A book written by a well known radio Bible teacher was recently put into our hands for examination. This we did cursorily and, while we do not feel that we should review the book as a whole in this column, we are constrained to examine its teaching on the very important but little-understood subject of God's sovereignty and man's so-called free will. We shall first speak of what God's sovereignty and related terms mean in their scriptural sense before considering the comments found in the book.
God's sovereignty means that God has a valid and inalienable right in the absoluteness of His Person, and in the greatness of His power, to do as He pleases with and in His own creation. Not that God will ever cease to act in and according to His own character and nature of light and love, but the crux of the matter is that He has this supreme right to do as He pleases. If this could be limited in anywise, then God would be circumscribed; in fact, He would cease to be God.
Closely akin to this obvious fact of God's sovereignty lies the truth of election; that is, God, acting in sovereign grace, has chosen some persons out of many with a view to blessing them. God chose Abraham out of an idol-worshiping world, and made him the depositary of His promises and blessings; and who shall challenge His right to do so? It was God's choice, not Abraham's.
When we come to the New Testament we find that "He [God] hath chosen us in Him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love." Eph. 1:44According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: (Ephesians 1:4). The point of time of His choosing does not enter into the question of His sovereignty, for it would still be His choice if He should choose some now or at any time. The fact that He did it before the foundation of the world shows that He had His thought and counsel about certain people before the world existed. He chose them independently of the world, and they were not to be of it (though in it for a time), as the Lord Jesus said,
"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." John 17:1616They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. (John 17:16). Theirs is a portion outside of and beyond the world.
Peter also wrote of election when addressing the converted Jews, saying, "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." 1 Pet. 1:22Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied. (1 Peter 1:2). They had been chosen by God out of an unbelieving nation. It was His sovereign choice, not theirs. As the Lord said to His disciples, "Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you." John 15:1616Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. (John 15:16).
Christians should not, however, rush to the conclusion that whenever we find the word "elect" in Scripture it refers to us, for God has other elect ones in other dispensations, as Abraham most surely was in his day. The Lord Jesus said that when the Son of man comes He shall send His angels and "gather together His elect from the four winds." Matt. 24:3131And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. (Matthew 24:31). These will be the elect Jews out of an apostate nation when He comes back to reign. The Apostle Paul also speaks of elect angels (1 Tim. 5:2121I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality. (1 Timothy 5:21)), which we judge to be those that were kept from sinning when many did.
Predestination is often confused with election, or choosing, and many profitless controversies have thereby ensued. While God set His heart upon us and chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, He has predestinated to something those whom He thus chose. So we read in Eph. 1:55Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, (Ephesians 1:5) of those whom He chose: "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will." Predestination then is the purpose of God concerning those whom He chose. He chose us out of a lost race that "we should be holy and without blame before Him in love," and then marked us out, or predestinated us, "unto the adoption of children." It is the peculiar place belonging to those whom God has chosen in this age. In Rom. 8:2929For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. (Romans 8:29) we read of being predestinated "to be conformed to the image of His Son." Again, it is plain that predestination is separate and distinct from election or choosing, and is the marking out of the chosen ones to a certain portion.
We knew one servant of the Lord who used this homely illustration to explain God's predestination: a father of a large family marked out each child for a certain vocation in life—one son was to be a physician, another an accountant, another an engineer, etc.
"Foreknowledge" is another word that is often confused with election, and even made to limit it, but there is no reason for such confusion. Foreknowledge is God's knowing certain persons in a past eternity-it is a knowledge of persons, not what they would do. (Not but what He does know, as omniscient, all that everyone does and will do.) When God chose to have a people out of a lost race before Him in love, He did not merely decide that a certain number of persons had to be saved to fill up certain niches in heaven, but He actually knew these persons individually. In Romans 8 we read, "whom He did foreknow," not "what He foreknew." Nor does it mean that He merely foreknew the fact that we would be saved, but that He foreknew each one individually. Peter also said, "elect according to the foreknowledge of God"; He knew the persons whom He chose.
All of this is most comforting to the heart of the saved soul. We gladly acknowledge that it was all of His grace, and that we were the unworthy objects of His sovereign choice. This does not (as some charge) make for any carelessness in our walk, for He who chose us created us "in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." Eph. 2:1010For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10). Where Peter speaks of election the same principle holds true, for our election of God is unto sanctification (or setting apart) of the Spirit "unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." We are set apart by the Spirit, not only to the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus, but to His obedience; that is, we are to obey as He did. And how was that? He as a man always had a will that delighted in God's will. He could say, "I delight to do Thy will, O My God," and "I do always those things that please Him [the Father]." His was not a legal obedience where a human will had to submit itself to God's will, but His will ever and always was to do the Father's will. (Except that He shrank from being made sin- a part of His divine perfection.)
Now we come to the erroneous teaching of the book in question. The author speaks of God's sovereignty and His right to do as He pleases, and then by later comments nullifies it. He limits God's right to do as He pleases by a misuse of the word "foreknowledge." Speaking of Jacob and Esau, this author says, "God looked down the avenue of time and He saw the response which would come from the heart of Jacob, and the lack of response, from the heart of Esau; on the basis of His foreknowledge of their behavior as free will agents, He was able to lay His plans accordingly." This is basically erroneous. If such could be true, God would be circumscribed by the volition of the impotent creature. This would leave Him no choice at all. God would cease to be sovereign.
God chose Jacob instead of Esau as the one through whom the Messiah would come, and that sovereign choice was in no way dependent on the later conduct of either or both men.
This author comes very close to another serious mistake, often made by others, by saying, "God chose Jacob, He rejected Esau." Many have attributed to God the reprobation of Esau and of all the lost; that is, they were rejected by God's decree before they were born. This is not to be found in the Holy Scriptures. God said to the mother, about the two boys, "The elder shall serve the younger" (Gen. 25:2323And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. (Genesis 25:23)), but did that make Esau a profane man? By no means. God certainly had the right to make Jacob the master, and Esau the servant, but that did not consign Esau to reprobation. What either Jacob or Esau did had nothing to do with God's selection, but it is not until the last book in the Old Testament that God said, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Esau and his posterity had then proved by a long and continuous course of action their unrelenting hatred of Jacob and his descendants. The infidel would fain place the statement of Malachi along with the one of Genesis which merely said which son would serve the other. It is important to remember that God did not say before they were born that He loved Jacob or hated Esau.
The natural heart of man rebels against God's right to choose some for blessing, but this is largely due to a lack of seeing the hopelessly lost condition of the whole human race. All, all have been proved hopelessly bad—"All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." All deserve death and eternal judgment- not one excepted. Mankind is so bad that unless God chose and called some, none would be saved. True we are saved by faith, but God is careful to add, "and that [faith] not of yourselves: it is the gift of God." Eph. 2:88For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: (Ephesians 2:8). I cannot even boast of faith, for if God had not given it to me I would not have believed. Not one redeemed one in heaven will be able to take credit to himself for anything. The poet Cowper well expressed this truth in the following words:
"Of all the gifts Thy love bestows,
Thou Giver of all good!
Not heaven itself a richer knows
Than the Redeemer's blood.
"Faith, too, that trusts the blood through grace,
From that same love we gain;
Else, sweetly, as it suits our case,
The gift had been in vain."
The official head of every sovereign state or country has the right to pardon condemned criminals, a n d occasionally this prerogative is used, but does that mean that all condemned criminals must be pardoned? Oh, no! And shall God, who is supreme and who in order to prove His love and maintain His holiness gave up His dear Son to the death of the cross, be criticized when He picks up some unworthy objects and gives them to believe? "Nay but, 0 man, who art thou that repliest against God?"
As for man's free will, there is no such thing. He may be free to will, but his will is not free. He is sold under sin, is a slave to his lusts, and a slave of Satan-how then is his will free? Did the slaves of a century ago have a free will to choose their masters or their work? Surely not. Neither has lost man.
Another has said, "A man being really set to choose between evil and good is alike horrible and absurd; because it supposes the good and evil to be outside, and himself neither. If he is one or the other in disposition, the choice is there. To have a fair choice, he must be personally indifferent; but to be in a state of indifference to good and evil is perfectly horrible. If a man has an inclination, his choice is not
free: a free will is rank nonsense morally, because if he have a will, he wills something. God can will to create. But will in moral things means either self-will, which is sin (for we ought to obey); or an inclination to something, which is really a choice made as far as will goes.... Man was set to good [in Eden], though not externally forced to remain so. He first exercised his will—free will, morally speaking—in eating the forbidden fruit, and was therein and thereby lost, and since then he has been inclined to evil."
If the Son makes a man free, he is free indeed (John 8:3636If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. (John 8:36)). When one is set free and has a new nature, then he may in the power of the new life delight to do God's will, but apart from new birth man is a slave. And if God did not act in grace, then all men would be lost.
We may well say with another:
"Why was I made to hear His voice
And hearken while there's room?
While others make the wretched choice,
And rather starve than come.
" 'Twas the same grace that spread the feast,
That gently forced me in,
Else I had still refused to taste,
And perished in my sin."
Let us remember that the truth of election is a family secret. We should not preach it to the unsaved. We should tell men of their lost condition, and of the Savior to meet them in their need. Then we should press the urgent need of repentance and of believing in the Lord Jesus Christ at once. The Apostle Paul who gave the Church the truth of election also said, "Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!" God calls on all men everywhere to repent, and takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. The old illustration of a great sign over an entrance, reading, "Whosoever will may enter," is still true in the gospel. Then when we have entered, we read on the reverse side that we were "chosen in Him before the foundation of the world."
Nor should we forget that the same Word that teaches us God's sovereign electing grace, also teaches that man is responsible for his sins. God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are found side by side in the Holy Scriptures. Man is responsible and will be judged for his sins and for rejecting Christ when He was offered to him. Man is without excuse, and in a lost eternity will have no one to blame but himself, while the redeemed in glory will take no credit to themselves, but confess what debtors they are to His grace. But never, never speak of election to the unsaved, and if perchance one of them should raise the subject and suggest that he does not know whether he is one of the elect or not, you can tell him that if he will accept Christ he is one of the elect. This throws the responsibility back on himself as to whether or not he will accept Christ. May God help us to keep all truth in its relative distinctness, and to share in t h e Apostle's burden: "Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sake, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." 2 Tim. 2:1010Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. (2 Timothy 2:10).