If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles, our first scripture reading this morning comes from Genesis chapter 22, beginning at the first verse.
After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac. He cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.
On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son. He took in his hand the fire and the knife, and so they went both of them together.
Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father.” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac, his son, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son, but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”
He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt sacrifice instead of his son.
So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide,” as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.
Your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice.”
So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. Abraham lived at Beersheba.
From there, we turned to Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8, beginning at verse 28. Paul writes, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
“And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Lord, you have given us your word to be a comfort and to be a guide for us. Remove any confusion from our minds, remove any misdirection from our hearts, and let us be open fields to receive your truth and let it grow up within us to be such a comfort and sign of your love and remembrance. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
There is a theological question that’s very important to each one of us, and it’s one which has been debated and is still a source of confusion and animosity among many of us Bible-believing Christians: who is ultimately responsible for my salvation?
If our forebear Adam is responsible for our corrupt nature and sinfulness, and if I am also personally liable to damnation upon my own account based upon my choices and actions, then can I not, should I not, also be responsible for the ultimate salvation of my soul by my personal choice and decision for God? If I sin and condemn myself according to my natural will, then can, should, or would God save me against that same will? If God wants to save me, can I stop him? Am I not sinful by nature as well, or am I truly good deep down inside and only make easily forgivable mistakes? If I can choose to do and be good, then why don’t I?
Is God sovereign over my salvation in Christ Jesus, or am I? You see, that is the crux of that theological debate between the Calvinist and the Arminian camps. This is not some esoteric or unimportant question because it is of grave importance for us with eternal consequences since the root question is: who is really sovereign, God or me?
So, being that it’s Reformation Month, we will spend the next few weeks investigating the scriptural arguments of the Remonstrants, the Arminians, the devotees of Jacob Arminius, and the Reformed response to them known as the Five Points of Calvinism, as commonly taught by the acronym TULIP. These doctrines were articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647 and are our sole standard and system of doctrine subordinated to scripture, which is affirmed by all the elders of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
First, we need a little bit of church history. The Reformation of the Christian religion, begun by Martin Luther in 1517, was about recovering the doctrine of God’s grace of salvation being affected by grace through our faith in Christ Jesus alone. This understanding of God’s love had become hidden and obscured behind the layers of ritual and uncommon language of religion, Latin, mandated by the Roman Church.
They had assumed authority as a mediator between the people and Christ, wrongfully claiming for themselves the power and authority to bind the consciences of people and to also forgive people’s sin by fiat.
Next, John Calvin established his school in Geneva, Switzerland, which led to Reformed preaching and teaching sweeping across Europe. However, although Protestants agreed about the distinct errors of the Roman Church, divisions and disagreements between different factions and different sects of the church began to develop based upon their differing interpretations of scripture and upon particular leaders and their followers.
One such teacher was Jacob Arminius, who disagreed with many of the points of doctrine taught by Calvin and his followers in Geneva—those doctrines which were then accepted as the Orthodox understanding of the Christian faith. Following his death in 1610, Arminius’s disciples wrote the Five Articles of Remonstrance to outline their objection and protest. Their position was later condemned as heresy by the Synod of Dort in 1619.
Unfortunately, as with many heresies throughout church history, many of their ideas have persisted and continued to infiltrate the church. These ideas have become accepted because sadly many people ignore the whole counsel of God, instead focusing on limited portions of scripture, especially those being removed from their particular context.
Now, these errors on their own may seem to be unimportant or be something which should be allowed some latitude as non-essentials allowing for liberty, but they are not. They are important, and they go against our confession of faith. The great problem is that they undercut God’s sovereignty by raising up our own human self-importance, and their first theological error and heresy concerns God’s election of a particular people to save.
As found in their article number one, the Remonstrants wrote that God, “by an eternal unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ, his son before the foundation of the world, hath determined out of the fallen sinful race of men to save in Christ for Christ’s sake and through Christ those who through the grace of the Holy Ghost shall believe on this his son Jesus and shall persevering in this faith and obedience of faith through this grace even to the end.”
That sounds almost okay, but they were so close yet so wrong, and it’s easy to understand how this misunderstanding could happen. What they’re saying is that God chose to save a particular people before the foundation of the world consisting of everyone whom God knew would one day trust Jesus Christ. They were saying that before creation, the omniscient God looked far ahead into the future and upon seeing that there were people who would choose to believe in Jesus, he decided to save those people because of this foreseen faith.
Do you see the problem here? The Remonstrants were suggesting that God saves us because of our faith, because of something that we do or will do, because of the work of faith of believing in Jesus. They believe that faith is something that we do rather than something we are given. They were suggesting that God acted and elected us in response to what we would one day do, transforming our salvation into a reward for our faith and obedience.
This idea goes against everything the Apostle Paul ever wrote and goes against everything that the prophets of the Old Testament wrote; it goes against the whole testimony of sacred scripture. Yes, it is true that everyone who believes upon Jesus will be saved, but our faith comes as a sign of our salvation, and our obedience to God is our response to his saving grace. However, the Arminian Remonstrants changed the order of operations, and as anyone who ever mixed up PEMDAS in school—Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction—knows, if you mix that up, the entire equation gets ruined.
The Remonstrants taught foreseen election, but what scripture actually teaches is unconditional election by God—the “U” in TULIP.
Now, there are too many examples in scripture that prove this understanding to cite and explain here today, but each citation supports the Lord’s self-description of his divine sovereign character from Exodus 33:19: “And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy,” then quoted by Paul in Romans 9:15 and explained in verse 16: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.”
Instead, this morning we’re going to look at two examples which clearly support God’s sovereign and unconditional election of all Israel, including the church, but which are also used by modern Arminians to argue against the clear testimony of the Bible.
Paul writes in Romans 8, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
“And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
These verses are often referred to as the “ordo salutis,” the order of salvation, because they seem to describe the order, the hows and what’s of God’s saving mercy. These verses make it quite clear that God is the principal actor in our salvation. God foreknows, God predestines, God calls, God justifies, God glorifies.
A plain reading of the text makes God’s sole sovereign role in the work of salvation very clear, but the Arminian error comes in through the meaning of one particular word being twisted or misunderstood: ‘foreknow.’
What comes to your mind when you hear this word? The English understanding is simply to know something before it happens. That seems pretty simple and clear-cut, right? God’s foreknowledge is him knowing everything that’s going to happen before it does. If God is omniscient, then of course he knows everything. So, clearly and logically, God knows who will believe in Jesus, and so then he can choose them, right?
Wrong. Because that assumes that God is a passive observer of history. It assumes that he created and is now sitting back just relaxing and watching history unfold until it’s time for judgment. That is a wrong assumption because our God is active in the world—past, present, and future. He is our creator and our sustainer. Most importantly, he is the one who has decreed all things that shall ever occur. Everything happens because it must happen because first God has determined and decreed that it should happen when, where, and how it happens.
The Greek word translated as ‘foreknow’ here is the word ‘prognosco,’ and we commonly use English derivatives of this Greek word based upon the flawed understanding of ‘foreknow,’ rather than how Paul and others of that period understood and used that word.
The two most common derivatives are ‘prognosticate’ and ‘prognosis.’ To prognosticate means to foretell or predict something. Prognosis is a word used in the doctor’s office meaning the doctor’s judgment as to what will happen to a patient based upon their symptoms. Sportscasters and political pollsters prognosticate all the time; they predict what’s going to happen in the big game or in the next election.
But they do not know what will happen. They do not know; they are not certain of what will happen in the future. Their predictions are all guesswork—educated and reasoned, rationalized and based on evidence, but it is still only their best guess.
A doctor’s prognosis is also educated and reasoned based upon the available evidence and their existing knowledge, but that too is really only a guess. However, the good news is the Lord does not guess.
Would you want to worship a God who does not know but who instead has to guess? Not I. God knows the future because he says what the future will be. The Greek and Roman understanding of ‘prognosco’ was to know beforehand—to have foreknowledge—but that foreknowledge is only known because it is certain and fixed, unchangeable, because it has been decreed and established by God.
It is His plan. A theater playwright has ‘prognosco’ concerning everything that will happen from the time that the curtain rises at the beginning of the play until the curtain falls at the end. Why? Because they planned it that way. They orchestrated it to happen because they decreed that it should happen that way.
The Lord possesses ‘prognosco’ of all history because he has decreed it to happen because he has established it to happen. The Lord knows that it will happen because he has said that it will happen. And since he is God, then he is the one who ensures it happens—whether directly or indirectly.
The problem with calling these verses in Romans the ‘order of salvation’ is that they are not really a temporal order. They are not first step one, then step two, then step three, and so forth because they all kind of overlap each other. God foreknows us because he created us, and as part of that creating, he either predestined us for salvation in Christ or not—all before the foundation of the world, before Adam’s fall, before we ever even needed saving.
And although God’s calling of us happens within time and space, his justifying of us already happened in our redemption through Jesus Christ, purchased through the blood of the Lamb who was slain from before the foundation of the world. We are now glorified in Christ Jesus even as we await future glorification, raised up to life eternal at the final trumpet sound.
Please understand that when God foreknows and predestines us, he also graciously gives us the faith necessary to believe in Jesus because he has already chosen us to belong to Christ. Therefore, our election—God’s decision to save some—can only be upon his sovereign will alone and in no way, shape, or form depended upon our believing.
We believe because of God’s work of salvation in us.
The other passage which concerns Abraham and Isaac at Mount Moriah should be a familiar passage to most of us. It can also be an uncomfortable passage for us, especially if we believe that salvation is dependent upon our belief. It could make us question the goodness of God. It could make us question God’s justice and love. It could make us question God’s omniscience, his knowledge and foreknowledge.
If the saving of Isaac depended upon Abraham’s faith, then could God leave something like that to chance and still be good? Could God gamble with mankind’s future by risking Abraham’s life? What if Abraham had followed through with what was asked of him?
See, the story begins with ‘After these things God tested Abraham.’ But really, why should God need to test Abraham? Doesn’t God know whether Abraham would pass the test or not? If God is omniscient, if God possesses perfect foreknowledge—since he has decreed all that shall ever be—then what’s the point or purpose of God’s testing?
Back in Genesis 12, we saw that the Lord called Abraham—called Abraham to go—called Abraham to obey—God called Abraham to step out in faith, which, according to Paul in Romans, then means that God also first predestined Abraham, necessarily meaning that God must have foreknown Abraham. So, why the test?
Much the same as any test from a school teacher, not for their benefit but for ours. God tested Abraham to train, refine, improve, and encourage him. God knew that Abraham would pass his tests of faith, but Abraham did not know he could not know that he would pass until he had gone through the trial.
This is again the same kind of testing which Israel experienced during the days of the judges. However, that’s not the only uncomfortable part of the story. God’s command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac—God tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son, his only begotten son, his legal heir, his beloved child, given to him through God’s promise and the one to whom and to whose descendants God had promised the everlasting covenant of grace.
Could our God really demand such a thing? Is that right? Is that fair? Is that just? Is that good? What if Abraham had actually killed Isaac? But God was not worried. The Lord God is truly sovereign, and even though the command was made, Isaac’s fate was safe and secure in his divine hands.
Still, the burden fell to Abraham to trust that the Lord really is who he says he is. His faith was tested because he had to believe that God did not really desire the life of his son and the death of all of Abraham’s hope. The author of Hebrews explains this for us, explaining what went through Abraham’s mind and heart, saying he considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.
Now, Abraham proved his faith in the Lord when he went and was about to sacrifice Isaac, but this proof was not for God’s benefit. Then the Lord stopped him and graciously provided a substitute sacrifice for his son. Then God said to Abraham, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and not withheld your son, your only son. I will surely bless you.”
Wait a moment, but God just said, “Because you have done this, I will surely bless you.” That sure sounds like promised blessing was a kind of reward or compensation for Abraham’s act of faith, doesn’t it? It would be easy to take that interpretation if this was the only encounter between God and Abraham.
But the Lord had made this promise to him first in Genesis 12:1-3 when God said to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you, and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
And he does it again in Genesis 18:18. The same blessing was promised beforehand, without any preconditions—not “If you go, then I will do,’ but an imperative: “You go, and I will do.” Going was a test of Abraham’s faith—a test he passed.
But again, God tested him with Isaac, and again Abraham passed. Abraham learned from passing that surely God will do because God is faithful, because God has kept him faithful to him. The rightness of Abraham’s faith and trust in the Lord were confirmed by God’s provision of a substitute, and his faith in God was now proven to himself.
Now, Abraham knew that surely God would also be faithful to fulfill all that he had promised. Like Abraham, we all go through our own trials and tests of faith, but they’re not for God’s benefit—for him to see if we will be faithful or not—but for us to know, to become more confident and sure in our faith.
It’s very easy for us to armchair quarterback stories in the Bible and church history, saying that of course we would do X, Y, or Z. But until we’re faced with those same choices of faith, we do not know that yes, we really would do that.
Passing these tests confirms your faith in Christ to yourself, not to Jesus. He already has every confidence in you that you will pass because he has foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and is presently upholding you, sanctifying you, and glorifying you because he alone has chosen and elected you to salvation in himself.
We could never have a hope of passing any test of faith without the faith that God gives us by his grace. Could you really ever believe that your faith in Jesus Christ might originate within yourself? Who in their natural mind would ever think that someone could gain eternal life by believing and trusting that some Jewish carpenter and itinerant rabbi executed as the vilest sort of criminal as an enemy of the state some 2,000 years ago—that by his singular death he paid the penalty due for all of your sins, all the evil and wrong which you and everybody else does in life?
It is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles indeed. The natural mind will call that nonsense. The natural mind will call that insanity and absurdity. However, to those who have been given the faith to believe, to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks—Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God—for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
If any of us are truly honest with ourselves, then we will each admit that we would never choose Christ unless he first chooses us. Sadly, we all know way too many people who will choose to not believe the good news of the gospel. They will hear these words of life, but they do not respond in the affirmative because their hearts have not been prepared by God’s spirit because they have not been chosen to do so.
The seeds in a farmer’s hand cannot grow unless they’re first planted and sown. If he just scatters them to the wind, they’ll blow everywhere around him, and while some may land in fertile ground, others will land among the weeds and others upon stony ground. Well, before there can ever be a harvest, the farmer must first plow the hard ground and prepare the soil—remove rocks, add fertilizer, remove the weeds, and such.
Then you must plant each seed with care and intention, choosing each place with purpose and love. Then you must water and care for those seeds until they sprout and spring up out of the ground, reaching up to heaven. That is what God does in his unconditional election of us.
This is all the product of God’s foreknowledge. First, he prepares our heart, sending his Holy Spirit to replace our dead and sinful heart of stone with a heart of flesh, predestinating us to faith. Then he calls us by sending us his word, his gospel through preachers, by the reading and hearing of scripture, and by the faithful witness of all the saints and believers who came before us.
Then he nurtures us in Christian community—in the body of Christ, the church—where we may be encouraged and built up in faith, be prayed for, and pray for others—being fed, mind, body, and soul—sanctifying us until we spring up like green shoots from the soil and graves of our old sinful life to now reach heavenward and eternal life in Christ in glory.
Do you not know that a seed cannot plant itself or water itself? Once you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked—dead, not dying—dead, not mostly dead, as a doornail. No light, no hope. There was nothing you could do to bring yourself to life. You needed to be resuscitated, to have life poured into you. You needed God to save you because you were beyond any person’s power to save—any person except God—except for Jesus Christ.
You need it. We all need it for God to choose to save you before any of us could be saved. We were dead, and in our deadness, there was nothing in us that merited or warranted our salvation, except that within his wisdom, love, and mercy, God alone chose to save us. Hallelujah! Amen.
We were not drowning in our sin. Jesus was not a life preserver thrown out for us to grab onto. We were drowned, sinking into the depths, until Jesus pulled us out from the water, put us in his boat, and then breathed life into us in the midst of the storm.
How then could our salvation be anything except the Lord’s unconditional work of election? So why should it matter to you that God solely sovereignly and unconditionally chose you to salvation?
It matters because you never have to worry that God may change his mind and take away your salvation because of something you did. It matters because I would not want salvation to depend upon me in any way, shape, or form because I don’t want to risk losing it. If I can earn it, then I can lose it. But if God chooses to give it to me, then I am confident that he will not take it away from me since our heavenly Father is constant and unchanging.
Because scripture tells us that he will not change his mind, it matters because at the end of the day, we human beings are the most undependable of creatures, and I honestly would not want to depend upon my own good works or efforts to ensure my salvation, since I know that I myself let down so many people in this life, including letting myself down, that I could never ever do enough to possibly outweigh my personal failings—even just the ones that I know about or remember— and ever hope to deserve God’s grace and mercy and his great gift of eternal life in the world to come.
If God’s choice of election unto salvation depended upon him looking into the future and choosing me because of my faith, that would change my faith into a salvific work. It would be no different from the Judaizers’ works of religion that they tried to lead the Galatians into. If my faith were a work, then it would make me sovereign over my salvation instead of God.
Believing that God elects based upon a foreseen faith denies his sovereignty over all things. Believing that denies that the Lord is truly God because you are claiming an authority greater than he, because your work of faith is the reason and cause for his election being conditional and non-sovereign.
Please understand that God’s unconditional election is to be a great comfort for us because God doesn’t make mistakes, even as we often do. For if he chooses to save us, then we know that we surely have been, we are, and we will be saved by God’s grace through our received faith in Christ Jesus alone.
The Lord God foreknows, he predestines, he calls, he justifies, and he glorifies us in his Son Jesus. All those whom he has chosen and given to Christ—we are his undeserving treasured possession, and he loves us so much—so much that he gave us his Son Jesus—so much so that he died so that we could live.
That surely was no accident. That could only be by Jesus’s sovereign choice, per his unconditional election for his particular people whom he foreknew and predestined to believe and be saved. Amen.