His Purpose Not Ours
Notes
Transcript
The way that many, if not most, see the gospel presented today likely seems at odds with our study of Romans 5 through 8 as a whole.
Consider the messages…
At times, it begins and ends with the declaration, “God loves you”. Or, it may be “God loves everyone and wants everyone to go to heaven, so He has done everything He can do to make salvation possible, so now you just need to decide for Him.”
And much of our cultural thinking, if people even do think about it, can be truly summarized in that infamous tract, “God cast His vote, Satan cast his, and now you need to cast the deciding vote.”
And this thinking has permeated even how people recount their own salvation: “I decided to accept Jesus”, as though God has made salvation available but the decisive action was theirs alone.
But nearly always, the basic motivation that people give for this is so that a person won’t spend eternity in hell.
Now, we really do need to be careful here, because these presentations draw upon some truths which must be preserved.
God’s love is real and glorious.
The sinner really must repent and believe – no one can ever be saved apart from personally and willingly entrusting himself to Christ.
And Christ really does save His people from the wrath of God and the eternal punishment their sins deserve. There are many earnest believers today whose minds were first arrested by the realization that they stood condemned before God, captive to sin, and entirely unable to deliver themselves. Remember Paul’s cry of anguish at the end of Romans 7: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”
This was not merely the cry of a man who disliked the punishment awaiting him, no! It was the anguished cry of a man to whom the Law had come – one who now saw the sinfulness of his sin, agreed with the justice of his condemnation, and realized that deliverance must come from someone outside himself.
We should never speak of that true deliverance as though it were small or unimportant!
But the problem comes when these things, which are true, are isolated from everything else Scripture reveals, and then made to bear the weight of the entire gospel, made to appear as they are the focal point of the entire gospel of Jesus Christ.
“God loves you” in this context all too easily becomes an undefined assurance that God “affirms you as you presently are”, and chiefly appears to exist in order to secure your happiness.
Similarly, “I decided to accept Jesus”, although in many ways a reasonable explanation, nevertheless can tend to place the decisive act of salvation within the sinner’s own will, as though the ultimate reason one person believes while another refuses must be found within the person themselves.
And again, the “God saved me so I would not go to hell” focus all too readily reduces salvation to being thought of as little more than eternal punishment-avoidance, a “get out of hell free” card if you will, to allow a person to go on with their life as they please as though Christ died merely to preserve us from the consequences of sin, while leaving us free to continue living for ourselves any old way we please.
The central problem is not that God’s love is unreal, that human faith is unnecessary, or that deliverance from hell is insignificant, no! The problem is the center around which these truths have been arranged.
And, if we’re honest, even our habit of using the word “salvation” in terms of only what we are saved from rather than what we are saved unto, can easily predispose us toward thinking only of our own rescue. Yet the New Testament does not leave us with the bare identity of being “those who are saved.” It describes believers as the church, the beloved of God, the brethren, the saints, those who are in Christ, those who belong to Him. Each description points beyond mere escape, over to the new relationship and purpose into which God has brought us.
Salvation is truly a rescue, yes! A rescue of the perishing, even. But it is not merely a rescue, and the rescued man or woman is not its ultimate center.
In this man-centered arrangement, God provides the opportunity, man supplies the decisive response, and the final goal is that man might obtain the eternal future he desires. In this, God’s holiness is muted, man’s guilt is softened, repentance becomes optional, Christ’s lordship is neglected, and God is reduced to the guarantor of human happiness.
But is that the account of salvation Paul has been giving us throughout Romans?
Is man’s will the decisive cause? Is man’s deliverance the ultimate end? Does the whole saving work of God arise and unfold according to the purposes of man?
Listen again to Paul’s language:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
Take note of this… these final words, “according to His purpose”, overturn that entire man-centered arrangement as being fundamentally flawed.
Now, there’s been good reason for us to distinguish the general call of the gospel from the effectual call of God. The general call goes outwardly and indiscriminately to every hearer; Christ crucified is proclaimed, every sinner is commanded to repent and believe, and Christ sincerely promises that the one who comes to Him He will never cast out.
But the effectual call is different; it is God’s distinct inward action by which He opens spiritually blind eyes, transforms the disposition of the sinner, and unfailingly brings that person willingly and believingly to Christ. Through this call, the sinner truly apprehends the truth proclaimed in the general call and willingly embraces the Christ offered there.
In the course of our study, we’ve also considered whether God acts unjustly when He effectually calls one guilty sinner while leaving another under the condemnation that sinner already deserves. We realized that God is not barring the way of anyone who truly desires Christ; apart from His gracious action here, both sinners already stand guilty and neither desires Christ as He truly is.
And those passages in 1 Timothy 2 and 2 Peter 3 which are so frequently placed in apparent opposition to this particular and effectual call do not overturn Paul’s teaching. Far from it! For we discovered that when those passages are read in context, they clarify and support it.
When we began this last major movement in verse 28, I described it as moving “from the fruit to the root”. “Those who love God” describes something real within the experience of the believer; the heart that once despised God has been transformed and now truly loves Him. And that love did not create itself, it had an underlying cause – God’s effectual call.
But in this last phrase, Paul takes us beneath even that call and shows us what governs it and explains why it is given; this is all “according to His purpose.”
And now we can see why these final words are so decisive. The effectual call did not originate in some purpose formed within us; it came according to His purpose—a purpose which existed before we believed, and indeed, before we ourselves existed at all.
If we begin and end our thinking of the gospel with human experience, we have begun the story too late and brought it to an end too soon. We have begun too late because God’s saving purpose preceded our faith; and we have ended too soon because God does not save sinners merely so that they might escape punishment. He calls them to Himself, unites them to Christ, and sets them apart for the holy ends He determined before the foundation of the world.
And here, I think that Paul’s second letter to Timothy can be especially helpful as we ponder these things.
Therefore do not be ashamed of either the witness about our Lord or me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity,
Notice how closely the idea Paul is conveying here corresponds to what we read in Romans 8:28. Here in 2 Timothy, He “saved us and called us with a holy calling”, but that calling was “not according to our works.” Rather, it was “according to His own purpose and grace.”
For our purposes today, I don’t want us to get overly caught up in that phrase “not according to our works” and direct our focus only onto the question of works versus faith – that is important, but by doing so we may miss the key point where this coincides with this last phrase in Romans 8:28, “those who are called according to His purpose.”
No, the importance of the phrase “not according to our works” for our purposes today, is that it rules out anything originating within us as the governing explanation for why God saved and called us. Our works, our worthiness, our wisdom, our potential… none of these things establish the purpose for our being called by God.
No, Paul directs our attention entirely away from man and toward God: “according to His own purpose and grace” is the particular way he puts it here to Timothy.
This is not a purpose formed by the sinner and then submitted to God for His stamp of approval, no! Nor is this referring to some purpose which God developed in response to something He discovered within us. And neither is it a purpose jointly authored by God and man, as though God contributed something, and then man in cooperation with God contributed the other part.
It is God’s own purpose, through and through. It proceeds from Him, it belongs wholly to Him, it is governed entirely by Him, it is tied inseparably to His grace.
This is important, because grace definitionally cannot be something which originates in our own worthiness or is owed on account of any work we do, or attribute we possess. The moment favor becomes something God owes us, it ceases to be grace and becomes a debt, and God is no man’s debtor – just look at the end of Romans 11, “how unsearchable are His judgements”, “who became His counselor”, “who has first given to Him [meaning God] that it might be repaid to him”, and so on.
So when Paul says that God saved us and called us “according to His own purpose and grace,” he takes the deepest explanation for our salvation entirely away from us and places it entirely within God Himself.
And then Paul takes us farther back than our minds can naturally go, saying that this grace “was given to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.”
This has come to be one of my favorite statements in all of Scripture, in the Greek translated as “from all eternity” here is “πρὸ χρόνων αἰωνίων”. In a very real sense, this refers to “the time before time was time as we understand time”.
Paul is reaching back to a time before every event within created history. Before we believed, before we heard the gospel, before Christ entered the world as a baby in Bethlehem, before Adam was formed from the dust, and before the ages themselves began, God’s purpose already stood—and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus.
God’s saving purpose was not formed in response to something that happened within history. It precedes history. It does not arise from the sinner, nor is it revised according to the sinner’s response. It belongs wholly to God and rests eternally in Christ.
Now, don’t take this to mean that our faith is unreal, or that repentance and belief are unnecessary – Scripture is absolutely clear, real repentance and belief in the heart are absolutely required.
Nor did His purpose take its governing character from the choices His creatures would make. Paul grounds it in God’s own purpose and grace, given to us in Christ before the ages began.
The sinner’s faith is not the author of God’s purpose, rather God’s purpose is the reason that the sinner is effectually called and brought willingly to faith in Christ Jesus, and in fact God’s purpose is centered on Christ. Every blessing in salvation comes to us in Christ: we are chosen in Christ, redeemed through Christ, justified through the righteousness of Christ, united to Christ, given life in Christ.
We who are in Christ Jesus no longer belong to ourselves; we belong to Him. Even the immediate setting of Paul’s words confirms this: God “saved us and called us with a holy calling.”
This was true of Paul and Timothy, and it remains true of every one of us today; everyone whom God saves He has called with a holy calling.
That calling is not holy because Timothy possessed some holiness which attracted God’s attention, no! It is holy because it proceeds from the holy God, sets those whom He calls apart unto God Himself, and lays claim to the whole of their lives for God’s own holy ends.
Timothy had been saved from condemnation, but he had also been called unto God.
And this forces us to ask the question which a man-centered gospel rarely asks: “For what purpose does God save us?”
Scripture answers that question at more than one level. There is an immediate purpose accomplished within the life of every person God saves—and there is an ultimate purpose toward which the whole saving work of God is directed.
Paul summarizes that immediate purpose in Ephesians 2:10,
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Paul has just declared in the sentences preceding this that we are saved by grace through faith, and not as a result of works. But he also immediately adds that although we are not saved by our good works, we most certainly are created anew for good works.
God did not save us merely to change the destination awaiting us after death. He made us His workmanship; He created us as new creatures in Christ Jesus so that we would now walk according to what He had prepared for us.
Even our new life of obedience, then, does not originate in a purpose formed within ourselves. The God who purposed our salvation also prepared the holy walk that would follow it.
Salvation is not merely deliverance from condemnation. It is deliverance out from the dominion of sin and self, so that we would now belong to God and walk according to His purposes. We who were appointed sinners in Adam are now appointed righteous in Christ; we who were under the authority of darkness have been transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love, namely Jesus Christ.
But even this transformed life is not the final and ultimate purpose of salvation. If we stopped with what salvation accomplishes within us, we would still leave man far too near to the center of it all.
No, God’s saving purpose can only be understood rightly when it is seen as part of His greater purpose in Christ:
For in Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, And in Him all things hold together.
And He is the head of the body, the church; Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
Listen to the direction of Paul’s language: all things were created in Him, through Him, and for Him.
And then comes that great statement of purpose: “so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.”
That includes God’s saving work within all of us who are in Christ Jesus. Not one of us began as a friend of God, we were all formerly rebellious enemies – myself included. But God calls sinners, unites them to Christ, makes them new creations, and prepares a holy walk for them, so that His Son might have first place in everything.
We truly do receive enormous, monumental blessings in salvation – but we are not its ultimate center, Christ is.
We are chosen in Christ, redeemed through Christ, justified through the righteousness of Christ, united to Christ, and given life in Christ, so that the glory and sufficiency of Christ might be displayed through those whom He has redeemed.
That is why Paul can say in Ephesians 1 that we have been predestined “according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will,” and then state the end toward which that purpose moves: “to the praise of His glory.”
So then, there is both an immediate and an ultimate purpose involved, the immediate serves the ultimate.
In the immediate sense, we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for the holy walk He prepared beforehand.
But even that serves the ultimate purpose: that Christ would have first place in everything, and that God’s saving grace would result in the praise of His glory.
So salvation does not begin with us, it is not governed by us, and it does not terminate upon us.
We are “called according to His purpose.”
And this truth must recalibrate the way we understand even our own salvation. If I tell the story only by saying, “I decided to accept Christ so that I would not go to hell,” I have begun that story too late, centered it upon the wrong person, and brought it to an end too soon.
Salvation truly is for our good, yes! But we must always recall that it is not centered upon us. God has rescued us from condemnation, created us anew for the holy walk He prepared, and united us to His Son for a particular purpose – so that Christ might have first place and God’s grace might be displayed to the praise of His glory.
That leaves us no ground for boasting, because the purpose did not originate within us, nor does it end with us. By His grace, God has taken us up into a purpose older and greater than ourselves.
And this gives us every ground for assurance, because that purpose does not rest upon the stability of our resolve, but entirely within the God who is even now at work within us, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
But it also leaves us no permission to continue living for ourselves, because we are His workmanship and we now belong to Him.
The God who works all things together for our good is the God who works all things according to the counsel of His will.
We are called according to His purpose – not ours.
Let us Pray!
