God Wins

I appreciate those of you dutifully opening your parallels and getting your notebooks out. I'm not going to be using it, but that's OK. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I look at the next few segments, and there is so much that has to go into them.

It's like preparing for some major debate or something like that. And it's a daunting task. There's no two ways about it. I'm not sure how we're going to do it, but we'll figure it out in some way, shape, or form.

But this morning, I wanted to have a little bit more of a not going to do the divide up into groups thing, but am looking for some more interaction than we normally have. And under a particular topic, some of you might keep up with a little bit of the blogosphere, and others might not.

I won't look at anybody right now, but that's OK. But there is a book coming out next month that has garnered a great deal of attention, especially given that almost no one has actually read it. And I'm not commenting on the book until I get a chance to read it, personally.

But it has engendered a great deal of conversation, and I think it would be good if we have the conversation here first. So that if you find yourself in a situation where you are talking with someone, issues come up, you feel prepared and confident to address the subject.

The book title is Love. Who would want to argue with that? I mean, is that not just the perfect book title? Love wins. That's positive and uplifting, and nobody would want to argue against love winning.

We all want love to win. But what does it mean? Well, there are certain texts of scripture that I have a feeling are going to be addressed in this book. For example, in Romans chapter 11, beginning of verse 30, we read, For just as you once were disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience.

This is addressed to Gentiles as a group. So these also now have been disobedient, and because of the mercy shown to you, they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience, so that he may show mercy to all.

He's going to show mercy to all. And I don't know if the conclusion of this book is going to be that there is no eternal punishment, there is no hell, a form of what is called Christian universalism. There are some people saying that from reading certain chapters of the book that have been released, that that's the conclusion they came to.

I don't know. But I do know that we live in a day of religious pluralism. And recently, I have had to listen to some religious pluralists. How would you define religious pluralism? Anyone? Some classes somewhere.

Yes, sir. And while they may be different roads and might express themselves in different ways, the end is the same, and the validity of each needs to be honored, and we need to be inclusivistic. Am I using all the proper societal buzzwords that we hear just constantly all the time now?

How many of you heard, for example, if we want the other side of this from the society's perspective, that this past week, a black Pentecostal couple in the United Kingdom were turned down from being foster parents because they hold to an improper view of homosexuality?

How many of you heard about that? How many of you didn't hear about that? The majority. Last night, I watched briefly a video from the BBC in the United Kingdom, and there was a panel discussion of this, and someone in the audience said, isn't this a form of discrimination?

And one of the members of Parliament, they call them MPs over there, said, well, no, because you see, what if a child placed with this family is naturally a homosexual? They would be deeply hurt by being told by these people that their natural orientation is wrong, and so we can't let folks like this be foster parents.

Then, amazingly, the very next guy who spoke was a gay atheist, and the gay atheist said, that is ridiculous. We have a new form of dogma, cultural dogma, arising that can only allow one side to speak, and I think it's dangerous, and I say this as a gay atheist.

The only guy on the panel, the inside of a wet shoelace, was the gay atheist, which just leaves you going, wow, this has happened really fast. Where did this come from? That's the opposite side, but it seems over on the Christian side, whatever in the world that is these days, anything goes, everything's equally valid.

A book just came out that's making huge waves amongst the people that I work with, and that I have contact with, in witnessing to Muslims. It's by a very well-known scholar, grew up in Serbia. He saw all the horrors over there, and the former Yugoslavia, and all that has taken place over the past couple of decades, and the ethnic cleansing, and all that kind of stuff.

He makes a very interesting argument. I mean, you can go through the Koran, and you can find all sorts of connections between Christianity and Islam, one God, and linguistic connections as to El, and Elohim, and Allah, and all the rest of this stuff, and Jesus is seen as the spirit of God, and the wisdom of God, and there's a lot of exalted things said about Jesus in the Koran, and all the rest of that stuff.

And then he makes this argument. He says, well, if we're all monotheists, we have one of two choices. Either we're worshipping the same God, but in different ways, or we have to say you're worshipping a false God.

And it's the false God part that starts wars, and has people killing people, and blowing planes up in the sky, and flying them into buildings, and all the rest of this stuff. And he says, are we consistent if we say that Allah is a false God?

Because look, we recognize that Jehovah isn't a false God. We look at Judaism, and we don't say the Jews have a false God. And yet, in many ways, the Jewish perspective is very much the same as the Muslim perspective in regard to Jesus.

So if you're going to say, well, you don't have the right God, because you reject who Jesus is, and that's the kind of argumentation that's being made. And so you have that kind of argumentation there.

You have religious pluralism. I was listening to John Hick. Anyone ever read any of John Hick? Read some of John Hick, Brother Callahan? Because I had to read John Hick in seminary. So John Hick is a philosopher of religion, and he was talking all about the equal validity, and how a true loving God would never limit the ways in which his children could approach him, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

It was really funny. He would have respect for all these different perspectives, except for one, which was the exclusivistic Christian perspective, that God has revealed himself in one particular way, has provided one particular thing.

That, for some reason, was the one thing that wasn't valid. As long as you allow for all sorts of other perspectives, then that's valid. Let's see. And in our society today, not as much here as in the United Kingdom, or in Ireland, or in Sweden, or Norway, or places like this, where it's much more prevalent, but we're moving a whole lot faster than I ever thought we would.

You not only have what we see, for example, in this, now Christians can't be foster parents unless you tow the societal line about homosexuality. And next it'll be abortion, and then everything. It's just, didn't they ever?

How many of you read 1984 in high school? How many of you have never read 1984? OK. Oh my goodness. It's a warning. I'm not recommending you go out and read it. It's a secular piece of literature. It's not a Christian work.

But it certainly is a warning that totalitarian governments that promise to take care of you will eventually also run your life. And I think we're certainly seeing that in many ways in Western cultures.

But you not only see that happening in the societal area, but society also seems to think that they have the right to now take that line of thought directly into the religious sphere as well. Society gets to determine what's right and wrong in thinking in the religious sphere.

And one thing, what they view, form valid form of Christianity that they think is very acceptable to them, and that they would like to foster and see grow, would be a form of pluralistic universalism, where not only do all roads lead to Rome, or Mount Fuji, or whatever, Mecca, everybody has their own form of this.

But also, you remove the concept of judgment. Salvation becomes finding the real you. I was going to say an army of one, but that's not quite it. Being the best you. Isn't there a book by that name, by Joel Osteen, something like that?

Something along those lines. Your Best Life. Now, there it is. The world loves that. They don't mind a religion that is basically a self-help methodology that is meant to help you to eat the right foods, and brush your teeth, and get good exercise, and just be the best that you can be.

They like that. And they will help to promote that. And we're coming to the point in Western society where the society itself is going to seek to promote that kind of Christianity. And if you're promoting one kind of Christianity, what are you doing to that which is not that kind of Christianity?

Well, you are biased against it. You are bigoted against it. You are seeking to repress it. And that's certainly happening already across the pond, amongst my friends over there. I've had conversations with them.

What's it like to be? I can go over there, and I can pretty much say what I want, because I'm going to get out of there. They're going to get rid of me. But what's it like to live there and start wondering?

If I preach Romans 1 on Sunday morning from the pulpit, will there be ramifications? Will there be results? Will a government official be knocking on my door because a member of family of my church has disciplined their child in light of what I have said?

And the government now says that's inappropriate. And we can sort of dismiss some of this by looking across the pond over there, but do we really think that that's that far away here? I mean, that pond is getting smaller and smaller as far as being a cultural divide is concerned.

And so what I wanted to ask us this morning to think about is this particular subject, because let's face it, in our faith, what is so incredibly offensive to the modern Western mind about what we believe?

It's its exclusivicity. Exclusivity. I always put an extra it in there. It's saying God has revealed himself in one way and not another way. Now, the world's never going to put it that way, because it's pretty clear God would have the right to reveal himself as he sees fit, and God could not be put under any particular obligation to reveal himself in multiple ways, but they'll never put it that way.

How do they express it? What's the common objection? How is it expressed in such a way that it's actually an objection that puts you on the defensive immediately? I'm sorry? Oh, we're all, of course, in charge of intolerance, but what's the accusation when you open your mouth, aside from saying you're intolerant, what is it about your specific beliefs that there's only one way, and that is through Jesus Christ?

What's the immediate twisting of that, the objection that's given? You want to have a universal love of God that makes no place for his freedom and his mercy or anything? That's true. But how's our society express it?

I'm looking for a specific phrase. Here it is. That's true. Normally not fair, but here it is. What makes you think you understand? You know your way. So they want to make you look like not only the intolerant person, but the arrogant person.

Who do you think you are that you know more than anybody else? You see, they've switched the ground from what it should be, and that is, are you saying that God is under some obligation to provide multiple ways of salvation?

Are you saying that man is not sinful in God's sight? And if man is sinful, that God is under some kind of external obligation to provide multiple ways for sinners to be at peace with him? You see, that's the real question.

But they don't want the real question. They want to shift the grounds and put you always on the defensive. Now, I've said it many times in here, and if you're visiting, you just have to take my word for it.

I've said many, many times in here that really the choice that we have is either being silent and orthodox or being prepared to bear testimony to a society that has been well trained now to reflexively put us on the defensive.

When the reality is, if what we believe is true, who should be on the defensive? Shouldn't it be our society? Shouldn't it be those suppressing the knowledge of God, shouldn't it be those who are refusing to bow the knee to the Lordship of Christ?

That should be the case, but so often the conversation begins with maybe a very politically correctly expressed way of putting it, but it's almost always an implicit accusation that you are the one who's wrong.

You are the one who's hateful. You are the one who's intolerant. You are the one who is causing division. You are a black eye on Christianity. Why can't you be like those other Christians? Anybody ever experienced anything like what I'm talking about?

If you've ever thought about opening your mouth in our society today and saying something, and it's much more so in the younger Brother Callahan's generation than in some of the rest of us. I won't mention any names, but some of us who have a little snow on the roof, or if we have nothing left on the roof at all, sort of feel like a lot of those houses in our neighborhoods these days.

I just don't get to have a new one, that's all. Everybody else has. It's amazing. I mean, this past week, hopefully most of you are aware of the fact that, once again, the cultural paradigm shifted massively, actually over the past two weeks, here just in the United States.

It was pretty quiet. If you don't have your ear to the ground and have some good sources of sound information, you might not have even noticed it, because I can guarantee you one thing, that most of the mainstream press isn't going to talk about it.

But you know that the current administration removed the protections of conscience that had been in place since the Bush administration. So if you work in a government-funded medical institution, you no longer have the protection of law from engaging in doing medical procedures that completely violate your conscience.

That's gone. You just lose your job, just like it is in England and other places. And then, as hopefully you all know, the president announced that he had instructed the attorney general to no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, because he believes it's unconstitutional.

That's not his job, but that's another issue. And so massive paradigm shifts right in front of our eyes, happening so much faster. That's one of the comments I've heard from people like Al Mohler, that the speed with which this is happening.

And it does seem downright inevitable now that within a very short period of time, and I'm not talking 20 years, probably within two or three years, our understanding, our entire belief of what marriage is, is going to be thrown under the bus.

How are we going to respond to that? What are we going to do with that? And the world looks at us and says, well, I meet nice, wonderful, loving Christians. They say, love? Why can't you be like them?

Why can't you be like them? And I would like to suggest we owe them an explanation. But I'd also like to suggest that if you haven't thought that through before you try to offer it, it's probably going to be really tough to really do a good job with it.

I mean, the first time through it might be a little halting and maybe a little disorganized. And people can tell when you're just sort of flying by the seat of your pants and you haven't really thought through it.

We have to be thinking through our worldview today. I mean, unless we're living in a cave, unless we're just going, I just can't handle this. And I understand that feeling. There are days I fire up that RSS feed.

And for those who don't know, that's a syndication feed where you choose your news sources and it's all right there. And it makes getting through things a whole lot faster. And you sort of keep an eye on things a little bit easier.

And it's depressing. It's depressing, I'll admit. I mean, I've got to pray and say, Lord, I immediately start thinking of that psalm, the unrighteous. They're having a heyday. And psalm 12 .7, the wicked strut about when that which is vile is honored amongst men.

And I just go, here we are. Here we are. Yes, sir. They're in Kansas, believe you me. It's a cry in shame that it was a cult that was under consideration. And Westboro Baptist is a cult, if you've ever.

I've met them. I've been up close and personal. I managed to get, I managed to speak with Fred Phelps in Salt Lake City a number of years ago. The reason I was able to get to talk to him was because I mentioned that I had just debated Barry Lynn on homosexuality.

And so he's like, and so I, but as soon as I said to him, and I was standing right here. And as soon as I said to him, but sir, the scriptures tell us that we are to speak the truth in love. As soon as I said that, he screams out, God hater!

And all of his cult just swooned down on top of me. In between me and him, just screaming, God hater! God hater! God hater! It was just, it was a signal. And that's how they shut down all conversations.

Just classic, classic cult. Just incredible. An amazing, amazing little teeny tiny group of people that have gotten about a million times more attention than they actually deserve. But, be it as it may, yeah, it was a sad situation to be going, if you give the government the authority to shut them down, how many people in the government want to shut me down?

Or that person down? Or that person down? So, yeah, we're not, the First Amendment does not exist in the United Kingdom. They don't have that. And the government has made it very clear, there are all sorts of people being tried right now in European countries for hate crimes.

For what they have said, what they have expressed in their words, and many of them are being tried for having said things hateful about Islam. Such as their expression of the opinion that they believe that Muhammad incited his followers to violence.

Well, duh. I mean, that's not even arguable. But unfortunately, in those cultures, truth is no longer the best defense. It's the mere expression of those things that is at issue. So, yeah, those are big things.

But going back to this, on a theological level, something like this, think about the very expression, love wins. It's positive. It's uplifting. And it automatically biases the debate. How can you argue against that?

I mean, let's say, for the sake of argument, that love wins ends up being an implicit argument for universalism. Everyone's going to get saved. Everyone's going to get saved. Is that how love wins? Think with me for a moment.

We don't like talking about hell. I'm concerned about anybody who does like talking about hell. I didn't say I'm concerned about anyone who talks about hell. I said I'm concerned about someone who has an imbalance and think that's just the most wonderful thing in the world to talk about.

I think we should talk about it as frequently as scripture does, which is pretty frequently. I think we should warn about it. But I don't think it should be something that, oh, I just love talking about hell.

That's weird to me. Love wins. If we're going to have these kinds of conversations, we have to recognize what the foundational, well, you've heard Brother Callahan and I use the term, what are the presuppositions that someone is bringing to this particular discussion?

Oftentimes, they won't even know. Oftentimes, they don't even recognize how biased they are, how they've bought into certain things. They've never even been challenged before. And when you do challenge them, be careful.

Folks in our society, they think first with their emotions, not with their minds. And so often, you challenge their thinking process. And what's their first reaction? Personal offense. You're offending me.

Well, you're offending me, too, but you didn't hear me saying anything about it. They respond with emotion rather than with reason. Love wins. How would you respond to someone who says, yeah, look, if you're really going to honor the love of God, and you think of how for God to love the world that he gave his only son, how can that love ever fail?

Now, hopefully, you're thinking with me. Because you know what? In a non-reformed or Arminian understanding of the love of God, where there is no differentiation in the love of God, it's all peanut butter love.

You know what I mean by peanut butter love? You spread it all over the place. There can be no particular love of God as he had for the people of Israel. There can be no particularity as was expressed every single time the sacrifices were offered in Jerusalem.

That sacrifice was not for the pharaoh in Egypt. It was not for the king in Babylon. Oh, we can skip over all that stuff. And what we want is a non-differentiated, ooey-gooey, peanut butter love of God.

And if you say that, and if love wins, then I can see why Arminianism has really been the fertile soil out of which universalism has grown. I can see that. It's sort of hard to argue against it. I mean, about the only way to do it is to sort of come up with this rather cold, philosophical argument that, well, but God's love will win, but this free will of man is very, very important.

And God's very, very concerned about that. And that's really the central aspect of things, you know? And so if a person just doesn't freely choose, then, you know, so you're saying God's love doesn't win?

God's love can't change, can't woo? Well, no, I guess there's just some, and there'll be people who take that position. But if you hear this phrase, it's coming out, I think, March, it's coming out next week, something like that, a week after.

I've ordered the Kindle version. That comes out later. That way I don't have to just throw it on my iPod and listen to it. I don't have to actually read the thing. Next few weeks, and many, many, many thousands of people are going to be reading this, OK?

How would you respond? Where would you start? Well, there's only two words up there. So I would suggest you would have to ask a question about both of them. First of all, what does wins mean? What does it mean to win?

We all want to be winners. What does it mean to win? We've got to define what winning is, but obviously, for us, most importantly, what does love mean? Is God's love just a really big, smushy version of human love?

And here's where we run into some issues, some honest problems. I'll be perfectly honest with you. But so many, quote, unquote, evangelicals, people who call themselves Christians, are so enraptured with a very creaturely God, a God who is made in our image, that they don't have a meaningful foundation upon which to define the word love to begin with, as far as divine love goes.

So the gospel, in fact, is all about God, and it's about what the triune God has done to glorify himself. And if it's all about the glory of God, then where does that fit into love, wins, especially because in their mind, this love is all one way.

It's all God's love for mankind. And the assumptions are, well, God's love wants the best for mankind, and therefore, it must result in this winning. And this winning would have to include what's best for them, and what's best for anybody would be with God for eternity.

And so he may have to take us through different paths, but he's going to get us there somehow, because that's how love wins. Love of who? And do they even have a sufficiently biblical view of God to realize that the greatest commandment is that we are to love God, and that the greatest good is the glory of God?

A lot of folks don't hear that on a Sunday morning. It's just not been a part of their instruction. If they're not regularly exposed to the word of God, or even if they are, they're exposed to the word of God in a context where it's constantly overlaid with human tradition, and they only see portions of the word of God, or they've been given an overriding interpretive grid that filters out all the tough stuff.

You're still dealing with a real difficult situation there as far as getting any communication to happen at all, but for you anyways, I would imagine you at least want to be able to walk away from this conversation, feeling like you gave a meaningful testimony that if there was some follow-up on it, if there was, you want to do something the Spirit of God can use in their life to call them, to challenge them to step up, and see that a cultural Christianity, post-modern Christianity isn't Christianity at all.

You can't just take human religion and stick a Jesus sticker on it, and that's good enough. In fact, it becomes a monstrosity when you think about it, putting the name of Jesus on something that's basically man-centered.

It just, so as soon as, you know, we understand why this attracts people, and the author of this book, just last night I posted a video where I responded to this fellow, and all the videos he puts out, they're so slick, and they've got cool music, and everybody dresses cool and all, and I was commenting during the video about how we Reformed Baptists, you know, we can't really, we can't compete in this area.

I mean, come on, you know, I don't have a guy right off camera strumming a guitar or anything like that, you know. We're just not quite there yet, but, and probably never will be, but we understand why this is attractive, and why the younger generation especially is attracted to two positive words.

I mean, that is not a title that John Owen would ever have used. First of all, it's way too short. It's not a paragraph long, and the monosyllabic or bisyllabic words cannot be used in Puritan book titles.

It's just not allowable. And we understand that for a lot of folks, it takes a lot of work to read some John Owen, or some of those Puritans, and stuff like that. We understand the attraction. But we're called to minister where the Lord puts us.

And the next generation has been deeply influenced by a way of thought that is fundamentally unbiblical. But we can't just sit back and draw our cloaks around us and say, well, we're not going to have anything to do with them.

What can you do about it? How can you challenge it without compromise? Well, I think it's calling them up to a higher standard. I mean, they are created in the image of God. And whether they like it or not, they're going to seek for some kind of consistency.

Their worldview isn't going to provide them a foundation for it, and that's where you can go, ah-ha. Wait a minute, you just made a moral choice decision based upon what? And show them their inconsistency.

Now, some of them will embrace that. Oh, isn't that wonderful? But they can't live that way. When they get in their car, they're going to drive down the right side of the road. They're not going to embrace the inconsistency of driving down the left side of the road.

Because they know the universe just doesn't work that way. They ain't going to get very far. So we need to respond to these things, and we need to think through ahead of time. And from my perspective, one of the most important things you can do is as soon as you hear something, identify the assumptions it is creating in the mind of the person you're speaking with.

Now, if you don't know this person from Adam, that might be difficult to do right off the top of your head. But you know a lot of your co-workers. You know why someone might be raising something like this.

And you've got to start off not so much concerned about what it does in your mind as what does that title mean in their mind? What are they assuming? And don't let false, unbiblical assumptions stand.

One of the greatest things you can do for them, if you believe them, especially to be a Christian, is to challenge the unbiblical nature of the assumptions that they're making and bring the light of the Word of God to bear.

I mean, for me, in my experience, when I see a true believer, I see a submission to the Word of God and a desire to know what the Word of God says. And it might take a while, but that's where I go. And when I look at that, I go, well, you know what?

Love does win in exactly the way that the source of all love has designed it to win. But you see, I would change that to God wins. God accomplishes exactly what God desires to accomplish. And God does desire to demonstrate His love, and He has done so.

But He also desires to demonstrate His power and His justice and His holiness and, yes, even His wrath against sin. And that's the fundamental problem with universalism, is that it says only a certain portion of God's attributes will be truly demonstrated.

That's the problem. So you haven't said, well, I'm not going to talk to you unless you read John Owen, but you have answered in a way that I think John Owen would go, yeah, that's right. And so it's just a matter of hearing what they're hearing and not compromising the response, but putting the response in such a way that you challenge the presuppositions that are in error in it.

So I know it was an unusual discussion, but hopefully somewhat timely in light of what we're facing today. Let's close in word of prayer. And dear Heavenly Father, as we go into this world this coming week, we have no idea what kind of changes will take place.

How many more opportunities will be given to us to bear testimony, but Lord, we would ask that you would help us to be instruments in your hand to your honor and to your glory, that we would not be silent Christians, but that we would be Christians who would speak words seasoned, as it were, with grace that would be used to your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name.