Untitled Sermon

To Ensure My Humility (2:8–9)

So important is it to Paul that God’s kindness gets full credit that his summary of this passage takes away every avenue of personal credit for our salvation. Paul says that we are saved by grace through faith, “and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). For centuries, commentators have put forth arguments about what the “this” or the “it” in this sentence means. Some have said, on the basis of their theology, “it” is grace. Others, on the basis of the nearest antecedent, say “it” is faith. Most modern commentators say that “it” is the whole package, grace and faith. Grace is his unmerited favor; it comes to us through faith in what he has done. But even that faith is a gift, so that no one can boast (Eph. 2:8–9). For we are God’s workmanship, a product of his hand, created in Christ Jesus—made by God through union with Christ—to do good works not of our devising, but that he himself planned in advance for us to do (Eph. 2:10). Grace is of him, faith is of him, our union with Christ is of him, the works we do are of him, and the intention to do them is of him. So there can be no boasting or pride, but only an acknowledgment of the kindness of the gift of God.

To reiterate, there can be no boasting or pride, but only an acknowledgment of the kindness of the gift of God, because this emphasis ensures our humility and clarifies our mission. The clear statement of Scripture and the witness of my own heart both affirm that my salvation is unmerited and unearned. Still, we must confess that no one but God can answer every question about predestination. I cannot take away all the mysteries of sovereignty or reconcile all the issues of justice and logic that it raises.

If, for instance, God is entirely sovereign, providentially controlling all his creatures and all their actions, how can we say in the Westminster Shorter Catechism that God left Adam to the freedom of his own will? Justice demands, at least at that stage of human existence, that Adam have freedom of choice in order for God to be fair in imposing punishment for his sin. Yet how could even Adam have been free if God is entirely sovereign, “preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions,” to quote another portion of our Catechism?11 Here our human logic reaches its limits, and we should not fear to say so even as we follow the clear teaching of Scripture in affirming both Adam’s freedom and God’s sovereignty.

We should be willing, as church historian David Calhoun taught his students was the practice of John Calvin in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, to acknowledge that when we come to the end of our logic we should not turn away from Scripture but rather affirm our humanity and humility by singing the Doxology. We do scriptural truth no disservice when we confess with the apostle Paul, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out” (Rom. 11:33). The reality of the ordinary progress of Christian understanding should not escape our notice: early believers “know no answers”; immature believers “know all the answers”; and mature believers “know the limits of our answers.”

There are legitimate questions regarding fairness and logic that Calvinism will not fully answer because the Bible does not fully answer. If we are not interested in boasting, then it does us no harm to acknowledge this while at the same time affirming all that the Bible does say regarding God’s sovereign activity in our behalf. Unending grace is my only hope and my deepest comfort. That I do know and passionately proclaim to sinners as much in need of grace as I.

Why some people and not others receive this sovereign grace in election is a question not answered in Scripture; the Bible is a book designed to address God’s people, not to answer all the questions of the world. But it is this totally unmerited choosing and enabling that further underscore the message of mercy that the Bible makes its main point. That point made clear in this passage and many others is that we can never stand before God and say, “The reason that I am yours is what I did or chose through my good actions, good sense, or good heart.” Our salvation is entirely a gift of God—of his grace. The point of Scripture is not to explain why some and not others, but rather to comfort those who face the impossibility of being saved by their own works that God has sovereignly worked in their behalf to secure what they could not. There can be no boasting or pride in this, but only a growing appreciation for grace that is made more precious the more we understand the nature of our heavenly Father. This is why our focus must be more upon the person of God, rather than upon the nature of predestination.

In a personal letter theologian Robert Peterson beautifully responded to a question I had about the intricacies and tensions of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. This was his response:

Knowing God (by his grace) permeates this discussion (and all of our discussions and more). It is easier to admit in humility that I don’t have all the answers, indeed don’t even know the right questions to ask, when I revel in the knowledge of God. He loves me and knows me and as a result, I know him. He is infinite and I’ll never exhaustively know him or have all the answers that I might desire. But knowing him puts everything, even questions about the divine sovereignty/ human responsibility tension in the Christian life, in a wonderful perspective.… I will never perfectly understand my wife and the workings of her mind … but I can rest in her love for me and in doing so put myself in a much better position to try to understand the inscrutable. We are all little children climbing into our Father’s lap and asking him our heartfelt but (from his perspective) childish questions.

Bryan Chapell, Ephesians, ed. Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani, Reformed Expository Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 87–89.