Wrong Views On The Sovereignty Of God (part 4)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Our great God, Father, we come before you this morning. We are thankful, rejoicing in the

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Lord Jesus Christ for all he has done for us. We thank you for sending the Lord Jesus Christ.

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We thank you for sending your spirit. We thank you for the blessing we have of having your word. Father, I pray that as we look to your word this morning, as we talk about sometimes weighty things,

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I pray that you would bless us and strengthen us, that we would focus on Christ, the truth of your word, and the blessings that are ours because of the living word and because of the printed word, in Jesus' name, amen.

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Well, I'll just turn and face the crowd. Boy, there's a mis -weight there.

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I thought I would start this morning, as we get back to our quiz, amazingly enough, I'm sure we might even get to question number 10 this morning.

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I thought I would start this morning by asking a question, because I like to ask questions. When you think of the word presupposition, what do you think about?

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Presupposition, what does it mean? Apologetics, okay, it's attached to apologetics, presupposition.

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If you presuppose something, what do you do? You assume it's true ahead of time.

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Thank you for that. So, getting back to our subject, which is the sovereignty of God and salvation, why do you suppose some people presuppose or have a presupposition of free will?

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That is to say, when we talk about a presupposition of free will, that is to say that man is morally neutral and that, basically, he is able to evaluate the truths of scripture and of God and of sin and of man and render a fair verdict, come to his own conclusion about whether he should believe or not.

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Why do people come to scripture with that sort of presupposition? Again, that assumption that they make beforehand, before they even go to the word, why do they do that?

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Okay, that's our fundamental presupposition. We think that,

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I mean, I'll just summarize it this way. Our presumption is that we are the center of what?

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The universe, all existence, right? When you wake up in the morning, you don't think, I am the center of the universe, but by how you think and by how you evaluate things, ultimately,

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I mean, even when you feel sad and lonely and everything else, what are you really doing? You know,

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I wish the world would just revolve around me. Sorry, because I do the same thing.

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But our presupposition is that we have a certain way of thinking that things are fair and right and good and just, and that's how we think everything should be.

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So when people come to scripture and they think to themselves, well, wait a minute,

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I see the passages where it says, or it seems to say, that God chooses,

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God saves, that God is sovereign in salvation. And you know what?

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I don't really like that. Because instead of me being sovereign or in charge, or let's be nicer, instead of me fairly evaluating things and me being morally neutral and me deciding things, it's actually

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God making all those decisions. I don't really care for that. And I think to be absolutely fair to the, especially

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Arminian position, Arminian coming from Arminius, which is another way of saying, and here's the 25 cent word, semi -Pelagian.

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What does semi -Pelagian mean? Semi -Pelagian.

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Anybody want my handy -dandy definition of terms, which I handy -dandily printed in landscape instead of,

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I don't know if there are two there or just one, or are there two? Okay, so I have another one. Anybody else? What's that?

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Yeah, I think so. I mean, I might have one more. Well, I mean,

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I printed these out a few weeks ago. Some of you might still have them. Oh, I do have a few more. I have one more.

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And then I actually have one printed out the right way. If you want to make copies, Patty, make them out of this one and don't do to the copier what

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I did. Do you have one? Semi -Pelagianism.

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You know, I can't tell this R .C. Sproul joke enough because he says, you know, he warns about Pelagius and his brother, semi.

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I mean, I love that. To just kind of review, Pelagius said that original sin, that is to say,

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Adam's fall into sin, has absolutely zero effect on every man, woman, and child.

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None. Everybody comes into the world morally neutral, able to make those kind of judgments that people want to make.

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You know, they want to be the evaluator of everything. They want to feel like they're not predisposed one way or the other.

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Semi -Pelagianism, also known as Arminianism, after Arminius, is the idea that Adam's fall had an effect on us.

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But it wasn't to make us morally dead, incapable of rendering judgment on spiritual things.

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But it kind of put us in a spiritual sickness, an illness, where we're not disposed toward God, but we're not really against him either.

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We're just kind of like, we're sick and we need the antidote. You know, this is where we would get the famous, how many have ever heard

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Billy Graham say something like this? You don't have to raise your hand, but here's the idea. Billy Graham would say, he'd give this long sermon, and then towards the end he'd say,

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Look at all God has done for you. He's taken 99 steps toward you, and all you have to do is what?

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Take one step toward him. Just take that one step. Just come on forward.

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Just raise your hand. Just say this prayer wherever you're seated right now. That's not

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Pelagianism. It's semi -Pelagianism. And it's this idea that you're not totally incapable.

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There's some, some call it this, an island of righteousness within you. There's some part of you that God has reserved where you can make that choice all on your own.

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Presupposition. Again, I started talking about presupposition. I think people come to Scripture, and they evaluate life through this lens, because they want to think that life is what?

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Fair. That God is fair. We talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago.

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What's wrong with the idea that God is fair? He's fair on human terms.

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Right? Is there a difference between fair and just? Yes. Ultimately, the answer is yes.

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Fair is, like Taylor was saying, it's what we think is good and right.

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I mean, we can, you know, argue about different criminal cases. And in some cases, we see the result and go, that's not fair.

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Maybe it is, or maybe it isn't. But justice, what God does is ultimately just, meaning it's right.

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And the problem we have, and the reason why it's so difficult for us when we come to the

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Bible as human beings, when we come to the Bible and we read things like, let's turn for a moment. Again, this is review.

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If we turn to Romans 5, we want to say, well, wait a minute.

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This doesn't sound right to me. Romans 5, verse 12. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because, listen, verse 12, the end of it, because all sinned.

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Adam, as our representative, fell in the garden. And because he fell, we all fell.

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People say, well, wait a minute, that's not fair. Okay, here we go again.

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It's not fair, but that's the economy that God set up, which was this. Adam, if you obey, then everyone who's in you, which is to say all your progeny, all your children, grandchildren, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, all the way down to, you know, whomever.

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All those are going to be counted as obeying. And if you fall, all of them are going to fall in you.

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If we go to verse 18, we'll see, you know, the flip side of this.

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And we talked about this a couple weeks ago. Therefore, as one trespass, one sin led to condemnation for all men, that one sin of Adam meant that we're all condemned.

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He goes on. So one act of righteousness, that is to say the act of Jesus, his perfection leads to justification and life for all men.

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For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners. So by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous.

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And there we have that kind of imputation language. I'm going to resist.

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But it's straight out of Second Corinthians 521, where God makes

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Jesus who never sinned to be our representative on the cross.

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Right. He pays the price for our sins. Why? So that those who are in Christ Jesus can have his righteousness accounted to them, imputed to them, because we need that righteous.

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We get forgiveness of sins and we get righteousness from the cross.

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Okay, so we talked about questions or comments because there are a few new folks here this morning.

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Yes. Okay. Semi -Pelagianism and free will.

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Semi -Pelagianism. Well, let's talk about a minute about free will and what it is.

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What's the popular view or even the semi -Pelagian view of free will?

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Or how would you justify it biblically? How would you justify free will? Okay, the idea is that we can make unbiased decisions, which is to say that we don't have presuppositions, which is erroneous.

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And if I were to say, how are you going to justify that biblically? What do people do? Have you ever read a book where somebody tried to justify the concept of free will within a biblical framework?

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I can tell you what they do because I've read a few books, and it's pretty, I mean, the most horrendous book, and Janet probably gets tired of me talking about this one, is called

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Debating Calvinism. And it was, I'll think of his, he produced

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The Berean Call. It was a monthly newsletter that came out, I'll think of his name, and it was him versus James White.

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And what he would do, what was his name? Because he was really good when it came to cults, and then he would come to, you know, he started criticizing

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Calvinism without even understanding Calvinism. And then he decided to, for whatever reason, engage in this book with James White debating

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Calvinism. I'm like, because here was his idea of free will to justify it biblically.

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He would say, well, we see people make decisions, make choices in the

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Bible, right? So you can't look at that and go, well, God forced them to choose that, therefore they have free will.

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What's that? Dave Hunt is correct, thank you. Dave Hunt, who, yeah,

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I mean, he did a lot of good things. He wrote a lot about, you know, his anti -psychology, anti -Roman

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Catholicism, anti -Mormonism, anti -everything, and then he got his anti -Calvinism tirade, and I'm like, you know, you're better off when you stuck to things that you knew.

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Yeah. What's the problem with pointing to, you know, or, for example, choose you this day whom you will serve?

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Does that indicate free will? And the silence descended.

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Okay. Mr. Zook is exactly correct. People who don't understand

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Calvinism, and actually I would go further, I would say people who don't understand doctrine, who don't understand how to rightly interpret the scripture, would go to places and say, well, wait, if they make a choice, it must be a free choice, it must be free will.

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Can the leopard change his spots? Can the

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Ethiopian change the color of his skin? See, these are biblical examples of what actually we could argue as free will.

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You know, could, can, well, let's put it, let's just make it simple.

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Can an unsaved person choose to obey God just of their own free will?

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Okay. And what is, what's the problem with outward obedience, which is what obedience without a right heart is, right?

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I mean, what is faith? You know, if we're going to define what faith is, it's trusting

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God, it's believing with your heart, right? Your central control system.

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You trust God, you believe in him. So what's wrong with outward obedience?

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And the answer is obvious, that God looks on the heart. God knows the heart. So can an unbeliever choose to believe

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God of his own free will? And the answer is, he can outwardly do things that might seem like they please

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God, but inwardly they are whitewashed tombs. Isn't that what

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Jesus said about the Pharisees? Why? Because outwardly, boy, oh boy, did they obey.

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But inwardly, what were they full of? Pride.

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Arrogance. They thought they were better than everybody else. So were they choosing to believe God, or were they more concerned with what everybody else thought about them?

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So the answer is, can an unsaved person obey? And the answer is no.

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What's the difference? You were talking about free will and semi -Pelagianism. Well, there really is no difference. Semi -Pelagianism is, in effect, it's trying to do two things.

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Well, three things. One is acknowledge that original sin has some impact.

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They look at Romans 5 and go, well, we can't deny that. We're not going to be dumb like Pelagius and say it has no effect when the

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Bible clearly says it does. But then what we're going to do is we're also going to preserve free will because we want to make sure that man is accountable, man is responsible, and he can't really be responsible if he can't make a choice.

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The third thing that they're trying to do, that Pelagius is trying to do, that semi -Pelagians, that Arminians are trying to do, is they're trying to protect

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God. Because, after all, if we don't have complete and absolute freedom and God chooses to save some and not to save others, then the automatic charge is what?

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God's not fair. And we can't have that. The answer to God's not fair is you don't want fair.

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He's God. He's not fair, but he is just. In Romans 9, which

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I think, Lord willing, we'll be talking about next Sunday morning during the sermon, what does

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Paul say when people say, essentially, they raise this charge against God? Well, wait a minute.

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If God chooses to save some and he doesn't choose to save others, that's not fair.

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Paul says, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who are you who answers back to God?

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In other words, it's not a question of, is God fair or not fair? This is a system that God has set up in his justice, where every sin will be prosecuted, every sin will be punished.

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And the question is not whether it's fair or not, but whether it's just. Will he punish every sin?

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And the answer is yes. And so Paul ultimately says, who are you?

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The question isn't, is God fair? The question is, who are you, old man, to even put that question in your mouth?

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Don't even ask that. You are a piece of clay that God has shaped and molded.

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And if you don't like God's system, then you don't like God. So let's close in prayer.

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No. Other questions? I mean, semi -Pelagianism ultimately is an effort to protect the concept of free will.

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Recognizing that Pelagius went too far. You know, his brother Semi comes along and says, whoa, whoa, whoa.

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You know, slow down, son. Okay. Yes. Almost none.

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I mean, you could probably write a dissertation on the differences, because it would be, you know, you'd have to get into the fine points.

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Okay. I wanted to say something that I couldn't spit out, so I just said fine points. Number nine.

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True or false. Calvinists teach, I don't think I, did I go this far?

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Maybe. Yeah, I did. Talking about double predestination.

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If God, and just to briefly recap, if God chooses to save some people, and he leaves other people in their natural state, which is to say what?

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Their natural state is dead in sins and trespasses, per Ephesians 2 .1.

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If they're dead in their sins and trespasses, they're incapable of choosing God. So if God passes them over and leaves them in there, whether we want to say it's active destination or passive destination,

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God knows where they're going, right? So this idea that somehow that is an offense against God's righteousness or his justice is wrong as well, because to put it simply, and then

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I'll move on to the next question, if God doesn't intervene, if God doesn't transform, if God doesn't cause to be born again, then where's everybody going?

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They're going to hell. So the wonder isn't that some people get passed over and some people are going to hell.

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The wonder is that God intervenes and saves anybody. He takes his enemies, Romans 5 tells us, and makes us ultimately his friends, his children.

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Okay, number 10, true or false? Calvinists do not believe in missions or evangelism.

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Calvinists do not believe in missions or evangelism. Where do you think the idea would come up that Calvinists, and by the way, the answer is false.

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But where do you think that idea would come up that Calvinists don't believe in missions or evangelism?

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Okay, because if God is sovereign, if he's as sovereign as you say he is, then what you're ultimately saying is he doesn't need anybody else to save people.

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He can just do it. Now, is that true? It's technically true, but it's not biblically true, and why not?

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Because we're given that charge by Jesus. We also see example after example after example of the opposite.

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People go and they preach and people are changed. Even with the

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Ethiopian eunuch, he's out in the desert. What happens? He's reading

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Isaiah 53. He's like, I don't know what this means, but I think

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I'm missing something. And what does God do? Sends Philip to him.

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Why? Because he needed somebody to explain it to him. So, you know,

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Calvinists are not against missions. In fact, some of the greatest missionaries of all time were, in fact, and are, in fact,

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Calvinists. Listen to what the Canons of Dort says. Canons of Dort, for those who don't know, the

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Canons of Dort were fired in... Sorry, couldn't resist. When I say

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Canons of Dort, it's C -A -N -1 -N. Canons that fire, you know, grapeshot and other things, have two

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N's in them. Canons of Dort were written as a response to Arminianism, okay?

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Semi -Pelagianism. Canons of Dort. Moreover, the promise of the gospel is that, whosoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish, but have eternal life.

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This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons, promiscuously, and without distinction, to whom

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God, out of His good pleasure, sends the gospel. In other words, we are to be people who freely spread the seed of the gospel.

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We want people to hear the gospel. Why? Because that's how God saves people. You never know, when you're communicating with someone and you share the gospel with them, what that ultimately is going to do.

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Sometimes they just kind of brush you off, right? I mean, has that ever happened? You tell somebody, you go,

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Oh, this is the best gospel presentation I've ever done in my life, and you get done with it, and they're like,

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Yeah. But we don't know what then happens, how the

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Holy Spirit might use that, how something might come along in their life, or how they even might, you know, their grandmother dies or whatever, they get out their old dusty Bible, just to look at grandma's, you know, pictures or whatever they've stuck in there, and they come across a few verses, and they, you know, they're convicted of their sin, and they get saved.

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The man who wrote this quiz, or he didn't write the quiz, yeah, he did write the quiz, Sam Waldron, says,

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Here we want to cry out to our accusers. Have you never heard of William Carey? Do you not know that the first Baptist missionary was a particular or reformed

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Baptist, and was sent out by the churches that were particular or reformed Baptists? The fact is that it is not

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Calvinism, but Arminianism, which is the great danger to evangelism and missions. The foundation of evangelism and missions is the exclusivity of the gospel.

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The great defenders of the exclusivity of the gospel are the Calvinists. Let me just expand on that a little bit.

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Why does he say that Arminianism is the danger to evangelism and missions?

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What do Arminians do? If you believe that every person you talk to has a free will, then what do you ultimately wind up doing?

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Okay, you'll give them the choice not to believe, and I've done this. I mean, please don't raise your hands if you've done this, but have you ever wound up making a gospel presentation that ultimately, if you step back and you listen to it, you go,

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I could have been selling a vacuum cleaner, right? Because I want to appeal to them so much.

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I'm so concerned about making sure that they like what I'm saying. I mean, you don't want to be an offense.

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I've heard people give the gospel like this. You know what, you're a rotten sinner. You deserve hell, but God's pretty nice, and he sent

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Jesus, and if you believe in him, you'll be safe. I've heard things along those lines, or even worse, but I've also heard where it's like, won't you please consider

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Jesus Christ, and did you know that he wants to save you? He desires to save you.

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He's willing to do anything to get you to say yes. He even went to the cross so that you'd believe in him.

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Is there anything wrong with that? Yeah.

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I mean, I once listened to a man say this. He said, God is wringing his hands in heaven, hoping you'll make the right choice.

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What is that? I mean, yeah, a powerless

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God, one who's just like, I mean, he might as well just be like, oh boy, I sure hope

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Steve will believe. I sure hope Cindy will come to faith. I wish there was somebody powerful enough to cause them to be born again.

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I mean, if we open our Bibles to 1 Peter 1, I wonder if we're going to see, thanks be to God, that Cindy, when she heard the gospel, caused herself to be born again.

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Is that where we're going to read? Can we just kind of fill in our names there somewhere? No. I mean, again and again and again, let's just turn to 1

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Peter 1. Again and again and again, the Bible makes plain that God elects,

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God saves, God does everything. And the reason I think we so often go to Scripture and we want to read something else is because we bought into ideas of, ultimately, the enlightenment, trying to make ourselves the center of all creation.

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And we're not. But at 1 Peter 1, sometimes these study

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Bibles, with all their extra pages, can really become cumbersome. But if we read verses 3, well,

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I mean, you don't have to read any more than verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

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And if I keep reading, which I will, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.

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Kept in heaven by you. Oh, wait. For you.

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Who by God's power are being guarded through faith. I mean, again, we think it's by our faith.

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Well, it's given to us. But we're being guarded by this gift for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

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In other words, at the very end, at judgment. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you've been grieved by various trials.

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In other words, your life is difficult. It's hard. Trials come along. But here's what you know.

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That God caused you to be born again, and he's guarding you with the faith that he's given you so that on judgment day you will stand before him blameless because you're in Christ.

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How do we get through this life? Because we know that no matter how difficult this life is, we're being protected, preserved, and we ultimately will be presented to the

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Father by the Lord Jesus Christ. Where's our free will in all of that?

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I don't know. I'm not really sure.

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But I'm not going to whine about it because if free will takes me out of that, I don't really want it.

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I mean, we could go to the Gospel of John where Jesus says nobody's able to take them out of my hands.

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Well, what does that mean? It means nobody, not even you yourself, can do that. He goes on to say,

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Waldron does, it is the Arminians who think God has to be fair with sinners.

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It is the Arminians who think God owes everyone a chance to be saved. It is the

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Arminians who think it's not fair to send people to hell who never heard the Gospel. It is the

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Arminians, therefore, who are always inventing ways for men to be saved without the

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Gospel. Let me say that again. Inventing ways for men to be saved without the

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Gospel. Is it possible for people to be saved without the

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Gospel? I mean, what about people who never hear the

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Gospel? What about that? Is it fair for God to send them to hell?

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What's the biblical justification for that? I was about to say somebody other than John, our resident theologian.

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Romans chapter 1 and verse 18.

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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness, by their sinfulness, suppress the truth.

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Well, what truth? For what can be known about God, in other words, it's this truth about God.

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For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for His invisible attributes, namely

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His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

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So they are without excuse. In other words, people who've never heard the Gospel, who've never heard the name

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Jesus Christ, can look around the world and they know what?

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They know that there's a God. They know that there's something greater than them because they can see

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His creation, they can see His handiwork, they can see His preservation. Nobody can say, I didn't know there was a

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God. That's what the

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Bible says. So on Judgment Day, saying, well, I was in Australia and I was out in the outback and nobody ever told me.

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I was in India. I was in the People's Republic of China, wherever I was.

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There's no excuse because there is evidence, ample evidence that there's a

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God. And it's interesting, Paul writes that they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. How do they do that?

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How do people suppress the truth in unrighteousness? Charlie?

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They fashion for themselves a cosmology that allows them to sin. Does somebody want to explain that to me?

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Okay. What do you do? You see everything around you and you make up a worldview that allows you to sin, that says ultimately, you know what?

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There is no God, so eat, drink, and be merry. Do whatever you want. It doesn't matter.

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And there's a father of that in our modern world and that father, his name is Sigmund Freud, ultimately taking some of the things, the fruit, we could say, of the enlightenment and embellishing it to the point where you really are your own

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God. You're not just the center of the universe. You are God. You are the evaluator of everything that is.

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When it talks about suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, it allows you, if you do that, to hold the truth essentially under water and drown it.

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That's the idea. So you look at the world and you say, well, there must be a creator because look at all the order and all the beauty and everything else and you hold it down in unrighteousness and you say, wow, this all came from an explosion in space.

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Wow, this all of life came from a primordial little puddle of goo. I remember that Star Trek movie and I was just like, if I was watching it on TV instead of in a movie theater,

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I probably would have shut it off when they all go back in time and they go back to the very first life form on earth and it's just a little organism in a little puddle of goo.

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And you go, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, yes.

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Okay, let's define a couple of terms. General revelation is what we're talking about, about creation, right?

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Everything that we see around us, what we can observe with our senses. General revelation.

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Special revelation, which you also mentioned, is this.

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So it's a good question. How do people who are living in the outback in Australia or they're living in the

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Gobi Desert, why anybody would live in the Gobi Desert, I don't know, but they're living in some odd, isolated part of the world.

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How do they get the special revelation that they need to learn about Jesus Christ and be saved?

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How does that happen, Cindy? God orchestrates it.

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Thus the missionaries. And I mean, if he has, you know, here's the thing. God, the triune

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God, before the foundation of the world, chose to save some people. That's what election is.

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We can go through the whole doctrine of election, but we don't have time. And if he chose to save some people before the foundation of the world, will he then not save them?

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Will God's will be thwarted? What did Jesus say of all that you gave me?

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I saved most. You know, I witnessed to most of them.

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You gave them to me and I return them to you.

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I mean, we could go back to John 17. Essentially, the elect come from the father to the son and then from the son to the father.

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Right. This is to glorify the Trinity, to magnify the Trinity. The idea that God's will would be thwarted because of somewhere somebody lives or some other random,

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I want to say mutation, some other random variant, right, that would prevent them from coming to faith in Christ cannot happen.

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If somebody is in the outback and they're somebody that God chose before the foundation of the world, will he send somebody to find them?

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You know, will it not be Philip? Will it not be

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Saul on the road to persecute the church? Will he not then be visited?

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Somebody will arrest them with the word of God and they will be convicted of their sin. It could be, you know, in any myriad of circumstances.

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We hear stories all the time about people who, you know, in a marketplace or wherever, where they just hear a gospel snippet and that leads to them being saved.

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Christina? Okay. Can I restate your question and see if you agree with it?

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Can they, can somebody be saved? I mean, can somebody be saved without a missionary?

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I hope so because, yes. And there are, it's true, there are places missionaries haven't gone yet.

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There are at least, because I don't want to overstate it, at least hundreds of languages that don't have a translation of the word of God, right?

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Which is one of the reasons why, you know, that work continues even now. So again, are there circumstances we can create whereby somebody cannot be saved?

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I don't think so. You know, I think if we look at Romans chapter 10, and we have to close here.

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We made good progress, so I think we've got a couple of questions. Looking at Romans chapter 10, verse 9, because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

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Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Now, that's where the Arminian wants to go.

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Just get somebody to confess with their mouth, and you know what, if you believe in your heart, whatever that means to you, that God raised

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Him from the dead, you will be saved. Paul goes on to write, For with the heart one believes and is justified, and that is to say declared righteous, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

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For the scripture says everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same

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Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. It's all true and very attractive to the Arminian.

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Verse 14, How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?

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And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

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And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.

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And here's the point. The point is, somebody has to explain it to them. Or they have to get a copy of the word in a language that they understand and then be illumined by the

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Holy Spirit when they read it. There is no getting around God's means to get to God's end, which is to save His elect,

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Charlie. Yeah, they're not islands of innocence because there is no such thing as innocence. We often get caught up in that.

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And let's just, I need to close, but let me just say this. Why is it that there are so many language groups and people groups that haven't heard

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Scripture? And now, you know,

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I'm completely drawn to blank. The name of the couple that went, you know, the four of them went down to South America into the jungle there.

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Yeah, Jim Elliot. Well, what about that? What happened to them when they went down there?

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They were received openly. It's great to have you. We've been waiting for somebody to bring us this good news of how we could be forgiven of our sin.

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And by the way, here's a little poison for you. This is why those people groups haven't been met.

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It's because when people go in there, what happens to them? Yes, we'd love to have you over for dinner.

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They don't want outsiders. Right? They're perfectly satisfied with where they are.

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I mean, I could go on and on about that. But, you know, the idea, and thank you, Charlie, the idea that there are these little innocent groups that are just sitting around, you know, waiting for somebody to illumine them couldn't be further from the truth.

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And now we see, you know, Janet and I were talking about on the way to church, you know, what is really happening in our

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Western world right now is that people are trying to bury the truth of God.

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They're so rebellious. I mean, it's almost impossible when you have schoolteachers, you know, instructing children 5, 6, 7 years old about all manner of wickedness, you know that we've completely lost it.

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You know, we don't live in a Western civilization where Christianity is king.

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We live in a Western civilization where Christianity is under assault. Even the basic premise of society is under assault, which is children should be protected.

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Children should be preserved. Children should be left in their, if not innocence, ignorance.

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You know, I was reading this week that one man, and I forget his name, but he said he was talking about all the facts of sexuality and everything.

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And he just said, talking about his child, that his child was not ready to bear that burden, right?

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And when you think about it, it's true. Let's let the kids be kids. Let's not pile adult ideas on them, you know, and adult sinful ideas on them in particular.

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But any kind of it, they don't need to know these things. There's a time and a place for everything. And five years old, hint, is not the time or the place.

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So with that said, we need to close. Father, I thank you for this discussion this morning.

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As we look to your word and we wrestle with ideas of fairness and justice, ignorance, innocence, all these aspects of life and all these thoughts.

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Father, steer us away from these arguments that would undermine the truths of Scripture.

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Teach us to bow our heads in obedience to your word, to understand what it really means to not argue against it, but to submit to it.

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Father, again, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, for his life, his death, his resurrection, for the truth so clearly presented to us in Scripture.