Do Not Ignore the Full Spectrum of Divine Truth

The depravity of man came from our union with Adam, he is our first guest, uh-huh.

My logical thought would be that, okay, if mankind fell to Adam's choice, then mankind is Adam, which is Christ.

If all of mankind was in Christ, then that would be the case. That's the argument of universalism, yes. Of course, all of mankind isn't in Christ, so that's why universalism is not true.

Two Humanities: In Adam and In Christ

But the analogy was that all mankind was in Adam, the first man, and why would all mankind be in Christ, the second man?

Because that would require you to be a universalist. Romans 5 does not say all of mankind is in Christ, it says those who are in him, and you're only in him by faith. So, that would be the answer to the question.

All of mankind is in Adam and receives from Adam the only thing they can receive from Adam, which is a fallen nature. But not all of mankind is in Christ, only those who believe in Christ are in him. There are obviously those who continue in their rebellion and in their love of their sin, and who are not the objects of God's grace.

So, there are two humanities, those who are in Adam and those who are in Christ. All who are in Christ were initially in Adam. We are all sons of disobedience, even as the rest, as Paul says in Ephesians 2.

But the whole point of Romans 5 is to explain why you have these two humanities, and why you have those who are in Christ and those who are not, and why we receive from Christ what only we can receive from him, while those who remain in Adam receive from him only what they can receive from him.

God's Decree Includes the Means as Well as the Ends

But in essence, whichever of the two we end up in, neither you nor myself really has anything to do with that decision. Is that true or false?

I would never express it that way, because the New Testament doesn't. Ultimately, God is the one who chooses who he is going to be gracious to in drawing them to Jesus Christ. But I think Reformed people need to be very careful that you not express yourself in terms the New Testament doesn't use.

Because I have believed in Jesus Christ. God didn't believe in Jesus Christ for me. Yes, he had to give me a new nature. He had to even grant me the gift of faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm just a wooden board.

That takes out all of the personal element of the work of the Holy Spirit in the spirit of man. It takes out the personal element of the renewing of the mind, of the creation of the new nature. All these things are very, very personal, and they're very, very important.

And so while the identity of the elect, and hence the identity of those who receive God's justice, certainly is a part of the divine decree of God. Everything else, which includes the personal working of the Holy Spirit of God in a person's life, and my decisions and my actions, are also a part of that decree.

And it is a, I think, tragic leveling out of that decree to a black and white, one-dimensional thing, if we do not recognize that there is so much more to it than that. The language that is used of the resurrection of the person from spiritual death, and the giving of new life, and recreation, and the pictures used in the New Covenant in regards to taking out a heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh.

All these things show us just how intensely personal and how important those aspects are. So I would never use that kind of terminology, even if on a, you know, a real simplistic logical statement. You could say, well, you know, it all goes back to God's decree.

Yeah. But God's decree includes everything else, including the means that he used to draw me to himself, and the changing of my heart, and the love of my heart for Christ, and the reality of my faith.

I believe in Christ. Just because we say that I could not do that savingly without God's grace enabling me to do so, does not change the reality of my faith in Christ. And so I think it's, I think sometimes, especially, I hear this from some of our younger Reformed friends that we call those who are in the cage stage.

There's such an emphasis one direction that there's a loss of balance, and we need to be very careful to be balanced in our presentation, because certainly those who oppose Reformed theology will not be balanced in their caricaturizations of us, so we have to be very careful to provide the balance of that ourselves.

I, it's, you know, I'm not meaning to challenge what you're saying. I'm just trying to understand, to me, like what you're trying to express.

Well, the answer is we do not have, we do not determine the identity of the elect. We do not determine the identity of the reprobate. God determines all of those things, and like I said, that is all a part of God's divine decree, as well as is the reality of the work of the Holy Spirit in the renewing of the mind, as is the nature of saving faith, as is repentance, as is all the means to the end that God has decreed for himself, and only by flattening out that decree into a simplistic linear line can we come to the conclusions that the enemies of Reformed faith do, and that is that we're just puppets and marionettes on a string.

So it is, it's like looking at a diamond from only one side and saying, well, this is all it is, without refusing to be able to look at it in its full order of beauty. It is, there is much more to it than what you can see from any one perspective, and the one perspective that God's decree determines everything is one perspective, but included in that is that it includes his providential actions within time, his interaction with us, his entering into time in the person of Jesus Christ, the grace, the entirety of the gospel, the preaching of the gospel, the building of the church, the work of the Holy Spirit, the means of grace, the preaching, all of these things are a part of that decree.

And so to flatten all of that out and say, well, God just decrees who's going to get saved and who doesn't, ignores, you know, it leads to the error of equal ultimacy, it leads to all sorts of errors that need to be refuted, because the Bible is far richer than a one-dimensional flattened out, well, this is all there is to it type thing.

Misrepresenting Reformed Theology by Flattening the Decree

Well, when you say, when you give the analogy, though, of salvation being akin to Jesus saying, it had nothing to do with this, it gives that impression.

Well, I can't help if people have false impressions. I can only speak the truth and let, you know, if they want to come up with a false impression that only takes a part of what I'm saying, you know, the Potter's Freedom wasn't 10 pages long, it was 300 pages long.

So I can't, that I have to leave up to the Holy Spirit, and when I hear people say, well, you gave me the impression, you know what? You're responsible for God, for the Word of God. I can point you to it, I can preach it to you, I can show you how it's consistent with itself, but if people want to take that and come up with a false impression and blame me for it, I can't stop them, but I'm also not going to worry much about it either, because it's not my responsibility.

If I speak the truth, speak it clearly, I leave it to the Holy Spirit to make application from there, and I can't worry too much about that. I have so many times talked about God decreeing the ends as well as the means and have attempted to be balanced, and yet people like David Allen and others continue to lie about me.

I leave that to God, you know? I correct it, I put the truth out there. If they insist on misrepresenting me, they stand before their own Lord. There's nothing I can do about it. I just move on from there.

Why a Longer Treatment Is Better Than a Simplified Summary

One last helpful comment. I've worked my way through The Potter's Freedom. I've worked my way through 99 of the debate.

Which is not nearly as much fun to read as The Potter's Freedom, I can assure you. Sure.

But it seems to me that it would be helpful for everyone. Just about one thing I think would be helpful to sort all this out would be for you to crystallize this all and summarize it down into, basically say, look, here's the Armenians.

Here's all the scriptures the Armenians are primarily throwing at. Summary statement encapsulates it, and that's pretty much it. You wrap it up in a package, and that's pretty much it. You got it.

Well, there is no question that there is a commonality to the threads of presentation. I really, really doubt there's going to be anything Thursday night that people have not heard before on the bondage of the will and the freedom of the will, for example.

Right. I mean, anybody who's listened to me knows which texts I'm going to be going to, how I'm going to present them. I have not been able to find anything from my opponent anywhere on this subject. That makes me a little bit nervous.

I like to listen to what my opponent has to say, know where they're coming from. That helps the debates be a lot better. I have not been able to find anything, so I'm a little bit concerned about that.

But I'll do my best anyways, and yeah. But I really think that, okay, the potter's freedom would have had one particular bent to it because it's Norm Geisler, and Norm Geisler is unique in where he's coming from on some of these things.

But the big three, Matthew 23, 37, 1 Timothy 2, 4, 2 Peter 3, 9, I've dealt with them. We've dealt with the why does God call people to repent if he's not going to grant faith there. Actually, I think if you put together what I've written, and Sproul's written, and Piper's written, and other people, I think we have looked at pretty much every.

I don't hear new objections very often. Right, I agree. So I think we have done that. There's not enough debate. This has been going on for years. Yeah, and every generation has to redo it, and I think the reason that every generation has to redo it is A, partly in our context, we don't know anything about church history, so we don't know these things have been debated before.

But secondly, language changes, the parameters change, the emphases change, and so each generation, you know, 20 years from now, there's going to be some 30-year-old fellow who's just a kid right now that's going to come out with a book on this subject, and it's going to rock the world because the parameters of the discussion and the language that's used to express it, not the essence of it, but those things will have changed.

Because I look back, and I see some books from generations gone by that were huge at the time, and they were very useful at the time, they were very needful at the time. They don't speak as clearly today as they did.

That's one of the things that's always been amazing to me about Calvin's Institutes is they seem to speak to every generation, and that's just an ability of writing that's beyond me. But I think that's one of the reasons each generation has to struggle with it.

You can't just simply go back and look at the nations that were Calvinistic at one time and fell into the trap of thinking, well, we've got it all figured out, and we don't need to be very passionately presenting this to our children and passionately defending these things.

It's all been laid out. Here's the systematic theology. Just believe it. You know, a lot of those nations are some of the most godless nations there are today because you cannot just simply codify something.

It has to be something that is the result of the Spirit of God in people's hearts. And you can have the truth and take it for granted, and unfortunately we see a lot of examples of that in history, especially over in Europe today.

So I think that's what we've got to do. But anyways, hey Dwayne, thanks for your call. Fair enough, thank you. All right, God bless.