Canons of Dort--Grace

Today we turn to the “I” of Tulip, irresistible grace. But before we dive into the lesson on this fourth head of doctrine, a word about grace and how to understand it. We often hear grace paired together with mercy, and can easily think that they are synonymous. But they are different. Put simply, mercy is not getting what we deserve, and grace is getting what we don’t deserve.

So, thinking back to last week’s teaching on total depravity, every human being since Adam, with the exception of Jesus Christ, is totally depraved—that is, totally lost, bound, dead in sin. There isn’t anything redeeming in a human being that would make them worthy of salvation. There is not such value or quality, or goodness or anything that would spare a human being from the deserved punishment for sin.

Mercy is the removal of the penalty for sin. Mercy is pardoning the sinner. Mercy is the family of a victim of murder, telling the murderer that they forgive him and do not require him to pay the penalty for murder. The deed is done, it can’t be undone. They will not hold it against him forever. God shows us His mercy in this, while we were still sinners, still guilty of sinful, murderous thoughts and deeds, Christ died for us (Rom. 5.8). Christ put Himself in our place, bore God’s wrath against sin, so as to meet God’s justice. And because the penalty was paid, we are forgiven by faith. God hasn’t overlooked the sin, He hasn’t swept it under the rug, He Himself paid it all.

Grace goes one step beyond mercy. It gives us what we don’t deserve: everlasting life. Grace unites us with God’s love. Grace is fellowship with God and others. Grace is all the benefits of God. All His goodness, all His power, all His strength, all His courage, all His obedience, all His Truth! We praise and glorify God because He is all in. In saving humanity from sin, He gave Himself, fully and completely. In compassion and patience, there is no comparison at all. In attention to what is needed for the giving of truth, He spared no detail. God provided everything, and He has made Himself and His salvation known, everything that is needed to be known for true conversion.

True Conversion (Article 11)

What is true conversion? Article 11 summarises it very well. Please bear with me as I tease a few things out. The first thing we notice is the the first bit of the article. Who is doing the work, just so that we are sure in our minds. It is God. “God accomplishes His good pleasure in the elect.” What is His good pleasure in the elect? He works in them true conversion.

What is true conversion? All that follows after, which God Himself does. He causes the gospel to be preached to the elect. Just a note here, we who are the elect, we know who each other are, as we are all here. But we don’t know whom else God has elected. So, we preach everywhere—like the sower who sows seeds not only on the good soil, but on the path, the rocky and weedy places. For by God’s grace, perhaps even those places can become good soil—for we see God’s work in true conversion:

As God’s Word is preached, He powerfully illuminates their minds by His Holy Spirit. This is why we pray prayers of illumination, before God’s Word is preached. This means that whenever a sermon is particularly good, meaningful, or connective—it is because of the Holy Spirit’s work in it.

The Holy Spirit works in the preaching of the Word—which by all human estimation is the least effective form of communication—but God takes by His power and makes it the most effective form of communication, man is weak; but God is strong. The Holy Spirit illuminates minds so that they may rightly understand and discern the things of the Spirit of God. God enables and empowers us to understand Him and His plan, and everything concerning His message, truth, righteousness, life, everything.

Now, remember last week’s lesson, there is nothing of the good things of God’s image in man that hasn’t been corrupted by sin. So, how can a sinful man, enslaved, dead in trespasses and sins, comprehend the things of God? Dead people, enslaved people cannot know or respond.

God the Holy Spirit makes people alive, and receptive to Him and His Word. He pervades—I love that word, He completely spreads through and is perceived in every part of the inmost recesses of man. The Holy Spirit, in entering the elect person, fills him. He is perceived by the man in his mind, his heart, his will, his strength, his soul.

This is described as opening that which is closed, softening that which is hard—think of Pharaoh, whose heart was hard, and God hardened even more. For the elect, the Holy Spirit softens the heart, removing the heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh (Eze 36:26). He circumcises the heart—remember circumcision was the sign of the Old Covenant with Abraham, the circumcision of the heart, the giving of oneself fully and completely to Christ is the result of the new covenant in Christ’s blood.

The Holy Spirit pours into the elect new qualities into the will—that is, a new desire. The old will was dead, and unable to do anything Godly. These new qualities transform the will so that, rather than being dead, evil, disobedient and refractory—stubborn or unmanageable—He renders good, obedient and pliable—manageable. The Holy Spirit transforms the elect into a good, strong tree that puts forth good fruit and good actions. The result of the Spirit's work is someone who is born again.

Born Again (Article 12)

Let me ask you a question. How involved were you in your conception? Not at all, right? Then, how involved are you in your regeneration? Not at all. You are born again, not by your own choosing, but by God’s choosing, as we read in John 1:13 “who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

God does this work, in and through people, through the preaching of the gospel—the good news about salvation in Jesus Christ—and all this work is of God, it belongs to God. We contribute nothing. This is why conversion is called being born again, or that as Christians, we are new creations. In this article, we see this powerful statement concerning the Holy Spirit’s work in conversion: “It is evidently a supernatural work, most powerful, and at the same time most delightful, astonishing, mysterious, and ineffable; not inferior in efficacy to creation or the resurrection of the dead!”

This is what it means to be born again. We are born, not by our own will, but by God’s will, in as much a married man and woman decide to have children. But as we all know, that decision doesn’t simply make it so. Having decided to have children, they have things to do, but more than that, far more than that, God has to enable a child to be conceived.

In as much as God decides who will or will not have children—consider how God opened and closed the wombs of Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Elizabeth, and many others. In as much as that, God also decides who is elect, and then works out conversion, or being born again, or becoming a new creation in Christ. God does the work.

And once the work is effected, then, the will of the man becomes active. And as the will is now active, the converted, elect person is “rightly said to believe and repent by virtue of that grace received.” This fourth head of doctrine rightly establishes the supremacy of God in the whole process of conversion and belief. As we’ll see next Sunday morning, when we look at Ephesians 2:1-11, we all know that even faith itself is a gift of God. Basically, everything we have is from the glorious, gracious, loving hand of God. But there are some who do not believe in God’s supernatural power of His omnipotence to bend the will of man to faith. And so we must reject this error.

Rejection of Errors (Paragraph 8)

Related to the concept of free will, those who do not believe in God’s omnipotent power to bend man’s will, believe that man can reject God’s grace. In other words, grace is resistible.

Now, we can understand why someone might want to suggest that man can resist God’s grace. They would use it to answer why people resist God’s grace, His love, His mercy? And they would suggest it also answers why some people seem to come to faith only to resist it later.

They then teach, that man is able to resist God. He is able to overthrow what God intends to do in a man’s heart, and by repeatedly resisting God and His grace, he can prevent his regeneration entirely. What do you see as the biggest problem with this idea? What is the problem with this answer as to why people fail to come to conversion, or why some seemingly converted people later walk away from the faith all together?

The problem is this, it puts man, or humankind in total control. It makes man more powerful than God. And it also assumes that a man or a woman can, by their own will, stay dead, or die again after being born again.

If that sounds weird, it is because we see in this error the notion that human beings are spiritually alive. We know that they are not. Human beings are dead in their trespasses and sins. A dead man cannot resist grace, any more than a dead man can respond to grace.

What this means is that God, in His omnipotent power, must make a man or a woman alive in Him first. God must raise mankind from spiritual death into spiritual life. This is what Jesus meant when He said you must be born again. It is a work of God. And God is omnipotent—all powerful.

As the rejection of the error in paragraph 8 continues, “This is nothing less than the denial of all the efficiency of God’s grace in our conversion, and the subjecting of the working of Almighty God to the will of man...” To deny all the efficiency, that is, adequacy, perfection, irresistibility of God’s grace is to deny God Himself. It is idolatry, for it is making God into something of our own imagination. It is the denial of God and the idolatry of man.

Good Soil (Article 17)

So what we find in the parable of the soils is a better explanation for why some appear to resist God’s grace. There are three bad soils, and one good soil. This is to say, that God’s omniscience together with His omnipotence works to establish some, but not all as members of His kingdom.

What we have then is some people making a good show of true faith, but not having true faith in the end. This is easily seen in those who look great on Sundays but fail to live according to the Spirit every other day of the week. I’m not describing someone who, by the Holy Spirit, is regenerated in Christ Jesus, who strives to live according God’s Word not only on Sunday, but every day of the week, but ends up failing and falling. Rather, I am describing someone who wants to look faithful in front of other Christians, but who really isn’t faithful in his or her heart. Such a person could be in church their whole life and not truly be saved.

Or how about the person in the church who cannot stand for the gospel of Christ, but walks away whenever there is pressure, or persecution? They slowly drift away, they stop coming as frequently. They don’t read their Bible or pray as often. Or they go along with every new idea, every wind and wave of human doctrine, human invention, human revisioning of the the word of God.

Or how about he person who intellectually knows that God is good, and He is the great provider for everything, but in their heart, they cannot trust Him. Their life is full of worry and anxiety—not the clinical kind, mind you, but the other kind, where they hold onto such feelings and never do anything about them. Or then there's the person who keeps looking at the things of the world in order to find joy and favour and delight. But no matter how often the world, even God’s good and wonderful things in the world, fails to deliver, even though he never finds what he’s looking for, he never looks to God, for God is kept from him, even though he comes to church.

In contrast to all those is the good soil. Good soil produces 30, 60, 100 times return. From one seed grows a plant that produces seeds, 30 times what was planted, 60 times what was planted, 100 times what was planted, depending on the kind of plant, the soil conditions, the growing conditions.

God’s promise is this: He chooses, He elects. He transforms the heart, removing the stoniness, removing the weeds, the worries, the cares, the concerns, and He makes it good soil. He transforms us so that we produce fruit: the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. He puts the life of Christ into us. He causes us to grow.

We grow also by calling others to faith in Christ Jesus. We begin in our homes; in our families. Your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews are your primary mission field! Then you have those in the congregation. Then you have people in every other sphere of life.

God is the one who chooses. We, from our perspective know who has been chosen—we can tell in ourselves, by the fact of the spiritual growth we see in ourselves and we can tell in others, in their spiritual growth. But we cannot tell by the people we meet in our neighbourhoods, in our workplaces, wherever. So we keep sharing Jesus, we keep inviting people to follow Him. We keep it up and never stop! Amen.