My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 4)

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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

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.

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

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

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

Today is August the 6th, 2020.

If you're going through our daily Bible reading at Sovereign Grace Family Church, today we're going to be reading Acts chapter 11.

So I encourage you to not only read that chapter, but to read it multiple times.

As I mentioned yesterday on the show, take an opportunity and maybe listen to it on audio if you have the capacity to do that.

This is the study, this is the passage for today that we're doing as a church together.

And my hope is that you're following along with the reading.

Now we're continuing in our discussion today on the topic of my pathway to Calvinism.

And though, as I said in the previous programs, many of you've heard the story of how I became a Calvinist, but I wanted to take this opportunity to share these things because I know that not everybody's in the same place.

Not everybody understands everything exactly the same way.

There's not absolute uniformity, even in our church on every single doctrine of scripture.

And so this gives an opportunity, as I said, to sort of show you where I'm at and how I got to where I am.

And hopefully maybe clear up some questions that you have and give you an opportunity to ask questions.

My hope is that lessons like this would inspire you to leave comments or maybe drop me an email.

And as I said, this is primarily being made for the Sovereign Grace community, our church community.

But if you're a person that's not a part of our church, we welcome you to the show, we encourage you to listen, and hopefully it'll be a blessing to you.

And I would go one step further and say this, if you are in Jacksonville and you do not have a church home, we would encourage you to come and visit with us and learn about what we are as a church and who we are as a church.

And one of the things that I will tell you about our church is we have a very loving and very supportive community.

It's a smaller church.

We, less than 100 people in regular attendance on Sunday.

So we're certainly no mega church, but we do love to have visitors and we love to show people the love of Christ and to teach the word of God.

So I would encourage you to come visit with us if you are listening but have never been with us.

And currently in Sovereign Grace, I am preaching through the book of Genesis verse by verse.

So I would encourage you to come and join us for our Sunday morning study.

Now, yesterday I said that it was Jesus who ultimately convinced me to be a Calvinist.

I know that's kind of a weird thing to say, but what I meant was it was Jesus who convinced me of the fact that no one can come to him unless God does something first, unless God does a work in the heart.

And that was very important to me.

That was as much as the subject of foreknowledge in Romans eight was clarifying and sort of scales fell off at that point.

When I began to study the words of Jesus in John six and really come to a conclusion on those, that was another watershed moment.

And if those words from Jesus were not as clear, I don't know if I would have been able to make the steps that I did in my journey.

But seeing those words of Jesus as clear as day, that was so powerful in my own coming to terms with what it meant to be ultimately to be a Calvinist.

And I wanna mention something else.

At this time in history, this would have been when I was still in seminary, I wasn't calling myself a Calvinist.

Even though I was believing these things, I began to use the phrase reformed pretty early on, but it was a while before I would use the term Calvinist, because the word Calvinist was like it was, you were persona non grata if you were a Calvinist in certain circles, you were not welcome.

It was like carrying a badge of dishonor to identify yourself as a Calvinist.

And so it was a long time, even though I believed in the doctrines of grace early on, it was a long time before I became comfortable calling myself a Calvinist.

And now I almost do so as a way to eliminate any misunderstandings.

People say, why are you so concerned with calling yourself, why do you call your show Coffee with a Calvinist? Why are you so concerned with calling yourself a Calvinist? And I say, well, my reason is at this point, one, I'm very confirmed in what I believe.

And two, it really cuts to the heart of the issue for a lot of people.

If somebody came up and said, well, are you Arminian or Calvinist? I can say quite clear, I'm a Calvinist.

I know I believe in all five points of Calvinism.

So for me, it's just easier.

You cut to the chase.

You find out where people are very quickly when you identify yourself as a Calvinist, people sort of immediately, if they know what that language means, they know what you're about.

I do think that there are some people who use the term badly.

I think that some people, that there are some negative connotations that can come along with the term Calvinist.

But ultimately, I'm comfortable with it now, but I wasn't always.

It took time, it took a lot.

But getting back to the text, and that's what I wanna look at today.

Today, we're gonna look at the monster text.

And when I say it's the monster text, this is the text that will eat you alive.

If you are not Reformed, if you are not a Calvinist, this is the passage that really is just, many people won't even touch it.

Or if they do, they will not exegete it correctly because they, and by that, I mean they won't go verse by verse through it and really see how the arguments of the Apostle Paul build on one another.

And I've heard people try to get through this text, they turn the text on its head, and they make this text say so many things that it doesn't say.

And the text I'm referring to, of course, is Romans chapter nine.

It's not one verse, it's not two verses, it's not three verses, it's an entire chapter.

And this entire chapter is on the subject of God's purpose in election.

And I want to remind you that just a few months ago, I did an entire lesson on Romans chapter nine, and I did a, we had a conference at the church, the Sovereignty of God Conference, and I preached a sermon on the idea of the potter having freedom over the clay.

Has not the potter right over the clay was the title of my sermon.

So if you want to go back and listen to that sermon, and listen to my lesson that I did on Romans nine, I would encourage you to do so, because with the time constraints that we have on this daily podcast, I'm not going to be able to do justice to the text as I would need to do to really flush out all that it says.

But this was the passage, and some of you've heard me tell this story before.

This was the passage that I was hollering across the room at my wife about, because as I said in a previous program, for about a year after I was first challenged with that phrase, what do you think about predestination? For about a year, I fought, and I mean fought against it.

I did not want to be a Calvinist for several reasons, not the least of which was that I was training to be a minister, and I had always heard Calvinism kills churches, and I had heard that if I was a Calvinist, I would never be able to pastor anywhere, no church would want me.

Again, persona non grata.

And so it was a scary thing to consider that if these things were true, and I had to preach them, it could make me very, very unpopular with people.

And you might say, well, that's a worldly way of looking at it, well, I'm just being honest.

I was afraid, and so I spent a year at least trying to disprove Calvinism, read several books trying to disprove it, read Robert Piccirilli's Grace, Faith, and Free Will, probably one of the better ones that I read against it, but Dr.

Piccirilli's book, basically what he said was he believed you could lose your salvation, and if you can lose your salvation, Calvinism isn't true, therefore Calvinism isn't true.

You may say, well, that's a silly argument, but he made a really, his book is good.

I think as good of a case as could be made opposing Calvinism, I think he made a decent case, but it was, at that point, it wasn't convincing.

And again, because he was not going up against other authors, it wasn't that I was comparing Robert Piccirilli with R.C.

Sproul, it wasn't as if I was comparing the writers of the Arminian side to the writers of the Calvinist side, I was comparing the Arminians to scripture.

When I read Dave Hunt in debating Calvinism, I wasn't comparing him to James White, I was comparing him to scripture, and I was seeing that what they were saying was not lining up with the Bible, and so, and I've said this many times, it's not Calvin who makes me a Calvinist, it's not James White who made me a Calvinist, it's not R.C.

Sproul who made me a Calvinist, it's not Roy Hargrave who made me a Calvinist, it's the Bible, it's Jesus, it's the Apostle Paul who makes me believe these things.

And so, I remember sitting, my wife and I had a little shotgun house over on Woodland Drive, and it was just us, it was before we had Ashley and Cody, and I was sitting on the couch in the living room, and I was reading my Bible, and I had a notepad and a pen, and I was just taking notes, and I would, I was studying Romans 9.

My wife was in the kitchen, our house, you know, everything was small, so we were sort of, you know, living room and kitchen were on both ends of the house, but they were still pretty close together because it was a small house, and I would just holler and say, "'Baby, do you hear this?' And I would read a passage from Romans 9, and she would go, "'Yeah?' And I would say, "'Doesn't this sound like, "'you know, what the Calvinists believe? "'Doesn't this sound like reformed teaching? "'Doesn't this sound like what he's saying?' And she'd say, "'Yeah?' And then she'd say, "'Yeah?' And a few minutes later, I'd say, "'Baby, can you hear this one?' And I'd read another passage, and it was just, it was on and on, and she could tell that I was beginning to become convinced.

As I said, it wasn't just Romans 9, but it was, Romans 9 was the monster, like I said, it's like a monster that'll devour you because you can't get past it.

If you're trying to be an Arminian, Romans 9 is gonna be the, that's gonna be the battleground.

People have twisted Jesus' words in John 6 and made it where, yes, you can come.

The Father draws everybody, blah, blah, blah.

People twist the foreknowledge in Romans 8.

God knows what you're gonna do, therefore, that's why he chose you.

People twist passages, but when you get to Romans 9, it's just so clear.

I mean, Romans 9, 13 is that, Jacob, I loved, Esau, I hated.

That passage was huge to me because I've been taught God loves everybody absolutely equally, and yet here's a passage where it says, Jacob, I loved, Esau, I hated.

And I remember I heard someone say, well, that just means God loved Esau less.

Hated there doesn't mean hate, it means to love less.

And I say, well, okay, so God doesn't love everyone equally.

And they say, no, he loves everyone equally, but you just said he loved less.

If Romans 9, 13 means, Jacob, I loved, Esau, I loved less, that still means God loves people differently.

And that is very important because at the heart of the concept of election is the idea of God choosing some and ultimately passing over others.

And why would God do that? Because God chooses to.

In fact, I want to read just a short section of Romans 9 for today's study.

Beginning at verse six, I'm going to read verse six to 13.

But it is not as though the word of God has failed.

See, people were saying, well, if the Jews aren't all saved, that means God's promises have failed.

And Paul says, no, the word of God has not failed.

For not all who descend from Israel belong to Israel.

Not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named.

This means it's not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of promise are counted as offspring.

That's, again, election.

God doesn't choose all the children of Abraham, but the children of promise.

Verse nine, for this is what the promise said.

About this time next year, I will return and Sarah shall have a son.

And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls, she was told the older will serve the younger.

As it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.

So this whole passage is about God choosing one over the other, and God's ability and willingness to make that choice.

And he made the choice before they were born so that it could not be said that he chose one or the other because of what they had done.

God did not choose Jacob because he was good and Esau, he did not pass over because Esau was bad.

Both of them were bad.

God chose to show grace to Jacob based on nothing in Jacob, but so that the purpose of election might stand, stand that God's purpose of election might be demonstrated.

And the very next question most people have, well, does that mean God's not fair if God chooses one and not the other? And that's exactly what Paul begins to deal with in verse 14.

What shall we say? Is there injustice on God's part? Is God not fair? He says, by no means, because he's, and you would think if we've misunderstood it this far, he would clarify it and he'd say, no, no, no, no.

God chooses based on what we do.

God's perfectly fair, but that's not what he says.

He says in verse 15, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.

I'll have compassion on whom I have compassion.

Then in verse 18, he says, so he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills, he hardens.

Beloved, that is insurmountable when we deal with the issue of election.

If you are an Arminian, how do you justify your belief when faced with this passage? And I know how some do.

I know some Arminians say, well, this isn't talking about individuals.

This is talking about nations, and we're talking about the nation of Jacob and the nation of Esau.

And I say, that doesn't make it any better because now you're just dealing with a whole lot of people God didn't choose, not one.

That doesn't make it any better.

And I don't believe that's what it's talking about here because later he'll distinguish that this is Jews and Gentiles.

So it's not referring to nations.

It's talking about individuals from the Jews and from the Gentiles.

But the other thing too that I often hear people say, well, this isn't about salvation.

This is about service.

And I say that doesn't work either because when you go down here, when you go later, it says, what if God desiring to show his wrath and make his power known has endured with patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory on vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory.

That's verses 22 and 23.

That is not talking about service.

That's talking about God's grace and God's wrath.

Vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, vessels of glory prepared for mercy, or vessels of mercy prepared for glory.

So this is about salvation.

And this is about individual salvation.

So Romans nine, again, to me, hugely important.

My wife remembers it well that night, hollering, baby, doesn't this sound like Calvinism? Yes, it does.

Because this is what it is.

I hope that this has been helpful to you today.

I know these have been longer than weeks past.

I hope that isn't an issue for most of you.

Hopefully this is continuing to be a blessing to you.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

Tomorrow, I'm going to go over some of the men and books that were helpful for me that went along with the scriptures that were helpful for me in confirming Calvinism.

So again, thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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

May God bless you.

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

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