Clough Divine institutions Lesson 3

Divine Institution #1 – Sovereignty and Volition

…on the divine institutions, there are four divine institutions, by way of review, number one, volition; number two marriage, number three, family and number four national government. All of these divine institutions are necessary for the preservation of the human race. Divine institution number one, we have covered and I’ve tried to show you that divine institution number one has certain very definite and drastic implications as far as we are concerned. We defined this first divine institution as responsibility before God to choose different ends and means in life. The responsibility before God to choose different ends and means in life!

We found that the divine institutions as a group have been attacked in our time, have been attacked down through the ages, and these divine institutions are under heavy attack today at certain points. We covered two of these points in divine institution number one, volition, when we said that one attack that comes against volition is determinism, where the whole universe is a machine, man can’t act independently of it. The second type of attack, more specifically, had to do with the idea that there’s no difference between man and the animal, and therefore since there isn’t any difference between man and the animals, therefore man does not truly have freedom. He is a victim of his instincts and his animal-like nature. Therefore we find that these institutions are under attack from various means.

Tonight we are going to finish the first divine institution with a consideration of how does this match divine sovereignty. If God is truly sovereign, then how can we have free choice? If all is truly certain before we even choose, then could our decisions truly be free. This has been one of the classic dilemmas that man has faced and as we start with this we might remember that no matter who you are, no matter what system you have, whether it’s communism, Christianity, or anything else, you have this problem, because it really doesn’t make any difference whether you believe in some form of determinism, such as the communists believe that the laws of dialectical materialism, etc. economic determinism, are going to guarantee them victory in the future, and yet at the same time they say that the communist party is necessary to bring this about. So they have to live with their…you might say in the horns of the dilemma. So there’s not really a criticism against Christianity because of this problem of sovereignty and free wil, everyone has it regardless of where you start.

How, though, does Christianity handle the problem? Let’s introduce it by going back to the essence box and looking at the character of God. The character of God: He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is love, and He is omniscient, He is omnipotent, He is omnipresent, immutable and eternality. All of these are attributes of God’s character. This means that no matter what the problem is we have to deal with these various attributes. Now we are a part of this lower circle which we will call creation and tonight we face the problem of the fact that we have volition within creation but within the essence box of God we have God’s sovereignty. How, then, do we link the two, sovereignty and volition, sovereignty and volition, sovereignty being the volition of the choice of the Creation, volition being the choice of the creature.

Christianity starts out and the Bible presents us with this dual picture, that we don’t have just the universe, we have the universe and God, and that’s a remarkable difference, because there are three possible ways of answering this question. One possible way is dealing with the problem of fatalism. This is one answer you can give to this problem. One way in which you can handle the problem is to simply say that everything is certain and there is no such thing as choice. All these things that you think are choices and decisions that you are making are purely an illusion and really when you get right down to the nitty-gritty it’s all one predetermined course in which we have no freedom. And this is an answer that has been given down through the ages; oriental religion largely goes into this type of an answer, fatalism, everything is predestined and we are ground under the wheels of history and we are victims, you might say, of the machine. That’s one way you can answer it, have everything certain, every little detail of life absolutely certain, but you don’t have any freedom.

A second way of answering the question is autonomy, and this says that everything is uncertain; we have a choice and at each moment we have choices; history goes on chaotically and so we have this idea of autonomy; these are the two extremes: fatalism, everything is certain; autonomy, you have choice, but since it’s a chaos it doesn’t mean much. In other words, just suppose we conducted a traffic pattern in Lubbock on the basis of autonomy; this would mean that nothing is determined. In other words, you drive down and if you feel like driving on the sidewalk drive on the sidewalk. And if you feel like driving the wrong way on a one way street, go ahead, freedom. Now you can easily imagine what would happen in the first five minutes; the insurance people would have enough business to keep them going for the next year. In other words, it winds up in chaos, and so even though you say well, I have the right and the freedom to choose whatever I want to, I can drive down this way and I can drive in any street, I can drive in any lane, on the sidewalk, anything else. In the end it doesn’t mean much, does it, because everybody else is doing the same thing. So out of perfect chaos you don’t get freedom either.

So it seems that these two, no matter how opposed they may seem in the end they result in the same thing. You don’t really have responsible true freedom, you don’t have any place to stretch or to move or to do anything. And so in the Bible we come to Biblical sovereignty. And Biblical sovereignty resolves this through the use of the Creator/creature doctrine. This means that the Creator is outside of the universe, contrary to fatalism and autonomy where you just have one closed circle, everything’s in the circle. The Biblical sovereignty of God outside of the creation, and that’s where the certainty comes from, outside of the creation; the creation itself, by itself, doesn’t have certainty; it has certainty only because God outside of it gives that certainty to it.

Now we are going to go to two Biblical examples of sovereignty and free will in a context that I have deliberately chosen to get away from the salvation problem. Every time we start dealing with sovereignty and free will someone brings up the problem of salvation. Now because this often gets jammed in the whole question we’re just going to forget about how this applies to evangelism, forget how it applies to salvation, and just consider the fact that God is sovereign and we are responsible free creatures under His sovereignty.

Therefore we are going to take two contexts in the Bible where this is treated outside of the problem of salvation. One of these is Acts 27; here is a classic instance of how this problem is treated in practical every day terms. Remember once again, we need to remind you that every great doctrine of Scripture is practical, there’s no such thing as a bifurcated knowledge, a head knowledge and a heart knowledge; every doctrine of Scripture has practical application.

Acts 27:21, Paul is a prisoner on board a ship crossing the Mediterranean. Certain things are going to happen to this ship and as a result Paul’s doctrine of sovereignty is going to have to be lived out in an experiential situation. I want you to notice carefully how Paul works. In verse 21 we have Paul addressing the men who are running the ship, because they have violated certain wise advice that he had given them. So “Paul stood forth in the midst of them, and said, Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss.” He’s speaking of the fact that the ship has run into a storm and is about to be smashed by the waves in the Mediterranean. The idea here is that they violated a certain obvious meteorological wisdom of moving out into the eastern end of the Mediterranean during this time of year, near areas where the shores are rocky. And of course this was suicide, particularly for a powerless boat when they were powered by the wind and they couldn’t control themselves too well, and so they are just asking for trouble and now they are in jam. The ship is facing a disastrous storm and they are about to experience calamity.

Acts 17:22, “And now I exhort you to be of good cheer; for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but only of the ship.” “…only of the ship. For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, [24] Saying, Fear not Paul, thou must be brought before Caesar; and, lo, God has given thee all them that sail with thee. [25] Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer; for I believe God, that it shall be even as it was told me. [26] However, we must be case upon a certain island.”

Now if you look carefully at verses 21-26 you see a statement of the sovereignty of God, because the angel that speaks to Paul gives Paul a sovereign guarantee. He says, verse 24, “thou must be brought before Caesar; and, lo, God has given thee all them that sail with thee.” Now that is a sovereign declaration by God that every member of the crew will be saved. Let’s break this passage down. The first part of the passage, verses 12-26, we have a sovereign decree that says all men will be delivered. That’s physical deliverance, this boat is going to crack up or something but a sovereign declaration by God says to Paul this is absolutely certain that all men will dogmatically, definitely, be saved.

Now we have the next step in the drama. The next step is that they engage the storm, verse 27, “But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and down in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country.” In verse 29 they “feared lest we should fall upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.” And verse 30, “As the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they had let down the boat into the sea, under color as though they would have cast anchors our of the foreship, [31] Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved. [32] Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat, and let her fall off.”

The point was that some of these men panicked, they were some of the crew members and they saw the ship was about to disintegrate and they panicked, we’ve got to get off this thing, we’ve got to get off of it. So at this point we have the second stage in the drama and here in verses 30 on down to the end of verse 32 we have this second stage in the drama where you have a volition of Paul and of the soldiers, a volitional act whereby these men have to diffuse their volition to stay aboard. The officer, the centurion, has to use his volition to issue the order to cut the rope to the boat. And so we have here a clear appeal to volition. And Paul clearly says in verse 31 that God’s sovereign decree that all be saved will not work unless they’re in the boat. …unless they’re in the boat! So now we have an appeal in verse 31 to volition.

Now let’s look at the end of the matter. They stay in the boat and then the last verse in the chapter, Acts 27:44, “And the rest, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass that they all escaped safely to the land.” So step three in the drama, verse 44, was the sovereign decree fulfilled? Yes, the sovereign decree was that all be saved. It was absolutely certain before the drama started that they would all definitely, dogmatically, be saved.

And yet we find something; the Bible is not operating as a fatalist would operate. If Paul had been a fatalist what would he have done? He wouldn’t have bothered to shout, verse 30-32 shouldn’t be in there; if Paul really was a fatalist and said “what will be will be,” God told me it’s absolutely certain, didn’t He say that all would be saved? So therefore I don’t have to worry, I’ll just sit down and relax on the deck of the ship, no problem, just let it happen because what’s going to happen is going happen, there’s nothing I can do about it. Now that would be the attitude Paul should have had had he been a fatalist, but this proves that the men of the Bible were not fatalists, even when they came face to face with the certain decree of God. They were never fatalists; they didn’t ask this way. So Paul didn’t act as a fatalist would. A fatalist would never have done what Paul did; a fatalist would never have shouted “unless you don’t stay in the boat, you will be saved.”

What else could Paul have done? He could have taken the role as an autonomous. What would an autonomist have done? If Paul had been an autonomous he would have shouted at the soldiers, I hope you’ll stay on board because maybe if you do you’ll be saved. In other words, Paul might have shouted it into the wind but secretly deep down in his heart Paul would have been saying to himself I’m not sure I’ll ever be heard and if I am heard I’m not sure what I say is going to be very significant because it’s all chaos out there, nobody knows what’s going on and how can I know that anybody is going to be saved, including myself. So therefore Paul was not an autonomist either; he didn’t believe in total absolute freedom; he believed there was a form and a pattern and a certainty to events, and yet he was not a fatalist either.

So what do we say? We say to this that sovereignty, this decree up here, included in the content of it a certainty of the volition. In other words, when God aid in verse 21-26 that all men will be saved, God knew in His omniscience and God said out of His omniscience that I know, and I’m not telling you Paul, but I know in My omniscience what’s going to happen. I know there’s going to come a crisis on the fourteenth day and I know it’s that day that you, Paul, are going to shout to the crew, and I also know that that crew is going to be responding to your shout and I know that all men will be saved. And so we have here a very interesting lesson about sovereign decrees, and if you can get this lesson down you will never have a problem with eternal security. Sovereign decrees include positive volition or negative volition, whatever the case may be. In other words, that decree is the certainty of which way the volition is going to go. That decree has within its total scope the fact that there is certainty to how these events are going to move.

Let’s look at it this way; suppose we take the essence box of God; suppose down here again we have the circle of creation. God has a plan for His creation; that plan is 100% certain. Why is it 100% certain? If God’s plan is not 100% certain God can’t be God. Think about it for a minute; if God’s plan is not 100% certain then God can’t be God because what you have then is Chance with a capital “C,” Chance, that’s your God but not God; Chance becomes your god. So all things have to be absolutely and totally certain as far as the plan of God is concerned but the certainty is inside God’s plan. Here’s the plan, and inside that is volition; the plan includes the free choices, that’s the point. From God’s sovereignty and from His omniscience God constructs the plan that includes volition.

Let’s look at it in another way. God’s plan starts out at point A, moves to point B by a series of decisions, B-1, B-2, B-3, B-4, the plan of God includes in its forecast decrees these decisions and so therefore God’s sovereignty encompasses and is greater than the creature’s volition. And so we have a series of decisions made to go from point A to point B. In this particular example, in verses 21-26 the sovereign decree of God just told you want point B was; it didn’t tell you anything about the decisions or the chin of events leading to point B; it just told you that all men would definitely be saved but it didn’t tell you how. Paul didn’t have the inkling, he had something but as time went on Paul began to discern the outlines how to go from point A to point B, at which time Paul, let’s say B-2, made a decision, I will shout, “stay aboard.” Therefore Paul said I clearly perceive that though it’s certain we’re going to arrive at point B, though that is certain, the means that God has ordained to get to point B is my shout, and therefore I will shout, and I will shout to the crew, stay aboard. And so we have a chain of events in the plan of God. Paul sees that his own free act is one of those links in the chain, therefore he does it. In other words, he does it in the confidence that he’s on the winning side.

And so we have in Acts 27 a clear instance in how a man who believed in the sovereignty of God works in practice. Now let’s see how we can work in practice. Turn to Romans 8:28, keeping with this same diagram of the chain. “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” How many times have you quoted this but have you understood the principles behind Romans 8:28. It’ll revolutionize your life if you realize what these principles are. They are powerful principles, they are undefeatable principles; they are principles that can never be opposed, no matter how bad the situation may seem in your life, these principles are so fantastic that there is no situation in your life that can possibly violate Romans 8:28. What Paul is saying, let’s take point A and point B. Here is the noun, point A, here’s where you are if you qualify for Romans 8:28.

What do I mean by qualify for Romans 8:28? I mean they are “called according to His purpose.” Are you “called according to His purpose?” Have you personally accepted Christ as your Savior; are you in union with Him? If you are, then this promise applies to you. All right, you, then, are in the status where you can claim Romans 8:28 because you have believed. Therefore point A delineates your position as a believer. Point B indicates your future, what God has ordained on down the line for you personally. Now what this verse says is no matter how small a believer you may think of yourself, no matter how defeated a believer you may think yourself, God has a plan for your life and He has a certain goal on down the road. And that goal is that “all things work together for good.” So we’ll let point B equal good, good for your life. Now what Paul says is that all the events and crisis and events that come into your life, all these aren’t good in themselves; if you read verse 28 carefully, that’s not saying all things are good, some people misread that and then they go around with some self-hypnosis and say all things are good, all things are good, all things are good, all things are good, and of course if you are an intelligent person you look at that person and you wonder when are they going to ship him off. That would be an intelligent reaction to some idiot that’s going around with self-hypnosis.

But that’s not what Romans 8:28 is saying; it couldn’t be further from the truth. This is not advocating self-hypnosis. Romans 8:28 says “all things work together for good.” In other words, all things…notice that says all things, not just some things, all things, the problem that you’re having, the frustration that you’re having, that’s included in the a-l-l of verse 28. All…ALL things are working to move you down the path from point A to point B. That’s what Romans 8:28 says. “All things are working,” and the “are working” is present tense meaning it continually works, 24 hours a day, it works and works and works and works and works to get you down the road. What’s down the road? Verse 29, here’s your position, He “did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son,” so we define the good as that position in phase three of the plan of salvation that God has for you.

Let’s look at the plan of salvation: here’s the point you receive Christ which I arbitrarily call phase one. Then we go down to the point of death, and between the time of your belief in Christ till the time of your death we delineate by phase two. Phase three is eternity. Now God just doesn’t have some vague home in heaven for the believer. He has a state for you in heaven, and by that I mean that He is going to bring you into a condition of training so that you will be prepared for eternity. This life, this phase two, has more than just random meaning. Phase two of the plan of salvation, or if you want to be theological about it, the current sanctification, progressive sanctification, has as its goal the training of you so that you in eternity will be fit. In other words, you are being equipped by the frustrations of life, by the pressures of life, by everything else that comes into your life, those are all designed to lead you, if you are a Christian, designed to lead you into this position where you will be fit to dwell in the presence of the Lord forever. And why we don’t know, but in eternity you will be able to look back on your life and say, now I see it, now I see why I had that frustration; now I see why God made me do that; now I see why I had that experience and that experience, and it all fits together. Now some of you can even now in your life be able to turn back and look back in your life and say I see some leading here, I see how things have fallen together into place and I can see this. Well in eternity you’re going to be able to look back and see how it all fits and falls together.

That’s what this verse says, there’s a meaning and a purpose here, but let’s apply what we’ve learned about sovereignty and free will. Here we know the sovereign will of God is that we be brought to a certain state for our eternal dwelling with God, in His presence for all eternity. That’s the guarantee; that’s the sovereign decree. That would parallel the boat thing in Acts 27; that would parallel the fact that all those crew men, it was certain that they be saved, but let’s draw some more parallels. Remember we said it was absolutely certain that those crew men be saved, Acts 27 said that. It’s also absolutely certain that we will be predestinated, we are absolutely certain to be conformed to the image of Christ in eternity; that’s certain.

But let’s make another analogy. Paul, in Acts 27, did what to make sure, or you might say to participate in the flow of events he wasn’t here…here is Paul out here looking at the flow of events [can’t understand word], he wasn’t passive, Paul didn’t adopt this stance, well I’m just going to sit here and watch God work and I’ll sit here and watch all this cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect bang, reach point B. That’s not the way Paul operated. He got into the chain by his volition and said stop, stay aboard, that you may be saved. Now it’s the same thing in the Christian life, we don’t passive stand outside of the path from the point that we received Christ to the time that we die. We don’t passively stand by and say well, God’s going to do great and mighty things. Sure He is, but if you sit by passively and you don’t exercise your volition, you’re heretical and at that point you’ve become apostate, you’ve fallen away from the true Biblical idea. You have false doctrine and it’s false to stand by and say oh, God’s going to do great things and sit completely by as passive. That’s wrong. That violates the doctrine of the balance between volition and sovereignty. If you had the same attitude Paul had just think back, what was Paul’s attitude when he saw the ship falling apart and the soldier going over the side. Did he just sit by, oh, it’s going to be so wonderful, do what God’s going to do? No, what did he say? You stay aboard; Paul actively became involved in the chain of events.

All right, so application, Christian life, you have to become actively involved in the chain of events that God has ordained for you to lead down to this point where you will be equipped to be conformed to the image. In other words, when you get down there it’s going to be the result of a couple of decisions that you made, a couple of decisions or more that you made in your life, and that’s why these acts of volition are terrifically significant, because those are just as significant as Paul’s decision to warn the crew. Had Paul not warned the crew you could have argued that they wouldn’t have been saved. In other words, Paul warning of the crew was absolutely essential that God’s goal be performed. And therefore acts of positive volition on your part are absolutely essential that you reach the goal that God has designed for you. And you can’t sit passively by and say God is going to do mighty things; that’s not the way you do it. You have to exercise your volition and the response to His Word.

Now this is one example, Paul in the boat. Let’s take another example of a man in the Old Testament; Daniel and prayer. Daniel 9:2, here we have a very practical thing and here, I think, is a place where a lot of Christians would do well to pay close attention to how Daniel behaves. “In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.” In other words, here’s the situation. In 596 BC Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire moved westward in a gigantic campaign of imperialism, bringing under the power of the Neo-Babylonians tremendous areas of land, geography. They moved into areas all the way as far westward as the Mediterranean Sea coast and they moved down into the northern areas of Egypt. It was a massive campaign of expansion and God has prophesied through Isaiah, through Ezekiel, through Jeremiah, through all these prophets that He was going to use Nebuchadnezzar and the Gentiles to bring this country to its knees because they had violated God’s Word. All right, He moved westward and in 586 the nation went into captivity; it was completely destroyed, it lost its independence. And incidentally, from 586 on down to the present day there has been no authorized independent government of Israel; none, including the things of 1948. There has been no God divinely authorized free government for Israel since 586; they lost their independence at that time.

But Jeremiah said the desolation won’t continue forever, the desolation will go on only for seventy years. Now of course, the people loaded with the human viewpoint of their day went oh, Jeremiah, let’s not be stupid, a little nation like Israel, are you kidding, clobbered by this big Neo-Babylonian Empire, it would be like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania swallowed up by the Russians in 1940 and the late 30s, swallowed completely up, and you mean to tell me that this nation in only seventy short years is going to emerge again, you’re crazy Jeremiah. But Jeremiah, of course, wasn’t articulating his historical opinion, he was articulating the verbal revelation of God and in 516 BC that captivity was up. Well, the year had come in verse 2, and Daniel had studied his Bible. Please notice even though these men had direct access to God through divine visions what did they study? They studied the Bible. If they were to go along with some of the people that are telling us “you get too much Bible study, you can get overloaded, you get top-heavy, all that doctrine up there in the frontal lobe and you can’t walk straight because you have a heavy head, all that head knowledge,” and so on. Evidently Daniel didn’t understand this business about head knowledge and heart knowledge and he understood the point that you had to study the Word of God and study and study and then study some more.

And so Daniel said “I understood by the books,” in other words, he studied and he studied and he studied and he studied and he studied, and it was laborious study. If you look at a Hebrew scroll sometime, you can pull that thing out and you look at something in Hebrew and if you want to cross reference it you should have a motor so you can turn the thing to get down to chapter one; you have forty chapters on a scroll, so you’re reading over here in Isaiah 40:20 and it says something, and boy, I remember something in 1:16 so there you go and you spend an hour turning back to chapter 1; now we’ve got something in chapter 32, and you start rolling over to chapter 32. That’s the way they had to study the Bible; they had it on scrolls, not on codices where the vellum or the papyrus sheets were latched to a binding. That wasn’t the way they studied, they studied on scrolls. So these people really put in their hours of Bible study and you can see what it resulted in, a fantastic testimony for the Lord. So we have the seventy years, and he learned by verse 2, see it’s one thing to study and it’s another thing to learn. He learned that the seventy years were up and furthermore, and of special significance tonight is that he learned this day, or this year that the desolations are going to be ending.

So we have a sovereign decree of God, a sovereign decree that says that the discipline will end; the discipline will end! And that’s absolutely certain; the discipline will end at the end of seventy years. But now Daniel does a funny thing, Daniel 9:3, now he responds to a sovereign decree of God. He’s absolutely certain that this discipline is going to end in seventy years, and then Daniel does a funny thing in verse 3, “I set my face unto the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes; [4] I prayed unto the LORD, my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping covenant and mercy to them that love Him and to them that keep His commandments.” Verse 5, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from Thy precepts and Thy judgments; [6] Nether have we hearkened…” and he goes on and confesses the sins of the nation. And here we have a great priestly prayer where he is using the 1 John 1:9 concept, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Now do you see something? Look at this again. We have a sovereign decree that is absolutely certain that the discipline will be lifted, but we also, and Daniel knew this, have other words in the Bible that tell us that no discipline is ever going to remove until confession is made. So on the one hand we have a sovereign declaration that the discipline will end at the end of seventy years, but on the other hand we also have Scripture that says yes, but discipline is never going to end until someone confesses the sin. So what does Daniel do? He confesses the sin. So here we have stage 2 in the drama where we have volition thrown into action and Daniel confesses the sins of the nation. And stage 3, the discipline ends, that’s the last of the book of Daniel.

Now let’s look at this; here we have the same three elements of the Apostle Paul… the same three! You start off with a sovereign decree of God; the reaction on the part of a believer in that day is to get involved in a chain of events that he knows is going to move him from A to B. Let’s draw a diagram: A is Daniel’s time; B was the lifting of the discipline. Daniel knew back here at point A that it was actually certain by the end of that year that the discipline would be lifted on the nation by prophetic decree. That was absolutely certain. But Daniel knew that in the cause/effect chain that God had ordained that God always works through that discipline is never removed unless someone confesses. So therefore he said I will confess. See, Daniel was not a passive observer in saying oh, let’s see God do great and marvelous things and I’ll watch the cause and effect sweep by me, watch God work. Yes, but Daniel said I step into the chain of cause and effect by my own volition and I will confess these things; I will confess the sins and the discipline will be lifted.

So from these two things can we draw some conclusions. We said last time with Paul and the boat; there we had an obvious situation which Paul got involved in the chain of events. Daniel got involved in the chain of events in the matter of prayer. Let’s apply this to prayer. God promises certain things but these certain things are contingent on our prayer. Turn to James 4:2; James says, “Ye lust, and have not; you kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.” In other words, you go through all this business, fighting everybody, arguing, with all the frustration, you don’t have what you want, and “you have not because you ask not.” Now what’s James saying? He’s saying there are definite things that God wants in your life and you don’t have them because you don’t ask for them. It’s that simple. Prayer is a necessary link in the definite certain chain that goes from point A to point B, definitely needed! And so here we might say let’s take out one of those links and label it prayer; prayer was necessary, confession was necessary. Confession is necessary in our life; it was necessary for Daniel and here James says the same thing, prayer is necessary, without it, it’s not going to happen, it’s that simple.

What can we say then? Turn to Ephesians 6:18, here you have a man, Paul, wasn’t Paul an apostle; didn’t Paul have unlimited powers? Wasn’t it Paul whose handkerchief they took and said here, we’ll take this handkerchief, we can heal all the sick people. Paul, you have great power, these apostles raised the dead, these apostles did all sorts of things, but look at this strange thing here in 6:18; here is his address to believers in his day. “Praying always with all supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; [19] And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, [20] For which I am an ambassador in bonds,” now isn’t that interesting. Paul said my ministry will be frustrated without prayer on the part of other believers.

In other words, here you have a man who is out here fighting satanic forces; he’s coming under tremendous fire and he needs some artillery, he needs some relief. Where are the believers that are manning the guns to give him the relief? And if he doesn’t get relief he’s going to have to retreat; the same thing that you have in a military situation; the ground soldiers cannot go in unless they are supported by artillery and air support and naval support. Without these they must retreat. And here Paul says, even here, the infallible apostle, the writer of over half of the New Testament epistles, even he said my ministry will be ruined unless you stand in back of me with prayer. Now if that’s true of Paul it must be true of the missionaries that we have for our church, a practical illustration. Well, if that’s the case, then isn’t their inefficiency perhaps in the field in various activities and areas, not due, maybe, to the fact that they’re not getting enough prayer support? Might it not be due to the fact that they, like Paul, are coming under tremendous satanic assault but they’re not getting any artillery from the back, they’re not getting any air support, they’re not getting any naval support and the result is they have to retreat, and the result is the gospel proclamation is injured.

You say well how could God certainly let this happen because it’s all basically under the control of God. God can allow defeat and the defeat will work together for good; these defeats will work together for good because the defeats are then used to train other believers what they were supposed to do in the first place. So God has a whole thousand an one ramifications here; you can’t argue that way out of a chain. But my point is to look again and review these two items and then we’ll turn to Romans 9 for the final passage.

There are these three elements that you always see in the Bible. Keep these three together and you’ll keep your balance. The first is that you have a sovereign decree, or we might put in parenthesis, if you don’t like all that language just simply say God’s will; God’s will expressed. And this is not His direct will, necessarily, but His overriding will, this is His certain will, things that He has expressed in the New Testament as absolutely certain such as, one of them we covered tonight, that you will be personally conformed to the image of Christ. Now some of you say well that’s hard to believe. Well, it may be, harder for me to believe, but the New Testament says that you will be conformed to the image of Christ. Now that’s a fact and that is in the doctrine of predestination, that’s the context of that verse. That means that every one of us who have personally believed in Christ will eventually be conformed to the image of Christ. Now some people can’t believe that; that’s how the doctrine of purgatory got started, they said my goodness, you see the way some of these saints check out, they’re in no condition to be conformed to the image of God, there has to be some difference between the time of death and the time they are conformed to the image of God so we’ll put in a little place and call it purgatory, that’s the only way we can explain it. But the Word of God doesn’t have any purgatory. The Word of God says that you will be conformed to the image of God…you will be conformed.

Now that is a certain statement about your life and no matter what happens in life, no matter how bombed out you get in your Christian life the will of God, the sovereign decree is that you will be conformed to the image of Christ. Now, what is the second step that you always find in the Bible? You have a volitional response to that decree…a volitional response. What’s the volitional response? The volitional response means that you see that to get there involves cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect, and it means there are going to be certain acts in here of volition, positive volition, positive volition, positive volition, positive volition, positive volition, and therefore if you really believe in the sovereignty of God then your immediate behavioral response will be to choose God’s will in your life. Example Daniel, 1 John 1:9, if you’re out of fellowship you will choose 1 John 1:9 and you will choose it in confidence that it will all work out.

Now let me show you a side benefit to this picture, and of course this one is that the goal will be reached. There’s a side benefit to all this. Let’s go back to Daniel in prayer for a minute; let’s suppose that Daniel didn’t have the certainty that the discipline would be removed. How would that affect Daniel’s prayer? Suppose Daniel didn’t have the certainty that God would lift the discipline? Suppose he said Lord, it’s about time that you’d kind of change your mind on this deal, now would you consider it? What kind of prayer is that? That’s a prayer without any confidence of an answer. In other words, without God’s sovereignty we can’t be confident in prayer. It’s a necessity to under gird the confidence in prayer. I can be confident when I pray and 1 John 1:9, when I use it. Why can I be confident? Because I know I am in the will of God and if I am in the will of God I’m in the definite cause/effect chain that leads to that predetermined predestined goal and victory is certain.

So therefore sovereignty gives me my confidence in prayer. When I pray in the will of God that He has sovereignly expressed to get me on down the line to the point where I am conformed to the image of Christ, when I pray a prayer that fits that chain I know it’s going to be answered and it gives me tremendous confidence. And this is why Daniel could confidently pray…confidently pray! And we didn’t have time to develop the passage in Daniel 9 but if we had had the time to develop it you would have seen that he prayed that prayer for about three weeks. Do you know why? Because the angel, that’s the passage where it took the angel three weeks to break through to answer Daniel’s prayer, and all the time Daniel could have been saying oh, gee, I don’t know whether it’s really certain that God’s going to lift the discipline or not. Look, I’ve been praying for this thing for 21 days, nothing happens, God’s not listening to me, too bad, turn it off. That could have been his response and after a while he would have given up and said well, kiss that goodbye, chalk it up to experience. Now that could have been his response but it wasn’t. Why? Because Daniel knew for certainty that God was going to remove the discipline that year and therefore knowing the sovereign will of God he prayed toward that sovereign will.

In other words, the way I picture this is in my mind is having an incline and having a boulder on this incline, and I know that gravity is going to pull that boulder down and so it gives me confidence as the ball begins to roll to push behind it and make it go down faster, and that’s what I’m doing in the Christian life, I’m pushing the rock down faster; I know that sovereignty decrees that rock is going to roll down and therefore I add to that by my volition in this thing (technically I don’t add to it but in the sense of the illustration) I add to the momentum of the rock by shoving it and I can be gleeful about it and I can have perfect confidence because I know the rock’s going down. So this is why you can pull in the doctrine of sovereignty and if you pull in and appropriate this doctrine of sovereignty in your life you’ll see why it can give you confidence. And you will understand something about history that many of our modern day historians have never understood; what was the secret of the Puritans?

What was the secret of these people that came to America, the Pilgrims too because they were influenced by the same thing although they weren’t the same as the Puritans. What made these people go all across the sea in these little boats, and if you’ve ever seen the Mayflower you ought to take a good look and don’t take two steps because you’ll fall off, and go across the Atlantic Ocean experiencing all these storms, go to an unknown land with no government aid, and go without any armed services to escort you or anything else, and go over there and carve out a civilization? What made these people do it? Because they had confidence in the sovereignty of God and that’s what made them tough and don’t you ever accept this ridicule that’s going around about the silly Puritans. The Puritans had quirks but if you look at the deep character of the Puritans there is not a man on the college campus today that could stand to any one of the Puritans, not one. There’s not a member of the faculty that could possibly stand up to the Puritans. They were brilliant, they were tough and they were spiritually mature people. And it’s because they understood sovereignty and they knew how to squeeze out every bit of it that they could in their life as a Christian. They grabbed onto these doctrines and used them and that resulted in a very tough virile aggressive Christianity.

Let’s turn to Romans 9 and see how Paul deals with an objection. Paul is dealing with an objection that will come up at this point, for a person will inevitably say, looking at this chain of cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, is it absolutely certain that we get down to the goal, B, and if it’s absolutely certain because God is sure, that we’re going to fall down on the way here, negative volition, we go into sin, and then we pick ourselves up, 1 John 1:9, we don’t mope, we don’t cry about it, and all the rest of it, like a lot of Christians who can’t recover, haven’t learned how to use 1 John 1:9 and move on, you have this up and down, up and down motion in the Christian life. All right, we move back up into the chain. Now couldn’t you argue that when you went down and decided to go against God’s will and you were out of fellowship, you learned from it, didn’t you? David learned from the Bathsheba incident, didn’t he? After all, Solomon was born out that union. And you learned in all these things of negative volition, so why couldn’t you come back to God and say well God, why do You condemn me for making negative decisions, getting out of Your will, when in the end it works together for good anyway. “All things work together for good.” Why, God, do You hold me responsible? Why do You judge me if going out will still result in the fact that some good comes out of it always…always!

Turn to Proverbs 16:4 is a classical reference on this. Proverbs 16:4 gives you the statement that Paul is trying to…somebody has illegitimately concluded from this and Paul is trying to counter it in Romans 9. “The LORD has made all things for Himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.” Now if He’s made the wicked for the day of evil, why does He turn around and blame the wicked? The wicked are essential to His plan: example, Judas Iscariot. Wasn’t Judas Iscariot essential to the plan of God? Yes, you had to have a Judas Iscariot to get Christ on the cross. Well if that’s true, then why don’t you come back and say well then why does he condemn Judas Iscariot? Was Pharaoh necessary for His plan to get Israel out of Egypt? Yes; well then why does God turn around and condemn Pharaoh.

The answer Paul gives is in Romans 9:19, “Thou will say then unto me, Why does he yet find fault? For who can resist His will?” Now be careful. Some people have misinterpreted verse 19 and if you don’t catch verse 19 you’re going to lose yourself in the rest of the whole passage of Romans. Verse 19 is not saying God has made us robots; what it is saying is that taken as a whole the plan of God includes positive and negative volition. Was it absolutely certain Adam would fall? Yes. Do you know why I know it was absolutely certain? Because in 1 Peter it says Jesus was crucified before the foundation of the world. If Jesus Christ is crucified before the foundation of the world then obviously it was absolutely certain that Adam would fall. But God still judged Adam for falling. All right, if this is so, then Paul says a person could say well who can resist His will? In other words, the plan of God is going to go on regardless of what happens; the plan of God is going to go on, Adam falls, God wins; Adam doesn’t fall, God wins. It’s one of these deals where you have a coin that’s got heads on both sides and you flip it, say I choose heads, do you want to choose tails. That’s the way God kind of runs history; it’s kind of a heads I win and tails you lose. That’s exactly the way… no matter what happens God’s plan comes out.

Now if that’s the case, no matter what happens God’s plan comes out, including all these negative volition decisions that are made along the way, if that’s the case when why does God get so upset with the negative volition? The classic answer begins in Romans 9:20. “Nay but, O man, who are you that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why have you made me thus? [21] Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?” Now let’s stop there for a minute; notice the motif. What doctrine’s involved in verses 20-21? The doctrine of Creator/creature; it goes back and this is why when I started I drew that diagram. Here’s Creator, here’s creation. You’ve got to keep the two distinct and Paul says this is the resolution to the sovereign/free will dilemma. You’ve got to consider it as God outside of the universe, He is over the universe, He has made the universe, and He as the Creator has the right to make the plan He wants to make.

Now ultimately this is the most profound answer that can ever be given. Some of you think well, that’s a trivial answer. Think about it for a moment and you wont’ think it’s a trivial answer. If you think the answer in verse 20-21 is a trivial answer you haven’t caught the point; we can’t go into the details of it, but you’ve got to think about the objection. The objection is why has God designed a plan with evil in it? Why has God designed a plan that’s going to have Adam fall; Adam falls and then Christ has to go to the cross, Christ has to suffer, why all this suffering? Why does God design a plan with it? God could have designed another plan, couldn’t He? Sure He could, He could have made another plan.

Why did He choose this plan, with the suffering? And in the last analysis that is His right as Creator. God has the rights to make whatever plan He wants to make. Now this is deeply offensive to modern man, and if you feel something rising up within you watch it carefully because the chances are that that’s the result of the culture that you’ve learned; that you’ve learned to think in terms of yourself as a free creature, responsible to no one and when you get hid over the head with verses 20-21 there’s something that wells up within you that makes you angry; no, no, no, no, there’s something that says, and Paul says hun-uh, the Creator has the right to make what He wants to whether you like it or not. That is His prerogative; He is the top dog.

Romans 9:22, and now he suggests a reason, he says God has the right, verse 20-21, and now he says…he adds verse 22 to guard against something, people could say well then, God has an arbitrary meaning, God just picks and chooses the way He wants to, no rhyme, no reason, no purpose, nothing, God just wants to be a meany so He does it this way. And Paul says before you conclude that, ask yourself a question. “Suppose God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.” And what Paul is trying to communicate in verse 22 is the fact that it burdens God’s heart to have the suffering; God is not up there completely detached from His universe, in one sense, now he’s detached as far as His being is concerned, but He is love, God loves you and you may not think He does and that’s because you’re all wet, but God does love you and He’s done many things to prove it. But, a God who loves and who sees suffering can never be happy and it affects Him. God has emotions; God has various personal affections and don’t think of God as a cold Supreme Being; that’s not a Biblical picture. It’s a holy being, He’s absolutely holy, but it pains Him, and verse 22 says this, that God is not indifferent to suffering, never.

For the classic passage to show that God is never indifferent to suffering turn to John 11:32. Once again Paul’s point: God has the right because He’s Creator, but this doesn’t mean God is totally arbitrary and flippant about it and detached personally; He’s involved with it. In John 11 we have a key illustration of this. Jesus Christ was God incarnate; was Jesus Christ indifferent to suffering? “When Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him,” remember now, there’s a personal relationship involved because these two sisters had Jesus in their home for supper many times, these two sisters knew Jesus personally and there was a personal warm relationship that Jesus had with these people and this was just a social relationship that He had in His incarnation. “When Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His feet, and said unto Him, Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. [33] When Jesus, therefore, saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping who came with her, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled, [34] And He said, Where have you laid him? They said unto Him, Lord, come and see.” And [35] “Jesus wept.”

Now there you have God’s attitude toward suffering. God has His right to make whatever plan He wants to, but you cannot draw the conclusion after saying that, and Paul guards against it. Remember Romans 9:20-21 says it’s God’s right as Creator, “but,” and then there’s verse 22 and that’s the one, “but,” b-u-t, “but” that does not mean God is indifferent to the content of His plan, and it doesn’t mean that God has chosen some plan that allows Him perfect comfort where He kind of floats in heaven while all the rest of us suffer down here. That’s not the Biblical picture. The Biblical picture is that God chose a plan in which He suffered too. And that’s what this illustration is in John 11; it’s not just an illustration, it’s an actual event, but “Jesus wept.” In other words, Jesus could no be indifferent to the suffering that He saw in front of Him, and when He was brought face to face with it He did weep, and that was his attitude and that’s the attitude to God.

And this is an answer that came up in one of our Tuesday night classes, we were talking about the fact that God is immutable and someone said that they were discussing this and the professor threw out the fact, yes, but why is it that in the Bible you read time after time where God repented, God changed His mind. How can God be immutable and change His mind? And some professor threw that out to his student and said ha-ha, God is not immutable because the Bible says God changed His mind. The answer is very simple if you understand the Bible, which of course the Darwinian professor did not. And that is, that God is a picture, anthropomorphically through Scripture and through the means of anthropomorphic illustration, the reason for this is that God has a character that is the archetype of our image of God; we are made in the image of God, and therefore…and God, love and so on is pictured through the analogies that we have, and when we change our mind and so on, what do we change our mind because of? We change our mind in response to our experience, and what it’s saying when God repents it means that the events of history as they go on case after case after case, cause reaction in the person of God Himself. In other words, God is so intimately concerned with each event in time that it does cause a personal reaction. Now God does not change, His character does not change, He’s absolutely the same yesterday, today, and forever. But when the Bible says that God repented, what it’s saying is that he is personally involved with a person, very deeply, and so that when I am involved in this relationship with God, for example Moses and God in the Old Testament, God says okay Moses, I accept your confession and so on. In other words, you get the idea that God is right there with Moses as a person, involved with Moses. And so when Moses prays, God says I changed My mind Moses. Now of course, God from infinity didn’t change His mind, it was actually certain what would happen but that is the way the authors have of conveying the fact that God has an intimate connection.

Now if you don’t grasp this, and I’m sure not all of you have grasped it because it’s a very difficult thing to grasp, but if you concentrate and grasp this principle it will resurrect your life from the doldrums because you will at last see that God is not indifferent to the tiniest detail in your life. He can’t be; He is intimately involved with it all. The suffering is there, yes; but remember John 11, “Jesus wept.” It causes God pain, and it causes God pain when believers suffer. It causes God pain when believers fail to claim the promises that He has provided. Aren’t you pained when you’ve told your children what to do, you’ve given them everything you could, you’ve pointed them in the direction and still they go another way? What parent is there that isn’t affected by standing by and watching your child deliberately hurt himself, violating all the advice you gave him and deliberately goes out and does something that hurts himself; don’t you feel pain? Sometimes you feel pain while you knock them in the head, but really, that’s a reflection that deep down you have concern for them and you are affected, and God says divine institution number three is archetyped or is a copy of His concern for us as believers.

In other words, and we’re going to discover this as we go through these divine institutions, that they all turn out to be systems of features of the creation that are patterned after His very character, and so when we come to volition and we face these problems of sovereignty and volition, remember that our volition in a small way is what God’s sovereignty is; it’s the analog, in other words it’s the closest thing, if you could go through the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of the universe tonight the nearest thing you could get to the sovereignty of God would be your own volition and to make the analogy similar, what did Jesus do in the Sermon on the Mount? He said what father among you, if his children ask for bread, would give him a stone? And what father among you, if his child asked him for a fish would he give a serpent? In other words, Jesus is using the analogy between God’s sovereignty and human volition; He says you wouldn’t do that, well why do you think God would do that? You have a picture of God that’s less than that of yourself and it’s ridiculous; absolutely ridiculous.

So when you think of sovereignty and free will, think of the three things we’ve learned tonight. Think of how the Biblical authors reacted. First you have the sovereign declaration of the will of God; for you that means Romans 8:29 or Ephesians 1:3, any passage that deals with predestination. That is a declaration of God’s sovereign will for you that can’t be controverted by any power on earth, that God has made that decision from all eternity that you personally individually, you, not someone else, not a name, not a number on a card, you will personally arrive at a point where you will be conformed to the image of Christ; absolutely certain because it was designed from eternity past, and that is the first thing. That is God’s sovereign decree for you as a believer in His Son.

The second thing: how did the Biblical authors always react when they were faced with the sovereign decree of God? They reacted by getting involved in the chain of events, by their own volition; the cause/effect, cause/effect, cause/effect. But what did Paul do? He didn’t sit by and say well, we’ll just let the Lord work. No, he said soldiers, get these men back on board or they’re going to perish. Daniel, Lord I confess the sins of this nation, that this discipline can be lifted. They put themselves into the cause, the chain; they became one of the links in that certain chain.

And then the third thing was that the goal was always reached.