God's Sovereign Choice Part 4
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Introduction:
"Compatilbilism"
That the free will of man is compatible with the Divine Decree
But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.
Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger; the staff in their hands is my fury!
Gen.
When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them.
And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them,
who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, “ ‘Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed’—
for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,
to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness,
I. Paul’s Passion (vs. 1-5)
II. Paul’s Proclamation (vs. 6-8)
III. God’s Prerogative (vs. 9-29)
We ended last time together really getting into the deep end of the deep end of the pool.
We have been discussing all of these things and realizing that God loved and chose Jacob and that He hated and did not chose Esau.
That is was not based on foresaw faith or rejection in either one of them for the Bible is clear, and we looked at those verses, that God does not decide to do what He does because of foreseen faith or rejection in men.
Because what you need to realize is that if God”looked down through the corridors of time” all He would see are a bunch of dead people, right?
Biblically speaking, without the assistance of Grace, He would not see people accepting or rejecting, because He would see a bunch of dead people.
Now, just to be far and complete, the synergist will say that they believe that the assistance of Grace is necessary for people to be saved.
But the problem with their view is that they say that at the end of the day the autonomous free will of man can override the sovereignty and the grace of God; and that is what is offensive about synergistic doctrine.
I think a great Biblical example of this is found in the Gospel of .
You remember that in , a very close friend to our Lord, Lazarus, was sick to the point of death.
He was from Bethany and Jesus was very close to he and his two sisters, Mary and Martha.
The Scriptures tell us that when Jesus had heard that Lazarus was sick He waited two days before He left.
Then in verse 14.
Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus has died,
There was no pony express or Jerusalem Postal Service around to bring Christ a telegram, this was Divine power at work.
When Jesus arrived at Bethany, he was greeting by Martha.
Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
In other words, I believe that you can heal him but I do not believe that you can raise him from the dead.
So there is no doubt here that we are speaking about a dead person.
No, notice what happened.
Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”
That is the reason that Jesus waited.
Because there was an old urban legend that after a person dies that their spirit hovered above the body for three days before going into Hades.
Perhaps Jesus was accommodating that legend so that there would be no doubt about what He was about to do.
When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.”
The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
The power of the Son of God goes to the tomb of a dead person and commands that life enter that body once again and it obeys His voice.
He did not “look down the corridors of time” to see if Lazarus was going to rise when He said “come fourth” and then determine that would happen, such is ridiculous.
He commands and it happens.
And then we began to really speaking about God’s prerogative in doing what He wants to do.
How that God will have “mercy on whom He will have mercy”.
Let me ask you a question.
Does that sound like that God feels obligated to give mercy?
No it does not.
But the problem with the theology of the synergist is that they really do believe that it is unfair and unjust God not to give equal opportunities to every single person and then what that person will do with it is up to them.
Now, that sound good and it sounds equal but it just is not Scriptural.
Paul gave us the illustration of Pharoah and how that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart each time that he said Israel could leave and then changed his mind.
As I said last time, right away the synergist will say that “But the Bible says that Pharoah hardened his own heart first and then God hardened it”.
Two points of that.
First, no one has ever argued that.
Men are born with hearts hardened toward the true and living God; which is why Pharoah worshipped a plethora of Gods before Moses ever arrived.
Second, and this is important, what was the Apostolic interpretation of the events in Exodus?
Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
The mighty acts of God at work there is Exodus demonstrate two great truths.
He delivered Israel to exhibit His sovereign mercy on those whom He desires and He raised up and destroyed Pharoah to exhibit the corollary truth that He hardened those whom He desires.
Only His divine desire determines which will it be.
Moses was a Jew, whereas Pharoah was a Gentile; but both of them were sinners.
Both were murderers, and both witnessed God’s miracles.
Yet Moses was redeemed and Pharoah was not.
God raised up Pharoah in order to reveal His own glory and power, and God had mercy on Moses in order to se him to deliver His people Israel.
Pharoah was a ruler, whereas Moses was a slave under Pharoah.
But Moses received God’s mercy and compassion, because that was God’s will.
The Lord’s work is sovereign, and He acts entirely according to His own will to accomplish His own purposes.
The issue was not the presumed rights of either men but rather the sovereign will of God.
The word “harden” is “σκληρύνω” literally means “to be unyielding in resisting information, to be obstinate ”.
Now, this is the flip-side of grace, the concept of hardening.
Some have alleged that God is unjust is hardening somebody’s heart and then punishing them for doing what he could not possibly stop from doing one his heart was hardened.
Such an idea if utterly repugnant to everything that the Bible teaches about the character of God.
The question is, Shall the just of all the earth ever do wrong?
God is incapable of committing an unjust act, there is no dark side to his personality by which He would commit an outrageous act of injustice, such as would be the case if he hardened somebody and then punished him for being hardened.
We have to make a distinction between:
Active Hardening
Passive Hardening.
And we need to understand here that what we are reading is God’s punitive judgment against a wicked man.
The Gospel of God: Romans The Sovereign Power of God (9:17–21)
Pharaoh was already wicked, he was already ill-disposed towards the things of God. Out of Pharaoh’s heart came only wickedness continually. To do something evil was Pharaoh’s sheer delight. The only thing that could stop him would be the restraints and constraints that God placed upon him. This brings in the concept of ‘common grace’. We distinguish between special grace and common grace. Special grace is for the redeemed: the grace of salvation. Common grace is the favour or the benefits that all men, indiscriminately, receive at the hands of God. One of the most important principles of common grace is the restraint of evil.
The Gospel of God: Romans The Sovereign Power of God (9:17–21)
All God had to do to accelerate the wickedness of Pharaoh was to remove the restraints from him. God had been keeping Pharaoh’s wickedness in check, providentially. Even though Pharaoh was powerful, he was not all-powerful, he was still under the control of the providence of God. Pharaoh would have liked to perform more wickedness than he actually did. God wanted Pharaoh to resist the Exodus, in order that Israel would understand that deliverance came not through the beneficence of Pharaoh, but through the redemptive grace of God. All God had to do was remove the restraints. He did not have to create fresh evil in the heart of Pharaoh. The evil disposition was already there, and so through a providential act that was both an act of punishment on Pharaoh, and an act of redemption to Israel, God removed the restraints and therefore passively hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
Some may say, “that’s not fair! If God knew that Pharoah was going to commit sin, shouldn’t God have stopped him?”
But I ask the question, “Why should he?”
If God stops Pharoah from committing sin, and therefore reduces the number of his sin and the consequent amount of punishment, he would be doing Pharoah a favor, and a favor is what we call grace.
So had God not hardened Pharaoh’s heart, he would have been gracious to Pharoah.
But Paul is emphasizing the point that grace is voluntary.
God does not owe Pharoah grace; so God let’s him go on knowing full well that is going to sin, and knowing full well that when he sins he is going to be brought into judgment.
Hence, God’s activity towards Pharoah is an act of punitive judgment.
Pharoah gets justice, the people of Israel get mercy.
So there is no injustice involved in this act of hardening.
Then the Apostle introduces another imaginary objector; probably one that he had heard.
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?
“Paul, that is not fair! How can it be fair that God hardens whoever He chooses and then holds them responsible for their hardening when their destiny has already been divinely determined?”
Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.
There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. They took them all in battle.
For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed, just as the Lord commanded Moses.
What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened,
Josua 11:18-20
Anyone who has taught the Doctrines of Grace or the Doctrine of God’s Sovereignty has encountered this reaction.
The best answer I give is the Apostolic answer.
Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
In other words, it is blasphemous even to question, not to mention, deny God’s right to hold men accountable when they are captive to His sovereign will.
If someone understands the doctrine of predestination as Paul teaches it, and they hate it, then they are merely demonstrating their own fallenness by attacking God and assailing his character.
The assumption made by those who reply against Gos is firstly, that God is unjust, and secondly, that God owes us mercy.
Those two errors need to be seen for what they are and we need the antidote to understand that firstly, God is never unjust, and secondly, God is never obligated to be merciful.
If we understand those two points we should have clear sailing through these difficult passages.
Paul continues by showing the absurdity of such an allegation:
Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?”
Ro
So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel.
And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.
Then the word of the Lord came to me:
“O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Romans: The MacArthur New Testament Commentary The Second Anticipated Question Answered
Although it is to an infinitely greater degree, God is the creator of men much as a potter is the creator of his clay vessels. And it is no more rational, and far more arrogant and foolish, for men to question the justice and wisdom of God than, if such were possible, for a clay bowl to question the motives and purposes of the craftsman who made it.
To fully understand God, we would have to be equal to the God who made us, a notion even more absurd than a clay pot’s being equal to the potter who molded it.