If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles please to Exodus chapter 33 for our first scripture reading beginning at verse 18. This is Moses on the mountain with God, and Moses said, ‘Please show me your glory.’ And He, God, said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, the Lord. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.’
And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.’
From Exodus, we turn to John chapter 3, beginning at verse 16. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord, you are good, you are sovereign, and you are gracious to love us and to love your creation. Help us to hear your words, to receive what you are saying to us in our hearts, to be encouraged, and to better trust and believe in you and your son Jesus for our salvation. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
John 3:16 is quite likely the most well-known verse in the Bible, and I would wager that almost every person in every country where the Christian religion has ever been in the majority can recite this verse from memory. It may also be the second most important statement in the Bible, after only, ‘In the beginning, God created.’
It is the one verse which all believers cling to as our sure hope in faith, and it is the one verse which non-believers will point to as their excuse for not needing to believe. This verse is also a special favorite of all those who hold to Arminian leanings because it is the one verse upon which they try to hinge their entire theological structure.
The main theological point that they dispute with it is the breadth of the atonement, the atoning work of Jesus Christ upon the cross, and who receives the gracious benefit of God’s forgiveness. This is also the same point where people who claim to be four-point Calvinists dispute, as the point where they can diverge from Biblical Christianity into full-blown heresy, where they cease being a Christian and truly become a heretic.
Now, I don’t use those words ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’ lightly, but here it is the plain and simple truth according to the testimony and witness of the entire Bible, the whole counsel of God. The Arminian perspective is unequivocally false. Webster’s in 1828 defined heresy as a fundamental error in religion or an error of opinion regarding some fundamental doctrine of religion.
Although there are some acceptable differences in opinion regarding certain doctrines and practices of the faith, salvation is fundamental. So we should only use the word ‘heresy’ to expressly refer to things which impact the Orthodox doctrine of salvation. The Arian heresy, which resulted in the Council of Nicaea, was concerning the eternal deity of Jesus Christ, where the Arian position suggested that there was a time when He, Jesus, was not.
This affects the doctrine of salvation such that if Jesus were not eternally God, He must therefore be a creature, and therefore unable to fully satisfy God’s wrath and justice. The Nestorian and Monophysite heresies, which resulted in the Councils of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., concerned the nature of Jesus Christ, with the Nestorian suggesting that Jesus possessed a union or fusion of the human and divine natures—human plus divine—while the Monophysites suggested that Jesus only possessed one nature: the divine.
This affects the doctrine of salvation in that if Jesus is not both truly, fully divine and fully man, fully both, then He could not be the perfect mediator affecting the atonement, as He would not be perfectly representing God to man and man to God. He would not be fully man to suffer God’s just wrath, and He would not be fully God to endure the infinite wrath to a full satisfaction.
These two councils affirmed the dual natures of Christ as one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man. His status is the God-man with the two natures neither being mixed nor mingled yet both fully present and active as a mystery.
So the particular Arminian heresy which we’re about to discuss, and was condemned as heresy by the Synod of Dort in 1619, concerns the breadth and reach of Christ’s salvific atonement. It concerns the quantity of those who are saved. Their doctrinal position actually argues for universal atonement, that everyone is saved by Jesus whether they want to be or not. Period.
This is the heresy called universalism, and it’s the idea which undergirds and supports the whole pluralistic religious movement that suggests Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God and that there are many ways to heaven apart from Jesus or that having faith is all that’s needed to get to heaven without a qualifier on what is needed to be believed.
Can you not see all the many problems with this perspective? Article 2 of the Arminian Roman strands proposes that, arguably there too, Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that He has obtained for them all by His death on the cross redemption and the forgiveness of sins, yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins except the believer according to the word of the Gospel of John 3:16: ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’
And in the first Epistle of John 2:2, ‘And He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.’ Their stated position is that Christ obtained for them all redemption and the forgiveness of sins—not for all God’s elect but for all men and for every man—making this interpretation of universal salvation quite clear.
To the Arminian perspective, everyone is and must be saved: all of the above, no exceptions and no exclusions. It’s as if they believe God were Oprah: ‘You get salvation, and you get salvation, and you get salvation!’ However, there’s a single caveat: it’s only the believer who enjoys this forgiveness of sins.
It’s no wonder that most antinomians also hold Arminian views. Believing in universal salvation certainly removes any value or relevance to following God’s law because why do I need to be obedient if I’m saved whether or not I obey? Now, if an admitted Arminian were to respond to this assertion, they would likely accuse me of misrepresenting their position, but I am trying not to. They would say that the most important and relevant phrase here is that ‘whoever believes in Him.’ They would say that what really happens is that when God’s grace was manifested through Jesus’s atoning death on the cross obtaining forgiveness for all of our sins and every sin ever for the whole world, He wiped our slate clean.
He atoned for the original sin of Adam and removed our sin nature and inherent corruption, making it so that now each one of us has the option to wholly obey God, to choose good or to choose evil, just as Adam was able to before the fall, making it so that we may choose Christ and receive forgiveness, goodness, mercy, life, and love and salvation instead of hell and damnation. They would say that God’s grace here is prevalent or anticipatory because we are now expected to respond positively to God’s calling and to thereby accept His free gift of salvation by our own free will, by choosing to believe, by making a decision for Christ to synergize with God’s Holy Spirit in our salvation, by cooperating with Him to complete Jesus’s salvific work.
They would say that since our slate is now clean, we no longer have a moral debt, so that after we hear the Gospel, if we do not choose Jesus, then we rightfully condemn ourselves: that then we are truly condemned by and for our unbelief. Now logically if by choosing we may earn damnation, then the converse must also be true: that by our choice to believe in Jesus Christ we may earn our salvation, transforming our faith into a salvific work instead of God’s gracious gift.
They will say also that after a person makes a decision for Christ, having first accepted His gift of salvation, that if they ever mess up and fall into continuing sin, something they call ‘backsliding,’ then they are at risk of losing their salvation. That they may still even now choose to walk away from the faith and never look back, returning to a life of reprobate wickedness and sin.
Many Arminian evangelists encourage their recent converts to read the Gospel of John first because they believe their ideology is supported and reinforced by all the words of Jesus’s beloved disciple, but they couldn’t be farther from the truth. Unless they separate their evidence from the context, John’s Gospel is filled with words of faith and love, but they were given to encourage those who already believe, and not to convince unbelievers to believe.
Even if their argument that God’s grace gives us an ability to choose Jesus and thus be saved were true, and correct, allegedly affirming with Paul that ‘for by grace you have been saved through faith,’ by assuming faith, our belief is a work that we do to be saved, then they would totally deny the rest of Paul’s statement: ‘and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.’ They would deny God’s sovereignty and His unconditional election of a particular people whom He has claimed as His treasured possession, going against the testimony of the entire Old Testament.
‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord, ‘but you say, ‘How have you loved us?’ Is not Esau Jacob’s brother, declares the Lord. Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.’ The Lord clearly chose Israel first, but all they could ever do was walk away and abandon faith in their God and King. Yet even still, He kept calling them back to Himself because He is the faithful one.
Truly, if the Arminians believe that Christ’s death on the cross was satisfactory enough to cover all the sins of mankind to allow God to forgive everyone, then the mere idea that a person could still spit in the face of God, could walk away from Him, could reject the free gift of salvation, then that would say that the Lord God is actually powerless to save us against the fact of human willfulness and our sinful intransigence. That kind of God could not be God if He is subordinated to any element of our human will. The Creator cannot be beholden to or subordinate to His creation, and if they truly believe that, then there’d be no need to evangelize at all because it would not matter.
However, fortunately, both the doctrines of unconditional election and of limited atonement are found throughout John’s writings—his Gospel, his three Epistles, and the Revelation.
Speaking of those who will believe, Jesus says, ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out’ (John 6:37), which is a clear example of unconditional election as well as the perseverance of the saints. God gives us to Jesus, and so Jesus preserves us.
Speaking of those who will be saved and raised to eternal life, contrasted with those who will be raised to eternal condemnation, Jesus says in John chapter 5, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; and he has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out: those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.’
All will be raised to eternal life, but only a specific sum will be raised to the joy of life instead of the tragedy of judgment. Jesus presupposes and clearly teaches that there will be two separate categories of people on the day of resurrection: those raised to live upon the new earth, those whom the Father has given to him, having first written their names in the Book of Life, and those who are raised to judgment and torment in the lake of fire, those who are judged by their wicked deeds and those whose names are found written in the Book of Life and whose wickedness has been covered by the righteousness of Christ.
Therefore, universal atonement is entirely unbiblical and anti-Christian. But how do they get to this heretical belief and position? By not understanding what the world is and by ignoring the context of John’s intended audience. The Greek word here used for world is ‘cosmos,’ and John’s use is very much the same as Carl Sagan’s: cosmos describes all of creation, the universe as a whole, the heavens and the earth.
The Greek Septuagint reads in Genesis 2:1, ‘And we’re finished the heavens and the earth and all the cosmos.’ So, the use of world in the third chapter of John’s Gospel may be better understood as universe or creation, not just the earth. The world in John 3 never refers to all people or even to the planet itself. The world—the cosmos—does not mean everyone or everybody. People are a part of the cosmos; we are a part of the world. But when we look back to creation—to Genesis 1:26—when God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image after our likeness,’ we know that we were made of a different category of life.
We were made different from all other creatures, alone being made in God’s image and alone given dominion over God’s creation. We alone amidst creation were made with and were given a capacity for faith. We alone were created with the ability to believe or to not believe.
The Arminian’s second point of argument comes from 1 John, that Jesus was the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. But the real question here is, for whose sin is He the propitiation? We know that John’s letters in his Gospel were written late in the first century. He wrote after Peter and Paul’s execution, and unlike Matthew and Mark, John’s Gospel was not written for unbelievers or recent converts but was written for believers to build up their faith.
John was not evangelizing towards conversion; he was evangelizing for the encouragement of Christians. His Gospel does not place the same kind of emphasis on His birth and the works of Jesus as the three synoptics. Ten of the 21 chapters in John’s Gospel concern the last week of Jesus’s life and His resurrection. Seven of those chapters were the last 48 hours, recounting Jesus’s final words of comfort to His disciples because the hope He gives and promises that He made to us.
What John writes about our sins in this first letter, he means the sins of believers. When he says the sins of the whole world, he means all of the sinful corruption that has infected creation because of our sinfulness. John was a Jew; he studied his Torah and he went to the temple, and through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit unto the truth, he understood the greater symbolism in the Day of Atonement. Each year on that day, the high priest made atonement for himself, his family, and for all the people, and then the high priest also had to make atonement for the whole temple with all of its implements and fixtures.
Leviticus chapter 16 goes into detail, saying, ‘Thus he shall make atonement for the holy place because of the uncleanness of the people of Israel, and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleanness.’ The Tabernacle and Temple were both designed and built as the representations of God’s heavenly temple, and if they needed to be cleansed of sin as an atonement, then the whole creation wherein the Lord will dwell also needed to be cleansed by Christ.
John does not suggest that Jesus died to forgive all people’s sins. He said that whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already. So there must be some who are condemned. Whoever believes is whoever has been given to Jesus by the Father because they alone have been given the faith to believe, as all others do not believe and are condemned in disbelief.
The observable evidence of life shows us that there are some who do good and others who do evil. Some people believe in the Lord and Jesus Christ while some do not. Therefore, by the evidence of faith, of reason, and from our own human perception, some people are saved in Christ while some others are not. Universal salvation is not taught by the Bible, period.
To be fair, Arminian Christians do not really believe in universal salvation, even though it is the logical and natural conclusion flowing from their teaching and interpretation. Truly they are not necessarily heretics, but their order of salvific operation is all mixed up. Most will readily admit that there are lots of unsaved people living in the world because that is what drives them to share the good news about Jesus so enthusiastically.
But they cannot convince anyone to believe the Gospel by their own power or persuasion; only the Holy Spirit working upon the hearer’s heart can. The sad truth is, if there is to be any value in the atonement at all, it must be a limited atonement. Yet the whole idea and need for an atonement is what seems to drive so many people away from the Christian faith.
The Lord God is just, therefore He shall punish sin and wickedness because He’s obligated to. The Lord God is merciful, therefore He shall show mercy and give grace, although He is not obligated to. You might ask, why did Jesus have to die on the cross? If God is omnipotent, couldn’t He have just forgiven our sin without the horror of the crucifixion? Wouldn’t that have been more good, more right, more fair? No, because that would have been unjust. Everything has a cost, even and especially forgiveness.
That’s part of why so many people are making such a fuss about the president’s plan for student loan forgiveness—the high cost, a high cost which the president will not pay for, but everyone else will. However, God the Son, Jesus, paid that high cost of our salvation for us, paying and satisfying God’s justice and wrath against our sin. So now He gives us grace to His elect, mercy, and forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life, because our debt—the moral debt of the elect—is truly gone, paid for by God’s grace.
The Lord told Moses, ‘And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy,’ because divine grace and mercy rest solely in the Sovereign—in His sovereign hands. Now, if He so chose, perhaps God could choose to save everyone, but He does not, because that would be an injustice.
The testimony of Scripture clearly teaches that God does not save everyone. There are lots of wicked people suffering God’s judgment and wrath: the generation of Noah washed away in the flood, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn of Egypt, the Canaanites during the conquest, the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Babylon the Great, the disbelieving generation who condemned Jesus, and all those who presently follow and will follow the false prophet and the Beast and the Antichrist. All these devotees of Satan from all time and all space will be cast eternally into that terrible lake of fire. They all receive justice for their sin.
However, while mercy is not justice, it is also not injustice. It is grace, unmerited and undeserved, given at the Sovereign’s and merciful God’s unconditional discretion. The Lord God is just to punish sin and wickedness; the Lord God is merciful to forgive and show mercy to His elect. Both justice and mercy flow from God’s love for His cosmos. Both are necessary because God is who He is, and both are necessarily limited.
If salvation were universal, then the same moral argument applies as if there were no God. If salvation were universal, then nothing matters; neither good nor evil, right or wrong, apply. Because if all things are forgivable, then all things are permissible. If salvation and the forgiveness of sin are universal, then after a person comes to faith, they don’t need to be changed. They can continue sinning because God will surely forgive those sins as well.
Then God’s law is reduced to mere guidelines without enforceable teeth, and if God’s law were only intended to be guidelines for life—as mere suggestion—then there would be no need for the atonement, no need for the cross, for Jesus to die upon, because there would be no standard for justice and forgiveness would be arbitrary at best and unnecessary at worst. Without justice, there can be no mercy; without justice, there can be no grace; without wrath, there can be no forgiveness.
We all hate the idea that some people will not be saved, but their condemnation is as much the Lord’s will as is our salvation. We will ask, why does God save some people but not others? Because we do not think that it is fair or right, but that’s the wrong question to ask. It is the most conceited question to ask because we assume that we are worth saving.
Well, we should ask instead, why does the Lord God save anyone at all? Why would Jesus die for me? The only answer I have to offer to those questions of why is love. God loves you; Jesus loves us. Therefore, He chose to save us by His own ineffable will and for His own good pleasure. None of us deserve grace; none of us deserve mercy. We all deserve judgment; we each deserve justice; we all deserve wrath. Yet because of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I pray and hope that I never receive justice because I would much rather rest in His grace.
The doctrine of limited atonement inspires gratitude within our hearts because God chose you; He chose me simply because He loves us. We should be thankful for His great gift of salvation since it’s not some trivial thing. For by it we gain everything, as it costs Jesus everything. This drives us to want to evangelize, to share the good news of Jesus Christ with everyone we know because we are presently enjoying the fruit of that grace, and we believe and know that it’s good, right, don’t we?
None of us knows who is or is not numbered among the elect, so it is our responsibility to let everyone know what Jesus has done for us. We must evangelize because God brings people to the knowledge of saving faith through the foolishness of preaching. We must all preach the gospel truth in our own way, through the witness of our lives and with our mouths, because everyone needs to hear it—for believers to be encouraged and for non-believers to either be converted or convicted by the Holy Spirit.
You yourself heard the gospel from somebody else, right? You yourself believed it after hearing it, didn’t you? Scripture says, ‘Faith comes by hearing,’ so it’s up to you and me to give others the opportunity to hear it and believe. The doctrines of limited atonement and unconditional election are such a comfort to us because God has chosen to save some, and since we believe that He has saved me and you—because we have His Holy Spirit dwelling inside us testifying to this fact—then we can be confident and assured in our salvation, knowing that we will never lose it.
Now we can face each and every day and every challenge which the world throws against us, trusting that God will turn it to some good, confident that with our eternal security and hope in Christ Jesus, knowing that God is in control and that everything’s going according to His plan and that finally, in the end, God wins. Therefore, we shall share in and enjoy His victory. Hallelujah!
So let us all thank the Lord that He has sovereignly chosen to save some rather than none at all. Amen.