09-13-2020

The Meaning of Foreknowledge and Predestination

Odd, that's what he saw, none, not one. And so if he saw people getting saved, which he did with his omniscience, that's not what foreknowledge means, but if he saw people getting saved, what he saw was his grace bringing his Holy Spirit to call them to open their eyes and ears and give them light and bring them out of darkness into his marvelous light.

That's what he saw. So the person doing the thing was not the cause, it was the effect of the salvation. And that's where Arminianism gets it wrong and that's where the modern church, for the most part, gets the gospel completely backwards.

But we've covered all that, haven't we? So it starts before time began. He foreknew and predestinated who his children would be. Then it moves into time and there we have two things. Those who he foreknew, he predestinated.

Then it comes in and says in our verses for today, those who he predestinated, he also called. And those who he called, he justified. And that's really the word that a Baptist, when they say I've been saved, they mean I've been justified, to be made just as if I'd never sinned.

And that happens in time. The calling and the justification happens in time. And then it says in the same ones that are justified or glorified, that goes out the other end of time into eternity. So it's everything.

These two scriptures cover everything, two or three verses right in through there. So we're actually on this one and we've been talking about justification. We gave a word study, kind of a lengthy one the other day, the other Sunday.

But just remember this, justified in the Greek means to be rendered righteous. It's in the passive. It means someone greater than you had to do that to you in me. So to be justified means you were rendered to be righteous by God.

God rendered you to be righteous. And we talked about that. And then we went into a doctrinal study, state you don't think you do, but you did. Why? You can prove it because why didn't you get saved three minutes before you got saved or two weeks before?

Because you didn't want to. You didn't want it. All right. And then the Holy Spirit came to you and changed your want to, and then you did it because you wanted to. You received Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.

And everyone this side of the cross that'll be in heaven did do that, but they did it because they wanted to because the Holy Spirit opened their eyes and ears and they wanted Jesus and they received him.

And all of that, we talked about all that, right? So you go into Genesis. What's interesting, God didn't start with John 3 .16. The whole world today thinks that he did. He started with Genesis chapter three.

And what's interesting, it's not verse 16. It's half of that. It's verse eight. But Genesis 3 .8 is where it starts. And you have to understand that first. And it's where Adam and Eve hid from the presence of God.

From that point on, man was depraved, came into the world hiding from God and no man, let's put it up there. There's none that understand it. There's none that seek it after God, Romans 3 .11. None. The world today, the church at large does not understand the depravity of man.

Therefore they feel that Jesus died for everybody and he just presented this gift and it's your decision to decide whether to take it or not. The problem with that theory and that gospel presented that way is there's no one that will receive it that way.

There's not one. No one is seeking that gift. And so salvation in the modern church is of man. It's instituted by the church. It's not that far from Catholicism. That's why I talk about Bapto-Catholicism and Pento-Catholicism.

And so many of our denominations have gone the same direction the Roman Catholics went where it's all about the church. It's all about the plan of salvation that that church has. And that other church over there is evil because they don't get saved the same way.

And the truth is they're all fighting over effects, none of them had the cause. The cause happened long before that person left the pew and came down here to ask what I do to get saved. They wouldn't have got up and come down here if the Holy Spirit hadn't already opened their eyes.

And that's what the Bible teaches us very clearly. So we have to understand the depravity of men before we understand justification. Then last time we went in, we looked at this little passage in Matthew 13, 27 about the wheat and the tares, all right?

And Jesus told this story. And what's interesting, they asked, he's telling the story and they come ask the man who represents Jesus, the landowner, he said, did you plant good seed or bad seed? Because you got weeds coming up in your field.

And he said, I didn't plant the weeds. I didn't plant the tares. He said, an enemy did that. And later when they asked him to tell them, explain this parable to us, he said, well, the enemy is the devil.

So we talked about this last week that the devil, Jesus, Christ said the devil put the tares here. Now the tares are people who will never be saved. They will not be saved because they're not, if you wanna put it in the sheep and goats type of allegorical understanding that Jesus gave us, goats don't get saved, lost sheep get saved.

So you have three kinds of people. You got saved sheep, lost sheep and goats, right? Now, I don't say that we know who the goats are because you and I know when we were lost sheep, we ran with the goats and we acted just like them, didn't we?

Right, because we're part of the human race. But God knew the difference. Jesus knew the difference when he walked up and looked at some of the Pharisees who he could see were goats just by looking in their eyes.

And he said, where I go, you cannot come. He didn't say you won't choose to come. He said, you can't come there because he said, I'm from above, you're from below, you're of your father, the devil. So he knew they were a tare.

But you and I don't always know that, but we can pray about it. And I'll tell you this, you should not witness to everybody. You should witness to who the Holy Spirit tells you to witness to. Lest they turn and rend you, the scripture says.

So the modern church has got it a little bit wrong today. And that's not unusual because if you go back for 2000 years, every church group has gone through a cycle starting with God is sovereign, man gets more and more important.

And it swings around to a full Arminianism where it's all about the church and all about what we do as people. And we take over from God and it becomes human salvation. And it never works because it's not real.

It's not the true gospel anymore. And so we talked about this little parable. And we asked the question, okay, if Satan puts the tares in the world, and Jesus puts the lost sheep who will become saved sheep in the world, how does Satan do that?

Can he create something out of nothing like God? Absolutely not. And we looked at that a little bit because it actually is in the story in the first portions of Genesis, where God gives the curse on the woman.

And most of us when we read that, we think that it just says she'll have pain and childbearing. But if you read it carefully, it doesn't say that. It says that what will happen is that he will multiply not only the pain, the sorrow, but also he will multiply the conception, which means she had more babies than she would have had.

And that may extrapolate all out through all of history. And those extra ones are the tares that would not have been born into the world had there been no fall, theoretically, but there was always gonna be a fall.

God only had one plan. Jesus was slain before the foundation of the world. We know that. So it's interesting right there is how Satan introduced these into the world. He used humans and he used things, material God had already made.

And as children are born, some are tares and some are wheat. And people don't like that doctrine. And they never have. They didn't like it when Jesus preached it. In fact, if you remember the one time when a whole hundreds of disciples walked away from him and he looked at his own apostle said, well, you leave also.

And they almost as if they were going to, but they didn't. But he had just taught on the sovereignty of God when they left him. So people have never liked the fact that God's in control of who gets saved.

It's so interesting. Charles Orden said one time, well, I think he said, I find that odd that people don't like that because among humans, we don't think it's a problem for the man to choose who his bride will be or the bride to choose who the husband will be.

But we don't want Jesus to choose his bride. Well, that's what that is. He chooses his bride. And would you rather have human endeavor cause who gets saved? Or you would rather have a loving, kind, all knowing God to be in control of that?

Well, I would choose the latter, not the former. And thankfully, that's how the Bible says it works. So we talked about all these things and it goes in and that same parable talks about when the wheat and the tares will be separated.

And that's at the end of this age, when the rapture happens and the first resurrection and so forth. So let me read to you something a little bit about how if you go back 2000 years and you want to see what your brothers and sisters in Christ have thought about certain passages because you don't ever want to have what's called a private interpretation where you just say, well, I think it means this.

We're not allowed to do that. You can think it means that but you're not allowed to teach it means that until the Holy Spirit's proven to you. And it fits with all of scripture and the Bible as a whole.

And you're using all 10 rules of proper Bible interpretation and it helps if you find some other brothers and sisters in Christ in the past 2000 years that have believed it the same way you think it means.

That helps a lot. And that's why we should always be studying. But let's look at John Calvin. And you say, well, that figures because he started Calvinism. No, he never called it Calvinism. He was a Bible teacher.

And when you read what he said in a few moments, it just blow your mind to read what this wonderful man said. Now, what's interesting about it, he did talk about total depravity, but what modern people that want to argue against Calvin say that he meant is not what he meant.

And you have to read him yourself or people will lie about it to win an argument. And by the way, if you're visiting, you probably haven't heard me say this. I say it all the time though. Calvin didn't invent Calvinism because 1400 years before Calvin, Augustine taught the same thing.

He taught the sovereignty of God, he taught election, he taught predestination, and he taught eternal security and he was a Roman Catholic. And before him, you can go back to about 88 AD, Price Ostrom and some other early church fathers taught the same thing.

And you go back before that, Paul taught it. You go back before that, Jesus taught it to him in the wilderness for three years. So it's Christianity, it's not Calvinism. But if you really want to find out about what Calvin thought, read him.

It's glorious. You know who Charles Spurgeon's favorite person to read was? John Calvin. And what were they separated by? Three, 200 years, something like that, two or 300 years. So that was sort of his mentor.

Total Depravity and the Human Need for Grace

Well, anyway, in this little passage in John 3, 10, it says, as it's written, there's none righteous, not one. There's none that understands, there's none that seeks God. This is what total depravity actually means.

It means that man and woman and boy and girl in their natural state are not seeking God. And the reason is they think they're God. They're in control of their life. They like it that way for a while. And unless the Holy Spirit comes and shows us that that life is rotten and not going the right way, or unless a parent tells a child, look, you've had a few spankings, why'd you get those?

Well, because I didn't do right, right. And then the Lord says none of us do right. So we need Jesus. We have to explain it, put it on their level, right? But it's the same thing. It's the same thing.

We're all children in a sense. But there's none righteous, not one. None that understands, none that seek after God. They're all gone out of the way. They're all together become unprofitable. That means to God, humans are not profitable to God.

He didn't save us to profit. He saves us because he wants to, and he's loved us from the foundation of the world. He's loved us and known us before he made anything. We've always been his. We have always been his in his mind and heart.

And he knows, and Jesus said, no man will come to me unless the father draws him. And listen to this. He said, I will lose nothing, but we'll raise it up at the end. Jesus will not lose a single one of the sheep.

And all of the sheep are his responsibility, not the sheep's responsibility. And all of these different religions in the world that rely on man doing something and keeping good to be saved, none of them are true because we're not our own shepherd.

We have to have a shepherd and it's Jesus. Their throat is an open sepulcher. Boy, we can sure hurt people with our words, can't we? We certainly can. Their tongues, they've used for deceit, to win an argument, whatever.

For whatever reason, we will lie in an instant just to win an argument. I think the older we get, the less like, we get where we don't like that anymore. We just rather know what the truth is. You know, that's kind of when you start maturing, I think, as a Christian.

But their lips are like the poison of asps are under their lips. So this is the way natural man comes into the world, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood.

I played round of golf with my youngest son, Matt, yesterday and we were out there taking a break and this old man, nice old man, just a natural man out there. He's working on his golf cart, trying to get the wheel off of it.

And man, something slipped and that wrench hit his finger and you do not want to hear what came out of his mouth. Right? Isn't that what it says? Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. It was amazing.

And as soon as he's done with all that, he was just friendly as he could be. Well, we all came into the world like that. Destructive, destruction and misery are in their ways. I mean, listen, John Calvin did not invent the depravity of man.

Paul didn't either, even though the Apostle Paul penned that, the Holy Spirit wrote it. And the way of peace, have they not known? Who is the way of peace? Who's the Prince of Peace? They haven't known him.

You can't know him naturally. There's no program a church in this city can come up with that will cause people to get saved. No program. There's no prayer formula when they come down here that I can tell them to pray and cause them to get saved.

And as I've said in recent days, if you go study church history, you don't have to go back very far. My great-grandfather, no, let me take that back. My grandfather told me a story about Gypsy Smith coming through Coors County, Texas, putting up a big tent out here and preaching.

And in those meetings, people would come down the aisle and they'd go down there and they wouldn't say, hey, repeat this little prayer after me and you'll be saved. What they'd tell them is you need to keep praying all week, pray that the Holy Spirit calls you because if he doesn't, you can't get saved.

Now that doesn't sound like they're giving the gospel, does it? But you know what they're not doing is they're not using sales techniques to try to get people to get saved and grow their church. They were telling the gospel truth.

Look, Jesus died for his people. If you're his child, he'll call you, pray that he'll call you. And they'd stay down there on their knees every night for two weeks. And then towards the last three or four days, the Lord would come down on that place.

And my grandfather described it to me, said it was like a wind blew through. And we saw, we didn't, but my grandmother saw Rocky Freeman who became my mentor later, because I got saved later after this happened, do a revival meeting in little Mahea, Texas, a hundred and something people got saved.

It's supposed to be a four day meeting. It turned into a 14 day meeting. God came down on that place and people were saved. And God is the one who has to do the saving because we are not ready for it.

We don't want it. The Holy Spirit has to open the eyes and that's the true gospel. There is no fear of God in the eyes of a natural man. So not one righteous among the race. Let's look at the points in those few verses.

And let's see if John Calvin was right about this. Was he correct about total prayer? There's not one righteous person in the human race that scripture just said, not one. Number two, not one that understands God or godliness.

Not one human understands that in their natural state that scripture says. Number three, not one that seeks God. Nobody's looking for him. You can put a gospel up on a billboard and it's fine. We need people to hear the gospel because the lost sheep need to hear it because the Holy Spirit will use that when he saves them.

But it can be in any form. It doesn't have to be King James. It could be like a grandmother told a child about Jesus. It can be any missionary. It can be, they heard it on the news, read it in a book, but they have to hear the gospel.

We have the water and the spirit. The water is the word of God. It has to be there. So I'm not mocking putting up billboards, but I'm just saying what you put there won't save a natural man unless the spirit comes alongside that word and brings it to life.

There is no salvation aside from the Holy Spirit, regeneration. While we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us, brought us to life. It's all there. Number four, right here in this little passage, all have gone their own way, not God's way.

We are God's and we know it and we like it until the minute the Holy Spirit changes our mind. And do you know what the word repentance means? Everybody says among the Baptist, you gotta do, some of them will say, you gotta believe to get saved.

That's actually salvation by works. I don't know if you ever figured that out. And they say, we don't believe in salvation by works. Well, what do you gotta do to be saved? You gotta believe. Well, that's a work you use in your brain.

Or the really serious Baptist, and I pick on them because I grew up Baptist, by the way, but the serious Baptist will say, you gotta believe and repent. But the Bible says the Lord brings repentance. So it's not something you gotta do, it's something you receive as a gift.

You receive it as a gift at the moment you're regenerated. It's not something you did, it's something God gave you. Because repent means to change your mind. Well, how are you as a natural man or woman, boy or girl gonna change your mind about who's most important person in the world when you think it's you?

It's not God, right? It's you. You're not gonna change your mind or you would have done it yesterday. It takes a miracle. In fact, it's such a miracle that God himself could not make your old man better.

So he slew it on the cross with Jesus and created a new man or woman or boy or girl inside of you to save you. And that's called the new nature, the new man or the new woman, if you're a woman or a child, whatever.

But God did that and it's just as miraculous as physical birth, which I have gotten to see five times in my family and nine times with my grandbabies and it's amazing every time. I can't keep my hands off the new babies when they come into the family.

Nothing like looking in their eyes and they look back at you and you see the love of God and you go, oh, I feel this all over my whole body. Oh, this is amazing, right? That comes from God. That's physical birth and it's miraculous.

And I figured the ladies particularly would say, amen, you know, I mean, how do you get through that without God, right? But it is a picture of spiritual birth. Jesus said, you must be born again. Humans are not naturally able to accomplish that.

Number five says there's not a human being in the race that's profitable to God. Number six, not one is good in the whole human race. So if God's looking out like the Armenians say, and they think foreknowledge means he's just looking out there, finding the good people and electing them, it's based on a lie.

That's a false presupposition because it says if he looked out, he wouldn't see any good human beings. In fact, he would see a race that was fit for hell, just like it was before Noah and his ark. And it says, God looked out and had grace on Noah.

And we think, oh, well, he found one good man. No, grace means undeserved favor. Noah was as bad as the rest of them. We see we don't get that in our little Bible story, but he was as bad as the rest of them.

And God showed his grace on him, which means undeserved favor. And he saved him by grace and stuck him on the ark, right? That's how we get saved because this proves it. And then number seven, they're all liars.

Oh, I'm saved? Really? Well, I'm saved too. Why don't we watch each other for a few years and then, you know, we'll kind of get that good brotherly feeling, right? It takes time to know if a person's really saved when they say they're saved.

But with time, we can. Our spirit can witness with their spirit because we both have the same Holy Spirit and he connects us and he connects us to Jesus and he connects Jesus to the Father, connects us to the Father.

And we can sort of tell, especially in a smaller church, when we've been around each other for a little while. But you don't know just because somebody says it, do you? You just don't know. But you treat them with love and you hope that they're hearing strong preaching because that will do one thing or two, one or two things.

It'll make them start to grow or it'll drive them away every time. This is how it works. So there's no good people and they're all liars. They're all cursers and they're bitter in their hearts about life in general.

They're quick to hurt others with their mouth, particularly. And their lives are filled with destruction and misery. If you understand that, you can begin to understand all of the work that God had to do to save you because you didn't do anything to save you.

So people ask me, maybe figured this out in 2020, you believe in salvation by works? I used to say, absolutely not. Now I say, oh, absolutely I do. But God did all the work. He did so many things to save us.

Who knows what all that took? But I know one thing, we don't even understand what Jesus bore when he bore our sins on the cross and God turned his face from his son. We will never know what that was like.

Praise God, because the only way to know it would be to spend eternity in hell. We will never know that, but he did it for us. And so we're saved by the finished work of God. I thought I had 10 points.

I had 11. And we do not know the way, the truth of the life. You can't naturally know Jesus. Only when the Holy Spirit calls you and opens your eyes, can you even see him. How many times did Jesus say, those who have ears to hear, let him hear?

Was it in the hymn this morning or in your son? One of you two guys were up here preaching around and I was thinking, wow, there it is. Ears to hear, probably was one of the hymns I'm thinking. Yeah. Well, I noticed one thing in the hymn.

Our hymn book is the modern version because in the old hymn book, it said we're worms and the new one, it said we're sinners. I like sinners better than worm too, don't you? Oh, look, I got another one.

We have zero fear of God. Okay, so there's the depravity of man, right? The apostle Paul called it the depravity of man 1600 years before Don Calvin lived and Augustine did it 1400 years before Don Calvin did.

So it's not Calvinism, it's Bible, it's the truth. And all of salvation is based on it and you can't understand salvation if you don't understand it because if you don't understand this, you will think you did something to save yourself or the church helped you get saved.

Some human thing caused you to get saved and you'll feel so good about it. And guess who gets the glory for that kind of salvation? The church and the human. It's humanism or in theology we call it Arminianism.

Justification by Grace Through Redemption

All right, so that brings us to number two point. You've got to understand. And the church goes, amen, because he moved to another point. Don't worry, I'll review that one next Sunday. But anyway, the second thing you got to understand, understand justification.

And what does justification mean again? It means to be rendered righteous by someone greater than you, to be made righteous. The Greek word for righteousness and justified is the same root word. So it's just two sides of the same coin.

But the same thing we have to understand is we got to understand what the word grace means or we'll never understand how a person is justified. And you say, well, that seems like almost the same thing.

Well, no, think about this. If you don't understand that grace means undeserved favor, you'll forget the undeserved part and you'll think you played some part in your own salvation. Some little part, I helped it a little bit.

Well, I had to believe. Even if you add that little bit, you got to be really careful what you mean by that. Because the Bible, the true Bible, the Greek, New Testament says that we are given at the moment of our calling, a wonderful gift.

We're given about 33 things, but one of them is this. It's called the faith of Jesus, not faith in Jesus. It's called the faith of Jesus. We're given his belief, his faith, and we are saved because of it.

Now, do we as humans believe? Yes, we have our own belief, but it's like a tuning fork and you hit it and you put this one over next to it, it'll start chiming at the same exact frequency. That's our belief.

But you know as well as I do, our belief comes and goes. First time God chooses to say no to one of your prayers or to wait for a while, you go, huh, I don't know if he's there. Why didn't he hear me?

Even King David, I think he's deaf. God's deaf. Oh God, hear me, as if he can't hear me, right? That's our belief. It's on one day, off the other. Belief today, doubt tomorrow. How would you like your salvation to be based on that?

And yet the modern gospel says it is. It's not. Listen, your belief was an effect, and an effect can never be the cause of the cause. Your belief did not cause you to be saved. It was a result of the fact that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit had given you the gift of Jesus' faith, and that faith can walk on water.

That faith can move mountains. That faith can save your dead, lost, deaf, blind soul. And mine, and it did. It's the greatest miracle that ever happened, is when David Mitchell got saved. She remembers me.

We were married before I got saved. But so, undeserved, that is, listen, that part we have to understand. Romans 3, 24, being justified freely by his grace. Well, what's interesting is if the word grace itself means undeserved, and you put freely in front of it, it's redundant.

It's like, now he's being saved freely by free grace. And grace means free, so it's freely by free, free grace. Do you think God's trying to get something across that we don't pay for it, we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we don't do it.

We receive it as a gift, and it's free. Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. And that word redemption in the Greek is the same word as ransom. Now think about what a ransom is when you wanna decide whether you believe Jesus died for everybody or not, because I don't believe that he did.

95 of Baptists didn't believe he did in 16, 1700. Who did they believe he died for? The elect. And the reason that's true is because everyone that he died for is going to heaven. Because he said, I will lose nothing.

So either every human that ever lives is saved, or like Jesus said, no, they're not, as broad as the way to hell, and many there be that go there, and few there be that go to heaven. If he's right about that, then he didn't die for everybody, he died for his own.

He died for his own people who he knew and predestinated before time started, who he called in time, justified in time, glorified right out the other end. Like the Bible says. Once you get that, the whole Bible will fit.

You won't have anything, even when we get to Romans chapter nine, eventually, which is the next chapter, it will fit the whole Bible. But until you get this, it'll never fit, you'll just leave it out.

In fact, it's never been in the Southern Baptist Sunday School quarterly ever in my lifetime. Why do they leave it out? They won't talk about it. Doesn't fit the modern gospel message of humanism. God chooses, it teaches it so clearly, I can't wait to get there.

So, this word freely in the Greek means I like it, without a cause. That's even stronger than our modern word freely, isn't it? So we're justified without a human cause. You like that? That's pretty strong.

You are justified. You are rendered righteous without a human cause. That's not the modern gospel. That's the gospel of the Bible. That's Calvin's gospel. That's Spurgeon's gospel. That's Torrey's gospel.

That's Whitefield's gospel. That's even John Wesley, sort of, he didn't totally understand this, but I think he knew who saved people, that it was Jesus. Augustine's gospel, he's a Roman Catholic. So, I mean, it's the Bible.

So, without a cause, and grace means this, if you just look up the English word, unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration. That's pretty good. You do know Webster was a born again Christian, right?

What was his first name? Daniel? Noah Webster? Now, when you look at grace, we're saved freely without a cause, without a human cause, by his grace. Grace in English means undeserved. That's what unmerited means, undeserved favor.

But in the Greek, it is kairis, and it means graciousness, excuse me, a gracious act, which means God performed a gracious act upon us when he saved us, and it means favor. It comes from kairo, which means to be cheerful, which I think is pretty cool.

So, where does joy come from? Joy comes from having the grace of God in your life. God saved you by grace, and we have a reason to be cheerful. Now, let's look at this word redemption up here, and as I said, it means to be ransomed in full.

So, one of the things Calvin taught that's so unpopular, you'll hear people say, well, I'm a four-point Calvinist, and I have trouble, I understand that, but I have trouble respecting it, because it just means you haven't finished studying yet.

That's what that means, because the fifth point that they want to leave off is they don't wanna believe, oh, let me put it in the positive. They wanna believe Jesus died for everybody. So, that's the one point they'll leave off, and Calvin called it limited atonement, which means he didn't die for everybody, he died for the elect.

They don't like that. So, a four-point Calvinist believes God is sovereign, except they believe that Jesus' blood was ineffectual for the largest number of humans. It didn't work. He died for them, but they went to hell, so his blood was ineffectual for the largest number of humans, which I find that weak.

To me, that's a very weak argument. But the interesting thing about it, when you look at the verse, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption, the word through is dia, which is like a pipeline through which things go.

So, the pipeline through which grace and salvation came is the pipeline of redemption. And the word redemption means to be set free by paying a price. It literally is the word for ransom in the Greek.

And we've told the illustration so many times, but just think about it. It's just logic. You have to use logic to understand scripture. God said, come let us reason together. So, if a man pays a ransom for his child, and the kidnapper has two or three other parents, children too, but they don't have the money, who gets set free?

You have to defy the definition of ransom to say all of them got set free. No, he didn't pay the ransom for everybody. He paid the ransom for his kids. And 100 of them are set free, and that's what ransom means.

So, you have to be illogical to believe Arminianism. You have to be illogical to be a four-point Calvinist, but I don't want to pick on you. I mean, I don't care. I was a three-point Calvinist all through my 20s.

And then by the time I was 30, I was a four-point Calvinist. By the time I was 31 and a half, I was a five-point Calvinist. No, I'm kidding. I don't know the exact ages. Charlotte probably remembers, because I got really irritating when I became five-point.

All right, so redemption means ransom in full. It comes from the little word apo, which means completely, plus the word lutron, which means to loosen or to set free. You were loosened or set free from the world, the flesh, and Satan by the price Jesus paid to set you free.