Arminianism (Part 2)

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Okay well we are back in Systematic Theology.

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It's good to have you all with us.

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We have...and here you go Ms.

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Jenny.

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It's good to have you back by the way.

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And everyone else have one? We've started looking at Arminian Theology in our last session.

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And I said, I gave you a little nugget last week, I said this week we're going to talk about free will.

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And so I didn't lie, I brought my notes, my free will lesson, which is going to be looking at various texts.

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I don't know that we're going to get all the way through it today, but I just want to kind of give a rundown of what we talked about last week just to very quickly help us understand where we are.

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Because this is part of an overall series on Systematic Theology.

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We've looked at...we're looking at various theological systems because that's the way the book takes us.

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We've looked at Roman Catholicism, we've looked at natural theology, we've looked at Wesleyan...I'm sorry not Wesleyan Theology...Lutheran Theology, Reformed Theology, and now we're looking at Arminian Theology.

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And as I said last week, Arminianism is typically only known in its separation from Calvinism.

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In fact we had a guy here at our church, we have a guy here at our church, who was looking for a Reformed Church, a Calvinistic Church, and he was calling churches before he came here talking to their pastors.

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And he called and spoke to one of the ministers of a local church and he said, are you guys Calvinists or Arminians? And the guy said, well I don't know what an Arminian is, but I know I'm not a Calvinist.

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So it's funny just that people typically, if you throw out Arminianism or Arminians, people don't even know what that is in a lot of contexts.

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They know what a Calvinist is because Calvinism has far more reaching implications in the grand scheme of Christendom.

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Calvin is responsible for much more than what we would say are the doctrines of grace or the five points of Calvinism, which didn't even really come from Calvin himself.

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Calvin was the theological mind of the Reformation, where Luther was the mouthpiece, he was the voice, he was the bull that went in and knocked the door down.

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Calvin was the man who wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

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He was the theologian.

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And not that the others weren't, but Calvin was the preeminent theologian.

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And because of Calvin, we have so much rich historical teaching that comes out of that era.

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And even things like the Protestant work ethic are things that were really brought out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

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The idea that you don't have to be clergy to do what you do for the glory of God.

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You can be a plumber to the glory of God.

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You can be an electrician to the glory of God, or a civil engineer to the glory of God.

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You can do those things.

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That is the Protestant work ethic.

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Everything you put your hands to, you do it to the glory of God.

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And these are things that, you know, even though they're certainly biblical, certainly things that had been lost in medieval theology.

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They've been lost in the ideas of the only people that were really serving God were the clergy, and everyone else was a second-class Christian citizen, if they were Christians at all.

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And so really there was a rebirth of understanding the value of the individual Christian during the time of the Reformation, and obviously Calvin had great influence on that.

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Arminius, on the other hand, was a second-generation, actually we might say a third-generation, student of Calvin.

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You had Calvin who taught Theodore Beza.

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Beza was Arminius' teacher.

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Arminius rejected the teachings of Calvin.

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His students became known as the Remonstrants, and we remember that word we talked about last week simply means to protest or to argue against something, and they couldn't be called the Protestants because, well, that name was already taken.

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So the Remonstrants, they remonstrated against the teachings of Calvin.

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And so we now have, historically, the division between Calvinism and Arminianism.

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And Arminian theology really focuses, at least attempts to focus, and we said to be fair, the desire of Arminian theology is to preserve the fairness of God.

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For God to be just, according to the Arminian, and according to most people, if you ask people, you know, what is justice, what is, and they'll say it's fairness.

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And for God to be truly just, he must be absolutely equal.

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No person can receive any more of his grace, no person can receive any less of his grace.

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God must absolutely equal.

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And the problem with that is, one, it's not biblical, because we do see in Scripture those who received extra measures of grace, we see those who received the gift of repentance, the gift of faith, and we see the Bible says, Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated.

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And so there's expressions of God's differentiation and distinction in his grace.

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And so God is just, but God is not what we would say fair in the sense of everything has to be equal.

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And for someone to argue that he has to be, to remain just, I tell people if God is absolutely fair, then we all go to hell, because that's what we deserve.

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If we really seek fairness, we receive the just penalty of our reward, which is hell.

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Certainly we don't want that.

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So we're glad that God is willing to remain just, but justify us through putting our sins onto Christ.

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You know, in reality, if we go with strict human fairness, is it fair that an innocent man should suffer? No, but he does so willingly.

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Why? Because he loves us.

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So the idea of preserving fairness is really a, is not something that is an attempt at trying to make the Bible, or make understanding of the Bible, it's trying to make, satisfy the human spirit.

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I want God to be a certain way, and so I'm going to make him be a certain way.

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Absolutely, absolutely.

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I want God to be absolutely fair.

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What do they do with people like Esau and Pharaoh and Jesus, who was pleased to make him suffer? The typical response that I have dealt with in different people, and I've certainly talked to quite a few, is that they will try to make the argument that men like Pharaoh was responsible for hardening his own heart, and God did not harden him until he had already hardened himself.

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Now, there is a passage in Scripture where it says Pharaoh hardened his heart, but it was after the passage which says that God said, I will harden his heart, and so did Pharaoh make a choice to reject God? Yes, and we're going to talk about free will in a little while.

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Did he make a choice to reject God? Absolutely, but was that choice absolutely free? And I would say no, because that choice was in accord with his nature, and that's where real understanding of freedom comes, is we have to understand that no thing that we do is absolutely free, because it's always a result of the nature that we have.

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This is such an important reality, is to think about the fact that everything that we do comes out of something, it comes out of a desire for something, and Jesus said, you know, we're either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness, but he never says we're free.

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There's no time where we just are neutral.

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The idea of the neutral man who is not inclined to the left or to the right is foreign to Scripture.

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There is no neutrality in man.

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There is rebellion or there is repentance, but there is no neutrality.

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One is natural, one is granted.

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One is natural, one is a gift, yeah, or granted as a gift, absolutely, but either one of those, either one of those will produce choices, yes, absolutely, and those choices will be free in accordance with the nature of the person, and that's the hard part, is understanding what we mean by freedom and free will.

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So without further pushing the issue, if you look on the chart that we have, it says God is sovereign, but it's chosen to grant free will to human beings.

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This is a huge part of Arminian theology, and because it is, I want to spend the rest of today and possibly part of next week kind of going over what we mean by free will, what Arminians mean by free will, and how those two things are not exactly the same.

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The question that most people have about free will, and you'll, in fact, I've heard this, is that if you don't believe in absolute autonomous free will, you believe that man is a robot, or a puppet, or some other thing that God is pulling the strings, or God's working the remote control, and that man is making no choices.

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That is not what we believe as Reformed Christians, but that is what is often espoused to us, or applied to us, by those who disagree.

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If you believe that, then you believe man's a robot.

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If you believe that, then you believe man is a puppet.

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But we know that's not true.

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Let me ask you a question.

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Did you all make a choice to get out of bed this morning? Yes.

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Did you make a choice? I didn't say did you want to make the choice.

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You chose to get up at a certain point.

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You chose to set your alarm last night at a certain point.

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I remember having this conversation right out there where my truck is.

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One night I was talking to a young man about predestination and election.

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He used to be our youth director here, and your stepson? Who used to be? James? James.

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Yeah.

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Well, he was related to you, right? He was actually related to my children.

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Okay, he's there, yeah, you're their half-brother.

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Okay.

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Well, he was out there, we were out there talking, and he says, well, he threw his keys down in front of me.

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He said, did God predestine that? And I just remember, and my answer was, are you learning anything right now? And he said, well, maybe.

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I said, well, maybe God predestined it, because you're learning something.

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But that was his argument, was does God meticulously ordain every single aspect of human existence? And the answer, on a simple level, is yes.

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To this effect, God is ordaining all that comes to pass because he has ordained the end.

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And for the end to come to pass, the means to that end must also come to pass, and it's almost like this.

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I ask people all the time, do you believe that a birth is ordained by God? Well, of course.

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Psalms tells us that, you know, that we were formed in the womb, and God fashioned us before we were even born, and he had signed our days, and he knows them, and all these things God has done before we were ever thought of.

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But nine months before you were born, or somewhere thereabout, an action took place that was required on two people, unless you were a virgin birth, which I don't think any of you were.

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An action was required of two people.

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If that action had not occurred, then you would not be.

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And as such, that action was ordained.

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And something brought those two people together, whether it was that they met and dated, or maybe they were married.

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Maybe they weren't.

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I don't know your situation, but something brought your parents together, and that was ordained, because it's an eternal regression.

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I look at my life, and I don't want to make this about me, but just for an illustrative purpose.

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My mom and my dad got divorced when I was seven years old.

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Well, six.

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Six or seven.

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I don't remember.

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I was right around that age, and as a result of that divorce, I live with my father.

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My dad met my stepmother, who brought me to this church.

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I've been in this church since I was eight years old.

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I grew up in this church.

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I didn't get saved here, but I did grow up in this church, and ultimately, after getting saved, came back to be the pastor.

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I, as a seven-year-old kid, would have cut off my left arm to keep my parents from getting divorced.

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I would have...

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I prayed.

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I didn't know how to pray.

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I cried.

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I begged.

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I slobbered.

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I held on to my mother's leg, you know.

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This is a real moment, and yet, had that event not occurred, I would not be here.

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Was that an event ordained by God? Now, you would say, well, did God cause that sin? That's a whole different issue on causation and secondary causes, and we can talk about that another time, but the idea was that God determined that it would be that way because He had a plan.

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That's the answer, is that there is a plan, that God is working out in time, that while...

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and this gives me hope for difficult times, because when I'm in a difficult time now, I know, well, God is working out His plan.

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Even in this difficulty, God has something that He's working out of this.

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That's why Paul can say in Romans 8, 28, that He causes all things to work together.

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God caused the divorce of my parents to work together for my good, even though at the time I would have cut off my arm to keep them together, right? So, all of that being said, and I haven't even touched on my notes yet, this subject has multiple layers, because it goes from the will of the individual, and to the issue of the determining decree of God, and how is He working out His decree, even while individuals are making choices? I would, I will tell you, my mother made a choice.

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My father made a choice.

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They made a choice in accordance with their nature, and it was a real choice, and yet it was part of the plan of God.

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It did not surprise God.

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Absolutely.

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So, so these are, these are realities that, what I'm saying is, we're not treading in light water.

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We're not, we're not walking in puddles.

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We're swimming in oceans when we deal with this very serious subject.

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Can I break it down like this? You have the, you have free choice to do whatever you want, but whatever choice you make, God's ordained.

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That's the one God ordained, and there's nothing you can do about it.

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Basically, I part of God's plan that I did that, even though I made the choice myself, that was part of the plan.

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Is that, am I wrong there? Yes, but I would, when we say there's nothing you can do about it, I can't change God's plan.

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Can't change God's plan.

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I don't want to, and this is where it becomes kind of touchy, I don't want to step into fatalism.

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Fatalism, what is it? Fatalism is the idea that we are essentially robots.

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We are essentially puppets.

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But that's not being a robot.

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I know, I know, and that's what caused me to do it, but it's part of the plan, and again, this is why I think this is a difficult issue.

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Let me, put them back, it's part of the plan.

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How many of you guys have avoided, how many of you guys have avoided injury, accident, or even death by leaving five minutes earlier, five minutes late? Every single person, right? Well, yeah, how many of you have been in an accident because of a certain, I mean, I was a kid, again, I keep making this about me, I went face first into a windshield when I was three years old, because when I was three years old, they didn't make you ride in car seats, but what you could do is you could stand up on the front seat of a pickup truck, jumping up and down while your mother drove down the road.

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Did that? Yeah, I'm jumping on the front seat of a single cab pickup that my dad had elevated well above its natural intended height, because my dad liked those big trucks, and I was jumping on the front seat, my mother didn't see the car in front of her, had stopped, hit it from the back, and actually rode up into the trunk.

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We ended up with our tires in the trunk of the car in front of us, and I went face first into the windshield, it didn't, it didn't, it spiderwebbed, it didn't bust.

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Yeah, you, it's still there, that's what all this is about.

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Easily could have broken my neck, easily could have destroyed my face, easily could have done several things.

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Most people don't survive that.

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Most people don't, absolutely, I mean, God, of course, was gracious and not, I didn't even go to the hospital.

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I got, they put me in an ambulance, this is again, 83, was it, you know, back then, you know, I guess, medical, nowadays, you gotta go to the hospital if you get a cut.

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I was face first in the windshield.

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No, he's fine, give him an aspirin.

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Yeah, that's like nothing, but my, my, my point in that is there's a moment in time that 10 seconds either way, two seconds either way wouldn't have happened, and yet, you know, we see these things, and I know, I have friends, I know people who didn't go to work at 9-11, you know, I was a guy who was a member of the church here before they moved, Mr.

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Quincy, and he worked, had an office, and he just happened to be out of town that day on 9-11, so he would, he told his story in church.

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I mean, you know, how many people didn't though? How many people did go to work that day? About 3,000.

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It's, it's, it's amazing to think how God is sovereign over everything, and He's sovereign over our life, and He's sovereign over our death, and there is a sense in which we're, we're part of the plan, but He is the master of the plan, and, and we are making decisions, but He is the ultimate decision-maker.

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But I think that's, until you become saved, it's so hard to grasp.

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Think about it.

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I mean, we think about how much we can do, how awesome our bodies are put together, but to think that every single body on this earth was put together by God, that all these things, it's just mind-boggling to even, you can't wrap your mind around the fact that God has all this in a plan.

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You almost have to take it for granted.

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I mean, it's just too big for us to comprehend.

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I mean, to me, it's, I mean, I know how intelligent my mind is, and I'm not, not that I'm some genius or anything, and you know, many people around me, how, how smart they are.

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I know guys that are menses and stuff, but they're not, they're, I mean, that's like one billionth of what God is.

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Oh sure.

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And I mean, I mean, and that's even bad to put it that way.

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Right.

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But my point is, when, when they can't even think of that, how can you wrap your mind about something being that much more infinitesimally smart than you? Absolutely.

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And, and, you know, years ago I had an epiphany, and it really was, it was helpful for me when I was thinking about the, the nature of God's knowledge, and, and I certainly don't, I'm not comparing God to a computer, but it just, this helped me.

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So if it helps you, good.

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If it doesn't, don't call me a heretic, okay? I was driving, I saw on the Danes Point Bridge, you ever have those moments in life where you have something happen, and you know exactly where you were when it happened? I was on the Danes Point Bridge, I was coming down on the, on the Regency side, and I was driving along, and I got to thinking, they have computers now that have databases that are almost infinite, that you can put, you know, the, the, the world's information, and this is back in the early 2000s, and I was just thinking, the world's information can be housed on a, on a home computer almost, you can put billions of bytes of information, and how many people in the world, seven billion people? You can put information about every human being in the world on one computer.

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You can put the vital statistics of every person in the world on one computer.

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How hard is it really to consider God knowing everything, when we can produce a device that can do so much? Now, I'm not challenging what you said, what I'm saying is, for me, that helped, because I was like, we made something that can do something amazing, and God made us, so it's sort of like a, it was sort of that regression thing.

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If, if I can make something that can do so amazing, and God made me who could make something that could do so amazing, how much more amazing is the God who made me? And it was sort of just a stepping back, and wow, you know.

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Yeah, we deal with the noetic effects of the fall.

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Are you guys familiar with that term, the noetic effects, meaning the mental, the mental failures of natural humanity, which are the limitations, the, the limitations in our, for instance, when somebody says, well, you know, a, a, an unbelieving sinner, you know, it can be brilliant and smart.

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Yes, absolutely, you know, we know Einstein and guys like Mensah, they can be absolutely brilliant, absolutely smart, but there, there are going to be limitations, especially spiritually, understanding spiritual things, because those limitations are sinful, and that sinful nature that we have does create limitations in our, even our logic.

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How many, how many unbelieving scientists make massive leaps in logic? For what reason? Because they've got to, they've got to put away the supernatural.

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I remember the one guy I heard very specifically, he said, he said, we don't know what made the world come into existence, but it can't be God, so it has to be something else.

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I'll believe in the ridiculous before I believe in the impossible.

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Absolutely, because it's the, it's his presupposition.

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He says, I believe in the ridiculous before I believe in the impossible, because to him, God is impossible.

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I remember.

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God is the impossibility.

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When Byron was here, he had one class, and we were reading the speech where it said, the star fell to earth from heaven, and he was kind of, as a scientist, he was kind of having problems with that, you know, because, well, actions in the universe have consequences, and I said, I said, do you believe that God could take every star and turn them into a butterfly? Yes, and he says, I'm like, well, you know, he can take the heavens, he's going to take the heavens, he's going to roll it up like a scroll, this entire massive 12 billion light year universe, he's just going to roll it up like a scroll.

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You know, he can do that.

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I mean, don't, you know, that's the power of God, and it's going to happen.

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And that's the, that's the infinite power that really is the impossible to understand.

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While I, while what I said earlier about, you know, it's amazing to think about, there is a, there is a level, because all we can do, the very best we can do in describing God is to describe God in accordance with the anthropomorphism, meaning that we ascribe to him human traits.

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When we say God is omnipotent, what does that mean? It means all-powerful, and what are we saying? We know what power is.

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Well, I can, I can, I can curl a 20-pound barbell, I can bench-press a hundred-pound weight, I know what power is.

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God's just more of that, right? We say God's all-knowledge, he's omni, omniscient.

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Well, I know what knowledge is, right? I know, I know you, and I know you, and I know me, and I know a little bit about how that cup was made, a little bit about how this paper was made, and I know a little bit about that phone right there.

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That's what I'm saying, God's, but we're comparing it to our knowledge, when really, it's a different, it's a, it's a totally different animal, it's a totally different, and not an animal, but it's a totally different category.

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Yeah, and so we compare him to us.

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I have power, God's just more.

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I have knowledge, God's more, right? But it's, it's different, it's not just more.

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Yes, and that's where faith, as big and wonderful as the universe is, he's bigger and more wonderful than the universe.

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Yes, and that's why, you know, people, we keep finding out that the universe is big, and it's oddly big, according to the photographs, you know, if you see the earth compared to the sun, compared to the bigger suns, and it's like, boy, we're this, we're a speck on the shirt of a, you know, we're a piece of lint on a shirt which is, you know, 3x large, we're not even a speck.

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But to God, nothing's too big, and nothing's too small, and it goes both ways.

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And yet, this whole universe is, according to Scripture, what does the universe do? Expands.

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Well, according to Scripture, the heavens declare the glory of God, the heavens declare the glory of God, so when we see how big the universe is, no matter how big we see that it is, what do we know? God's big God is bigger.

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All right, let's look at my first, basically, this lesson is made into a couple of just position statements, that when I'm dealing with someone talking about the subject of free will, I give certain statements that I believe are biblical, I back them up with Scripture, and this is what the argument for free will that I make, and we'll start with the first one.

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Okay, first thing, first position statement of this lesson, though able to make choices, we are not completely autonomous.

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When I talk to the Arminian, when I talk to people about free will, I ask them, define for me, what do you mean by free will? And they'll say, well, we're able to make choices, and oftentimes if I say, well, yes, I believe we're able to make choices, but what are you really saying? They'll, we are able to make choices without any direction or external or internal forcing.

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We're absolutely neutral and can choose one thing or the other, and that's typically what is referred to as autonomy, the ability to make choices that are undetermined by causal factors, all right? Autonomous simply means self-law, it's from the word auto, which means self, and namas, which means law, where we get the word, well, namas, it's Deuteronomy, it's the second law, the second giving of the law, that's where Deuteronomas, the second giving of the law.

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Autonomous or autonomy is the idea of self-government, means that a person has the freedom to do what it wants, how it wants, when it wants, the way that it wants, and in a sense that's true, in that we do have a certain level of autonomy.

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What time is it, by the way? I think we're part of 14, great, we're out of time, perfect, but here's the first, let me just make, and we'll start with this next week, the Bible is clear about one thing, when it comes to autonomy, mankind, this is our first majors point, and then I'll make a sub point A, why do I say that though able to make choices, we are not completely autonomous, letter A, mankind is sinful by nature.

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If man was truly, absolutely free, he could choose to not be a sinner, and if that were the case, grace would be unnecessary.

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So that's the first, I think, I think that's the first major point that I try to express to people, if you really believe that you're absolutely free, then what you mean is that you can choose to not be a sinner, and here's the thing, Pelagians believe that, he was a fourth century heretic, fifth century heretic rather, and he argued with Augustine that yes, God tells me to be holy, must mean I can be holy in and of myself, unaided by grace, and that's why we call Pelagius the arch heretic, Pelagius, and we'll deal with him more next week.

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Let's pray.

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Father, thank you for the opportunity that we've had to study together, and I do pray that some of what I've said today has been encouraging, and helpful, and has helped us move along our understanding of sovereignty, as we know that that must precede an understanding of our will, his understanding, your will, as supreme.

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We thank you for all that you do in Christ's name, amen.