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In the first half of the program, I wish to begin providing a response to a very lengthy message I was sent. I am not going to identify the person who sent the message. This is a person who has been raised in a Christian home, and I think once I read the entirety of it to you, and it is long, you will understand why I am going to be taking time to respond to it for 45 minutes today and 45 minutes tomorrow, if I need be, until I finish up the response.
I would call this pastoral apologetics, in essence, because as you listen, I think you will be able to see why we need to respond to it and why I would challenge you, the listener, to as you listen to this, ask yourself the question, how would I respond?
How would I respond if this was a member of my church, a member of my family, asking me these questions? How would I respond? We are going to need to think considerably more deeply than we would if we, for example, had to respond to Brother Jack from last week.
This is on a completely different level, and so listen with me to these questions. When considering the beginning of humanity, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in or obeying God if belief and obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.
It seems clear that they would not. It is claimed that unbelief or rebellion is a result of some arrogant desire to sin over desire to obey. Simply put, we want to do what we want to do. A side issue here involves this very notion Christians like to use the fact that they religions emerge in all cultures as evidence for our God's existence.
The problem is that many of these religions we deem as false also have notions of punishment and reward with similar traits given to the deity or deities of their choice. It does not make any sense for us to have this innate desire to worship and obey a God if that is the very desire we have suppressed since the Fall.
It is certainly unclear why we would create various deities whom we fear and worship to avoid some other deity we are supposed to fear and worship, especially if that deity is purported to be merciful in response to nothing other than faith.
This irrationality will emerge later. Sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans. There are certain prohibited ways of living that are easy in relation to abstaining from them.
This is primarily because of our animal instinct. Sexual desire is caused directly by the way our bodies are made. They are no different in force than the animal, which can willfully engage in as much rape as they want and never have to get married, disregarding very infrequent instances of animal, social, sexual monogamy.
Other side issues here involve the specifics of the Fall, which is never satisfactorily mentioned in the Bible at all. It is obvious that the entire nature of physical reality must have changed, which you would think might emerge in the story.
Storms, earthquakes, geological formations, the dietary system, venomous animals, sharp teeth in an enormous variety of species, light somehow traveling faster than itself, and all manner of difficulties that clearly suggest something completely different about the origin of the universe, no matter what your presuppositions are.
As Christians, we struggle desperately to come up with answers that strain all scientific and probabilistic credulity. The other cause of most sin is the desire to preserve one's life, which is an offshoot of the sexual act, the desire to preserve one's race or group.
The desire to preserve our lives causes us to lie, steal, cheat, etc. In society today, there are obviously occasions when life is not in jeopardy, when some sinful act is committed, yet this could be nothing more than an evolutionary hangover, an unfortunate residual headache from darker times.
Today we engage in this life preservation behavior in analog form. We struggle against other people and the accumulation of wealth, since need is minimal, with a general surplus of safety and basic necessities in a privileged West.
We were not always in civil society. Most people outside the West still aren't. And life preservation was the main goal of every animal, including humans. These propensities are innate, even if evolution is false.
This innate disposition is, of course, claimed to be a result of a fall in the human race. Adam and Eve willfully engaged in sin, thus forever solidifying this default position in subsequent humans, even if they would perhaps have liked it otherwise, though even desiring it is apparently excluded from our determined nature.
This notion of a fallen nature does not help the story. Given proper information about God and an originally unbroken nature, obedience in rational beings is certain, though a propensity to desire rebellion being present initially suggests brokenness from the beginning anyway.
No matter how strong a natural passion, it is always the rational choice to mortify the body in the way Jesus prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. Cut off your hands and pluck out your eyes, do whatever is necessary to keep yourself from going against a deity who must have given you this ability to desire what one ought not desire.
No rational being, when given a certain amount of information requisite for some future culpability in action, would ever deny a supreme infinite being. This is not to claim that we are completely rational beings, it is clear that we are not.
We engage in all sorts of nonsensical behavior, yet how in our perfect pre-fallen state could we ever engage in this most irrational of all acts? Adam and Eve must have been borderline retarded to believe in a talking snake's wily suggestions.
They could never have properly understood their position in relation to God. Adam supposedly named all creatures, so they knew all the animals and were aware that God had created them. What is this ridiculous subordinate snake saying?
What does he know? Perhaps we should check with that incredibly enormous being who made all this appear from nowhere, including this tree and us. We know he purposely put it here and told us not to touch it.
Why would he create a tree that somehow made us become like him? Something is amiss. The snake said, you will not surely die, as a means of enticing them after God told them that they would. What in the world is death to them?
It's an absurd notion. They had never witnessed it, and a full explanation must have been required. Wait, says Eve, you mean we will no longer exist like we did not exist a few days ago? Okay. What would that matter?
But if threatened with more than death, it would again be ludicrous to go against the knowledge they must have possessed. They were given one command, do not eat from the tree. So they already had within themselves an understanding of what to do and what not to do, a direct knowledge of good and evil.
They were allowed to do whatever they wanted, except this one thing. If a snake talked to you, aside from merely seeking psychiatric attention, it might be a good idea to check his facts, if it went against that one command.
This act of disobedience, if rationality is to be saved, eliminates the possibility that they possess the necessary knowledge to make a decision for which they could be condemned. It will be objected that ignorance does not preclude us from obedience, but that is only in societal law of a purely human construction, which is developed in response to imperfect information.
A legal system could not function without that stipulation, as everyone would obviously claim that they did not know a certain action was illegal. With God, this is not valid. He knows what they know and has perfect information.
The Roman church must have seen all this ridiculousness and tried to save it early on by claiming we have free will, along with some proper knowledge necessary for culpability. This was a valiant but futile effort.
Free will, for these purposes, broadly means we have the ability to do what we want within certain physical or spiritual restraints. Originally, we must also have had the freedom to do what we ought. But why would the want ever be in discord with the ought, when full knowledge of the incredible power of God is clearly seen, not only seen generally, but with a special certainty of its origin?
No one in the entire world has been more certain of the existence of God than Adam and Eve must have been. It even says God walked with them in the Garden of Eden. If they were not fully aware of God's power or position in relation to them, this must be a function of God keeping it from them purposefully, or their own mental faculties were of an extremely inferior constitution, which was obviously also a design of God.
They must have been completely capable of irrationality, the most contrary trait imaginable in the classical deity. Therefore, that deity must have constructed the existence of irrationality in humans.
Even if some open-ended ability of freedom were granted without the clear logical necessity of having been created with this flaw, which permitted their excursion into unreason, what caused the emergence of irrationality in the serpent?
Unreason must permeate reality, a reality that God created. If we are to save the literal veracity of this story, something in Christian belief has to give. Either God is not of the omnipotent sort, which logically leads to everything being determined, or human suffering, not to mention enormous amounts of animal suffering, which many very confused people claim does not really exist without human levels of consciousness, does not actually matter in any humanly conceivable sense of the word.
To us, love cannot exist, or be defined, in any remotely transcendentally factual way. Neither can judgment. It is claimed that those without the knowledge of Christ, or their need of redemption, will be judged less harshly than those with greater knowledge of the law and redemptive plan.
It is uncertain what this differing judgment could mean, though I tremble to venture at the difference between one infinite horror in comparison to double that horror. These people, apart from the knowledge of Christ, are said to disobey the law within them, and will be condemned according to their refusal of conscience.
But they are incapable of performing in accordance with this conscience. How can somebody be condemned for something they are absolutely incapable of accomplishing by the very constitution given them by the condemner?
The pat answer is that this is all part of a pure and unknowable plan, a demonstration of infinite wisdom, mercy, and judgment. What terror and feverish sorrow I feel for any creature subjected to the negative side of this determination.
Could there not be any way to complete this plan by saving just one of those people in the hills of the Himalayas by preventing their birth? Or just one Aborigine? Or just one poor child off the streets of Compton?
How supposedly precious is an eternal human soul, and how terrible these tortures which are effected against them. Oh, that just one be prevented from being born. How this would save them from immeasurable pain.
To me, this is the most important idea in all of Christian thought, yet even Paul did little more than completely ignore it. When he said, Who are you, O man, to bring a charge against God, and then simply states God can do what he wants, he can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who would get eternal bliss, all these people had sin projected on them from oblivion and a complete inability to obey.
It is insanely difficult, if not completely impossible, to understand how anyone is culpable in any humanly definable sense of the word. I have no problem with what Paul said. An infinite being can obviously do whatever he wants, there is no doubt about it.
My contention is there is no possible way for humans to define characteristics of a God who creates feeling, dreadfully minuscule beings simply to destroy them. Not just a few either. It is highly likely that the roughly 30 of the world that claims to be Christian actually have what we describe as saving faith, is highly unlikely the roughly 30 of the world that claims to be Christian actually have what we describe as saving faith.
That means billions upon billions of people are going to incur infinite misery simply because they live with no possibility of anything else. At least 70 of humanity is created to be torn limb from limb, tortured in indescribably brutal ways for all of eternity.
This is obviously an enormous problem for any human being with even a modicum of empathy or feeling. It is obvious why most Christians don't believe what the Bible clearly teaches about predestination and is really, whether in scripture or not, nothing but a logical consequence of an omniscient God.
I would even say most people that do believe in predestination never really think about what it really means. It is unbelievably unsatisfying to hear Paul's response. Like I said, not because an omnipotent deity could not do as he wishes, but simply because due to the fact our entire faith is based upon words like love, sacrifice, mercy, goodness, righteousness, evil, judgment, etc. and none of these can be properly understood or defined in any meaningful sense with what we know about eternal predestination and culpability from conception.
Our foundation of belief simply cannot be laid without understanding this incredibly important question. Everything is based on it alone. And then there were a few comments afterwards about recognizing it was a long email and did not expect me to answer immediately.
I got this just a few days ago and as I listened to it, as I read it, I actually listened to it on my ride today. I mp3'd it so I could have it fresh in my mind, listened to it a couple times. But when I read it, I had some choices to make.
It would be a long process to respond to everything in writing and only one person would benefit from that. We have heard many of these objections before in different contexts, but this seemed to me a unique context again because we're talking about a person who has been raised in a Christian family is asking these questions.
Now, I am operating on the assumption that all of these words are this individual's words, that these aren't quotes. This is an argument from an atheist webpage or something like that. And I'm going to function on that basis in attempting to provide a response and to do so within the context of, like I said, what I guess would be described as pastoral apologetics.
The issue in this email, in this series of objections, is fundamentally an objection against the idea that God can hold anyone accountable if he truly is the sovereign creator of all things. It is based upon what I believe would be some highly questionable conclusions drawn from speculative thinking about the nature of Adam and Eve that I think goes against what we know and certainly against scriptural teaching.
But it is a fundamental attack upon not just the concept of predestination, because quite honestly, though many of our Arminian friends seek to avoid these very questions by constructing systems like Molinism and all their ways of avoiding the tough questions, they don't actually succeed in doing so.
As we will see as we examine the debate later on in the program, one of the issues that comes up is the position of Molinism, and it's just a way to try to get around these difficult questions. These are difficult questions for the concept of God as God.
It just so happens that the Reformed understanding of these things is just upfront in being consistent with what the Bible says. And so I'd like to go back through this and seek to provide some kind of meaningful response.
But again, I would ask you as you listen to that, I hope you listen to it and ask yourself the question, if I was sitting on a plane, a bus, a train, and reading my Bible and someone with these issues, these questions, maybe someone who sat down next to you said, you know, I used to believe like you.
And then I started thinking about these things and no one could answer my questions. How comfortable would you feel in giving a response? That is a question that I would ask you to consider because I do believe that we should think through these things as difficult as it may be, as uncomfortable as it may be.
I do believe that we should think through these things and face them straight up. That's what we try to do here on this program, as challenging as it might be. When considering the beginning of humanity, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in obeying God if belief or obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.
It seems clear they would not. It is claimed that unbelief rebellion is a result of some arrogant desire to sin over a desire to obey. Simply put, we want to do what we want to do. Here's the ground of the objection is this.
The ground of the objection is no one had better evidence of the existence of God than Adam and Eve, our first parents. And therefore it would be irrational for them to act in any way that would be in opposition to God because they knew that God exists.
So therefore the idea basically is that there is a corollary, there's a direct connection between the more certain your knowledge of the existence of God and evidently your obedience to Him. Now, many things need to be addressed immediately.
First of all, we have very little knowledge of the nature of Adam and Eve, their conversations with God, the time frames in which they lived as far as how long was it from the creation until the fall.
We have two and a half chapters and very little of it narrates for us the precious information we would like to have to be able to answer all the speculative questions that we might have concerning Adam and Eve.
What we can tell from that initial record and then from the assumptions made by Scripture throughout in regards to the culpability of Adam and Eve and our relationship to Adam and Eve, it really forms the basis of our theology concerning who they were and what their capacities were.
The whole concept seems to be that Adam and Eve were either stupid or created in such a way they could not be held accountable because they just weren't smart enough to figure out that it's really dumb to sin against God.
Well, you're not going to get me to argue that it's not really dumb to sin against God. It is. Sin is stupid. There's no question about that. But the question, of course, brings us to recognizing that we live in a fallen state and they did not.
There's no one that we can look to other than there's only been one unfallen person since Adam and Eve initially, and that, of course, is Jesus, and he was rather unique. We're not Pelagians. Pelagianism clearly is not a biblical position.
And so we have to be very, very careful in extrapolating from our experience back before the fall because we have really no means to do that. The information becomes quite tenuous at that point. And we can assume certain things.
We can assume that that Adam was a perfectly rational being, but human beings are not merely rational beings. We have the ability to be rational, but it is all of our experience that there are certain people who are more and certain people who are less dedicated to the pursuit of rationality, the application of the laws of logic.
There are many people who are extremely emotional and considerably less rational than others of us, and they tend to drive those of us who seek to be somewhat rational right up a tree. But the argument here, basically, is that if they had sufficient knowledge of God's existence, it seems to be that they would never have sinned, because if you really knew that the real God exists, you would never do something that would result in your being separated from Him.
Now some of the questions we'll get into as we read them, but some of them were, you know, how could they have known what death was and God would have to explain all these things, and it's not explained.
Well, we aren't given that information, but there are a lot of assumptions that have been stuck into these objections. The fact that God said, you shall surely die, and Adam and Eve's response is not, what, would indicate to us that if we're going to err on one side or the other, we might want to err on the side that Adam and Eve knew a whole lot more than we might want to give them credit for.
Nothing is recorded about an objection. Nothing is recorded about a question. I think we're pretty safe in recognizing that they knew that the penalty for breaking this one rule, this one law expressed by God's holy word to them directly was extremely significant.
Did they need to understand the entire ramification of spiritual death, physical death, their offspring, and so on and so forth? I question that. I don't know what basis would be given for saying that they had to have a full and complete knowledge of all of the possible ramifications so as to be able to make a fully informed decision for the rest of their posterity and everything else.
But this is the argument, and that is, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in or obeying God if belief and obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.
There's the argument, and I simply say to you, as is noted by the writer himself, men do not simply function as logic machines. Men do not, I mean, even in looking at the fall itself, is not Eve's intentions and purposes fundamentally different than Adam's?
They are. You have the dynamic of Adam and Eve, and you immediately see Adam trying to shluff it off on Eve immediately. Does that not reflect a difference in how both of them approach this particular act?
It seems almost mechanistic of our writer to reduce Adam and Eve to a calculator that goes, well, I am perfectly rational, and here are the facts, and therefore you run the computations, and this is what you do.
I don't believe man has ever been created in that way. I don't believe that even Adam and Eve were created in that way, because there would have been differences between Adam and Eve, between man and woman, even pre-fall, not just physical differences, but I would imagine that what we see today in the fundamental differences that exist in outlook between men and women is not something that developed after the fall.
And so, keeping those things in mind, a side issue that is then introduced in the next paragraph, Christians like to use the fact that religions emerge in all cultures as evidence for our God's existence.
Okay, I've heard it said that the universal religiosity of man needs to be explained. I would not say that the existence of religions in all cultures is evidence of God's existence. It is consistent with what God has said in Scripture, because God has created man in his image, he is a worshipping creature, and therefore if he refuses to worship the one true God, he will find other outlets for his worship, which includes the creation of false gods, gods that he can control, gods that are not sovereign, gods that, you know, man's religions creates mechanisms, sacramentalism, whether it be a high church sacramentalism or the gross, simplistic sacramentalism of animism.
It's all the same thing. Religion exists to provide you with means by which you control God's grace. And so all forms of idolatry, whether it be atheism, whether it be secular humanism, whether it be false religions, all of it is a mechanism whereby the worshipping man twists the creator-creation relationship, defines what he is going to allow as worship, and redefines the object of his worship in accordance with his own desires.
And so this paragraph I did not find to be founded rationally or biblically, because it says, the problem is that many of these religions we deem as false also have notions of punishment and reward, with similar traits given to the deity or deities of their choice.
It does not make any sense for us to have this innate desire to worship and obey a God if that is the very desire we have suppressed since the fall. Well, of course, the desire, it's not a desire that we have suppressed.
That's not what Romans 1 says, is it? We don't suppress a desire. We suppress the knowledge of the one true God and twist that into the worship of false gods. And so it's not a desire that is suppressed.
It is the knowledge of the one true God that is suppressed. It is certain and clear why we would create various deities whom we fear and worship to avoid some other deity we are supposed to fear and worship.
No, it makes perfect sense. As long as you get to control the access, you get to define things, you get to, I've said many, many times, people desire the benefits of God without dealing with the one true and holy God.
It's always easy to create an edited version. And so when it says this irrationality will emerge later, well, we haven't found an irrationality. We have found an error in understanding in our writer about what is suppressed.
And things like that. But we have not yet found any of this irrationality. Continue on. Sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans.
By the way, sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. I'm not sure I understand what that means. Our rejection of the one true God is part and parcel of our fallen nature. It is the nature of the person.
What was Jesus' teaching? What is fundamentally descriptive of a person who is not in right relationship with God? He does not like the light. He craves darkness. He wants to be away from the probing, searching sight of God.
And so sinful passions are the result of our rejection of God, not the foundation of our rejection of God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans. Well, enjoyable in the short term, but it's also painfully obvious that those actions prohibited by the Bible that are briefly enjoyable to humans frequently bring massive pain and suffering as well and separate us from life and often lead to death itself.
There are certain prohibited ways of living that are easy in relation to abstaining from them. This is primarily because of our animal instinct. Well, I don't happen to believe in something called animal instinct.
I think that while we are created to live in this world and therefore must be able to respond to the universe around us, the created world around us, it does seem that some of the statements in this letter indicate a rather complete embracing of a secular viewpoint as to man's nature, which I do not share.
Sexual desire is caused directly by the way our bodies are made. Well, on a certain level, on a certain level. It's sad, though, that someone raised in a Christian family would not see that that is a woeful limitation of a biblical view of sexual desire, especially between a husband and a wife as they are united together in Christ.
They are no different in force than the animal, which can willfully engage in as much rape as they want and never have to get married, disregarding very infrequent instances of animal, social, sexual monogamy.
Well, they are very different in force. They're very different in force. Again, you can identify, if you wish, the hormonal foundations of some of these things that, ah, see, it's similar over in this animal here or something over there.
But again, that is confusing the fact that as we have learned more about our physical creation, we see the connections that we have with the physical creation and the mechanisms that God has instituted.
But that does not mean that that is the extent, the limit of these things and the very fact that we have sexual morality in Scripture and that when we follow that sexual morality, we experience fulfillment that an animal can never even begin to think of is demonstration of that fact.
And so I completely reject the phrase, they are no different in force than the animal, if what that means is they're just the same thing. No, they're not. They may have similar foundations physically, but we transcend the mere physicality that is ours, and we go far beyond that.
Other side issues here involve the specifics of the fall, which is never satisfactorily mentioned in the Bible at all. Well, satisfactorily, hmm. Satisfactorily to whom? Evidently, it's satisfactory to God.
How exactly? Let's say we had 20 chapters narrating for us the specifics of pre-fall man. How can we even understand some of these things? What kind of language would be used to describe pre-fall man when we don't have any experience with it?
Would that really, would 20 chapters be enough or would someone be saying, well, that's not enough? That's not satisfactory. I become concerned when someone says, well, that just doesn't satisfy me. Well, why?
Who gets to determine what's satisfactory? I mean, I have lots of people who, well, the Bible is just not clear enough for me on this or the other thing. Well, okay. It is obvious that the entire nature of physical reality must have changed, which you would think might emerge in the story.
Possibly. I can certainly see that the argument goes on, storms, earthquakes, geological formations, a dietary system, venomous animals, sharp teeth, an enormous variety of species, light somehow traveling faster than itself, and all manner of difficulties that clearly suggest something completely different about the origin of the universe, no matter what your presuppositions are.
So in other words, there is a result of the fall in regards to death. I don't buy into this light traveling faster than itself thing. I assume that that is some reference to one of the mechanisms of explaining the age of the earth stuff.
I think it's significantly simpler to simply ask the question, does Scripture describe creation as having been made functional with a purpose, the demonstration of the glory of God, and functional in regards to the story of redemption played out upon this little speck of dust called planet earth?
The answer is yes, it very clearly presents it in that way. Therefore, it had to be created in such a way that it was functional. If you reject that assumption, then the results of your examination of the universe are going to be completely disconnected from reality, because you're going to start with assumptions of chaos, disorder, and end up with completely different conclusions than you would need to have if you actually looked at the universe and said, wow, there's order here.
It must be a purpose. And yes, God has communicated his purpose. I have a feeling that's what's being spoken of there. But evidently, there needs to, on our writer's part, be some extensive discussion of the fall outside of its spiritual ramifications on a mechanical and scientific level.
Problem being, that really wouldn't be able to be done until modern times, because we wouldn't have the language to actually express it, would we? And so if it's God's purpose to bring about redemption at an earlier period of time, to bring about the coming of the Messiah and things like that before there could be a meaningful discussion of plate tectonics or anything else in regards to the nature of the fall and a switch from a peaceful coexistence of animals, if that's what the assumption is.
I don't even know why that has to be a necessary assumption, but how would anybody have understood any of that would be the question. So as Christians, we struggle desperately to come up with answers that strain all scientific and probabilistic credulity.
May I challenge my writer back? If you want to see straining all scientific and probabilistic credulity, pick up any major biological textbook today and listen to them attempt to explain something like the F1 ATPase mechanism in the mitochondria of living cells and listen to them use creation language.
They cannot avoid doing it. They cannot avoid doing it. And then turn around saying, but we all know this wasn't created. This is just random. You want to hear scientific and probabilistic credulity strained?
Listen to someone try to explain the clear evidence of design without mentioning the designer. I would say that's a whole lot more along those lines. The other cause of most sin, and we, I guess the preceding one, we've already challenged that one.
The other cause of most sin is the desire to preserve one's life, which is an offshoot of the sexual act, the desire to preserve one's race or group. I don't believe that for a moment. I don't even really understand what it's saying.
The desire to preserve our lives causes us to lie, steal, cheat, etc. Really? No examples were given, and I would go, I don't think so. Most of the times I've lied and, well, I really, I did steal something once when I was in first grade because it was very colorful, but had nothing to do with keep myself alive.
I don't, I just don't see the connection here at all. In society today, there are obviously occasions when life is not in jeopardy, when some sinful act is committed. I would say, yeah, about 99 .998 of the time.
Yet this could be nothing more than an evolutionary hangover, an unfortunate residual headache from darker times, or it could be exactly what the Bible describes it as, that we have a sinful nature and we are selfish and we are willing to use others and so on and so forth.
Today, we engage in this life preservation behavior in analog form. We struggle against other people and the accumulation of wealth, since need is minimal, with a general surplus of safety and basic necessities in a privileged West.
I have never thought of my life as a struggle against others for the accumulation of wealth. I don't even begin to understand that. It doesn't enter into my thinking, my experience. I don't even understand it.
We were not always in civil society. Most people outside the West still aren't. And life preservation was the main goal of every animal, including humans. Well, again, from a good Darwinist perspective, yes, but I'm not a Darwinist and I don't see any reason to look back at history and see all the self-sacrifice and all the things that people did that had no sense in a Darwinian evolutionary perspective as if that's somehow not relevant.
These propensities are innate, even if evolution is false. No, I would say that what is innate is we're creating the image of God and therefore, by the grace of God, the common grace of God, capable of doing many things that go against this very kind of paradigm that is being promoted here.
And we see that often in history. This innate disposition is, of course, claimed to be a result of a fall in the human race. Now, we haven't agreed about what this innate disposition actually is as yet.
That's going to come up later on, I think. But the perspective of mankind and the behavior of mankind is the result of a fall. And what is really the target, really, in this email is the concept of federal headship, the ability or freedom of God to treat Adam and his posterity as one group and have one person representing the other.
We know this is what Jesus does with his people. This is what Adam does with those who are in him. And this is the fundamental objection. God, that's not right. God can't do that. That's not fair. That's the fundamental objection.
Adam and Eve willfully engaged in sin, thus forever solidifying this result position and subsequent humans, who I might add, likewise willfully engage in sin and love sin and love selfishness and do not by nature love to do what is good for others.
Even if they would perhaps have liked it otherwise, though even desiring it is apparently excluded from our determined nature, from our determined nature. Here's where you start really, again, getting into the main issue.
And that is, well, if if God determined this to be my nature, then he can't condemn me for that, even if it's what I love. He made me to love it. You always have in the back of this, this idea of this poor, innocent creature with this big, nasty God behind him with a gun in his hand saying, be evil, be evil, rather than the reality of this rebel creature who has to be constantly restrained by God to not do more evil than he does.
That's normative in my experience in reading these kinds of objections. And questions. This notion of a fallen nature does not help the story. Given proper information about God and an originally unbroken nature, obedience in rational beings is certain.
I reject that. This is where we part company. Because this assumes that God created mankind as a calculator. It's a computer. If you put in the right data, out comes the right response. It works every time because it's just a mechanism.
That's what rationality is. Is good data in, good data out, junk in, junk out. This is too low and mechanistic a view of man. I'm sorry. It is. Because it says, though a propensity to desire rebellion being present initially suggests brokenness from the beginning anyway.
Why? Why? This is where you've got to catch hidden presuppositions and assumptions. The assumption here is God should have created Adam and Eve in such a way that they could not fall. It cannot be a part of God's purpose that the fall take place because, you know, this idea of God glorifying himself, the demonstration of all of his attributes and the incarnation and all that.
No, no. God doesn't have the freedom to do any of that stuff. If he's going to be judged by us, and that's what this is all about, is judging him in this matter. If he's going to be judged by us, then his judgment have to have been in such a fashion that he could have created mankind and a perfect creation would not have fallen and could not have fallen because he has perfect knowledge and therefore the perfect computer will spit out always the perfect thing as a result.
Let me just finish this paragraph and we'll take a break. We'll pick up with this one tomorrow. Whenever it is we end up doing, I'll blog the information. No matter how strong a natural passion, it is always the rational choice to mortify the body in the way Jesus prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount.
Cut off your hands and pluck out your eyes, do whatever is necessary to keep yourself from going against a deity who must have given you this ability to desire what one ought not desire. And so the idea is if God gave you these desires, then God cannot condemn you for following through these desires.
And if you are truly rational, the only rational choice would be to do whatever you can to not sin. There is the statement. How would you, how do you respond to that? I mean, again, it's being, it's being put back upon Adam and Eve.
It's not really dealing with where we are today, but sometimes it is applied to where we are today. I agree it is irrational to sin against God. But I do not agree that that makes God unrighteous if he condemns us for acting upon our desires.
And I do not believe that mankind's activities can be limited simply down to a calculator. And well, if we're perfectly rational, then we'll always do the right thing. And the less rational we are, that's where problems come in.
And therefore, there must have been a problem with Adam and Eve. We'll pick up with that particular point. We're, I'd say, a quarter of the way through looking at the bar over on the side. We'll pick up with that tomorrow.
I'm not going to reread the note. It's a lengthy note. If you are listening for the first time, that is somewhat to your disadvantage. But it is a lengthy note focusing primarily upon the claim of impossibility for God to hold accountable man for his sin, in essence, in light of certain presuppositions.
Specifically the, well, interestingly enough, the very first sentence of the next paragraph in the email that I need to respond to, I think, lays out the primary argument. And that is, no rational being, when given a certain amount of information requisite for some future culpability in action, would ever deny a supreme infinite being.
That is, the assumption is that if Adam and Eve had sufficient information about the existence of God, and they knew God's existence perfectly in the sense that they knew perfectly well that God existed, they had direct communion with him and direct conversation with him.
If they had sufficient knowledge of his existence and sufficient knowledge of the ramifications of their actions, such as in taking of the fruit, then there has to have been a constituent problem in their makeup.
He's going to go so far as to say that they would have to be borderline retarded to sin. The assumption is that for God to hold man accountable, God must have made man in such a way that man would not sin as long as he had complete knowledge.
And I have asserted this reduces man to a calculator. You put in the inputs and the calculator will spit out the right answers based upon what's put in. And that's not what man is. Man is not simply a calculator.
He's not a mechanism whereby you can put in the numbers and out comes the right end of the equation. That's not how man is. That's not how God created man to be. There is a spiritual nature to man. There is a will of man.
Man's will acts upon his nature. And of course, one of the problems here is that we switch back and forth between our current experience of fallen creatureliness and experience that we only know a very little bit about.
And that is the unfallen nature of Adam and Eve. And I think one of the problems here is a speculation on the nature of Adam and Eve that sometimes is unwarranted. In response to that statement, when given a certain amount of information requisite for some future culpability in action.
I'm not sure exactly what that means. It seems that our correspondent believes that if Adam and Eve had been given a clear enough revelation of God, then they would never have sinned. Therefore, they weren't given a clear enough revelation of God or there was something wrong with them in their constituent makeup.
One of the two and either one of those renders it impossible for God to hold them accountable for their actions. Why? We're not told. Evidently, there is some kind of ability on our writer's part to determine what is right and wrong for God based upon some external standard that I don't know.
I don't get any real evidence of where this external standard is derived from, how it came about, I don't know, but it's there and that would be one of the things that would need to be asked is where does that come from?
Now, notice what it said next. This is not to claim that we are completely irrational beings. It is clear that we are not. We engage in all sorts of nonsensical behavior, yet how in our perfect pre-fallen state could we ever engage in this most irrational of all acts?
And I would say because Adam and Eve were individuals who, while made perfect, that is complete, they were not changed in such a way as to be made incapable of sin. There is a lengthy discussion in Augustine from long ago regarding the subject of ability to sin, possibility to sin, impossibility to sin.
I won't try to impress you with all of the Latin phrases. But the point is that the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 5, when he talks about the gift and the transgression, he says that the gift is not like the transgression.
There is something greater about the relationship of the redeemed in Christ Jesus. That relationship is different and, in fact, superior to the unfallen relationship of Adam and Eve with God. And it is superior to and greater than that relationship because of union to Christ and the incarnation and the accomplishment of everything that the triune God chose to do in his self-glorification, in Christ Jesus, in taking on human flesh, in joining that human nature to himself, and then joining the elect to Christ so that his death becomes death, his resurrection, their resurrection, and their very life is his life, resurrection life, eternal life.
That is not the position that Adam and Eve were in. And so I would say to you they were made with sufficient knowledge and sufficient intellectual capacity to function the way that God chose them to function, and that was specifically Adam as the covenant head of the race that is in him.
Just as Christ was perfectly fit for the role of the covenant head of the race that is in him. Romans chapter 5, again, same discussion that is found there. Now, it seems that the argument is being made, well, if they weren't made in such a way that they could not fall, then that's God's fault.
Well, I certainly believe that the fall was part of God's plan. I mean, I just don't see any—I mean, unless you don't believe God has knowledge of future events, then clearly it is. And the entire purpose of God in redeeming a people in Christ Jesus makes no sense outside of the fall.
So if that is the case, then they're being created in such a way as to be able to fall without God having to force a change upon them or force them to sin is the issue. And it seems like what is being said is, no, he could not have given that kind of freedom.
He could not have made that kind of age. They would have to have made the same way that we are as redeemed people, unite with Christ with a changed nature, a nature that specifically longs for Christ, so on and so forth.
And I, again, go, how do you get that out of two and a half chapters of scripture that almost never mentions anything like that? Where is this external source from which this kind of thinking is coming from, is the question.
Here's the phrase, Adam and Eve must have been borderline retarded to believe a talking snake's wily suggestions. I almost find a little bit of sarcasm there. It says they could have never properly understand their position in relation to God.
We have a tremendous amount of revelation from God concerning our relationship to God, what he has done in Christ Jesus. May I submit that any Christian who ever sins, and I do that every day, is sinning against far more light than Adam and Eve did?
Does that make me irrational? Well, I suppose if you define rationality in such a way as implying sinless perfection, maybe, but it goes far beyond that. It goes to our lusts and our desires and our nature and our emotions and exalting ourselves over God and all sorts of things like that.
We don't just simply live on the stick and carrot model, which seemingly this author thinks we do. I mean, if we're perfectly rational, then we know that if we go against God, he's going to whack us over the head and therefore we're always going to do...
No, it doesn't work that way. There's great complexity as to our behavior and the reasons for our behavior. And I just don't think that we can boil it down like this. And as I said, there seems to be some sarcasm here in talking about a snake's wily suggestions.
The nature of the serpent prior to the temptation is not known to us. There's one thing that is clear, and this author had mentioned this earlier, is the curse of the serpent results in its current form that we have today.
We don't know what it was like beforehand. And atheists and others just love mocking the talking snake. There must not have been anything overly unusual about its ability to communicate in light of Adam and Eve's response to it.
So what its nature was before fault, we don't know. Again, it's pure speculation, and it's pure speculation on the part of atheists and others to engage in sarcasm as if there is a direct relationship to the modern form of a snake today.
And that of the means by which communication took place and the statements that were made. It goes on to say, Adam supposedly named all creatures so they knew all the animals and were aware that God created them.
What is this ridiculous subordinate snake saying? Well, why would you think that it would seem ridiculous to them, is what I would ask. What does he know? Perhaps we should check with that incredibly enormous being who made all of this appear from nowhere, including this tree and us.
We know he purposely put it here and told us not to touch it. Why would he create a tree that somehow made us become like him? Something is amiss. Well, if what is being asked fundamentally in this is for Genesis chapters 1 through middle of chapter 3 to be expanded into a systematic theology written in modern Western language replete with references to scientific literature, psychoanalysis, and everything else, if that's what you want, that's not what God's given us.
And, of course, that would also mean that if God had given us that, it wouldn't have made any sense to anybody for the vast majority of redemption history. And I would suggest that that also would cause you to think, hmm, what kind of revelation did God give us that would actually be satisfying to any humble person who will stand humbly before God in light of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the clear ordered nature of the universe, and yet not make me and my current standards the standard by which everything must be judged?
I would have to ask you what kind of revelation would allow that to happen, and that might help to answer some of the questions. Something is amiss. It sounds like what's being said is, well, I would have done better than Adam and Eve.
And I suppose if you wish to think that you would, that's your prerogative from a biblical perspective. Adam was placed in a position, and God has accepted his role, his federal role, as head of those who are in him, and that's the way that is.
You can speculate all you want that you would have done better, you would have been smarter, you wouldn't have been borderline retarded. But I think that involves a tremendous amount of speculation and a tremendous amount of presupposition being read into something that's really not there.
The snake said, you will not surely die as a means of enticing them after God told them they would. Enticing them. Well, maybe. I think it was just a direct contradiction of what God had said, and that, in fact, remains the lie that we continue to believe every day.
I mean, there are people who, if their eyes were but to be opened, would see all the evidence of God around them. They're suppressing that evidence. It's been made clear to them. And they sin every day.
They mock God every day. In fact, some of the smartest people in our world, what are they known for? Mocking God. Are you telling me that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens aren't smart? That they're borderline retarded?
No, they tend to be very intelligent people, but that obviously demonstrates that it's not one's IQ that determines the quote-unquote rationality of sin. What in the world is death to them? It is an absurd notion.
They had never witnessed it, and a full explanation must have been required. Why? Again, two and a half chapters, and you can come up with this kind of certainty? Really? Where'd you get this? I just have to ask the question, where does this level of certainty about the nature of pre-fallen man and what had and had not been said, and the level of understanding, where does this come from?
I don't have that kind of certainty. I can't. God's word doesn't give it to me. You can only guess at such things, and that's a rather weak basis upon which to make such grand conclusions. What in the world is death to them?
Well, maybe they were smart enough to understand. It is an absurd notion. Why? They had never witnessed it, and a full explanation must have been required. How do you know God didn't give it to them? Do you really think this is an...
I mean, look at the Gospels. You can read the Gospel of Mark in a very short period of time, and yet it's a record of three, about three years worth of ministry. Do you really think any of this is meant to be an exhaustive...
All we are told is that they are told they will die, and that they know what that means. Now, as Adam and Eve walked in the garden in the cool of the day, did they not say anything? But because the entirety of the conversations aren't recorded for us, that means they didn't happen?
Or they only talked about baseball? Maybe they talked about the lockout and how excited they were. The lockout was over. I don't... Again, it seems like there's a tremendous amount of speculation here that then becomes the basis upon which to, in essence, ridicule God and his revelation.
But where is the speculation coming from is what I would like to know. Wait, says Eve, you mean we will no longer exist like we did not exist a few days ago? Okay. What would that matter? Well, I know I didn't exist prior to 1962, but I don't want to die.
What would it matter? I don't want to die. That's why. I don't even... At this point, it sort of went off track a little bit. And I'm like, what would that matter? Everything that I know that is alive wants to stay alive, you know?
The ant running across my kitchen sink, when I miss with the first shot, turns and runs and tries to live. I normally don't miss the second time around. But that's... What would that matter? Well, is that really a question?
But if threatened with more than death, it would again be ludicrous to go against the knowledge they must have possessed. Yes, we agree. Sin is stupid, but people do stupid things. Pre-fall and post-fall.
Because the reasons, motivations of sin are manifold, many, and complex. We are not a calculator. Okay? It just doesn't work that way. They were given one command to not eat from that tree. So they already had within themselves an understanding of what to do and what not to do, a direct knowledge of good and evil.
When you say a direct knowledge of good and evil, they have a direct knowledge of God's law. But does not knowledge have different components? I mean, I can know certain things, but I haven't experienced certain things.
I can know how a parachute functions, but I have never voluntarily exited my body from a perfectly functioning aircraft, okay? That's, you know... And so I would be careful at this point, because unfortunately, I think there's a lot of ambiguity and mixing of categories when it says a direct knowledge of good and evil.
Not experientially, but of the consequences. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted, except this one thing. If a snake talked to you, aside from immediately seeking psychiatric attention... Okay, I'm just going to skip over that, because that's just silly sarcasm.
Because, again, it assumes you know something about the form of the serpent prior to the fall, which you don't know. And so that's one of the indications that makes me go, okay, you need to dial up, dial back the whatever it is you're reading these days.
If a snake talked to you, aside from immediately seeking psychiatric attention, it might be a good idea to check his facts if it went against that one command. Again, I have clear revelation from God that I am to love my wife as Christ loved the church.
And so when I snap at her, does that not mean I'm stupid? Well, in a sense, yeah. But there's a whole lot more behind husband and wife relationships and the sin in them than just one command, do it, or you're stupid.
I mean, that's just such a simplistic approach that I don't understand the origins of it. And it just doesn't fit with our experience. It doesn't fit with the scripture either. Someone in Chaldea said, I would shoot a talking snake on site.
But the question is, would the game warden allow you to shoot a talking snake on site? That's the question. I don't know. Anyway, this act of disobedience, if rationality is to be saved, eliminates the possibility that they possess the necessary knowledge to make decisions which they could be condemned.
Wrong. Just that that foundation has not been laid. That is the fundamental error of the objections that have been raised here. The fundamental error is that there can be no culpability because it would be absolutely irrational to go against this level of knowledge.
That's ludicrous. And therefore, there must be something wrong with them. And therefore, God's to be blamed for all of that. That is a simplistic, mechanistic understanding of how man functions, makes decisions, and interacts with God that there is no basis for in scripture or really no basis for even in our post-fall state.
And so that is one of the fundamental errors of this thinking right there. And so I'll just have to keep repeating that as it ends up being the foundation of everything else that comes afterwards. It will be objected that ignorance does not preclude us from obedience.
Well, no, I do not object. I do not make that objection. It's not a matter of ignorance. It wasn't that they were ignorant of what God's purposes were. And there is only a certain level of knowledge that is necessary for culpability.
So I'll just skip over the rest of that because that's not where I would go anyways. The Roman Church must have seen all this ridiculousness and tried to save it early on by claiming we have free will along with some proper knowledge necessary for culpability.
Well, I don't know what's being read here as to what statement of the Roman Church or when the Roman Church allegedly did this or the other thing. I have no way of knowing. This was a valiant but futile effort.
Free will for these purposes broadly means we have the ability to do what we want with certain physical or spiritual restraints. Originally, we must also have had the freedom to do what we ought. Now, I'm not sure if this is the ought implies ability argument that has been gone over many, many, many times.
Ought does not imply ability, even though that is what many, many, many people think. Well, God told us that means we have the ability. Be perfect. He was the Father. Heaven is perfect. Well, that must mean you're a good Pelagian.
This was a valiant but futile effort. Free will for these purposes broadly means we have the ability to do what we want within certain physical or spiritual restraints. Originally, we must also have had the freedom to do what we ought, but why would the want ever be in discord with the ought when full knowledge of the incredible power of God is clearly seen, not only seen generally, but with a special certainty of its origin?
Well, we've gone over this a number of times. You can have full knowledge of God's ability to punish and still go against that. Man does that all the time and obviously did so in Adam as well. No one in the entire world has been more certain of the existence of God than Adam and Eve must have been.
It even says God walked with them in the Garden of Eden. Yep. If they were not fully aware of God's power, position, relation to them, this must be a function of God keeping it from them purposefully or their own mental faculties were of an extremely inferior constitution, which was obviously also designed of God.
Neither one. They must have been completely capable of irrationality or they were perfectly capable of rebellion and sin and that rebellion and sin is not merely to be defined on rational or irrational grounds.
They must have been completely capable of rationality, the most contrary trait imaginable in the classical deity. Therefore, the deity must have constructed the existence of irrationality in humans. No, Adam and Eve were made capable of rebellion against God and rebellion against God is not merely to be defined within categories of just what is rational or irrational.
There is much more to it. It has more moral, ethical categories that transcend the argument that is being presented here and even we experienced that in our post-fall state as well. Even if some open-ended ability of freedom were granted without the clear logical necessity of having been created with this flaw, which permitted their excursion into unreason, what caused the emergence of irrationality in the serpent?
Unreason must permeate reality, a reality God created. And so again, the argument basically is if anybody, even if we just move the question back to the serpent, if anyone goes against the creator, this is irrational and no one would ever do that.
Well, again, this ultimately comes down to the question of the origin of evil itself and there have been great discussions of evil as the absence of good and so on and so forth. The fact of the matter is that I don't have any problem whatsoever.
In fact, I have to. I am forced by a meaningful understanding of theodicy, the justification of God in the light of the existence of evil. That evil exists as part of God's decree, but it exists for a purpose, a morally justifiable purpose, which is fundamentally the glorification of God in the redemption of a particular people in Christ Jesus.
And whether you place that origin in Satan or in Adam and Eve or how you work all of that out, discussion of means and things like that, it is not a failure in the creation as if God is under some type of obligation to make a creation that cannot fall.
That seems to be part of the presupposition here is that God had to create in such a way there couldn't be a fall. No, his purpose was to redeem a particular people, which included the fall. So he creates it such a way that you have a being that is perfect in its creation, but it is not given the gift of indefectibility and that indefectibility leads to the mechanism whereby you have redemption itself.
If we are to save the literal veracity of this story, and I'm not sure what literal veracity means in this person's mind by this point, especially in light of the talking snake stuff, something in Christian belief has to give.
Well, I don't see that. I certainly have not been convinced by this mechanistic argumentation about, you know, assuming certain things about Adam and Eve or talking snakes or near retardedness. Either God is not of the omniscient omnipotent sort, which logically leads to everything being determined, or human suffering, not to mention enormous amounts of animal suffering, which many very confused people claim does not really exist at human levels of consciousness.
I'm not going to get into a discussion about animal suffering. Does not actually matter in any humanly conceivable sense of the word. Now, I've tried to figure out what this means. Um, actually does not matter in any humanly conceivable sense of the word.
What does that mean? Um, are you saying it doesn't matter in the sense that God would never allow this to happen or that God could have no purpose for it? It doesn't say. I don't know. I can't answer that question.
Um, the fact of the matter is, if you have a sovereign God who is accomplishing his purpose, and in fact, he, his purpose is to engage with his creation, engage with his people in time, so as to bring about redemption of a particular people who are, who demerit that redemption, then how can that, how can anything not have a purpose?
How could, how could any of that not have any? See, I don't understand it. To us, love cannot exist or be defined in any remotely transcendentally factual way. Neither can judgment. Why? Why? I mean, God's nature, when you say love can't be defined, um, how about in this is love that we did not love God, but he loved us first and we have the incarnation, we have redemption.
And we even have the fact that, that people who deserve instant judgment for their sinfulness experience long lives of, of great blessings and happiness. And it's been often said that the, the mark of a changed heart, the mark of a changed heart, uh, is not asking the question, why do bad things happen to good people?
The mark of a changed heart is asking, why do good things happen to anybody at all? Because that's the mark of a heart that actually knows the depth of its own depravity. Uh, love cannot exist or be defined in any remotely transcendentally factual way.
I don't understand. I do not see that a basis has been given to that. I, I hear the assertion, but where's the basis? Neither can judgment. Why not? Unless you have reduced God down to our level and set up an external authority to him, God says it is sufficient to judge man for doing what man loves to do, for acting upon the desires and intentions of his heart.
And in fact, God is actively involved in restraining man's madness. And yet he doesn't judge us on the basis of what we would have done if he hadn't restrained us, but only upon what we did do. Is there not grace and mercy even there?
So what's the basis of saying that love cannot be defined in a transcendentally factual way, or that judgment cannot be defined? What's the basis of it? I haven't seen it. It is claimed that those without the knowledge of Christ or their need of redemption will be judged less harshly than those with greater knowledge of the law and redemptive plan.
Yeah, uh, Crazen and Bethsaida versus Sodom and Gomorrah, uh, amount of, amount of light. Yes. It is uncertain what this differing judgment could mean. Well, given that I don't, nobody knows the exact nature of eternal punishment, um, I would suggest that part and parcel, and I think I have solid biblical basis for saying this, part and parcel of eternal judgment, it's not God exercising power to torment anybody.
I think when the restraining hand of God is removed from man's wild God-hating and detestation of God, hence detestation of self, I think it's primarily a self-torture. I think it's, it's, it's what you see in the worst of the atheists who are absolutely consumed in their hatred of God.
Remember what Doug Wilson, it's funny, we'll be talking about Doug Wilson a little bit more here in a little while, but, uh, Doug Wilson said something very wise about Christopher Hitchens. Remember, remember the statement I've repeated a number of times?
There are two things that are absolutely certain about Christopher Hitchens, uh, that he believes, that God does not exist and that he hates God. And it's true. He's certain God doesn't exist and he's certain that he hates him.
And that is, that is the self-contradictory nature of the atheist and the rebel against God when God's restraint is removed from him, will consume himself in his loathing of God and all that God has made, and there's the problem, is that he's made in the image of God and it becomes self-loathing.
Um, so how does that, how does that translate into, uh, it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment? I don't know. I'm not, I don't understand the, the exact mechanism of punishment, but I'm told that there will be a difference in how God judges in light of the amount of light that a person had.
Though I tremble to venture at the difference between one infinite horror in comparison to double that horror. Um, well, I, I think it is appropriate to consider, uh, punishment as a horror, but it is a punishment that is a horror in light of both justice as well as the nature of the one who has been sinned against.
These people, apart from the knowledge of Christ, are said to disobey the law within them, will be condemned according to this refusal of conscience, but they are incapable of performing in accord with this conscience.
That would be due to their fallen nature. And there's the one thing that's always missing in this con, in this, in this context. Listen to what it says. But they are incapable, and incapable is an italics, by the way, of performing in accord with this conscience.
How can somebody be condemned for something they are absolutely incapable of accomplishing by the very constitution given them by the condemner? But notice what was just said. I don't think our writer understood that he had just contradicted himself because he's just recognized.
Yes, it's, it's, it's going to be based upon the light that we had. And then he turns around and says, but it's based upon absolute standards. You see the question, the element that's always missing when I hear these objections is that none of these people ever desired to do these things.
They never desired. They love their sin. They love their sin. They love their idolatry. Whatever it might be. I mean, we can have the religious pygmy in Africa, or we can have the secular humus scholar in, in Scandinavia someplace.
They're both engaged in idolatry in very different ways on very different levels, but it's still idolatry nonetheless. And one had far more light than the other. But the argument of culpability has to take into consideration the desires of the heart of the person.
And I will say, once again, God has never stood behind some morally pure person with a theological or spiritual gut and said, sin, you, I don't want to sin. No, you must sin. It will fulfill my plan. That's not how it works.
And it would have to work that way. If it's going to be relevant to the idea of the condemner, the pat answer. And again, I, I pick up on these types of phrase, phrases. The pat answer is that this is all part of a pure and unknowable plan, a demonstration of infant wisdom, mercy, and judgment.
Well, that's not a pat answer. That's a transcendental answer. But certainly there's far more to the answer that has been given, even as I just noted. Then, oh, well, you know, it's just infinite wisdom.
Yeah, there is infinite wisdom. There is infinite mercy. There is judgment. There's no question about that. And I am not saying that I can sit here as a finite human being with one ten billionth of the information of the world and what God is doing in this world and make judgments based upon that.
But I do have the revelation of the word of God, and I do see its consistency in mankind's behavior. And in light of that would indeed tremble to be in a position of arguing that God does not have sufficient reasons for acting as he, as he, as he has.
What terror and fever sorrow I feel for any creature subjected to the negative side of this determination. In other words, what terror and fever sorrow I feel for the non-elect who do in this life exactly what they desire to do and who refuse to bow the knee before the creator.
But what I'm hearing, and maybe I'm reading between the lines, but I think I have read this as carefully as I can numerous times, is I'm hearing a fundamental rejection of God's ability to judge and God's ability to demonstrate the entirety of his divine attributes in his own creation.
Either God has to limit the revelation of his attributes to justice, holiness, wrath, and give everyone punishment, or he has to limit himself to love, mercy, and grace and save everybody. But if he actually desires to accomplish his purpose so that the entirety of his body of attributes are revealed in his creation, that doesn't work.
That, that can't, that can't be. Just not allowed to do it because this would require us to believe that he transcends merely human categories of activity and judgment. Could there not be any way to complete this plan by saving just one of those people in the hills of the Himalayas by preventing their birth?
He has saved many of the people in the hills of the Himalayas who did not deserve to be saved, or just one Aborigine. How many believers have given their life to reach the Aborigines, or just one poor child off the streets of Compton?
How many poor children off the streets of Compton bow in worship before Jesus Christ and will experience unmerited, demerited eternal life in his name? How supposedly precious is an eternal human soul and how terrible these tortures, which are affected against them.
Oh, that just one be prevented from being born. How this would save them from immeasurable pain? Well, how this would save them from immeasurable pain? It would save them from existence, I suppose. And so the idea here is, well, there just, there cannot be punishment that is appropriate to a creature, not only for having lived their lives in rebellion against God, but just simply for having been related to Adam.
Fundamentally, the argument here is God cannot act federally. God cannot act federally. So if this writer is consistent, then this writer likewise cannot accept the idea that by one act of self-giving sacrifice by the perfect God-man, Jesus Christ, that that can have any effect for anyone else, because it is by union in Christ that we receive his benefits in the same way that by union with Adam, we received the condemnation.
And if what's being said is, I just, I will not accept that. Well, it is only the spirit of God that can cause anyone to accept that. And there's many a person who will look at that and say, I'm not going there.
Not, I don't want to, I don't want to accept that. Sure, according to the scriptures, that's how God has dealt with people in the past. And you had the example of Achan, but I think that's unfair too.
I'm just, I refuse to worship that kind of God. I will either create my own or I'm just not going to believe anything. That does not change the reality that we live in a created universe that clearly has the fingerprints of God all over it.
And that God has invaded this universe in the person of Jesus Christ. There was a resurrection. And that one who predicted his own resurrection and then brought about his own resurrection taught that these things were true.
But again, outside of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, I can explain why there is no contradiction. I can explain how God has done these things. But fundamentally, if you want to get to the point of saying, I reject God's economy, I reject the idea that God has the right to act in this way, or because I have some humanly derived standard, I just reject that you can talk about love.
Well, maybe your definitions of love have not been properly grounded all along. You know, it was something that really changed a lot for me. When I recognize the greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, that is not an emotion.
That's not an emotion. That's choice. That is a way of living. That is a recognition of God's role and God's character and the fact that he is my creator and I'm his creation. And when a person truly does recognize that my very life, my breath, the beat of my heart is in his hand, there is a fundamental reorientation of reality itself that comes with that.
There is no question of that at all. I continue with the note. It says, to me, this is the most important idea in all of Christian thought. This has to do with God's predestination, judgment, man's culpability.
Yet even Paul did little more than completely ignore it when he said, Who are you, O man, to bring a charge against God? And then simply states, God can do what he wants. He can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who get eternal bless.
All these people had sin projected on them from oblivion and a complete inability to obey. It is insanely difficult, if not completely impossible, to understand how anyone is culpable in any humanly definable sense of the word.
Well, that is, to me, a rather surprising statement when we talk about what Paul said, because we know what is being referred to here, and that is specifically Romans chapter 9. But my concern really is that, and I can understand, it's possible this individual has not encountered an in-depth discussion of Romans 9 that even happens within Reformed churches.
And I have read Reformed commentators and authors who have, in essence, said that Paul did kick the question down the road, in essence, and did not answer it. Let me remind you of what the text says. You will say to me then, why does he still find fault?
For who resists his will? And then literally, Romans 9 20, oh man, who are you, the one answering back to God? The thing molded will not say, the molder, why did you make me like this, will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?
Now, that's not what our correspondent seemed to remember it saying. But I would like to suggest that Paul does answer the question. He does not skip the question. He gives a very fundamental and foundational answer to the question.
He doesn't ignore it. The objection is, you will say to them, why does he still find fault? For who resists his will? So the objector, after what has been said concerning God's sovereignty in the matter of salvation and the words of verse 18, so then he has mercy on whom he desires and he hardens whom he desires.
The objector says, well, basically says, how can there be any judgment in light of this? How can there be any judgment in light of this? How can he still find fault? Because if his will is the final determiner of all things, then there can be no judgment.
And the response that our correspondent has missed is the fact that verse 20 begins, oh man, that's the first address is, oh man. And if we would but understand what that means, the address is to a creature.
And is asking the question, in fact, if I could turn this around in light of what has been said in the rest of this email, the rest of this email said it would be absolutely absurd for a creature who knows God exists, has knowledge of God's existence to sin against that God.
That is the ultimate of rationality. Well, may I suggest to you that it's likewise the ultimate of rationality for the creature to answer back to its creator and not recognize his created state? Oh man, on the contrary, who are you?
The one, and then it, let me look back at the email here, it says, to bring a charge against God. Well, sort of, yeah, that's one possible way of looking at it. Because it has krinah there. So it, but it actually means, apokrinomai, to reply, to answer back again, it has anti in front of it.
So there is a response being given to God and it is a response that is inappropriate for the creature. And Paul doesn't just simply say, well, he can just, in fact, this is a misrepresentation. I want to correct the misrepresentation.
When it says, he can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who get eternal bliss. That's not what he says. That, that's, that is, that is a, again, just as the nature of Adam has been simplified to a mere calculator, that as long as he's got the right information, he'll come out with the right answer.
And that's not how human beings make decisions. In the same way, I wonder why someone would hear Paul in this way. He can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who get eternal bliss.
First of all, as soon as you hear anybody say that the sole purpose of the non-elect is eternal destruction, you are not dealing with someone who's actually really fairly handling the scriptures. You're just not.
Because they're looking at only the final destinations and they're not looking at the process by which God glorifies himself and by which his attributes are demonstrated, which includes the fact that these are individuals who live in a universe surrounded by evidence of God's existence.
His fingerprints are all over everything that they touch, everything that they are. They've suppressed that knowledge. They've twisted that knowledge. They've engaged in every form of idolatry. And yet he has not destroyed them the first instance they take a breath.
In fact, he has given them tremendous amounts of blessings. He has restrained them from committing many other sins that they would have committed otherwise. And yet he's done all that for his own purposes.
If you don't allow that in there, then you're not really dealing with what's being said. I'm sorry, you're just not. And so it is not he can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who get eternal bliss.
As if those two were just this simplistic equation. Because especially the extension of grace, powerful grace that brings about the salvation of undeserving people who actually deserve destruction is part and parcel of what's being said here out of the same lump, remember?
So it's right there. But Paul does not just simply ignore this. Because the discussion of the thing molded will not say to the molded, the plasma will not say to the placente, the one who molded it, why did you make me like this?
That's a given. And in verse 21, does not the potter have a right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? Now, you may not like, and I can understand.
In fact, I would submit, just as I said last time, outside of the work of the Holy Spirit in someone's life. There will never be a joyous, willful submission to the recognition that we are the clay in the potter's hand.
As long as the heart of man remains in rebellion against God, that is something that is going to be absolutely reprehensible. But the question remains, if God is the potter and we are the clay, then is there any basis for answering back to God?
And that's why verse 22 says, what if God, it presents to this objector a hypothetical situation. What if God, although willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?
What about that enduring with much patience? You see, normally in these types of objections, the holiness of God, the fact that God's wrath should break forth immediately against any rebel sinner in his universe, all that stuff is just laid aside and the focus is upon, oh, that poor little child in Compton, that poor little person in the Himalayas.
And so I would say Paul does answer, and he answers rather clearly and rather forcefully at that point. So it says it is insanely difficult, if not completely impossible to understand how anyone is culpable in any humanly definable sense of the term.
Well, there's the problem. You're trying to humanly define it rather than allow the divine definition of culpability. And I would suggest to you that that divine definition of culpability, and we're going to have to go into this in the discussion in the Fernandez-Comis debate as well, is seen over and over again in Scripture in such things as the holding of Joseph's brothers accountable for their sin.
Their sin was the result of God's intention. That's exactly what God intended to happen, to get Joseph into Egypt to save many people alive. God's intention is perfectly good. Man's intention is evil.
Man is judged on the basis of what his intentions were. Isaiah chapter 10, God brings Assyria against Israel to punish Israel, and then he punishes Assyria for what they did against Israel. Now, is this Assyria, this wonderful, good country that God forces down and makes them do bad things?
No. If anything, God has to restrain their evil. He uses them to punish his covenant people, but because they do it all with I, I, I, they never acknowledge God. They are proud and arrogant. Then he punishes them.
Same action. God's intention is holy and good. Man's intention is evil. What are they judged upon? Some type of concept of libertarianism? No, they're judged on the basis of the intentions of their heart.
Acts chapter 4, the church prays to the sovereign Lord. Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Romans, the Jews, gather together against your holy servant Jesus. All sorts of different intentions. Herod's a nut. Pilate's a political coward.
The Jews hate Jesus because he's exposed their, their, uh, uh, religious hypocrisy. The Romans just kill people. And what does the church understand? One action. God sovereignly determined the action.
They weren't forced to anything. In fact, they were constantly with hell. How many times did it say his hour had not yet come? They wanted to kill Jesus. Not yet. Nope, can't do that. They're restrained.
And what are they judged upon? The fulfillment of their desires. Now, if you want to say, well, yeah, God just sort of made us so we could never have evil desires, then what you're saying is you, you really do want some kind of mechanistic determinism where mankind is just a puppet on a string.
And that's not how he's made us. That's not how it works. It goes on to say, I have no problem with what Paul said. An infinite being can obviously do whatever he wants. There is no doubt about it. My contention is that there's no possible way for humans to define characteristics of a God who creates feeling, dreadfully minuscule beings simply to destroy them.
He's never done that. I want to, because I know who this person is. I want to in first person say to you, I don't know where you got that. That's not what God has done. God has created this universe to bring about his own glory and to redeem a particular people in Jesus Christ.
And you have somehow become so focused solely upon those who are justly punished by just God that you've lost sight of the mercy and grace that he's extended to all of them, let alone the mercy and grace in Christ Jesus that brings about the redemption of this, well, people that according to scriptures, a number greater than the sand of the sea.
And I don't understand that. Simply destroy them. No, I, that's not, that's not the God I worship. And I doubt that that's really the God you've been introduced to over your life. It continues on, not just a few either.
It is highly unlikely the roughly 30 of the world that claims to be Christian actually have what we describe as saving faith. I would agree with that at this point in time. I mean, I don't know, I don't know their hearts, but I would definitely agree that a large portion of what calls itself Christianity isn't, and neither do I judge God's actions and purposes solely by polls of today in our current situation.
That means billions upon billions of people are going to incur infinite misery simply because they lived with no possibility of anything else. No, no, triple no. It's not simply because they lived. They lived in a universe soaked with evidence of God's existence and they suppressed it and engaged in idolatry.
They followed the lusts of their hearts. They did so willfully. They had to be restrained from doing more than that. You can't ignore that part. At least 70 of humanity is created to be torn limb from limb, tortured in indescribably brutal ways for all of eternity.
That is not why they were created. That is not why they were created. You have, you have, I can fully understand why someone encountering the Bible's God-centered teaching that God is glorifying himself, that it is all about God.
It's all about the demonstration of all of his attributes to all of creation. I can understand how someone understands that theology but doesn't get the God-centered part of it and becomes focused not just upon man, but specifically upon unregenerate enemy of God man.
Boy, I can certainly see how that would end up creating some massive imbalances, massive imbalances. But that's what we've got here is this, this poor minuscule little creature that's been created just to be beat up on as if his evil is not something he loves.
And yet he does love his evil. Oh, but God should have kept that from happening. Well, you and I have a minuscule amount of the information that is available to God. And to judge him on that basis, that takes us right back to Romans chapter nine.
Who are you? Oh, man. This is obviously an enormous problem for any human being with even a modicum of empathy or feeling depends on what your empathy and feeling is focused upon. If your empathy and feeling is focused upon what you think are these poor abused little creatures, okay, it doesn't seem to be any empathy or feeling for God's holy law.
And how do you deal with man's sin? How do you deal with what man does to man? I mean, just look at the last 150 years of human history. How many millions of people died? I just watched, sadly, a very troubling video about a week and a half ago of the Taliban executing a bunch of Afghani policemen.
Brutally, brutally. How does that happen? Oh, well, you know, but since God knew it was going to happen, then, you know, he's just unfeeling and they're just doing what they've been forced to do. No, they wanted to do this.
And in fact, every day God restrains him from doing worse. He doesn't get any credit for it. That's for sure. But anyway, it is obvious why most Christians don't believe what the Bible clearly teaches about predestination and is really, whether in Scripture or not, nothing but a logical consequence of an omniscient God.
I would even say most people that do believe in predestination never think about what it really means. I'm not going to dispute that in this sense. There are many people who, by God's grace, have, in his grace, been given true teaching and just are sort of apathetic about it and don't think these things through.
Let me tell you something, brother. When I was first introduced to these things, I remember spending some long hours trying to think through these very ramifications. And we certainly have, I think I can say, over the years, the 900-some-odd hours of dividing lines we're currently streaming live across the internet 24 -7.
That's not including, I mean, how many times have I spoken during that time? Sermons at churches all across the United States and now in the UK and Australia and Sunday school classes at PRBC. I mean, we're talking thousands and thousands of hours.
And sometimes I'm criticized for raising issues that are a little uncomfortable for us to talk about these things. Well, maybe your experience is that a lot of people don't think these things through.
And you're right. I think there are a lot of people that don't, but here we are sitting on the dividing line and we're thinking them through. And it's not the first time we've done it. And that's one of the reasons I asked and received permission to discuss this and to do so openly.
It is unbelievably unsatisfying to hear Paul's response. My friend, you haven't heard Paul's response because I can't think of anything more satisfying personally. I remember when I first started really wrestling with Romans 9, that I saw the connection between Paul's response and I don't know if anyone... The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock.
What an incredible work. I mean, you cannot speed read this stuff. You have to ponder it. You have to chew on it. And I remember seeing the connection between what Paul was saying. If you just knew the grandeur and glory and trustworthiness of this God, then you would understand that Paul did give an answer.
And I can tell you, my friend, I am satisfied with Paul's answer. And I would suggest that anyone thinks it was a surface-level, kicking-the-can-down-the-road type answer that you just haven't understood it.
Like I said, not because an omnipotent deity could not do as he wishes, but simply due to the fact our entire faith is based upon words like love, sacrifice, mercy, goodness, righteousness, evil, judgment, etc.
And none of these can be properly understood or defined in any meaningful sense with what we know about eternal predestination and culpability from conception. I know this is what you believe. I have not, in having read all of this, found any foundation for that assertion.
You have read into the story of Adam and Eve. You have confused categories. And I'm sorry, I see no basis for that. I can identify love. All I have to do is look at the cross. In fact, I can identify love and recognize that the true God has such a manifold varieties of love that it is appropriate to say that God has shown love for every single creature in provision for them, in making his sun to shine upon them, and for everyone that is born unclean, a stench in the nostrils of a holy God, yet he has shown them patience and mercy and grace.
And again, the real question that has to be asked by a person who knows his or her own heart is not why bad things happen to people. Notice I didn't say good people because there ain't no such thing. But why good things happen to anybody in light of the reality of our sin.
I can define all of these. I can define judgment in regards to Joseph's brothers. They experienced judgment. And yet what they did was predestined by God. There's no question about that. And I say God was absolutely just to do what he did.
He used them to save many people alive. He could have just simply struck them dead and you'd have to admit that would be perfectly just. And yet you seem to have a problem because he lets them live and then he uses them.
And his judgment comes upon them in other ways. I can identify all of those words. Our foundation of belief simply cannot be laid without understanding this incredibly important question. Everything is based on it alone.
I don't agree with that. I do agree with your identifying this as a central issue. And it is a central issue. And I do agree that this touches on the very nature of God. But I think that there are even more foundational things in regards to God's existence and attributes and holiness and purposes that I've had to keep bringing in to provide an answer here.
And your focus has been a little bit up the ladder. Yes, far more foundational than most people. I give you credit for that. But still not quite there. I think there's more. I think there's more. So believe it or not, that's the note.
That's all of it. And I hope once again, if there are people in our audience that have been troubled by this discussion, well, I apologize for that only in the sense that if that being troubled has been due to my lack of ability, clarity of thought, preparation, whatever else it might be, then I apologize for that.
But I do not apologize for raising issues on this program that I admit can be very troubling for people. It is troubling for people to think difficult things through, but I have said many, many times it is far better to think these things through within the context of faith than to be thinking them through within the context of unbelief out there in the world.
That's why I say to the church, your preaching and your teaching, your Bible studies, your fellowships, do not fall into the trap of trying to avoid difficult subjects. That's where people's toes should be stepped on.
It should be in the context of faith. And I really hope that this discussion has been of assistance, not only to the one who wrote to me, but to others as well. We are going to take a break.