WWUTT 383 God's Sovereign Plan? (Part 1)

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Has God predestined all things from before the foundation of the world? The Bible says He has.

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Are you responsible for the decisions you make? The Bible says you are. And it's only our folly that leads us to believe these two ideas are incompatible when we understand the text.

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Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt

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.com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. And greetings in the name of the

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Lord Christ. We're continuing a series this week on God's sovereign election. On Monday and Tuesday, I critiqued the sermon from the late

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Dr. Adrian Rogers entitled Predestined for Hell? Absolutely not. Today, Thursday, and Friday, I'll be critiquing a sermon from Dr.

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Steve Gaines entitled God's Sovereign Plan that was preached on September 8, 2013 at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, the same church that Dr.

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Adrian Rogers pastored for over 30 years. Dr. Steve Gaines is the current president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, having been elected in June of 2016. He ran a close race with J .D.

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Greer, a noted Calvinist. But before the vote went to a recount, Greer withdrew from the running and gave the nomination to Dr.

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Gaines. Some of the comments that I witnessed online during the voting process revealed to me just how divided the convention continues to be over matters like regeneration, election, predestination, even the grace of God.

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Unfortunately, with the election of Dr. Steve Gaines, no pun intended, I do not see a reduction in that divide.

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If you thought that Dr. Rogers was hostile toward reform theology, Dr. Gaines is even more so.

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Now, to Dr. Gaines credit, I did hear an interview in September where he said that he doesn't believe

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Calvinism should be expunged from the Southern Baptist Convention. This is unlike Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, who said last year that Calvinists should leave the

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Southern Baptist Church and go be Presbyterians. In that same interview, Dr. Gaines said that we need to have loving dialogues where we're not talking at each other, but with each other.

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However, if this sermon is any indication, Dr. Gaines really has no interest in trying to understand the viewpoint that he is criticizing.

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In fact, at the end of this sermon, he goes as far as saying, don't you dare contact me about this.

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While the critique of the critique of Dr. Rogers sermon was in response to the common ways in which

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Romans 9 is taught falsely, this critique of Dr. Gaines sermon is in response to the common fallacies regarding the sovereignty of God.

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This sermon is presented in its entirety. It has only been edited for time, removing long pauses.

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No content has been removed. Here is Dr. Steve Gaines reading from 2

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Kings 8 as his root text in the sermon entitled God's Sovereign Plan.

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And with that, that would be a good segue into what I'm talking about tonight. God's Sovereign Plan.

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Let's say that together. God's Sovereign Plan. Second Kings chapter 8.

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And we are still studying Elijah and Elisha. And of course, we're in Elisha right now.

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And when I looked at this passage, I said, you know, this would be an excellent text to speak about the sovereignty of God.

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Some people believe that the sovereignty of God means that everything that happens is the will of God. That is not what

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I believe the Bible says that the sovereignty of God is. I think that it is

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God is sovereign over everything that happens and that He can take everything that happens and accomplish

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His ultimate will. But when you start saying that everything that happens is the will of God, then all of a sudden you have thrown

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God into a category of ordaining sin. God does not predestine what

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He prohibits in Scripture. God does not predestine sin.

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All right. So already we begin with confusion here. Gaines has defined sovereignty according to what he thinks it is.

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He says, I think that God can take everything that happens and accomplish His ultimate will.

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That definition is actually closer to providence than sovereignty. In God's providence,

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He foresees and lovingly preserves and governs all things through secondary causes.

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One of the best examples of this, I believe, is the Great Commission. Jesus said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the

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Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold,

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I am with you always to the end of the age. That's Matthew 28, 18 through 20. So God is using

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His disciples to accomplish His plan of salvation and He is with them always.

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That's providence. His sovereignty is defined in verse 18 by the fact that He has all authority in heaven and on earth.

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That's what sovereignty is. It is ultimate, supreme power and authority.

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In Colossians 1, 18, Paul uses the word preeminent. There is nothing higher, no power greater than God and God alone.

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God has the absolute right to do all things according to His good pleasure.

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Psalm 115, 3 says, Our God is in the heavens. He does all that He pleases.

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God has chosen to display the full range of His glory through all of His creation, not only through the objects of His mercy, but also through the objects of His wrath.

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And that's what we talked about when we were critiquing Dr. Rogers' sermon, that passage out of Romans 9, verses 22 and 23.

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In Acts 4, 23 through 31, when the disciples prayed for boldness, they said,

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I'll read this prayer to you, Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father

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David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, why did the Gentiles rage and the people's plot in vain?

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The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together against the

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Lord and against His anointed. For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant

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Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan predestined to take place.

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And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant

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Jesus. The disciples place their full trust in God because they know

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He is sovereign. They saw demonstrated through Herod and Pontius Pilate, individual persons, along with the

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Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, entire ethnicities of persons, what God had decreed through His servant

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David a thousand years before, the crucifixion of the Son of God to reconcile fallen man to himself.

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And yet, Acts 2 and 4 are clear that while the murder of Jesus Christ was in accord with God's predestined plan because nothing happens outside His will, those who perpetrated this offense were still morally accountable.

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The cross of Christ teaches us, among other things, the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.

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Dr. Gaines is about to teach that these two concepts are absolutely not compatible.

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That is what you will hear in a sermon full of generalizations, straw man arguments, and red herrings that goes from left field to Timbuktu while taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

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This message is all over the place and much less thought out and organized than Dr. Adrian Rogers was, but I'll try to remain on task as best as I can.

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In doing so, I may not respond to every claim Dr. Gaines makes, in part because his arguments are all over the map, and also because his conclusions are drawn from false premises.

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I simply cannot respond on the grounds that he establishes. But I think at the very end of this, we'll still have been able to establish a framework built on a foundation of God's Word.

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Let's continue. Now, we live in a day when people say, oh no, God made me this way. That is not right.

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God made us in His image, and we have a choice.

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And you know what, really, if you think about it, the people that really gravitate toward everything that happens is the will of God, I can't help what

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I do, it's just the way I am, you know what, that's indicative of our whole society.

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We want to blame somebody else for our problems. We don't want to take responsibility.

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Even if it's God, even if it's predestination, even if it's a theological blaming, we want to do it now.

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Right. That's the problem with society today, the doctrine of predestination. Sinful men have been blaming

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God since the fall. Adam was the first one to do it. The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.

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And then Eve deflected blame too. She said it was the serpent's fault. So at the fall in Genesis 3, you had someone blaming

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God and someone else blaming the devil. Man's problem is not that in his theology he gives

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God too much credit. Man's problem is that he gives himself too much credit. The reason he blames someone else instead of admitting fault or recognizing sin is because he thinks he's innocent.

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Proverbs 21 .2, every man believes that he is right in his own eyes, not because he learned the doctrine of predestination somewhere and figured out that he can just blame

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God. I'm going to show you that God has a plan on three different levels, at least.

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But we can either obey or disobey the plan.

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And God does not predestine either our obedience or our disobedience.

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God, his predestination is all wrapped up in his foreknowledge.

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When you see predestination in Ephesians 1, it is a plan of salvation, not a people to be saved.

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We are predestined in Christ. That word occurs almost a dozen times in Ephesians 1.

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And what it means is that God created a plan for salvation.

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We are saved in Christ. Herschel Hobbs said it this way. He's the one that really taught me about what that means in Ephesians 1.

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He said, Steve, it's like this. And I did my PhD dissertation on his preaching.

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I read almost 500 of his sermons. I have them in my office. I'm the only person in the world that has all of his transcripts, all of his sermons on file.

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They did not save them at the Baptist hour. He preached for 18 years on the Baptist hour nationwide when radio was the big thing on the

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Baptist hour. And he preached great sermons. And I have all of them in my office. And I don't know what

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I'm going to do with them, but I've got them. But he said, it's like this. God made a fence, and that fence is

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Christ. He said, here's what he said. I predestined that everyone who is within that fence, who is in Christ, is saved, and everybody that's not is not.

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A plan was predestined, but God did not say, okay, you're in, you're in, you're out, you're out.

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God didn't do that. God, there's not one verse of Scripture that says

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God predestined anybody to go to hell, specifically. God did predestine, though, that if you don't know

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Jesus, you will go to hell. And there's a difference. So let's look at it. First of all,

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God has a plan for individuals. That's really funny that Dr. Gaines says God predestined a plan, but not people.

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And then his first point is going to be that God has a plan for individuals. Gaines has a very inconsistent theology, and this is going to come up several times over the course of this very jumbled sermon.

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You'll notice that he tells you what's in Ephesians 1, but he doesn't actually read it.

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And later on, he'll draw only one verse out of Ephesians chapter 1, and it's only to serve his point, not teach his hearer's understanding.

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So according to Herschel Hobbes, God predestined a plan and not people. And we've already looked at one passage,

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Acts chapter 4, completely contradicts that definition. But let's stick with the analogy that Gaines presented. God made a fence, and that fence is

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Christ. And everyone inside that fence is saved, and everyone outside the fence is not.

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Here's the major problem with that analogy. There's a possibility no one gets saved at all.

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If God's plan of salvation is dependent upon us making the choice to go into a fence that God has set up for us, what if no one decides to do that?

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That means there's a possibility in God's predestined plan, not people, but a plan, that no one would actually make the choice to accept it, and Jesus would have died for nothing.

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Now, you can argue, well, people have accepted it, and Jesus didn't die for nothing. But Gaines is going to say toward the end of his sermon that he doesn't know who's saved.

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So we don't actually know that anyone has ever truly accepted this predestined plan.

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That problem is compounded even more when you read in Romans 3 .11 that no one understands and no one seeks for God.

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Now, Gaines is going to say, well, God knows the choices that you're going to make, but he doesn't make you choose.

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If God foreknows the choices we're going to make, how could we have made any other choice?

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Clearly, there's only one possible choice we could have made, the choice that God foreknew we would make.

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In Gaines' own free will paradigm, there is no free will. This is one of many conflicts in Gaines' reasoning, and we'll get to that again later on.

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Look at verses 1 -6. Now, Elisha spoke to the woman whose son he had restored to life, saying,

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Arise, go with your household, sojourn wherever you can sojourn. Did you hear that?

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Sojourn wherever you can sojourn. Come back to that in a minute. For the Lord has called for a famine.

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It will come, even come, on the land for seven years. So the woman arose, did according to the word of the man of God.

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She went with her household and sojourned in the land of the Philistines seven years. Notice here that God sovereignly warned the woman and her family to leave

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Israel because a famine was inevitably en route. There's the sovereignty of God.

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God was planning the weather. God was planning the famine. But God allowed the woman to make some decisions for herself.

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Did you notice that? He told her through the prophet Elisha that the famine was coming.

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He told her how long it would last, for seven years. But then he said, did you catch it?

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Arise and go with your household and sojourn wherever you can sojourn. God allowed her to choose where she would go.

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Every minute detail of her sojourn or her traveling was not spelled out and ordained by God.

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You see, God created us in his image. And part of that means that we have freedom of choice.

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And our freedom of choice, to be sure, is tainted by a sinful nature.

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So by and by, we are going to choose willfully, volitionally choose of our own choice, of our own free will, sin.

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God does not ordain and predestine those choices. God doesn't say, you choose this sin, you choose that sin.

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God doesn't predestine our sin. Again, he doesn't predestine what he prohibits in Scripture.

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Yeah, Dr. Gaines has a very two -dimensional perspective of the sovereignty of God here. He thinks that if God were supremely sovereign, we would have to see that spelled out word for word in the pages of Scripture.

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The writer of Second Kings would need to say, God made the woman get up and he moved her arms and legs and relocated her to the place where he had prearranged for her to go, you know, and that sort of thing.

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So Dr. Gaines thinks that if God predestined all things from before the foundation of the world, that makes God a puppet master and we're all just as puppets and he's the one pulling the strings.

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But as Dr. James White has pointed out, the thing that blows up the puppet master argument is the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

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When God entered into human flesh, did the puppet master become a puppet?

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Of course not. And according to Hebrews 2 .17, Jesus became like his brothers in every respect.

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So if Jesus did not become a puppet, then guess what? We're not puppets either. Jesus is the word who became flesh and dwelt among us,

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John 1 .14. So likewise, when the Bible speaks to us, it speaks into our realm of existence.

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It does not give us a play -by -play of every sovereign move of God.

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By the grace of God, we get to see glimpses of his sovereignty, but only glimpses because we're man and he's

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God. The Bible says that we're able to clearly perceive God's infinite power and his divine nature in the things that have been made, that's

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Romans 1 .20. But we cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end,

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Ecclesiastes 3 .11. We see in part, but we will not see fully until the day that we enter glory.

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John said, this is 1 John 3 .2, Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.

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When God spoke to Moses through the burning bush and he told him to go back to Egypt and tell

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Pharaoh to let my people go, Moses said, well, who am I that I should do this thing? And God said to him, this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you.

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When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.

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We have not yet ascended God's holy mountain and are able to look back and see how

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God was intricately working in every minute detail. We don't get to know that yet.

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For now, we can only behold the mystery of God's sovereign workings to the praise of his glorious grace.

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As Walter Smith wrote in one of my all -time favorite hymns, immortal, invisible,

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God -only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes, most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days, almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

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Love that hymn. Where do people get that idea? They take verses like Ephesians 1 -11, and again, out of context, in my opinion, which is all about in Christ and predestination and all that in Christ, they say in Ephesians 1 -11, and here's how it reads in the

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New American Standard, also, we have obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to his purpose, who works all things after the counsel of his will.

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They take that last phrase and say, see, everything is after the counsel of his will, every minute point.

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Now, look at me. I'm talking about, look, just look at me. They believe that I did my hand just like that, that was predestined by God before the foundation of the world that I take my right hand instead of my left hand.

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They say, you're being silly. I'm not being silly. I'm talking about every minute thing that happens, they say, is predestined by God, including every sin.

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God ordains everything that is said, everything that happens. Now, when you start taking that to the nth degree, you see the fault with that.

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God now is responsible for our sin. We are not responsible. They say, oh, no, no, you're responsible. You did it.

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But then they say, but God made you do it. Now, I just got news for you. I can't go there.

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And they will take sermons like I'm preaching right now. And it's amazing to me how much time they spend just tearing apart little things.

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But the bottom line is, logically, that's what they're saying. Hey, just like I'm doing right now, as I've already demonstrated, if Dr.

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Gaines wants to argue about logic, it is not on his side. Has not

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God made foolish the wisdom of the world? As Dr. R .C. Sproul has said, if there is one single molecule in the universe running around loose, totally free of God's sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.

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John Piper, a renowned Calvinist, used to believe, as Steve Gaines does, and use the same self -grandizing illustrations as the one that Dr.

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Gaines just gave about his hand. You know, if God predestined for the foundation of the world that I'd move my right hand instead of my left hand.

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While a student at Fuller Theological Seminary, Piper described himself as a flaming free willer.

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One of his classes was led by theologian James Morgan, who was teaching on the sovereignty of God.

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And Piper once stood in front of him with a pencil in his hand. He said, watch this, Morgan. And then he let the pencil fall to the ground and angrily snapped.

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I dropped it. At the end of the class, Piper recalls, after patient pointing to the

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Bible, he wrote in one of his exam booklets. Romans 9 is like a tiger devouring free willers like me.

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According to Ephesians 1, 4 through 6, which Gaines did not read, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before him.

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In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.

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According to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

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Now tell me, does that sound like God predestined a plan and not people? It is very particular.

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He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

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Dr. Gaines is trying to say that God predestined a plan. According to this passage, God predestined us.

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He did not place his love and his affection on a plan. He placed his love and his affection on people.

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How do you predestine a plan anyway? I'm going to plan a plan. That doesn't even make any sense.

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To predestine is to plan. Spurgeon said, I believe the doctrine of election because I'm quite sure that if God had not chosen me,

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I should never have chosen him. And I am sure he chose me before I was born or else he never would have chosen me afterwards.

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And he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love.

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Spurgeon also said, if I find taught in one part of the Bible that everything is foreordained, that is true.

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And if I find in another scripture that man is responsible for all his actions, that is true.

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And it is only my folly that leads me to imagine that these two truths can ever contradict each other.

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I do not believe that they can ever be welded into one upon any earthly anvil, but they certainly shall be one in eternity.

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They are two lines that are so nearly parallel that the human mind which pursues them farthest will never discover that they converge, but they do converge and they will meet somewhere in eternity close to the throne of God.

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Whence all truth doth spring. Dr. Gaines problem is that he's trying to weld these two concepts,

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God predestining anything and man's responsibility together upon his own anvil. And he's failing miserably to the detriment of himself and also to his hearers.

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And that, unfortunately, is where we're going to have to stop today. But we will pick up the remainder of this sermon tomorrow.

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Let's conclude with prayer. Our gracious heavenly father, we thank you so much for the grace that you poured out upon us before we even came into existence, before the foundation of the world was laid.

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You knew us and had placed your affection upon us before we were born, before mom and dad were even aware that we were expected before they had even chosen a name for us.

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You knew us fully and placed your love and affection on us in Christ Jesus.

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And so I pray to the praise of your glorious grace that we would live lives worthy of the calling that we have received in Christ Jesus.

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May we show ourselves to be his disciples, citizens of the kingdom of God, which we are awaiting the appearance of.

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So let us be found as faithful servants to your praise and glory, holding out this message, this gospel, which we heard and transformed us from darkness into your kingdom of marvelous light.

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And we pray and ask these things in the name of Christ, who gives us all strength and boldness.

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Amen. Gabriel Hughes is the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find out more online at www .utt