Clough Acts Lesson 34

Doctrine of Perseverance – Acts 13:42-52

An announcement, Frances Schaeffer’s latest book, this is probably Dr. Schaeffer’s greatest work that he’s done, kind of culminating his ministry. It’s a book that is called How Shall We Then Live. He is one of the leading evangelical apologists of the 20^th century; this book is the basic text from which the 1.15 million dollar production of the ten half hour films have been made. These films have been filmed at 150-200 locations across the world, at the various cites of archeology, architecture, art and music and the thesis of this series is to show how, as the western world has gravitated in the early days of Rome toward the Christian position, western culture was edified and built up, and how in recent centuries since the western world has drifted away from Christianity, western culture has declined. And this should, after reading it, convince you that ideas have consequences; therefore I highly recommend this book. Christian families ought to have this on their book shelf. It has paintings, pictures showing the relation of art through the centuries to theology, and hopefully it will tie what you’re learning about Scripture into the general culture at large and show you why we as fundamentalists have made a disastrous mistake so far in the 20^th century of not adequately challenging the culture around us.

Turn to Acts 13 and continue our study on Paul’s missionary journey. Remember, so far in Acts 13 we have seen the recording of Paul’s sermon; this is the first one recorded. We noticed last time in verses 17-23 how Paul approached the teaching of the Word of God into the situation that he faced, and one of his key points that Paul did is that he took all facts, all isolated instances, and wove them together into a plan of God. As we said, using the illustration last week of the B-52s and their Hanoi raids, they had to fly in a particular formation so that the ECM equipment would operate and they would be impermeable to the SAM missiles, or at least as impermeable as modern military technology can make one. And if one pilot would break formation out of fear, and ruin the cover of his buddies flying along on his wings, then he would jeopardize the lives of every man in the particular raid. In other words, the success of the raid depended upon the positioning of the air craft in respect to one another; very vital. In the modern army, the army is finding the same thing out with the portable anti-tank weapons that from this point forward, as we’ve learned in Yom Kippur, from this time forward army and infantry are going to have to be integrated as a team; tanks can no longer be sent out into a battlefield unprotected. It’s the ironic thing that the tank has to protect the foot soldier whereas the foot soldier also protects the tank and they have to be integrated as a team and it requires tremendous discipline and tremendous coordination that has never occurred before in the battlefield except on the modern state of Israel.

So in apologetics we have the same thing. Whenever Christianity is presented, whenever some fact of history is presented, it must always be presented in coordination and linkage with every other fact, otherwise you make yourself vulnerable to the unbeliever slicing away at your position. You’ll show that Jesus Christ rose from the dead but if you disconnect that from the doctrine of creation the unbeliever will simply say send it in to Ripley’s Believe it or Not. The unbeliever can always undo every fact that you throw his way if you feed him the facts one at a time. But when you present the entire Christian system and say the resurrection of Christ represents the culmination of a plan of history dating back to creation, that God made the universe in a certain mortal way, He is going to transform the universe into an immortal state and the resurrection of Christ is the first stage of this process, now you’ve said something about the resurrection of Christ. Or if you’ve insisted that God speaks to man verbally in history from Mount Sinai, such that you could record it on a tape recorder, and the modern man laughs at it and says fool, there is no such thing as an infinite God speaking words to man, language can’t carry infinite truth, and you respond by saying it can if the universe was brought into existence the way Genesis says it was. And so it is that you must hold all pieces together and present a coherent undivided integrated Christian presentation, and therefore when Paul began to preach at the synagogue of Antioch, that’s why in verse 17 he began immediately by using the verb for election. Israel, “the God of this people of Israel chose our fathers,” notice all the verbs in Paul’s message emphasize the subject of the verb is God doing the doing, man does the receiving. God chose our fathers, God “exalted the people;” verse 18, God “suffered [bore] their manners in the wilderness; verse 20, God “gave them judges;” verse 21, “they desired a king; and God gave them Saul;” verse 22, God removed Saul, God “raised up unto them David,” God did this, God did that.

Surely Paul is writing a tremendous theme of God’s sovereign control over history and every fact of history. And when he does this he has established his listeners with his framework. He doesn’t just present facts; he presents the overall interpretation of facts. So let this represent then all the Old Testament information that Paul has disgorged to his synagogue congregation. Now what happens? After this he then is going to add material about Jesus Christ and he is going to take events in Christ’s life, that Christ was virgin born, that Jesus Christ was crucified, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead; these are isolated facts which, if left to themselves, have no more survivability than a lone B-52 over Hanoi. But integrated into the system they have perfect survivability because they depend for their validity on the overall picture, the overall presupposition, the worldview. And this is what Paul does and this is why when he transitions into Jesus Christ in verse 23 it’s a smooth transition. And we shall see today his hearers were deeply infuriated by it all.

And then in verses 38-41 we concluded last time with a study of Paul’s invitation and we contrasted Paul’s invitation here, an invitation to faith, with the invitation often given in evangelical circles where we have a begging Jesus on the doorstep. There’s no begging Jesus on the doorstep here. If anybody’s doing the begging it’s man that’s doing the begging because Jesus Christ is pictured here as the great sovereign judge of history. It’s like this; suppose we were to conceive of a very famous judge holding a very famous trial, and in that trial the judge has come into the courtroom, he’ll put on his black robe and he’ll sit behind the bar and he begins to open the trial and begins to judge. Now the judge at that point is functioning as a judge in his own courtroom. But now let’s suppose, since that trial is yet a week or two off, the judge decides that he is going to go out and meet the people that are coming on trial. So he takes off his black robe, steps out from behind the bar and goes out on the sidewalk and begins to talk to people. This trial in the next week or two is going to be a very interesting trial because in this particular trial men are going to be judged, not on the basis of whether they broke the law, they’re going to be judged on whether or not they have violated the judge’s own rights or not. And in that trial in the future, obviously evidence will be needed; the judge will have to consider all the evidence, whether these people being brought into the courtroom for this future trial have indeed violated his person or not.

And so the judge says well since I have the trial in two or three weeks, I’ll go out and get data; let’s see if men do respond to me or they do not respond to me; whether they violate my rights or they keep my rights. So the judge walks as a civilian in plain clothing down the sidewalks and he meets the very people that are going to be in his trial in a week or two. And some of the people spit on him, and other people shake his hand, and there’s a clear cut response among men to the judge in regular clothes walking on the sidewalk. Now the trial comes; a week has passed, maybe two weeks, and a judge is sitting now with his black cloak behind the bar, ready to pass judgment on those who come into the court. Will his judgment be true? Of course it will, because the men who have come into the courtroom at that point have already judged themselves by their response to the judge.

Now in a very gross way and in a rough [can’t understand word] way that’s what the picture is of Jesus Christ. He is the future judge; He has, so to speak, taken off his cloak, stepped from behind the bar, and is now walking the streets of humanity to see whether men are going to accept Him or reject Him. He doesn’t get on His knees hoping that you’re going to open the door, begging and ringing your doorbell; that’s not the Biblical Christ. The Christ we read of in this invitation is the One who is the future judge and you’d better get your stuff together because you’re going to face Him one way or the other. That’s Paul’s invitation. The invitation, in other words, is not a begging invitation. In fact, we might even say it’s a threatening invitation, and thus it ends in verse 41, “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish; for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you.” Christ is dividing men.

Now the reaction, Acts 13:42, and we’ll read through the text. “And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath. [43] Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. [44] And the next Sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God. [45] But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spoke against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. [46] Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. [47] For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou should be for salvation unto the ends of the earth. [48] And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed. [49] And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region. [50] But the Jews stirred up the devout and honorable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts. [51] But they shook off the dust of their feet against them, and came unto Iconium. [52] And the disciples were constantly filled with joy, and with the Holy Spirit.

That was the follow-up to Paul’s great sermon. Now let’s look at the details of the response. Verse 42, be careful, the word “Jews” and “Gentiles” are not in some of the manuscripts and the attempt of verse 42 is not to divide Jews and Gentiles; that’s not the issue. The issue is just simply to show you that there were people stepping outside of the synagogue that Saturday, or Friday night, whenever they had the service, and they wanted Paul to teach the next week. It shows several things; it shows for one thing there was no sudden decision; accepting Christ or rejecting him is the greatest decision that you’ll ever make. There’s no decision that you can ever make that outweighs this one; your marriage, your job, where you go to live, whatever you do, whether you go to college, what course to take, none of those things can ever compare with the momentous decision of rejecting or accepting Christ because you see, that decision controls all the other decisions and that decision determines whether your other decisions are eternally going to be fruitful or not. So this is a big decision and men want to hear it again. Now this is not a put off, they emphasize they want to hear that message, they want to think about it for a week; they want to meditate upon it.

Please notice too in verse 42 that it’s the Word they want to hear; they don’t want to hear some emotional binge; they don’t want to hear some ranting and raving; they want to emphasize the content, the Word, that’s what they want to hear. They want to understand what they believe and they want to know why they believe what they believe.

Now in verse 43 it describes another thing that happened after that sermon. It says that “many of the Jews and religious proselytes” those would be the Greeks, “many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas,” and then Paul and Barnabas turned to them, and apparently throughout that week, kept on “persuading them to continue in the grace of God.” Now if you stop for a moment and think of that last part of verse 43, that’s a strange statement, “continue in the grace of God.” If you’re going to continue in something you evidently started in it. So from this we gather that these people are believers. And that’s interesting because if these people are believers the only way Paul and Barnabas know that they are believers is not by water baptism; water baptism isn’t even mentioned in verse 43, how they know they’re believers can’t be because they raised their hand and came down an aisle, the synagogue didn’t have any aisles. So how did they know that these people were believers? The only sign that we’ve got available to us in the text that they had actually responded to the Word of God is that they wanted more of it; they flocked around Paul and Barnabas. That response alone is given that evidence that these people have been regenerated.

Now that you have to be careful of. We have people who insist that you have to show a certain particular evidence of saving faith, you’ve got to be baptized or else you’re not really saved, there is no saving faith there. But this passage shows no such evidence as that; other people insist that you have to sign a card, join a our particular local church rather than the one down the street because ours is the bride of Christ, etc. In other words, there are false distinctions made. The true Scriptures only say one distinction; there’s an attraction to the spiritual things of the Word of God. And that attraction itself is an evidence of faith. These people, some of them didn’t have any crisis, apparently some of them just believed as Paul spoke. Remember that sermon is quite demanding; we went through it last week and as he developed his theme of the sovereignty of God over every fact of history, they found there was no escape from the judge who walking the sidewalk; they had to make a decision because they had to face that judge in a yet future trial. So they knew and they responded. In fact, oftentimes people here will respond to the Word of God because they just happen to hear it and they respond to it; there’s no coming down the aisle. And yet every once in a while, it happens about once a month we have some dear little fundy that sits in the back row that gets mad at me because I don’t have an invitation to which I usually respond, the teaching of the Word of God is the invitation. That’s the whole point here, the teaching of the Word is the invitation; there’s no need for added invitation, the Word is the invitation. That’s why we teach it.

Then Paul says, “they kept on persuading them to stand in the grace of God.” Now from all we gather in the New Testament, the apostles had no little infallible litmus test by which they could go around and find out whether this person is a Christian, this person isn’t a Christian, this person is a Christian, they had no portable X-ray machine that you could stand in front of and show the regenerate heart. There was nothing like this by way of a litmus test; there was only one test that the early church had and from that one test we get one of the great doctrines of the Reformation, the doctrine of perseverance otherwise known, in a less sophisticated way, as the doctrine of eternal security, but the more educated title for this doctrine is the doctrine of perseverance.

The doctrine of perseverance states that perseverance faith, that is faith that keeps on, not perfect, we’re not talking about perfection, but faith that keeps on is the revelation of one’s election and justification, that election and justification are shown by persevering faith. An example of that in the Old Testament would be in Elijah’s day; Elijah is very depressed, he’s fought the battle, apparently single-handedly against Ahab and the northern kingdom’s administration, and he’s so frustrated that Baalism has triumphed everywhere and so he goes and has this session out with God and God says to Elijah, Elijah, don’t worry, I’ve got 7,000 men, and he adds something and what God adds to that statement tells you something interesting, because Elijah could have immediately said well I didn’t see them, where were they. One criteria God says, I have 7,000 men who have not yet bowed the knee to Baal, and so their saving faith was shown by their refusal to join the apostate religious movement that dominated the culture of their time.

See, saving faith has different signs in different situations; in that situation if you bowed your knee to Baal, that was a sign that you were not saved; if you didn’t bow you knee to Baal it was a sign that you were saved. Now in another historical situation the sign of saving faith would be different depending on the spiritual issue of that generation. But in that day it was… and whether it’s that or another sign isn’t really the issue here. The issue here is that that godly remnant, the elect remnant in the northern kingdom, revealed itself by its refusal to bow the knee before the syncretist Canaanite religion of Baalism. So perseverance is the outward sign in history, in space/time history, the empirical evidence of election and justification.

Secondly we have said that perseverance gives one assurance of salvation. Assurance of salvation is given in the New Testament by persevering faith. John 15:5-6, we developed that passage of the vine and the vineyard, Colossians 1:21-23, Paul says “if you continue,” and in the book of Hebrews time and time again in the book of Hebrews you have the “if” clause, “if you continue,” and it’s very carefully constructed in the Greek, if you continue, then you have been, perfect tense, very interesting syntax, “if you continue, then you have been.” It’s not talking about Arminianism, holding on with your fingernails to your salvation. “If you continue, then you’re going to be saved, huh-un, that’s not the way the grammar reads. It says “if you continue, you have already been saved.” So perseverance is a sign of the assurance of salvation.

And the apostles used perseverance to test whether or not one was in the faith; thus in 1 John 2:19 one reads how the apostle says, “they continued not with us,” they didn’t persevere, because John says, “they never were of us.” How John got that picture was from his own personal experience, superintended by the Holy Spirit of course, but it was his personal experience. It seems that John the apostle, more than any other apostle that associated himself with Christ, it seems like John was hurt the most by Judas Iscariot. We don’t know why, we don’t know what kind of relationship John the apostle had with Judas, but time and time again in John’s writings these little digs are given, there goes Judas Iscariot, the one who was with us and who betrayed us. And it’s John who records the fact of Jesus saying, “all of you are clean, but not all of you, for He knew who it was that should betray Him.” And so it’s always on John’s mind, Judas Iscariot, Judas Iscariot, Judas Iscariot, that unregenerate pig because that is what the word of the unbeliever is, the unregenerate pig who was in our midst, who did miracles in the name of Christ, who took our money, who had fellowship with us, who broke bread with the Savior; Judas, the man who no longer remained and finally peeled off; Judas never was with us because he peeled off. So Judas becomes the model of one who does not have persevering faith; they peel out sooner or later.

The third thing we’ve said about the doctrine of perseverance is that the doctrine of perseverance depends upon present grace, not just past grace, present grace. In the Old Testament the picture is again and again that Israel has worn out her right to be elect of God. The prophets present the rib proceedings in the book of Isaiah, these lawsuit proceedings in Hosea and the other prophets prophetic books and in those books they argue this way: they say look Israel, you have burned up any claim you have on God’s grace, you don’t care whether God promised it to you, you’ve burned it up, and so therefore if you are to continue in existence Israel, right now you will need enduring grace from God. And that theme is carried into the New Testament and this is why we read verses like Romans 8:34, when Christ is making intercession for us, why? To continue application of the finished work on our behalf. Hebrews 7:25, the intercession of Christ is able to save; it’s not talking about sanctification, it’s about salvation, it’s talking about the fact that we are kept saved, in the present tense, by the continuing intercessory ministry of Christ.

Don’t be a fatalist about eternal security. Fatalists in eternal security always look at just the promise; well God promised to keep me secure; that He does. Will He? He sure will, but what is the means that God uses to keep us saved from moment to moment? He promised it yes, but what is the means He actually uses in experience? And that is the intercessory ministry of our high priest, that’s what Hebrews is all about. And so the doctrine of perseverance is a vital doctrine to make every man dependent at every point upon God’s grace, and that’s why Paul says continue in the grace of God. Practically what does that mean? “Continue in the grace of God,” what did Paul expect his converts to do? We learn something here; if you lead someone to Christ what can you expect that person you lead to Christ to do? What should you expect them to do? Some of you are involved in evangelistic things and you are there when someone trusts in Christ, it’s kind of dumped in your lap to follow them up, is what usually happens in evangelistic groups, and so what do you do now, you know, where are the instructions. All right, here are some things that Paul obviously expected these people to do and we today can expect people to do.

The means of sanctification are always two-fold, law and grace, not the Old Testament Law, the law used here means the Bible, the Word of God. And to be sanctification every person needs both, you need to know what God wants you to do and you need to know how is He going to help me do it because I’m a depraved rebellious creature. So I need both these factors, and the New Testament is very balanced about this at times; the New Testament describes our Christian life and the fellowship with God from the standpoint of the Law and so we’ll read of a statement that goes like this: “Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly according to all wisdom.” That’s Colossians, but then on the other hand, turn in a few pages, you get to another epistle and how is the Christian life described? “Be filled with the Spirit,” that’s talking about the means. One is talking about the law, that is the Word of Christ, the other is talking about the Holy Spirit which is given by grace to enable us to keep the law.

Now both of those factors are needed, Christians who try to live on grace without the law become antinomian, became the licentious crowd. Christians who try to live on the law without grace become the legalists, so both sides are needed. So both, therefore, must be present in the one who continues in the grace of God. Practically it means that if we are to take in the Word of God we must take in the Word of God, it’s that simple. Bible-reading to start with; a person isn’t worth a damn in the Christian life unless they do their own Bible-reading. This business about getting a few tapes and reading somebody or listening to a sermon once or twice a week is not going to hack it; you have got to study the Word of God for yourself; there is no substitute for personal study and you will never amount to a hill of beans until you do that personally. You have got to absorb the Word of God yourself. Where do you start?

Where does the new Christian start? Start in the simpler places, start with the Gospel of John, start with a couple of Psalms. Start with some of the small epistles, don’t try to bite off all of Isaiah and digest it in five minutes; take something that’s easy, that you finish. Get encouraged by the fact that gee, you know what, I can read the Bible after all. I’m a graduate a modern public school and I still can read, excellent accomplishment. So we read and get in the Bible and then we’ve got to get in a local church where the gifts are functioning. That’s another problem today; everybody’s in this little parachurch group here, and a parachurch group there, and I’ve got this group and that group because the local church isn’t doing it’s job. The local church never will do its job as long as we have these groups running around. The local church is the place and somebody’s got to be challenged into there; you’ve got to pick out a church that suits the individual, that’s Bible teaching and go from there. So that’s one thing, one practical concrete area of taking in the Word of God; there has got to be exposure to the Word of God.

What about the other, what about appropriation of grace? A person has to be encouraged to start using the faith technique immediately. They have to understand the principle of confession, 1 John 1:9, that God forgives their sin if they will admit it to Him, admit their responsibility. And they have to understand the various basic promises; get the person started in Romans 8:28, 1 Peter 5:7, “Casting all your cares upon Him, because He cares for you.” Pick up 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “In everything give thanks,” these are basic elementary promises and Christians ought to be challenged immediately to start there. In other words, have the new believer start appropriating grace, even in some small areas but get started, the left foot after the right foot and so on. You can’t walk a block without taking the first step and so this is the whole point here.

So, “continue in the grace of God,” refers to these very practical means of sanctification. And Paul argues in verse 43 that there’s a possibility they won’t continue and if they won’t, there’s a very good question they never were born again. That solves the problem of the flake-out types, that impress everyone, you know, they have a girlfriend that came to the evangelistic conference and they want to impress her how spiritual are and they go through the motions and then disappear after a while, or visa verse. Or we have some other little gimmick that’s used, somebody wants to get a promotion in their company so they show up at the boss’s church and there are all sorts of false motivations. And Paul says that doesn’t cut it, it’s just whether you “continue in the grace of God” that cuts it.

Acts 13:44, “And the next Sabbath day” a major problem, six days have gone by, for six days these disciples have been taught the Word of God. Paul and Barnabas had an excellent follow-up system; they did not allow people to be born again and then just left on the doorstep some place. They taught them, they prayed with them, they ascertained some of their needs, they began to work with them from the Scriptures, and so verse 44 shows you that the people they worked with began to fan out, began to tell other people about this, hey look, this guy’s really got something to say, and so finally almost the whole city comes, [“came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God.”] This is a Roman colony; there are lots of Gentiles here and there’s a tremendous hunger here, obviously half the city shows up. The synagogue opened its doors one Saturday morning and everybody couldn’t get through the doors. Why? Well, the whole city is out there, that’s why. Now we have to go back and find out why.

Why the tremendous response? Now it’s not given to us in the text, we have to infer it from history and from other factors in the New Testament. We know these people lived under the fourth kingdom of Daniel 7, the kingdom of Rome. Rome is pictured in Daniel 7 as a monster, worse than all the other previous kingdoms of history. And what makes the monster worse is man-made teeth, iron teeth; animals don’t come with iron teeth, men makes those. And iron claws, and Daniel says it’s with the iron claws and iron teeth that the fourth kingdom tears and shreds and rips humanity. There’s something subhuman machine-like and anti-humanitarian about Roman organization; it’s the kingdom of man.

By the way, we’re still in the fourth kingdom, it’s going to revive into a very strong form during the tribulation. But the whole west… I hope some of you read Frances Schaeffer and his book, he’ll develop that, the whole west has never really left Rome. You think back to the man who has invented the modern concept of world government; it came from Dante, Dante’s an Italian. Our secretary of state wrote his basic PhD dissertation on the system of maintaining peace in Europe under Metternich and he wrote down this… in this whole area went Italian diplomacy, Roman diplomacy, our foreign policy today through Henry Kissinger is modeled on Roman policy. The man who began much of modern theory in diplomacy was Machiavelli who wrote the book, The Prince, and Machiavelli is an Italian, he’s a Roman. So don’t think we’ve left Rome; we haven’t left Rome, Rome is still with us. The major themes in our culture are still Roman. Rome dominates.

These people lived at Rome at close range and they had heard the great vaunt and pride of Rome, Virgil expressed it the Aeneid this way: “For thou, O Roman, learn with sovereign sway to rule the nations, they great art shall be to keep the world in lasting peace, to spare the humble souls and to crush to the earth the proud.” That was the hope and the breath of every Roman, that was the great creed to the kingdom of man, that man shall rule, and if man doesn’t do it, of course, no one will. Rome was built up artificially; Daniel warned the human race for centuries before that when Rome came there would be something phony about it, something different. What is it that’s different about Rome than all the other kingdoms in history? Rome was built upon the city first and the government first, family and tribal ties second. In the very story of the founding of Rome, Romulus and Remus, Remus watches as his brother Romulus plows a furrow in a circle around the place where he’s about to found the city of Rome. Remus sits there in the field watching his brother, the plow puts the dirt up on one side of the furrow, and as it comes around in a full circle obviously there’s a small earthen wall a few inches tall next to the furrow, and Romulus very proudly looks down at this furrow he’s cut in the ground and he says this is my city, and Remus says and this is what I’ll do to your city and he leaps over this little earthen wall that has just been plowed up, and Romulus pull his sword and slays his brother and says and this is what I’ll do to anybody that crosses my wall. And so in the very myth of the founding of Rome you have the fact that Rome was founded not on loyalty of brother to brother but loyalty to the city first. It’s not tribal, it’s not like the ancient civilizations that were all basically one culture, one tribe; everybody comes to Rome united by only one thing, we’re members of the city, we’re members of Rome, Rome then, the state, becomes what unifies man, not the tribe.

This is the nature of Rome, these people lived in a Roman colony, they had bought the Madison Avenue line that is being bought by Americans today, the Roman faith; and what is the faith that is behind Romulus and Remus? What is the faith that motivates that fourth kingdom of Daniel? It’s a very simple faith, a faith that goes back in history to the time of Satan and it’s this: that Chance or man rules; those are the only options we’ve got. Most Americans believe that, even fundamentalists, even some of you believe that because some of you still think that if government doesn’t do it, no one will do it. We even had the spectacle this week of a very well-known senator telling the head of the Federal Reserve system, buddy, you’d better be ready in January with a new administration because we’re going to manipulate the currency and you’d better bend or you’re going to get fired. What does that mean? That would be like you go out as a carpenter to build a house and in the morning your yardstick is this long; this is your standard reference, you cut all your lumber by this yardstick, your studs all measure three feet, that was your standard measure. All morning long you cut your studs, and you save the rafters for the afternoon so you take a lunch break; you come back from lunch and pick up the yardstick and it’s shrunk. How are you going to measure your lumber in the afternoon, you’ve got a different standard.

See what’s happened, somebody’s tampered with the weights and the measures. That’s considered a sin in the Old Testament. We’re not discussing monetary theory here, we’re discussing sin. To tamper with weights and measures God declares to be a sin in Scripture. And whenever you have the national currency inflated by the engines of the Federal Reserve system you have changed the value of the weights and the measures; the value of the dollar is a dollar of value to the businessman, the man sits and he orders his stock, he tries to put his business in order to predict what the market is going to do, and what is his yardstick; the carpenter uses a ruler but what does a businessman use? What does he use to price the goods that he has in his store but the dollar? What does he use to pay the labor and estimate how much a person is worth but the dollar. So he comes back from lunch and the feds just cranked out more money during lunch hour. Now his dollar has shrunk and now what’s he going to do to all his plans that he’s made, all his payments, all his budget, all his products. What about the old person that made all their retirement plans on the old dollar and now since they got beyond the age where they can produce what’s happened to their dollar? They got ripped off, that’s what happened to them, because we’re always debasing the currency, both parties do it and it’s sinful. Do you know why they do that? Because most Americans including evangelical born again Christians say well, if the government doesn’t make jobs and if the government doesn’t give full employment no one will. Government has never given jobs; for every job the government makes it destroys three in the private sector. Government doesn’t make wealth; you should know that from Scripture. The fourth divine institution is not the wealth-making institution, the private family, the private individual is the wealth generating person, not the state, because the state started in Genesis 9, the wealth institution started in Genesis 2. It’s a simple story of Scripture but of course, who reads the Bible any more? Who reads?

Chance or man… Chance or man, that’s the basic faith. But says Paul, Paul has come into Antioch, Paul has hammered his theme over and over, all those verbs we saw, God did it, God did it, God did it, God did it, and so what does Paul say? It’s not Chance that reigns and it’s not man that reigns, God reigns. Those are the three choices you’ve got, and Americans had better figure out which one they believe. Who reigns in the market place? Adam Smith, informed as he was from the Christian consensus, though he wasn’t necessarily a Christian himself, thought that the invisible hand reigned in the market place, the law of supply and demand which was God’s Law, God has His rules for the market place and you dare not tamper with His role because God alone is omniscient. No bureaucrat, no set of economic advisors has omniscience. There is not modern Joseph available to any state on the face of this earth, and therefore since omniscience is not available, anytime that finite man tries to tamper with an infinitely complicated system he fouls it up every time, and that’s what’s happened. Why? Because we in the United States still, because we live in the fourth kingdom of Rome, still share Rome’s faith—if the government doesn’t do it no one will.

It’s the same thing in education, if we don’t have public education who will get educated? The answer is the same people that got educated before there was public education. Do you think education just began in 1850? What did people do before 1850? One thing they did, they read well. Read Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, they were handed out as tracts in New York City, you read them today, ugh, oh, gee, this is deep vocabulary, hard stuff. How did those people in New York City in 1776 and 1780 read the Federalist Papers? There was no public school. That’s why they could read.

So it’s a breath of fresh air that Paul brings into Antioch. He challenges, not the specific programs of the Caesars, he comes in and he challenges the faith of the Caesars. He undercuts the whole system; he doesn’t bother to dismantle the shingles on the roof, he drives a bulldozer in at the foundation and completely overturns it and that’s why in verse 44 the whole city comes out. The first time in their lives they heard somebody who seriously believed that there was a God who reigned over every fact of history and acted like it, they didn’t just talk it, they acted like it. That’s what’s refreshing.

Now Acts 13:45, we have the classic response of the legalists. Everywhere religion goes you have the legalists. Fundamentalism is loaded with legalists. Who are legalists? Let’s be careful; legalists are people who do two basic things to the means of salvation and sanctification. First, they take God’s infinite standards, such as the mental attitude sin, you shall not hate, and they contract them down to a manageable package, “thou shalt not kill.” See what happened on the Sermon on the Mount? Moses had said “thou shalt not kill,” but what Jesus said is Moses meant more than just the physical act of killing; you can kill your brother in your mind. That’s what Jesus said, He said “whosoever hates his brother shall be in danger of hellfire.” And Jesus re-stressed the infinite standard but because the legalist says I am autonomous, I don’t want to trust God to help me live the Christian life, the Christian life is impossible so what I’ll do is I’ll make the Christian life possible and how I’ll do it is I contract down God’s standards to manageable proportions. Usually, by the way, they’re all proportions that fit me but not my neighbor. If my neighbor happens to have a problem with alcohol, I will be a teetotaler and boy, you aren’t saved if you take some wine before your supper, that kind of thing, selective depravity, everybody’s depraved except me. That’s how the legalists operate.

Now the legalist has another little gimmick, because he has already contracted God’s absolute standards down, now he’s free of grace. He doesn’t have to rely on the filling of the Holy Spirit because he’s made the demands of God’s law so trivial that anybody, any moron can fulfill them. So this is the legalist. Now a very sad thing begins to happen to this kind of a person, deep in their soul because the moment they go into this spiral of legalism, the minute they contract down God’s great, strong, stern demands on our sin nature and they wipe out grace, they release the Pandora’s Box of mental attitude sin, the horrible kind of sins that Scripture speaks of, mental attitude, the kind of sins that destroy people slowly from the inside. I don’t think there’s a more physically gross disease than cancer; it just eats people to pieces. We’ve had people eaten and are being eaten alive in this congregation by cancer. But cancer is only a physical picture of what mental attitude sin does to a person’s soul. You think cancer is bad, take a Biblical attitude to mental attitude sin and if we could peer into our soul and see the grossness of mental attitude sin, envy, jealousy, maligning, vindictiveness, and see what that does to us, we would think cancer was great by comparison.

This is what happens in verse 45, “But when the Jews saw the multitudes,” they saw Gentiles who now were being offered salvation without coming through the Jewish door, there’s no longer selective depravity operating, people, all men everywhere were now open to salvation and so, “they were filled” and the word “filled” here is the same word used for the filling of the Holy Spirit, “they were filled with the mental attitude sin of envy,” and watch them go into action, remember, mental attitude sin always lead to overt sins eventually, “they were filled with envy and they began to speak against those things” so they started contradicting, or trying to, what Paul had taught, [“which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming.”]

Acts 13:46, Paul and Barnabas reply, now the understanding of how these people felt, you want to visualize it, a very easy way to visualize, put yourself in their shoes a moment. Dr. F. F. Bruce gives this amusing comment, he says: “Knowing, as we unfortunately do, how pious Christian pew-holders can manifest quite unchristian indignation when they arrive at church on a Sunday morning to find that their pew has been occupied by rank outsiders who have come to hear a popular visiting preacher, we can readily appreciate the problem.” And that’s a pretty good picture, that’s pretty fair of what these people are doing. See, what Luke is saying in verse 45 is that their theology is a product of their sin; it’s not that they have intellectual objections against the gospel claim here, it’s that they’re mad at Paul. The intellectual objections come along later on in the process, they just kind of dreamed up tools to beat up Paul and Barnabas with.

“Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing that you are putting it,” present tense, “you are putting it from you, and you are,” present tense, “judging yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles.” See the judge has stepped down, taken off his clothes from behind the bar and now he goes outside on the sidewalk and this time Jesus Christ is present not personally and directly but He’s present through His representatives, the apostles, and wherever the representatives go people show whether they’re for Christ or against Christ by how they treat Christ’s appointed apostle. And thus it says, “you are putting it away from you,” they didn’t find it, they put it away from them, eternal life. They did it by their own choice, shaping themselves up for the judgment to come.

Then he quotes Isaiah 49:6 in Acts 13:47, “[For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying,] I have set thee,” originally this was a quotation directed to the nation Israel, “I have set thee, O Israel, to be a light of the nations, that you should be for salvation unto the ends of the earth.” Now Paul goes back to attack these legalistic Jews who were developing an ultra nationalism that prevented the Word of God from getting out through the boundary and leaking out into the outside world. Israel had been conceived as a divine viewpoint counterculture; it was called out through Abraham to sit and just sort of cook in the back burner of history for a while until the brew was thoroughly cooked and out of this would come the Bible, the Messiah, the complete picture to men of what a just society would look like. Well, Israel was to form that function, God had decreed it. Remember what the theme of Acts 13 is, sovereignty of God in every area. And so here’s the sovereignty of God operating. Paul says election, you were elected to do this job, and so he says to the people because I know God and I know what He means when He says I elect you to do something, and I know that election can never be stopped, I say to you people that God’s Word is going to go to the ends of the earth in spite of your opposition.

Now here’s one of the strange things about Biblical sovereignty. Biblical sovereign is not fatalism; fatalism is the belief, well, you know, what’s going to happen is going to happen so we can just sit, might as well relax while it’s happening so we’ll just sit here. That’s fatalism. Fatalism ignores the means by which that something is going to happen. People are going to be won to Christ…you bet; how’s it going to be? Because someone gets off their butt and goes out and witnesses; that’s how it’s going to be. In other words, God’s sovereign election occurred by means of human action. See, Biblical sovereignty includes action, it’s an incentive to act; if you know that you’re going to win that’s encouragement to get out there and play ball. And so here Paul is saying this; this is the encouragement you personally gain. He knows God’s elect purpose in history is to save all the nations, to bring the Word of God to all the nations, so therefore he knows that in spite of their opposition He’s going to win.

And then we have that mysterious verse where it looks like men are made into robots, Acts 13:48, “And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, [and glorified the word of the Lord],” obviously this is a picture of what happened locally at Antioch, but it’s also a picture of what’s been happening for 1900 years; Gentiles hear the Word of God because the apostles, so to speak, have been kicked out of just the Jewish subculture, they’ve been thrown out into the world and the Gentiles rejoice, but then it says, “and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.” Oh-oh, what’s that talking about? “As many as been ordained, and you can’t fudge the word “ordained,” because the word “ordained” is a military word which means command; it’s also a word that means to write on a scroll. So what are we going to do about this one. And it’s in the perfect tense, which means that it was done in time past and then they believed, a definite strong indication. Well, when all else fails in interpreting the Scriptures, go to the context of the book, and let’s go to other places in the book of Acts where the same theme comes up and let’s interpret all the verses the same way, because after all, the same guy wrote them all, Luke. He doesn’t change his mind halfway through the book.

Let’s go to Acts 2:39, an earlier incident of this kind of phraseology, In Acts 2:39 Peter’s first sermon. Acts 2 is Peter’s first sermon, Acts 13 is Paul’s first sermon. “The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off,” now look at the last part, “even as many as the Lord, our God, shall call.” God is ultimately sovereign over all of history, that’s what it’s saying.

Turn to Acts 18:10, here’s a good practical example because it shows in evangelism the jams you get yourself into at times and you get so frustrated you’re going to quit and then what do you do? You don’t quit, you keep on, and here’s how it all works together. Paul is in an evangelistic situation. He got very depressed, he got all sorts of flack from everybody, all sorts of resistance and opposition, he was about ready to quit. Paul says don’t quit—don’t quit! Verse 10, “For I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee; for I have much people in this city.” Now the people He has in the city are not yet Christians, but nevertheless God says “I have many people in the city,” now you just stay here and you witness, you evangelize. You see how it’s used? Not to say well, what’s going to happen is going to happen, rather it’s saying look Paul, start evangelizing, don’t stop because you’re going to be successful, hang in there and I guarantee you success. That’s how Biblical sovereignty is viewed.

Those are some references to the positive side of this kind of election. We explain doctrine of election in the third election framework pamphlet but let’s turn back to Acts 13 and just back off for a minute and look at the picture. Here we have God who is the Creator of history. God’s attributes, God is sovereign, righteous, just, and so on, all of God and His attributes we draw as an open box because God is infinite, we don’t know everything there is to know about God, never will know everything there is to know about God. If we did, it’s not God we’re talking about. But then we draw creation as a closed circle because it’s limited. Here’s the creature, or the creation, there’s the Creator. Now we’re down inside the creation and we’re trying to figure out this big problem, sovereignty and free will, and we get this data that comes to us, God talks down and He says I have elected so and so. What’s that mean? So we’re looking down with finite minds at an infinite speaker. Now what we’ve got to do is be careful of something; inside the creation we see cause/effect relationships, you know, the law of gravity always works. The pencil has no volition, it just goes. And so if we have this view of God’s causation in history, we’re all transformed into fallen pencils. There is no freedom, there is no chance to act. Why? Because I’m borrowing my idea of cause/effect out of my daily experience as a creature, failing to see as a Christian and I should see that what we’re talking about in sovereignty is not these cause/effect things but God acting on the creation.

How He acts on the creation we’ll never know but there are some things that we can think about that might help us a little bit. Now we’re ultimately never going to get all the facts together because we’re dealing with an infinite problem. But there are some things we can do to relieve some of the pressure. Let’s back off from the issue of salvation and ask very simple questions. Maybe after we’ve asked a few of the simple questions the idea will catch on, we’re familiar with it, then we can come back to the verse. Let’s ask ourselves why did God make men with ten fingers and not twelve. Sometimes we see twelve-fingered idiots in the Old Testament but they’re freaks, but basically men only have ten fingers. You say well, that’s a stupid question to ask, men just have ten fingers. Yeah, but why ten? Why not nine, twelve or some other number. Well, I don’t know, it’s just that way. Why? Because God chose to make it that way, didn’t He. God chose at some point in the past to make us with ten fingers. All right, why did God chose to make the earth with one moon? Why not three or four, it’d be interesting, one could look from this side of the car and one from that side of the car and both could see moons. So more moons might be interesting; why didn’t God make more moons on the planet? Why not? He only made one and we don’t know why, we just know that, in fact, the planet earth only has one moon. And we can only therefore say that this is the way God made it.

Now let’s come back to our subject a little closer. God made history a certain way; this history goes on in time, it will certainly come to a certain culmination. Didn’t God know where history would go when He created the universe? Yes, He must have, He’s omniscient. Didn’t He, therefore, deliberately change to make history that would have a hell in it? You know, I didn’t think of that before… you’d better start, because no matter how much you fuss and back up and angle in, around and through free will, you’ve still got the problem—why did God design history the way history is? And the way history is, that the human race gradually divides itself, some go to hell and some go to heaven. There’s not an accident, God didn’t set the wheels in motion and say oops, look at that. God chose to make history the way it is. Therefore, He chose to divide the human race over certain issues. You say well couldn’t God have made history so that all men would be saved? Sure He could have but He didn’t. Why? I have no idea; He made it so the human race could divide. Now he could have made the division of the human race, all people, brunettes on one side of the fence, all non-brunettes on the other side of the fence. He could have made history another way, everybody with a certain IQ on one side of the fence, everybody lower than that IQ on the other side of the fence. He didn’t choose to do it that way; He chose to make the boundary belief or rejection of Jesus Christ.

Now when it says God elects some to salvation and he elects some to damnation, for that is the corollary of sovereignty, what we’re saying isn’t that God reaches down here, again with the gravity illustration, and forces us in the flow of gravity one way or the other, what it’s saying is that God designed history deliberately creating people whom He knew would fully and completely accept Christ with grace; He also created people who would reject Jesus Christ apart from grace. Why? We have no idea. We just know that He did deliberately create history with people in it who would deliberately reject. Said another way, even more specifically, didn’t God know what Satan would do when God made Satan? Of course He did. Why, then, can’t we accuse God of sin? For the reason that God didn’t sin; Satan sinned. See, you can’t accuse God of sinning and making a sinner unless you can show that it’s wrong to create a person who will freely choose wrong. And there’s no way you can say that so you can never say that God is the author of sin. All sin in history has come about [can’t understand phrase] product of a man or creature’s choice. That choice is responsibility; God has made history with responsibility inside it.

And when we come to a verse like this, in Acts 13:48, “as many as have been ordained to eternal life believed,” means that God had created the people at Antioch, He had created His plan of grace and as He administered and worked out His plan of grace, those are the people who came out and believed. It’s not saying they are robots or automatons, they made a real decisions, a real responsible choice. But why the word “have ordained,” or “were ordained” is in the text is to show that the mob is not in control of the situation. God is in control of the situation, and all the flack that Paul and Barnabas are getting as a result of their evangelistic thrust in that synagogue, man is not calling the shots. See that’s what’s so refreshing about Paul’s sermon anyway to these Romans. Rome said man are [can’t understand word], Paul said reigns.

Now there are other verses but let’s just take one, Acts 4:27-30, to show God’s sovereignty over adversity. A very practical conclusion is going to drop out of this in about a minute. Just to show you the scene doesn’t begin in Acts 13, here is the worst sin that men ever did—crucify Jesus Christ, the worst of all possible sins. Now look what the Bible says about it. “For of a truth against thy holy servant” it should be, “Jesus, whom thou hast appointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the nations, and the people of Israel, were gathered together,” now look at verse 28, for “To do whatever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.” In other words, the worst of all possible sins itself was strictly under God’s sovereign control. It wasn’t something out of control, it wasn’t Chance, it wasn’t Herod jamming the gears of God’s cosmic plan. No-no, Herod is one of the gears of God’s cosmic plan. And that’s how adversity, disappointment, heartache and opposition were looked upon by these new first century Christians. They didn’t look upon these things as sand in the gears; they looked upon adversity as one of the gears. And that’s why this passage is going to end the way it does.

And that’s why this passage ends the way it does, Acts 15:49, “And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region.” That is, these people had been won to Christ, they were discipled in the Word of God and they began to evangelize. The word “region” would correspond to our word state, it’s like Paul went to San Antonio, the city; then from San Antonio everybody fanned out across Texas. He went to the city of Antioch and from the city those people he won to Christ fanned out in their local areas. It shows you, by the way, how evangelism should go.

Verse 50, “But the Jews stirred up the devout and honorable women, and the chief men of the city,” a little sidelight on that; all over the ancient world women in that day flocked to Judaism by droves, remember that when you hear these little squeaky ERA characters running around saying oh, the Bible is so anti-feminine, it’s against women’s rights, and we have even one candidate who doesn’t like what Paul says in 1 Timothy 2 about women. Now if the Bible is so repressive against women’s rights, isn’t it a strange thing that in the ancient world when you had complete paganism reign women didn’t like the paganism. They liked Judaism. Do you know why they historically liked Judaism? Because in Judaism the family and the marriage were protected and the woman wants protection. A woman wants freedom but she wants protection and she got it in Judaism. That’s how these women came to be in Judaism; and apparently the men weren’t but the women were; rabbis went to the women and said hey, can you get your old man, he’s the mayor of the city, and start working on these guys, get Paul and Barnabas out of our hair. Yeah, I’ll do it. And so they turned the women against Paul and Barnabas, they expelled them, [“and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts.”]

Verse 51, they cursed the city, the “shaking of dust” is given in Matthew 10 as the sign of a cursing. The king has formally rejected the people and therefore they’re rejected his representatives, they’ve rejected him so he rejects them. [“But they shook off the dust of their feet against them, and came unto Iconium”] But the conclusion of the matter is in verse 52, in spite of the persecution, in spite of the fact their teachers… how would you feel about this, you were led to Christ and all of a sudden the guy that leads you to Christ, the Apostle Paul, gets kicked out of the city; you’re left in the city with a mob that’s against you. Isn’t that a great way to start the Christian life. And what do they do? They’re filled with the Holy Spirit. [“And the disciples were constantly filled with joy, and with the Holy Spirit.”] Why are they so confident, happy, smiling at their adversities? Because they’re learned a secret, their Roman faith is wrong; it is not man that rules, it is not Chance that rules, it is God who is omnipotent that rules.

Let’s stand and sing…..