10-18-2020

Romans 8:28-30 and the Meaning of Foreknowledge

All right, so, you know, you bring this up, we hadn't talked about this in a little bit, but it says known from eternity into time and then out the other side of time into eternity. And that's kind of what's interesting that you find a lot in Romans chapter eight verses 28 through 30.

It spans all of known time, even before time began into time and out the other end when you're into eternity, what we call eternity future, which is kind of funny how we have to phrase it, but all of that's in those few verses.

And we've been talking especially about verse 30, but verse 29 in Romans chapter eight says, for whom he did foreknow, then he also did predestinate. Now those two events took place before time began.

So they're not in sequence, they are just now. God is now, right? I am. So they just both happened. One didn't cause the other, one didn't come before the other. They're just both a fact of before time started.

God knew us with affection and love and individually knew us as his children. If you study everything the Bible teaches about foreknowledge, it's always about him seeing his people. It's not about seeing the acts of anything going on in the world.

That would be omniscience that he knows everything that's gonna happen. That's omniscience. But foreknowledge is about people. Very interesting. So he fore, you could say, if you wanted a great English translation, you could say he foreloved us because it's an affectionate term.

And so he loved us and knew us before time began and he predestinated us to be adopted into his family before time began. So that was long before you were here and I was here. And so we played no role in that.

And that's where the Armenians get it so wrong. They think you've got to have some little human bit to help God with salvation. And it is so, so unnecessary and wrong. It brings glory to man, not where it should be with God.

Jesus said, it's impossible for men to be saved. Check it out. In the Bible, Jesus said it's impossible for men to be saved. He said, but nevertheless, all things are possible with God. So God has made a way for his own children to be brought to him.

And that's what this is talking about. So obviously, and a lot of people don't like this passage, so they try to remove it. The great Charles Spurgeon said, you'd have to take a pen knife and cut pages and pages out of the Bible to remove predestination from the Bible, to remove election from the Bible.

He said, if you believe in your Bible, you can't remove it. You have to deal with it. And people don't like to, but why don't they like to? I have a feeling that born again, people do like to look at this and think about it.

Now, there are born again people who don't know this yet. That's fine. But people who resist it, Charles Spurgeon had a problem believing they were really saved. Now, I won't say I have a problem with that.

I just won't say what I think about that. But I'll say what Charles Spurgeon thought about it. He didn't think a believer who's introduced to this and they push against it, he couldn't understand that from a spiritual viewpoint.

Because once you understand it, you understand how special you are to God. You're his child and have been since before he made anything. And so who would push against that? Maybe only those who are not his children.

I don't know. What do you think? I'll throw that out for you to think about it. But the same people, the same group of people that he foreknew and predestinated, now we come into time in verse 30, he called them and he justified them.

Two things. He called them and then he justified them. And now we are in time. So we have a bit of a sequence. At least we can study this in sequence. But the truth is when the Holy Spirit calls you, this is the effectual calling we're talking about.

When he opens your eyes and ears and gives you life. While we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us? You see, that's not me. It doesn't say, while we were yet in our sins, hath me quickened me? It doesn't have any me in it at all.

It's he, it's God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit did all the work to save us, including changing our want to, to make us want to be saved. And you know, Arminians love to say, well, you try to make us like puppets and we're on a string and God just makes us do stuff.

He makes us love him. Well, you know what? Humans, I've experienced this my whole life and I'm sure you'd agree. Humans do what they want to do. That's why Adam and Eve got in trouble. They ate fruit because they wanted to and God held them responsible for it.

But at the same time, God knew they would eat the fruit. God had predestined that they would eat the fruit because without the fruit, you have no cross. And without the cross, you have no way of God to display the infinite love that he has for us to give his only son for us.

So both are working together. The sovereignty of God and the will of man works together throughout scripture. But to try to eliminate either one of those, you become a false teacher and you're believing in a false gospel if you eliminate either one of those.

The responsibility of man on one hand, sovereignty of God on the other. They both coexist all the time in God's mind, certainly in God's viewpoint. It's more difficult from man's viewpoint, but it's still just as real.

Depravity, Universal Guilt, and the Need for Effectual Calling

So what did the Holy Spirit do? The Bible, listen, you'll never understand salvation and you will have it where man plays a role in his own salvation. But think about it. Every religion of the world other than biblical Christianity believes that man does save himself.

The Buddhist believe that, Islam believes that, Hinduism believes that, Judaism bordered on that. So yeah, the religions of the world, they do believe man saves himself. But the Bible says man cannot save himself.

And it starts not in John 3, 16, but it starts in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, where man fell in the garden of Eden. They fell away from God. And then before that was over, they were hiding from God. And that is the teaching of the depravity of man.

And it's all throughout scripture from beginning to end. And unless you understand that, you'll never understand why a man cannot play a role in his own salvation. He doesn't want to, that's why he can't.

You won't do anything you don't wanna do. And the Bible says, there is none that seeketh after God, not one. None, not one seeks after God. So how can you have an Arminian gospel that says you have to decide to come to God and then he sees you do that, so he elects you.

That's nonsense because you won't decide to because you don't wanna do it. You never will wanna do it unless the Holy Spirit calls you. And when he calls you, and that's what it's talking about here in verse 30, those who he predestinated.

You see, it doesn't say everyone. Now there is a sense in which the Holy Spirit calls everyone that's called the universal call. And that means he sends the gospel out to everyone. There is a calling to every human.

The elect will be saved by it. And the non-elect will be judged by it because their conscience heard the calling too. Their conscience heard it, but their mind couldn't grasp it and wouldn't grasp it and didn't want it.

So they will be judged by the same gospel that saves the elect, right? That's the only sense in which Christ died for everyone. You can say he died for everyone if you want to, but it doesn't mean that he ransomed everyone.

Study that if you don't believe me, just check it out. Does not mean he ransomed everyone, but he died for everyone in the sense that he died for the non-elect so that they would be judged because God the Father is just gonna ask, what'd you do with my son?

They're gonna say, well, nothing. He's gonna say, depart from me, I never knew you. But the reason that they had to depart from him was not because so much that they were evil and wicked, which they were, it's because God never knew him.

You see, whom he foreknew, that's who he called. You see, it all fits together if you'll just study. You know what you have to do? You gotta get to a point, not even talking to my congregation right here.

You guys know this stuff, but to the world out there listening to us, some of you guys don't know this stuff yet. So all you gotta do is just right here, just decide you're more interested in truth than you are in winning an argument.

And when you make that decision and just start asking the Bible what it says and stop trying to tell it what it's supposed to say because of your theological background, this would be great for seminarians and pastors to hear me today.

I know, because I've been through all that as a young man and now I arrive here as an old man and all I care about is the truth at this point. When you get there, you grow up as a Christian and that Bible will begin to speak to you.

It all fits when you understand these things right here. Listen, if the Holy Spirit had not come to you individually and opened your eyes and your ears where you could hear God and see God in your heart where it was cold, stony heart and turned it into a warm, loving heart that wanted God, you would have never received Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

And you think that's what caused you to be saved? It was merely an effect of your salvation. I shouldn't say merely, it's wonderful. It's hugely important. There won't be anyone this side of the cross that goes to heaven that didn't receive Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.

They had to make a choice, a choice of their will. But that was an effect, ladies and gentlemen. I know you don't wanna hear that if you've never heard this before because you wanna think you saved yourself by believing but you didn't because that would be a work.

You didn't get saved by works. You got saved by grace through faith and it's not your faith. It's Jesus' faith that saved you. Check it out all through the book of Galatians, different places. You're saved by the faith of Jesus, not faith in Jesus.

And then you can have faith in Jesus once you have the faith of Jesus. Once it's a gift, Ephesians 2, 8, 9. Very simple, Ephesians 2, 8, 9. It is a gift from God. What is? The faith. So that's different than your believing because your belief turns on and off depending on whether God does what you want him to do.

Everybody understands that. If he doesn't answer your prayer right now, yes, you go, well, I wonder if he's really there, right? You can't be saved with that kind of wishy-washy stuff. That's humanism.

The entire Armenian world, from the Methodists to the Pentecostals to the Church of Christ to the Roman Catholics, they're all based on that wishy-washy kind of faith. And they just hope that you happen to die on the good side of it and you're believing at the minute you die because if you don't, you've lost your salvation.

You know, that wouldn't be the gospel because gospel means good news. That would be bad news if my salvation was dependent upon anything I had to do. But it's not. And that's why it's called good news because God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit have done all the work to save the ones that he foreknew and predestinated.

His own children. It's all done. And when the Holy Spirit comes, he just informs you of it and you wake up. And guess what? The moment you wake up or you call that a nanosecond or what? I don't know. It all happens in the blink of an eye.

Over 33 things the Holy Spirit does for you, one of which is he gives you the faith of Christ. He gives you a change of mind. He changes your want to, and all of a sudden you just want Jesus. Really, all he has to do is let you see him.

He just opens your eyes and says, there's your shepherd, your sheep, your hungry. You've got the food. What will you do? And you make the choice. He doesn't make you do anything you don't want to do. Two seconds before that, you didn't want to do it.

But when the Holy Spirit touches you on the shoulder, since you belong to God anyway and always have, you just didn't know it. You ran with the goats, but you were a sheep your whole life. You just had to be a lost sheep.

And guess what? The shepherd just found you. He knew where you were the whole time. And he sent his Holy Spirit who obeys he and the father. And he said, now, now is their birthday. Now they really are born.

They were born physically. Now they're going to be born spiritually now. Wake them up now. And he does it obediently. And he wakes you up and you make the decision. But guess what? By the time you make that decision, you've already been regenerated.

You now have God's genes. You have the ability to desire things like that that you never had the ability to desire. And therefore you do it because you want to. That's the only way you make the whole Bible fit together.

You think this is tough. You just wait till we get to Roman chapter nine. If you don't understand these things, you might as well skip Roman chapter nine, which comes right after this. You just skip it because it won't work for you.

You'll have to totally change it to make it fit Arminianism. You have to totally change it to say it doesn't mean what it says. So every time you do that, your conscience will bother you though. If you're a Christian, your conscience will bother you if you start trying to change the Bible.

And that's a good sign if it bothers you. If it doesn't bother you at all, then you're a goat who happens to be a theologian. And the seminaries are full of them. Churches are full of them. Pulpits are full of them.

Jesus said, when I come, there'll be many false prophets. And the book of Jude says, some of those are sent by Satan, foreordained by God to the blackness of darkness forever, which means they were predetermined to be satanic teachers of doctrines of demons and so forth.

They were foreordained to that. That's their job. And they do it and then they end up going to hell. You don't believe it? Just read the book of Jude. And there's other places where it talks about that as well.

First and second Peter have some interesting things to say about it too. So there's a lot of stuff in there that we don't like to study and read, talk about much, but you know what I really think it is?

I just think Americans really don't like the true God very much. They don't like how he is. They've invented a God that loves everybody and is okay with everything. I had a gentleman, I saw a gentleman who literally said this, God has elected all men to be saved.

All right, now, where does he get that? It's not in the Bible. He invented a God like that. That's how he wanted God to be. He just saves everybody. So you know what? If it comes true for you, sir, I hope God puts you right next to Hitler in heaven, okay?

Because that's your theology. God's gonna put the rapist right next to your daughter in heaven. Because you think God will put them all there, right? Listen, it's nonsense. And it's not biblical. So it's a non-biblical God who doesn't exist.

It's an idol that people are worshiping in this country. And the biggest on destiny by what you do with your will, that's nonsense. If that were true, no one would be saved. In fact, Jesus said, no man can be saved.

That's why he said it, because he knew man. Read that passage, the rich young ruler, the story of the rich young ruler, read it and ask yourself, why did the Jews come back to him? His own apostles say, well, Lord, if that's true, how can any man be saved?

Jesus said, he can't. No man can be saved. But with God, all things are possible because God created a way. God looked down at a completely annihilated fallen race. And he looked at his son, who the Bible says in the book of Proverbs, had loved the earth of all the planets and loved humans more than anything else.

And the father gave his son a gift. He said, look, I know they're annihilated. They deserve hell. And I know you're disappointed, but I'm gonna give you a gift. I'm gonna show you a way to save, but you're gonna have to die on a cross to do it.

Are you willing? Jesus puts his hand up. Before time began, Bible says in the book of Revelation, he was crucified before the foundation of the world. He raised his hand and said, yes, I will do that.

If you will give me some of them, save some of them. It does never say they will save themselves. The whole, you get in a burning building and timbers fall on you. Don't you need a fireman? You don't save yourself.

So you think you're gonna save yourself from the annihilation of an entire race that deserves hell? That's the Arminian view. You just decide, you just wake up one day and say, I think I've decided to save myself.

But the Bible says there's none that seeketh God, none that want that. So how are you gonna do that? You better get called, all right? So listen, listen for the calling. You know how you'll know when it happened to you?

Because for the first moment in your life, you will truly desire Jesus Christ to be your personal Lord and Savior. The first moment, you won't even know why you thought that thought. And that's the little, the subtle, quiet voice of the Holy Spirit just woke you up.

And you might as well fall on your knees right there and praise God. Because you just avoided hell and you didn't even do it. You received it as a gift. That's true salvation, ladies and gentlemen. It's not preached much anymore.

There've been people that have hated it through all of the last 2 ,000 years and even before that. And there still are. And people still hate this truth because they want a way to save themselves because they think that makes them better.

But their righteousnesses are as filthy rags, the word of God says, you'll never make yourself better. So you have to be called. In the same group that he foreknew and predestinated, he comes into time and he calls them on their spiritual birthday.

And then he justifies them. We've been talking about what that means, but in the Greek, it's passive, which means you can't do it to yourself. Someone bigger than you does it to you and he renders you righteous, which means you're not really righteous.

You're righteous in the Father's eyes. He sees you as righteous. He actually does make you righteous by giving you Jesus's righteousness, not because you're living a good life. Because we still mess up, don't we?

We're not saved based on our righteousnesses. We're saved based on the righteousness of Jesus that is given to us as one of the 33 gifts the Holy Spirit gives us at the moment of our spiritual salvation.

He puts on the robes of righteousness. We're all dressed up in Jesus and the Father sees us as Christ. And therefore we're justified, which means it's just as if we never sinned in God's eyes. That's awesome, isn't it?

Think about that. Well, we figured out that there's about seven things you've got to understand if you're gonna understand being saved by grace. Grace means undeserved favor. How can an Arminian put that together?

Well, the very word means undeserved favor, but I have to play a part in it and deserve it a little bit. That's their theology. There's no logic in their theology. It's all because it's how they want it to be.

So they read that into the Bible and their seminaries help them a lot. PhDs all over the world say, yeah, that's right, that's how it is. You help God a little bit. And they'll show a million ways where you help God and even use scripture to do it, which will defy and totally disagree with hundreds of other clear scriptures, but they just don't show you those.

I can't tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of students I've had around the country at tradeway meetings where I just put scripture up on the wall. And they said, well, I've never seen that before.

And I said, well, it's in your Bible. I just pulled that out of the Bible. Well, I've never seen it. Well, so, but if it is there, will you believe it? Well, I'll think about it. But they go home and they do think about it.

I've had many people tell me they got saved in those meetings and revival because they started studying the Bible. Cause I challenged them, showed them something their pastor had never shown them cause he didn't want to, just didn't fit his little bitty theological box from his seminary.

It's evil and wicked. It's no different than the Pharisees. And they're the ones that killed Jesus, by the way. So we started looking at point number one. The first thing you gotta understand is the depravity of man.

We covered that. Second thing is you gotta understand the meaning of grace. If you're ever gonna know what it means to be justified because you're justified by grace and grace means it's free, which means you can't pay for it or do anything to get it.

Totally knocks out Arminian theology, if you just understand it. And there's seven things, but we're on point number two. Here's the things we've already covered. Number one, how should we deal with false teachers that teach it the wrong way?

You find the answer in Galatians two, four through five and 16 through 21. Number two, what causes people to believe false doctrine? Well, I gave you one when we were studying that. It says they're bewitched.

That's like witchcraft. Their brain, their mind is bent by false teachers and doctrines of demons. Demons teaching them false stuff. But here's another one I didn't give you. I'll give you this one this morning.

First Timothy four one. Now the spirit, that's the Holy Spirit, speaks expressly that in the latter times. So this really applies to us, doesn't it? How many of you believe we're in the end times? Everybody.

In the latter times, some shall depart from the faith. That means the true Christian faith. Really? You mean they will believe that God didn't save them, they saved themselves. They'll believe that there's a way to build a stairway to heaven on your own.

That's what they'll believe. They'll depart from the true Christian faith, which is by grace. Some will depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and the doctrines of demons. That's how people believe it the wrong way.

You see on the way the Bible is, you gotta be bewitched, mesmerized, and believing doctrines of demons and be seduced by other spirits other than the Holy Spirit. And you think it's God teaching you that, so you go teach seminary.

And you teach it wrong in seminary because the demons have convinced you God said, no, it's this way. Even though there's 15 ,000 verses it violates, I'll just change those verses a little or dress them up a little to fit with my false way.

And I think God's doing it the whole time. And most likely I'm a goat, not a sheep anyway, and I'll never be saved, most likely. Some are lost sheep who eventually will get saved though, praise the Lord, right?

And then we talked about the total illogic of salvation by works. And you find that in Galatians 3, 13 through 14. This little part of the study all came out of the book of Galatians. It's impossible for the natural man to be saved by doing good works.

Number two, it's contrary to the unconditional Abrahamic covenant, which is found in Galatians 3, 14. If it's unconditional, it means you can't do anything to help it. It's a covenant only God played the role in.

He gave his son to die and ransom you from hell. He did all that. And you received that as a gift. There's no condition for you to do anything. Number three, salvation by works, again, is a contradiction of terms.

You have to defy the very definition of grace to say that you played a role in your salvation or your justification, Galatians 3, 17 through 18. And then we talked about what's the correct purpose of the law.

It's to lead us to Christ and show us a need for grace, Galatians 3, 22 through 28. And then lastly, we talked about the law as weak and beggarly compared to grace. People who think they gotta keep a bunch of rules to get to heaven, that's a beggarly method of salvation compared to Jesus saving us as a free gift.

And then the last thing was some will never receive the truth, Galatians 4, 9 through 13. The great apostle Paul said, will you count, he's talking to a church group. Will you count me as your enemy because I told you that your plan of salvation is not true.

It's false because you think you help God either save you or keep you safe. Will you count me an enemy because I'm telling you that's a lie from hell and it's doctrines of demons. Will you count me an enemy because I tell you the truth?

That's what he said. That implies there's some in the room that would. All right, so here's where we are today. Cast out the bond woman. See, here's another problem with believing in works salvation because the Bible teaches we're supposed to cast out the bond woman.

Now, it's an allegory, obviously, what does it mean? And then next it says, the persuasion that you can help yourself get saved or stay saved does not come from above. So where does it come from then?

Below, doctrines of demons. And I know you have friends that believe that way, but you know what? If you really love them, tell them the truth. And then you may be asking the question, will you count me as an enemy because I tell you the truth?

Do you have the guts to do that with your friends? You'll answer to Jesus someday for it, whether you did or not. He's gonna ask you, well, what about these six or seven or eight friends here that never saw the light and you were with them every day?

You know, were you afraid of me? Were you embarrassed about me? I mean, why didn't you show them that I saved them? Why didn't you show them my blood? One drop of it is what saves them. It's not their preacher and their priest and all that garbage.

Why didn't you share that with them yourself? Well, he was an austere man and I was afraid of him. Well, that's what Sunday school was about. So you buried the gifts and the knowledge that God gave you in a hole in the ground.

Now you're gonna give it back to God at the judgment seat of Christ? That's not gonna go real well. Good preaching, Brother David. Galatians 4 .30. Nevertheless, what sayeth the scripture? Now this is how you should deal with these people.

They're very difficult to argue with. We just had a case of it this week where a seminarian from the Methodist church who just, I just went out of my mind the name of their biggest seminary. I know it, but I just forgot it.

But he's from their seminary and he wanted to debate this issue. And he threw out about 10 things in one little paragraph that literally, if you went to the scripture, what sayeth the scripture would take 80 pages to answer because I've done it before with less questions than his.

80 pages of scripture, you could give them to answer it, but do they really want that or are they just trying to win an argument? See, so I won't even do it unless I know that answer. You see what I'm saying?

I'm not gonna waste my time on someone that's just throwing something out there to make me eat up my valuable time. All right, so, but I've done it before. So I know it's like 50, 60, 70, 80 pages to answer it.

And isn't that what Paul says? Nevertheless, what's the scripture say about these things? That's, you always take them to scripture. It doesn't say you argue with them. It says you instruct them. Now that may seem haughty, but it's not.

It's just the fact that you do know the answer, don't you? You know the answer. They don't know the answer. You instruct them, hopefully with meekness, that's not the easy part. That's harder when they start jabbing you.

How many of you watched the debate? And not the debate, but the town meeting with President Trump. See, he did pretty well to stay meek and that's not easy for him, is it? He did pretty well with the young lady that was jabbing him for a whole hour and a half or however long.

And he just, he handled her really with meekness and instructed her with facts about economics and everything in the world. But we're supposed to do it with scripture, cast out the bond woman. So here's what the scripture says.

Now, Paul is gonna tell us, and he's talking to some, got some Judaizers, sorry, in the crowd. He has some Jewish people that wanna bring them back to the law, especially in the Galatian church, the false teachers were probably Jews in that case.

And he says, well, let's go look at the scripture of the Jews then. So he's gonna take them to the Old Testament. And he says, what does it teach in the Old Testament about whether you're saved by faith or whether you're saved by works?

Well, it says cast out the bond woman. That picture is what? Works, works, salvation. And cast her son out too, which to us, when we read that old story in the Bible, it seems cruel almost that Sarah told Abraham, you need to get rid of her.

And she's the one that told him to be with her. She realized that's not such a great idea, didn't she? Didn't take her long to realize that either, did it? Send her out in the desert with the child. I don't care what happens to her.

That's what Sarah said. What did Abraham do? He obeyed her. He sent her out there. All right, but what did God do? God took care of her. And great nations came from that son. But they're nations which picture paganism even to this day and create all kinds of problems for Jews and Christians, even to this day.

But that gave us a story that God uses now, allegorically, to teach us the difference between salvation by grace, unmerited favor, you can't do anything to get it or help it, and where you add some works to it.

That would be pictured by the bond woman. And he said, cast her and the son out of the desert and let them die because it's false. It's false, it will hurt people. Now it seemed cruel in the story, but it's a picture.

Even when it was happening, God intended it as a picture. They just didn't see it yet, but we see it. For the son of the bond woman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. What does that mean?

Non-elect, not elected, not part of God's children. And you say, well, that's not fair to sweet little baby and a sweet young woman that just did what the master said to do. And the master's wife said, do this.

And she did everything obediently and was a sweet person and all, that's just not fair, is it? That's why God don't, I'm sorry. That's why people don't like the sovereignty of God. They think God's mean.

God, listen, God just doesn't do it like I would do it. And I've said this so many times, there's at least two groups of people in every crowd I go to. There's the one group that said, well, if I were God, I would just save everybody.

That was our Methodist friend. He said, God elected all men. No, he didn't, but he wants it that way. So he just says that God did that. So he lies about it and makes him feel better. So there are people that would just, if you were God, you would just save everybody.

But there's another group of people in every audience that I go to, and what they say they would do is I'd kill them all and start over. So which are you? Well, it doesn't matter because God didn't do it either way.

He did it his way, and he will always do it his way. He doesn't care what you think about salvation. What he did was he had a race entirely deserving of destruction, and he elected some or chose from out of that race to be saved so that humanity could go forward into the thousand-year millennial kingdom and still exist.

Otherwise, they would have all been annihilated. God chose that they not be. That's grace, that's mercy, that's love. And people think God's mean because that also means some people don't get chosen. They get what they deserve.

But see, they don't look at it that way because they don't think any man deserves to go to hell because all men are good. Armenians think that all men are good and that God is mean. They switch it. They get it backwards.

God is the mean one, so I won't believe that God or the Bible. I've got to reinvent one that fits the fact that everything is good. I don't know what they do with Satan. They probably think he gets saved too.

I've never studied about what they think about Satan. That's interesting. I don't think they believe in him. That's probably easy, just he's not there. He doesn't exist. So it's not a biblical view. Nevertheless, what does the scripture say?

That's what we always have to go back to because that's the only authority we have, the God-breathed scripture. So throw out the bondwoman and the son. Why? It represents false doctrine and a way of salvation that doesn't exist that will mislead people if they're introduced to it.