-G-R-A-V-E, he's retired now, but he still has sermons on YouTube.

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I encourage you to look him up.

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He is worth listening to.

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And going back and to the reason why I bring him up is because Pastor Hargrave said something that was just, again, another light bulb moment for me.

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He said, so many people come up to me and say, I don't believe in predestination.

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And he said, but it's in the Bible.

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And I remember exactly that's how he said, it's in the Bible.

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The word predestination is in the Bible.

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You can't say I don't believe in predestination.

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You can say I understand it differently.

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You can say it's where, you know, you can debate what it means, but you can't say I don't believe in it because it's in the Bible.

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So that's what I'll leave you with today.

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If you want to look at those passages I gave you to look up, think about the fact that if you've had issues with predestination, understand this, the word is in the Bible.

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The word elect is in the Bible.

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Election and predestination is throughout the New Testament.

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It's not only in the writings of Paul.

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In fact, what we're going to see in the days ahead is it wasn't really Paul that convinced me to be a Calvinist, but it was Jesus.

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Because as much as I believe the whole scripture is inspired by God and the writings of Paul are as inspired as the gospels, it was Jesus's words that really convinced me that not only was I going down the right track, but that I had understood correctly what it was I was learning.

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So I hope today has been an encouragement to you.

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I know the last two days have been a little longer.

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I hope that isn't a problem for those of you who are daily listeners.

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I know, you know, these are a little longer, but the audio makes it a little different.

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My production's a little different now, but I hope it's still being a blessing to you.

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If you have questions, please send me those questions.

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I'd love to talk to you about it.

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And tomorrow we're going to go in and I'm going to show you how Jesus ultimately confirmed everything I was investigating about Calvinism and how that ultimately led me to my confirmation.

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And I'll explain more about that tomorrow.

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So thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 630 AM on YouTube and Facebook.

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If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment and subscribing to the channel.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.