By Jim Elliff
Election by a sovereign God was one of the
mainstay doctrines in the preaching used by God during great days of Awakening.
Will it be preached today? Should it be preached today?
During
the revival ministry of Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844) more than 25,000 were
converted, principally in the New England area. According to John Thornbury
this figure would be about 600,000 if percentaged to our present population.1
Nettleton, for one, did not shrink back from proclaiming a God who elected. The
following vignette comes from the book on his life by his dear friend Bennet
Tyler.
A certain individual
said to him: "I cannot get along with the doctrine of election."
"Then," said Nettleton, "get along without it. You are at
liberty to get to heaven the easiest way you can. Whether the doctrine of
election is true or not, it is true that you must repent, and believe, and love
God. Now, what we tell you is, that such is the wickedness of your heart, that
you never will do these things unless God has determined to renew your heart.
If you do not believe that your heart is so wicked, make it manifest by
complying with the terms of salvation. Why do you stand caviling with the
doctrine of election? Suppose you should prove it to be false, what have you gained?
You must repent and believe in Christ after all. Why do you not immediately
comply with these terms of the gospel? When you have done this, without the
aids of the divine grace, it will be soon enough to oppose the doctrine of
election. Until you shall have done this, we shall still believe that the
doctrine of election lies at the foundation of all hope in your case."2
I
concur. Election by a sovereign God is "at the foundation of all
hope." It is this election that we wish to explore in the next few pages.
There can be no question that the Bible speaks of election. In fact, God says
that we are elect before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4).
Let me
introduce this subject of the sovereignty of God in salvation by writing out
this statement: God saves sinners. To put it so that the emphasis is not
misunderstood perhaps it should be written: God saves sinners.
Thus the Initiator of salvation is given greater visibility. He does it all.
But to fail to emphasize the word "sinners" would make the
sovereignty of God seem less gracious, so we will write it: God
saves sinners! Will that do? No, because the action God takes
toward us is too precious and freeing to be diminished in the least. So, let us
write a completely italicized version: God saves sinners! Then we
must underline it—and continue to underline it without ever becoming casual or
passive with the theme!
I
start out like this because I want us to see that when we are emphasizing the
sovereignty of God in salvation, we are bringing something home that is dear to
those of us who know ourselves to be sinners. The sovereignty of God caused
grown men like Paul to rip loose in doxologies of praise as if his heart were
pulsating through his pen (Rom. 11:33-36); it causes angels to break forth in
paeans of joyful adoration as described in the Revelation (Rev. 4:11); and it
has more than once brought me to my knees and filled my eyes with tears of
thankfulness. It is the sinner that God's sovereignty affects.
But
there is a sobriety that God's sovereignty brings to the salvation issue,
explaining in part just why it is among that set of doctrines which have been
used so effectively in historic revival. The seriousness has to do with the
awful prospect that one may not be chosen—that God's converting grace
may not be given. In days when this doctrine was preached under the power of
the Spirit, there was compelling reason for a sinner to ask if he or she was
included among the elect. When a man like Paul in the New Testament Awakening,
Luther and the others of the Reformation, Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield
of the revivals, held out these truths, people feared a God that had a will and
the power to exercise it.
Contrary to accepted belief, persons under some measure of conviction in
days of revival were not prone to dally away their opportunities for a good
eternity when they heard preaching on the premise that God's sovereign will
must be accomplished without fail—more likely they were prone to plead for
mercy. This is the way of conviction of those times. It was not que sera
sera. They did not so much question God as themselves.
This
doctrine could produce apathy, but then so could any doctrine. Apathy sometimes
has more to do with the ineffectiveness of the preacher than the doctrine. God
says we are to make sure of His calling and electing us (2 Peter 1:10). I
suggest, though, that a person dropping his interest in pursuing salvation by
the excuse of God's sovereignty is giving signs of an insensitivity that is more
characteristic of the non-elect. It shows little concern for the soul, little
belief in the consequence of sin, little assurance of hell's reality. In short,
for a person to fail to be interested in his election, to really put off
thinking of himself in the light of it as he is faced with it, is gross
foolishness. It shows he was never really that concerned anyway.
Belief
in the sovereignty of God in electing some sinners to eternal salvation and
therefore passing over other sinners (all of whom are deserving of hell, by the
way) is not a belief that exists only in the way-out fringes of Christianity.
Below are listed some names of those who preached and wrote it. Now do not
think that the belief of others in history establishes any doctrine. A list could
be made on the other side. But it does help to say that we are not alone in our
interpretation of Scripture, the Scripture being of "no private
interpretation." This is not a new doctrine—forgotten, yes—but not new. So
I will start the list with Christ and Paul, Peter, John, and the others, and
continue with these:
Wycliffe, Tyndale,
Coverdale, Ussher, Lightfoot, virtually all the King James Version translators,
Beza, Brainard, Edwards, Whitefield, Carey, Fuller, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor,
Adoniram Judson, Luther Rice, and China Inland Mission missionaries. Matthew
Henry, Martin Luther, John Brown, Joseph Caryl, Thomas Chalmers, Alexander
Maclaren, John Gill, Bishop Hall, Charles Hodge, Bishop Leighton, Thomas
Manton, Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, G. Campbell Morgan, Matthew Poole, Bishop
Reynolds, William Gurnall, J.C. Ryle, John Trapp, Robert Haldane, C.H. Spurgeon
and Thomas Scott.3
We
could add a host many others, including George Mueller, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and
several prominent authors and preachers of today, such as R. C. Sproul, John
MacArthur, J. I. Packer, John Piper, Joni Eareckson Tada, etc. All of this
listing is again just to say that a person who genuinely interprets Scripture
as giving God supreme sovereignty over who is and who is not saved does not
mean that he or she is in a freakish minority of irrelevant theologs. Yet, as I
said, the important thing is whether Scripture teaches the doctrine. So let's
look carefully in John chapter six. I shall attempt to make a brief argument
for the sovereignty of God in choosing those He wishes principally out of this
text alone. This will not be an exhaustive, systematic study but a textual one
nonetheless.
We
must think of this issue of the dispensing of eternal life as a three-legged
stool. Not a short stool, like the Victorian "cricket." Breaking a
leg of that stool, and falling off would not matter much. No, it is a tall
stool, way above the clouds. To lose one leg of this stool in our understanding
is to fall into doctrinal inaccuracy and misrepresentation. Each leg then is
representing one irreducible action bringing salvation to men. In John six we
find these three actions are as follows: God's giving certain men to Christ (v.
37), the Father's drawing men to Christ (v. 44), man's believing in Christ (v.
47).
Let's
begin then with the last statement concerning our topic and move to the first
in the order of the text. That is, we will move from man's action to God's
action. This is the more gentle way.
Jesus
had been describing Himself as the Bread of Life or the Manna from God, before
a large group of interested people. As the conversation progressed, some of the
Jews began grumbling and asking questions among themselves (vv. 41-42). It is
while speaking to their grumbling that Jesus says, "I tell you the truth,
he who believes has everlasting life . . . . I am the living bread that came
down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever" (vv.
47, 51a).
Now
here is a point of agreement between those who believe in election based on
God's purposeful choice beginning with Himself alone, and those who believer in
it based on God's knowledge of man's choice: man must believe. Here is the
first leg of this enormous stool. Without belief on man's part there is no
salvation. "How, then, can they call upon the one they have not believed
in?" (Rom. 10:14).
If my
car was inoperative and I went to the mechanic for help, I would have to hand
over the keys. That is my action of trust in the mechanic. It is fides vive—
living faith. Without doing that, all my talk about the competency of the
mechanic results in nothing. And so, without our giving the keys of life over
to Christ, we have never really trusted. This is Bible belief simply stated.
But if
we stop at man's believing we have a real distortion. We have created on our
understanding a big man and a small God: a strong and able man choosing his
destiny and weak God who does not determine but simply waits on man. In fact,
we have a very frustrated God. He wrings His hands waiting for capricious man
to decide for Him. He begs a little—but not too much, for then He would
overpower man's will. He is sovereign, but sovereign over what? Certainly
nothing to do with man's will. The weather maybe. If salvation is determined by
man's believing alone, then God is not sovereign, but man is.
You
may say that God's sovereignty is exercised in restricting Himself to submit to
man's will except when He necessarily must step in to keep long-term promises
going the right direction. This is problematic from two directions. The
relation of one event to another necessitates that God be sovereign over every
individual matter of the universe. This we could term the Law of Contiguity.
One event is contiguous to another in such a way that the latter event could
not take place without the former. Thus, to say that God determines one action,
such as the failure of one car to hit another car (that's why you said,
"Thank you, Lord,"—because you believed God did it) means that the
event just before was orchestrated by God as well (the scream from the wife who
woke up the sleepy driver). If then all events are in some way contiguous, to
get one event done, God must control all; if God determines all, He determines
who is and who is not converted.
Now we
come to the second leg: God's drawing of the sinner to Christ. In John 6:44 we
read: "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and
I will raise him up on the last day."
Now,
again, we all must agree that it takes God to draw the sinner to Christ. Has
any one of you come without God's intervention? The reason you must come
through God's intervention is that you are a man or woman dead in your sins
(Eph. 2:1). This inability (Rom. 3:10-18) is complete in that it affects all of
your faculties. For a sinner to come to Christ without God's luring him it
would be tantamount to a humpbacked whale flying through the air. First of all,
the whale does not want to fly—it is not his environment ("No man
seeks God"); and if he wanted to fly, he would not know how. ("No man
understands"); and if he wanted to, and understood how to, he could
not because he would not be able to ("No man does good, not even
one") (Rom. 3:10-12).
Thomas
Hooker said:
The will of natural
man is the worst part about him. The worst thing he has, the greatest enemy he
has, is his own heart and will. It is the corrupt will of a man that keeps him under
the power of his sins, and keeps him off the power of an ordinance that would
procure his everlasting good. I speak it the rather to dash that dream of
wicked men, when they do ill, and speak ill, yet (say they), "my heart is
good." No, truly, if thy life be naught, thy heart is worse. It is the
worst thing thou hast about thee... the deceitfulness of the heart is above
all; the masterfulness of the heart is beyond all that we can conceive. A man
may discern a man's life, "but the heart is deceitful above all things and
beyond cure." The will of man is uncontrollable, it will stand out against
all reasons and arguments, and nothing can move the will except God work upon
it.4
The
word draw in John 6:44 is, in fact, the word "drag." The
dragging could be likened to that of Lot who was dragged away from Sodom. No
one will come to Christ without the Father dragging him. But this drawing is in
the form of "an inward disposing of the soul to come to Christ."5 As Luther said:
The drawing is not
like that of the executioner, who draws the thief up the ladder to the gallows;
but is a gracious allurement, such as that of the man whom everybody loves, and
to whom everybody willing goes.
So to
be drawn is to be moved by the Spirit to what you do not have naturally, a
desire or affection for Christ. We are not here speaking of a desire that is
surface, but one that is deep — a desire for Christ that is related to who He
is, His loveliness and beauty (Phil. 3:7-10).
All of
us in evangelicalism believe that man must believe and God must draw. But how
many does He draw? That is the question and the place where God's sovereignty
is most evident.
The
statement about which we are concerned is found in John 6:37. "All that
the Father gives Me will come to Me and whoever comes to Me I will never
drive away" (Italics mine).
Here
we find selectivity. Man believes to receive eternal life; man must be drawn to
that place of belief. But does God draw everyone? The answer from the passage
is clearly negative. Let me put down the context:
All that the Father gives
Me will come to Me, and whoever comes to Me I will never drive away. For I have
come down from heaven not to do My will but to do the will of Him who sent me.
And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that I shall lose none of all that He
has given Me, but raise them up at the last day. For My Father's will is that
everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and
I will raise him up at the last day (37-40. Bold mine).
The
Father "has" some persons and "gives" them to the Son in
order that the Son may give them eternal life, never losing them, but raising
up on the last day all that are given Him. God's will, after all, is that these
"given" ones have eternal life. Whoever is given is brought to
Christ and kept. Does this include everyone? Is everyone "given" to
the Son? I think it is impossible to get around the fact that Jesus is
describing a select number. The progress of the action goes plainly from the
Father to the Son to the person. As Jesus said, "All that the
Father gives to Me will come to Me. . .", thus putting the
intiatory action in the Father's court (italics mine).
This
"having" and "giving" of the Father is seen in John 17 as
well.
Father, the time has
come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. For You granted Him
authority over all people that He might give eternal life to all those You have
given Him. (vv. 1b-2. Bold mine).
The
giving of eternal life is for those who believe, but first they must be
"given" to the Son by the One who has them. Look further,
I have revealed You to
those Whom You gave Me out of the world. They were Yours; You gave
them to Me and they have obeyed Your word. Now they know that everything You
have given Me comes from You. For I gave them the words You gave Me and they
accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from You, and they believed
that You sent me. I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for
those You have given Me, for they are Yours. . . . My prayer is not for
them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in Me through their message,
that all of them may be one. . . . Father, I want those You have given
Me to be with Me where I am, and to see the glory You have given Me because You
loved Me before the creation of the world (vv. 6-9, 20-32a,24. Bold mine).
Here
again, the message is articulated with rich simplicity. God has certain ones
in His heart from eternity, and those specific ones and no others are given
to the Son, who then does certain necessary things for them in order to secure
eternal life. So one hundred percent of those given are secured by Christ, and
not one less or more. To say that they were the Father's because they
believed is to completely distort the language. They rather believe because
they were given to the Son. The Son then died for them, revealed Himself to
them, prayed for them, etc. They believed precisely because they were
"given" ones. The others did not believe but "were of their
father the devil" (John 6:44).
You
say, don't men have the ability to reject the gospel? Yes, In fact they always
reject the gospel as natural men (1Cor. 2:14). It is because of this rejection
that God necessarily must elect and procure certain ones through Christ.
Without God's election, the Son's intervention, the Spirit's revealing of the
Son, etc., they would be left to their rejection alone. Therefore, God in His
love arranged that some would be so changed, wooed, lured, and inwardly
motivated, that they would irresistibly come to Him. Their wills are not
violated but are rather won over decisively by the process of drawing to
Christ. All the rest of mankind gets what they naturally desire¾which
is not Christ.
Now we
can understand the passage in Acts 13:48 as simply restating the order from
God's perspective. "When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and
honored the Word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life
believed."
These
three actions make a secure stool or platform for understanding the gospel. In
summary they are as follows: God's giving to the Son those He has elected in
love eternally; the Father's drawing of these elected ones to the Son in an
irresistible fashion; and the individual believing in Christ. I must not imply
that every time the gospel is given it must include a full-orbed discussion of
these three elements, but the evangelist must be sure of them or else what does
come out will be man-centered.
We
answer this in the negative. No, it is not fair for God to elect some and pass
over others. God is not fair in virtually any area. You were not born in the
desert of Somalia, for instance. That is not fair. Some of you were endowed
with certain physical characteristics or mental characteristics,
differentiating yourself from others as to ability. God's love for variety seen
in creation itself is an indication of God's feeling no compulsion to be fair.
God is just and merciful. But these two qualities are worlds apart from
fairness.
What
do I mean? We live in a day when fairness is constantly argued. Everyone who
feels he or she represents a minority position or group begs for equal public
access. The courts have tried to satisfy everyone's feelings of equity to the
point of the ridiculous. So for us to think that God is not fair is to make God
"politically incorrect." But fairness is not in the definition of
God. Justice is. Fairness, as it is understood by most, is the making of all
things equally accessible (or, as applied to our discussion, the giving of
everyone for all time equal access to God, or, the theory that all are equally
drawn and equally influenced by God to come to Christ). To give justice is to
award what is exactly correct as far as penalty or reward according to the
behavior. Now God is just¾impeccably so (Deut. 32:4). God has never failed
to punish one sin or to reward one true deed or righteousness. The just
punishment of all sins has either fallen on Christ or on the sinner. In the
final judgment of the damned, sins, every one of them, will be judged as still
being the responsibility of the unconverted person (Rev. 20:11-15). But the
saved will find themselves fully acquitted by the death of Christ for every sin
(Rom 8:1). Sin therefore is fully dealt with by a very careful God. God never
fails to be just in this sense.
God is
also merciful. He has been merciful toward the elect, yet not without justice
being fully met in the death of Christ. In another broader sense He is merciful
toward all. By giving rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt.
5:45), and by tolerating the non-believer and even giving him some happiness,
etc., He shows His mercy. This we call common grace. Now the Scripture says
something about the mercy of salvation: "For He says to Moses, "I
will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I
will have compassion" (Rom. 9:15).
So we
find that God's mercy salvifically does not come to all but only to
some, although he shows some temporal mercies even to the non-elect. In this
God's mercy and His justice come to man apart from considerations of fairness.
Though He is not fair, He cannot be accused of being unjust or unloving.
Remember that the practical way that the sovereignty of God works out in
terms of salvation is through God's drawing the individual to Christ who
otherwise would most assuredly continue to run from Christ on his own (John
3:19-20). God therefore gives the man without Christ what he wants and the one
coming to Christ what he wants, which is Christ Himself.
The
drawing of certain ones to Christ is irresistible in the final sense. When all
the supposed disciples of Christ left at the hard teaching of Christ on His
sovereignty, He said, "This is why I told you, no one can come to Me
unless the Father has enabled him" (John 6:65). Then He turned to His
chosen men and asked, "You do not want to leave too, do you?" Do you
remember their answer? "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of
eternal life" (vv. 67-68). There really is no other place to go when we
are drawn by the Father to Christ. Others can leave, but the chosen ones
cannot. He will come to Christ and be kept to the end, as Christ promised. He
will raise him up on the last day.
Remember that when Paul brought up a third party contention that God's
election was not fair, God answered with firmness. Note:
One of you will say to
Me: 'Then why does God still blame us? For who resists His will?' But who are
you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it,
'Why did you make me like this?' Does not the potter have the right to make out
of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common
use? (Rom. 9:19-21).
The
next question is: Isn't election based on foreknowledge? It is commonly held that
the resolution to this issue of God's predestination is that it is based upon
prescience or foreknowledge in the sense of simply knowing beforehand. Because
God sees the sinner believing in Him, He elects him to salvation. We
will call this the "pre-sight" view.
Let us
readily admit that the idea of God's knowing beforehand is prevalent in the
biblical writings (Ps 139:1-4, 15-16, etc.). God knows the end from the
beginning. But it is also held by Scripture that God foreordains or decrees all
that comes to pass (Lam 3:37-38; Ps. 33:11; Acts 17:26, etc.). So we have two
philosophical ideas put in the same arena. Which of the ideas leads the
salvation process?
The
following statements are my rationale for believing that the pre-sight view is
deficient.
Let's
look at the principal passage on foreknowledge and salvation, Romans 8:29, for
help: "For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed
to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many
brothers" (Italics mine).
J.P.
McBeth, a Baptist theologian said:
God is omniscient and
knows everything. He has known everything from the beginning. Nothing is a
surprise to God, nor does He ever come into possession of new knowledge. Thus
God knows all people. But this word means more than an intellectual knowledge.
It means that God knows some in a special way. In grace, in life from eternity.
This is the initiative of our salvation. Redemption has its rise to God and not
in man.
These
observations may help us see the reasons for preferring the determination of
God as the basis of election rather than prescience. The word foreknowledge
is actually better understood as "thought of endearingly beforehand,"
or "foreloved," or "foreordained with forethought." Here's
why:
1.
The foreknowledge spoken of is
foreknowledge of persons, not events. The statement reads, "whom He
foreknew. . . ." (Rom. 8:29-30) You see this as well in Romans 11:2,
speaking of His endearment to Israel: "God did not reject His people whom
He foreknew" (Italics mine). Therefore we can deduce that foreknowledge as
related to salvation is not just seeing a person's conversion experience prior
to election and therefore electing on the basis of the individual's choice. It
is a foreloving of persons.
2.
The pre-sight view of election makes God
seem absurd in His language if not somewhat dishonest. You see, God has gone to
great lengths to say that some are elected, chosen, foreordained, predestined
as part of His eternal purpose. For God to say that He saw those that would
choose Him and then He calls them elect (select from a number) is linguistic
trickery. It is like the Queen decreeing that the sun will rise in the morning,
as others have said. God's words about His action toward man would mean nothing
but could only be construed as a way of presenting an authoritative front that
God is in charge, whereas the decisions of eternal life and death are really
within man alone.
Apply this to prophecy. Much of prophecy is
presented to us as that which God determines to do in the future. Is this the
truth of it? Did God prophesy that John the Baptist would be the forerunner of
the Messiah (Isa. 40:3-5; Luke 3:3-6) on the basis of pre-sight, and then
declare that it would happen? Doesn't language lose all meaning to say that?
Does it not make sense of the language to say that the action predicted was
based on God's determined plan and not just what He saw happening?
3.
As a philosophical idea, God's decreeing
of a thing has dominance over His seeing a thing beforehand. Even though we are
learning that the word foreknowledge is more than pre-sight, we
nonetheless cannot disregard the verity that God sees all things beforehand.
Thus God's seeing all things has forever been a reality to Him, and God's
determining all things has also been forever. These two have had eternal
origins. As long as He has decreed, He has known; and as long as He has known,
He has decreed. So, in one sense, we cannot put one philosophical idea ahead of
the other in terms of time. Yet we can put one above the other in terms of
dominance. If God has seen and determined at the same time, we cannot make His
decreeing subservient to His knowing. The reason one is preceding the other in
terms of force (not time) is that determination is a willful act of God,
whereas seeing is a passive act. God cannot help but see all, but He wills to
decree. Therefore what He determines, He sees; and what He sees, is determined.
The force of decreeing a thing dominates the seeing.
4.
The word foreknowledge in the
passage considered above and in the other similar passage, 1 Peter 1:2, is
rendered by most Bible translators as "forelove" and
"foreordination" (or similar wording), rather than as simple
pre-sight—even by some who hold differing views of God's election. In other
words, the language and context of Scripture call for such a meaning to be
attached to the word. Consider the following:
"For those whom
He had marked out from the first" (Goodspeed),
"For those on
whom He set His heart beforehand" (Williams).
"For those whom
God chose from the first" (The Century N.T.).
"Whom God the
Father has predestined and chosen (Moffat on 1 Peter 1:2).
"Chosen of old in
the purpose of God the Father" (New English Bible).
5.
And finally, to believe in the pre-sight
view represents a reversal of normal biblical order. There are many verses that
state man's believing results in eternal life (John 3:36; Rom. 10:9, etc.).
This is the truth as far as it goes. Yet behind that believing there are those
verses which teach that God must have elected the person to be a believer.
These reveal the doctrine of election as the basis upon which man has the
ability to believer. Consider:
"All who were
appointed for eternal life, believed" (Acts 13:48).
"You do not
believe because you are not My sheep" (John 10:26).
"It does not,
therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy" (Rom.
9:16).
"It is because of
Him that you are in Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 1:30).
"We love because
He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
As Arthur C. Custance said, "Either
God is sovereign and election is an expression of God's will, or man is
sovereign and election is an expression of God's foreknowledge."
More
questions as to the nature of election come immediately to the mind. As we
explore the work of God on behalf of sinners, keep in mind the heart of John
Calvin. "I desire only that we should not investigate what the Lord has
left hidden in secret, nor neglect what He has brought out into the open, so
that we may not be convicted of excessive curiosity on the one hand, or of
excessive ingratitude on the other."6
I must
ask now, will you preach and teach the truth that God saves sinners? Will you
be faithful to the Scripture as you see it? Will you speak without fear of man?
I know
many men and women who are deathly afraid of preaching this doctrine because of
the self-sufficiency of their peers. This man-fearing spirit has done much to
steal from the gospel its God-centeredness in our age. We are reaping the
results, for we now live in a virtual dust bowl of activity with much less to
show for it than we would like to believe.
I do
not say that we should preach this doctrine as if it were the only thing to
say. It does permeate other doctrines. It permeates like dye with cloth. Yet,
we must make something of it as the text makes something of it. When the Bible
says that a man must believe (leg one), let us preach that faithfully. Jesus
did not refer to His sovereignty at every occasion with non-believers. Yet also
remember that the books of the Bible were written to be read as a whole,
including both the doctrinal and hortatory, the horizontal and the vertical,
the lofty and the practical, etc. This awareness will help guide us in our
presentation of doctrine by forcing us to undergird the admonitions of
Scripture with the doctrines that accompany, and vice versa.
In the
final place we should remember that the doctrine of election is principally for
the good of those who hear. It says that sinners may be saved. It says that
those without hope have hope in God's love. Though fears may come when one
considers the implications of being non-elect, it is most certainly a positive
doctrine.
It was
theologian Augustus H. Strong who reminds us of election's beauty:
Election and sovereignty
are only sources of good. Election is not a decree to destroy. It is a decree
to save. When we elect a president, we do not need to hold a second election to
determine that the remaining millions shall be non-presidents.
Endnotes
1. John
Thornbury, God Sent Revival, p. 233. Welwyn, Herts, England: Evangelical
Press, 1977.
2. Bennet
Tyler and Andrew Bonar, The Life and Labours of Asahel Nettleton, p.
405. Reprint, Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975.
3. Jay
Green, "Calvinism Today," a foreword to The Five Points of
Calvinism in a Series of Letters by Horatius Bonar, Andrew Fuller, John
Calvin, John Gill, Thomas Goodwin, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 10-12 (N.F.C.E.).
4. Application
of Redemption, Bks. 1-8, p. 328, quoted in Iain Murray,
"Thomas Hooker and the Doctrine of conversion: 'God's Most Mysterious
Work,'" The Banner of Truth, February 1980, p.14.
5. Marcus
Dods, "The Gospel of John," in The Expositor's Greek Testament,
ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970.
6. As
quoted in Dr. Timothy George, "Blessed Hope or Second Coming Scam?" Florida
Baptist Witness, November 12, 1992.
Copyright © 1998 Jim Elliff.
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