Clough Genesis Lesson 64
Birth of Esau and Jacob; Doctrine of election – Genesis 25:1-26
One of the basic points that we have made
time and again in this series is that from Genesis 12 through the end of
Genesis actually, you have what is called the dispensation of promise. The dispensation of promise is called that
because it’s a historical era in which God is preparing the world for the
Now one of the principles we have stressed and stressed and stressed through all of this and we will continue to teach it and teach it and teach it is that doctrine comes to man in concrete pictures; it does not come to man in systematics. Systematics are derivatives to the primary revelation which is in a concrete picture. There’s a reason for this; it’s because only some men some of the time think systematically but God must save in such a way that all men all the time can know Him, and the only way that God can communicate in such a way that all men all of the time instead of just some men some of the time is to teach in simple graphical pictures because all men all the time think that way. And this is why we’ve seen some of these simple graphical pictures.
First of all we’ve seen on the basis of Scripture why God can teach about His incomprehensible character in easily comprehendible pictures. It follows from the way God designed the universe. Here is God the Creator and here is the universe, His creation. We know that the universe testifies to God’s character; Psalm 19:1, “The firmament shows His handiwork.” So there is that in the universe and in the creation that matches in some way God. But the Scriptures also tell us that God Himself is incomprehensible; you can’t know God and I can’t know God fully because as 1 Timothy 6:16 and John 1:18 make very clear, He dwells in the light whereunto no man can approach.
We’ve seen a number of simple pictures, things that God has worked out down here in creature history, things that correspond to the way He is. They are not identities, they are correspondences, just as man is not an identity with God but he is a correspondent, the Bible says you and I were created in God’s image. What does it mean to be created in His image? It means that somehow we’re a finite replica of the way God would be if He were suddenly mapped into finite space. So man, then, is the image of God.
Now looking at this we come across several
interesting pictures that we’ve studied in this dispensation of promise. In Genesis 19 we studied
Then we saw in Genesis 22 the sacrifice of Isaac and we saw in that sacrifice a picture of the Father and the Son in the Trinity with the Son being obedient, even unto death, the death of the cross. In Isaac’s case he was obedient unto his father, even the death of having his throat slit on the top of the religious altar. So Genesis 22, for the third time, gives us a story so simple a child can understand it, but nevertheless a story that gives patterns, gives categories, it shapes our minds to be able to think about Christ. No one can think about Christ until they’ve had their minds prepared for Christ. And you haven’t got your mind properly prepared for Christ until you have had it prepared by the Old Testament. And so the Old Testament gives us these forward pictures. Here the picture of the father, the picture of the son, the picture of the only begotten son and the picture of the death of Christ on the cross.
Then in Genesis 24, which we finished last week, we find the picture of selecting a bride for the son, an enormously significant passage because it parallels the Father looking for a bride for His Son and sending the Holy Spirit to bring that bride to the Son, just as Abraham, the father, sought a bride for his son and sent the servant ahead to gain that bride for his son. So again we are prepared, our minds are being shaped by the Holy Spirit’s own primary revelation, the pictures of the Old Testament.
We mention this only because there is a
tendency on the part of some and always has been in church history and once in
a while there arises in
In Genesis 25 we come aboard to another picture and this one is the most difficult of all; the picture of Jacob and Esau, the picture with is a child’s birth, children’s birth, the birth of twins, a picture again so simple a little child can repeat it but nevertheless a picture that corresponds with one of the most difficult doctrines of all Scripture; sovereign unconditional election. So let’s look at some of the preliminary passages in Genesis 25 for this chapter has sections in it and we want to get through some of the primary sections to get on the main birth narrative.
The first four verses deal with the third
woman through whom Abraham had children.
Genesis 25:1, “Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was
Keturah. [2] And she bore him Zimran,
and Jokshan, and
Now verses 1-4, giving what appear to be obscure and trivial historical facts, this is the kind of passage that the neo-evangelicals are now telling us can have error in it because it’s (quote) “not essential” to the primary saving purpose of Scripture. As we said last week, this is why one of the theological advisors to Young Life wants to have his Bible inspired errors and all and he can do so by referring to passages like this, claiming that these verses are really insignificant. Are they? We said that the defense against erroneous inspiration is the fact that these so-called trivial historical passages are legal records. And back in Genesis 17:6 there was a promise made to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. Furthermore, it was stated that he would be a blessing to the entire world, the world of the three sons of Noah. If that be the case then verses like verses 1-4 are not irrelevant to the main theme of Scripture; they’re very relevant. The Holy Spirit has included these apparently trivial items simply to give us a legal record that God did, in fact, meet His promise of Genesis 17:6. Therefore, we cannot tolerate errors in these first four verses and therefore they are not trivial.
The next section, Genesis 24:5-11, deals
with the final days of Abraham and what he did in those final days. It’s noteworthy that in these final days he
did something with his property; something with his property that shows Abraham
to be the great and mature believing steward that he was. “And Abraham gave all that he had unto
Isaac. [6] But unto the sons of the
concubines, whom Abraham had, Abraham gave gives, and sent them away from
Isaac, his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country. [7] And these are the days of the years of
Abraham’s life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years. [8] Then Abraham died in a good old age, an
old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people. [9] And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him
in the
The interesting thing about verse 6 is that Abraham is so intent that the Messianic seed be protected, you notice he divides his estate before his death; he doesn’t wait until after the death. This way he secures the possession for the Messianic seed. Isaac is guaranteed his inheritance, and Abraham, though he’s a believer in the sovereignty of God is not a fatalist. He makes sure that the sovereignty of God is carried out by means; the means of disposing of his property.
Verse 8 shows us another quick, very quick reference to how Old Testament people thought. It’s commonly thought that the Old Testament, and this is usually done by high school religious teachers with two months education in religion, it’s usually said by these people that the Old Testament saints had no idea of life after death. Now if they had no idea of life after death where do we get the strange phrase we get at the end of verse 8, “he was gathered to his people.” His people are dead, and this expression, if you reference it in the concordance and look carefully is a clear indicator that the Old Testament saints quite clearly perceived life after death. In fact, they were so sure of life after death, Jesus at one point in the Gospels derives the entire doctrine of resurrection from this belief. So those of you who have heard from some comparative religionist that Old Testament people do not believe in life after death are simply tragically misinformed. Verse 11, [“And it came to pass after the death of Abraham, that God blessed his son, Isaac; and Isaac dwelt by the well Lahai-roi.”] The significance of this is Isaac’s stability in the land.
Now beginning in Genesis 25:12 and continuing through the end of verse 18, once again we have one of these little patches in Genesis 25. You’ll notice that this one begins; “Now these are the generations….” “These are” in Hebrew, what we call the toledot; the toledot, or generations is a marker in the book of Genesis; it indicates, we think, we can’t be dogmatic, but it indicates we think sections of records that when Moses or the men working under Moses complied the book of Genesis from previously transmitted records, everywhere you see “and these are the generations of,” it was the beginning of a section. For example, in Genesis 2:4, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” In Genesis 5:1, “These are the generations of Adam.” In Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah.” In Genesis 10:1, “These are the generations of Shem, Ham and Japheth.” In Genesis 11:10, “These are the generations of Shem.” In Genesis 11:27, “These are the generations of Terah.” And now all the way from Genesis 11, now down to here in Genesis 25 we have, “and these are the generations of Ishmael.”
What we have here is a title; a title of a
section that tells us this is what Ishmael produced in history. Again, we could write off verses 12-18 like
our erroneous neo-evangelical friends and simply kiss it off as irrelevant
trivial historical detail. But are they?
Wasn’t one of the promises to Abraham and to Hagar, remember out at the well in
Genesis 16; God comes to Hagar and He says woman, your son, Ishmael, will be
the father of many nations. What do you
find precisely listed in verses 12-18?
The many nations, showing that this is not a trivial escapable detail;
this is a legal record saying that God performs what God said He would
perform. Genesis
Now Genesis 25:19, notice we go into another toledot; this is the ninth one in the book of Genesis and it’s Isaac. And whereas Ishmael took but seven verses, Isaac starts here and goes all the way over to the time of Jacob. And obviously by the volume of verses; we just have seven verses devoted to Ishmael, you have dozens and dozens and dozens devoted to Isaac. Why is this? Because again it goes back to the view of history that we have. Here we have Abraham, and history must be viewed as a process of progressive differentiation. Abraham starts out and Abraham is God’s chosen man. Abraham has two sons at least, first that we know: Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael is reprobate; Isaac is elect. Isaac is the one chosen over Ishmael and so out of one man, a common source, you have two. This one is important from Scripture in the sense that his record is a record of the dealings of God, hence verses 12-18. But that’s all, no salvation comes out of Ishmael and so therefore no salvation coming out of him makes him beside the point. So now we come over here to Isaac and the text begins with Isaac and carries this on for some time, the generations of Isaac.
We’re going to look at Genesis 25:19-26 this morning because that will give us far more material than we can ever cover. I want to read it; read to yourself and think through, try to feed your soul’s mind’s eye with these imaginative pictures of the childbirth because this is the primary picture we’ve got of this doctrine of sovereign election. “These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son: Abraham begot Isaac. [20] And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah as his wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Paddan-aram, the sister to Laban the Syrian. [21] And Isaac entreated Jehovah for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was entreated by him, and Rebekah, his wife, conceived. [22] And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the LORD. [23] And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in your womb, and two manner of people shall be born of thee; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. [24] And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb. [25] And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau. [26] And after that came his brother out, and his hand grabbed hold of Esau’s heel, and his name was called Jacob: And Isaac was threescore years old when she bore them.”
It’s the story of the birth of twins but a story that, like the other stories, under the analogy of God is being used to teach something very, very mysterious about history, that history is a product of God’s sovereignty. Notice first of all at the beginning; verse 20 being of curse but a repetition of Genesis 24; then in verse 21 the theme of barrenness. Why is it that these women, these mothers of the early patriarchs were all barren women? Why is it that they all had a fertility problem? Why is it the Scriptures constantly go back to the fact that these couples are childless; they are childless, they are childless. Now the Bible doesn’t tell us explicitly but I think there’s adequate data in the Scriptures to infer there’s a reason why these two women, Sarah and Rebekah, are barren women. If these stories are meant to look ahead in history, and if by looking at these stories we see truth in God Himself and His actions, then by looking at these stories of women who are barren we see the theme, life out of death. And that’s exactly what the Bible points to in future history, life out of death, that the patriarchs were no more able to produce life out of that which was dead than we are. Physically they could not produce life out of that which was sexually dead and so spiritually we can’t produce life out of that which is dead. The theme is deep and it’s imbedded in every story, hence the repetition, not because the author had a limited imagination; it’s because the sovereign Holy Spirit sets these stories up and sets the history of the stories up.
So Isaac entreats the LORD for his wife, and in the Hebrew it’s a queer expression here, it doesn’t say he entreated the Lord on behalf of his wife; it says he entreated the Lord in front of his wife. And it’s a very vivid picture and it’s the picture of the man and his calling when his wife is not doing her job to fulfill that calling. Here’s the husband; he’s been given a calling by God, just as Adam was given a calling by God in the Garden of Eden. Part of this calling, of course, is to produce the Messianic seed, but obviously Isaac can’t produce the Messianic seed by Himself, he needs his wife’s help. But his wife is infertile and therefore she’s not fulfilling her role in accomplishing the calling. Therefore, because it’s a calling issue you see prominent in verse 21, Isaac prays in front of his wife. He prays, as it were, as she stands there, God stands here, and Isaac comes over and stands in front of her. Now why is this assumed line of God, Isaac and Rebekah, Isaac standing in front of Rebekah? Because it’s Isaac pleading the cause of the call: God, You called me to this function; you have brought this woman to me but as she is she’s incapable of carrying on and therefore the petition.
And so she conceives, and then the next thing begins to happen, the struggle in her womb. Now the story of the struggle, an as we get into this pregnancy, we get a lot of details of how God works. Probably the best way of handling this is to turn to Psalm 139:16 for Psalm 139, more than any other passage of the Bible, that deals with pregnancy. In fact, there’s an entire theology of pregnancy in the Scripture, unfortunately woefully neglected by most Christians. Psalm 139:16 is one of the most serious statements about pregnancy that I’ve ever seen in the text of Scripture. David, in the context, is praising God for his destiny, and his destiny began with his conception, not with his birth because during pregnancy his physical being is being molded. He says in verse 16, “Thine eyes have seen my substance, yet being incomplete [unformed],” in other words, he’s not a full living person yet, he’s still construction, but nevertheless, though he’s under construction, note, “and in Thy book all” and the best translation I think for handling this is “in Thy book all the preordained days were written,” however you want to translate it you’ll notice some of the more modern translations struggle with verse 16 but at least they do a better job than the King James. The principle is that the child’s destiny is built in the womb during the nine months and the reason is because his body, which is going to be the carrier for his spirit, his body is being molded and being put in, all the days, all the things that God has for him is being put into him during the pregnancy period. Destiny begins in the womb. This is why it behooves pregnant women to take care of themselves, dietary wise, hygienically and otherwise. And we know, for example, in modern medicine it’s been shown how the infant can be born as drug addicts when their mother carrying them is on drugs. And a number of other things like this to show a very physical way that the mother shapes her baby’s destiny by what she does and what she is during the pregnancy period.
So it is back at Genesis 25 that Rebekah carries these babies and at the time she doesn’t know, probably, that they’re twins, I doubt she does because of what it says in verse 24, but she notices a strange fetal movement. Now I think every pregnant woman could say that she’s felt babies struggling in the womb but this particular struggle was a very unusual struggle; so unusual that the Holy Spirit brings it up for comment. This isn’t the only place in the Bible that the fetal movement is brought up for comment. Remember the story, at Christmas time we often read it, the story of Elizabeth carrying John the Baptist, and as Mary comes in, the baby in her womb leaps; there is an uncommon fetal movement and the mother detects it quickly. Now why were these Hebrew women so conscious of unusual patterns in fetal movement? Because they had the proper theology of pregnancy. They watched and they listened and they observed their own pregnancy because they knew enough as believing women that the destiny of their children was being written during those periods, hence any unusual fetal movement would speak of something unusual, perhaps, in the destiny of the infant that they were carrying.
So Rebekah reports it and she’s disturbed and it’s an elliptical sentence that she says here and it’s not… we can’t be dogmatic on how we translate it but I think the best way of saying the sense of what she says is, “if it be so that I carry the Lord’s seed, why do I have this going on in me.” And what she’s bothered with is there seems to be a militant thing that’s going on within her, and supposedly the Messianic seed is supposed to bring peace to the world. There’s supposed to be at least some tranquility to this. Granted, there should be normal fetal movement but nothing like this. This is a constant, intense struggle going on and it disturbs here and it disturbs her so much that she doesn’t even go to Isaac, when it says “she went to inquire of the LORD,” and the word “inquire” if you look at a concordance is always used to go to a cultist to inquire of the priest; we don’t know where she went. Martin Luther thinks in his study of verse 22 that she went to see Shem, who, on a strict genealogy would have still been living, but she went some place, some special place, other than just her husband, to inquire of the Lord.
In Genesis 25:23 we get the report back that she got direct revelation. We have no idea of how that direct revelation happened, where she went to get it or how it came to her. All the text says is that she inquired officially and she got an official word. And the official word came back that “Two nations are in your womb, and two manner of people shall be separated,” literally, “from your belly.” Now this is interesting for the detail that it makes. Destiny begins by the shaping of the physical body during pregnancy but the actual life of the infant begins at birth, hence it says they will be separated from the point of birth or separated when they move out of your belly, and that’s the thrust of this particular verse. But the two children, though born of the same father and the same mother in the same womb at the same time in the same house, one is an elect one and one is reprobate.
What better picture can God give us of the differentiation processes of history than to begin with twins, with a shared destiny and yet an eternally separate destiny. That’s why this picture is so powerful. That’s why this picture we will have to study for a number of weeks before we really come away with some grasp of what sovereign election really says. And God says before these infants ever lived, He says when they begin to live, beginning with their birth, not with their conception, they’re parallel, but beginning with their birth, beginning with their life, then they have two separate destinies and as history unfolds these destinies spread apart and become further and further and further removed from each other.
He says, “the elder shall serve the younger,” and this in reverse to the normal process. Normally the elder was the firstborn and the younger would serve the elder. Well, the prophecy is given in verse 23 and the Hebrew believers, interested as they always are in checking up with the facts of history against prophetic statements, it doesn’t come as any shock that verses 24-26 records the first act of these twin’s lives. Literally as it follows from verse 23, the separation process, God says, will begin when they are separated from your belly, and so the separation from her belly begins in verse 24-25 with the birth itself.
Now here, in addition to fetal movement, you obtain something else interesting about the Bible and about Bible times. The mother, as well as the father, observed carefully anything odd about the birth of a child. It seemed to be as though they were waiting as very impatient observers around the scene of birth, hoping that there would be something a little unusual about the birth of this child that would give them a tip about the destiny of that child. They were linking clearly different things about the birth with different things about the child’s later life. We see this a number of places where children are named for what happened at the day they were born, so here.
Genesis 4:24, “… behold, twins,” this is why I suggest back in verse 22 she, while she sees struggle, she doesn’t really realize they’re twins. Verse 25, “And the first came out red, all over like a hairy garment; he had his own little fur coat on, and interestingly the word “Esau” is made of the letters of the word for hairy garment which may suggest that he was named, I can’t prove this and it’s tight lexically to show it but it seems like the word Esau is coming off of something about the way Esau looked when he was first born. Clearly though in the second case Jacob is named for his birth. “And after came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel,” so he was born grabbing his brother’s heel. It doesn’t mean he took hold of it during the birth process; the picture in the Hebrew is that he was born, one infant actually came out and they were connected by Jacob constantly holding the heel, so as they pulled Esau and pulled him out they were pulling Jacob out because Jacob was holding right on, and that’s how Jacob got his name because the Hebrew word for heel is yakob, the Hebrew word Jacob, yakob. So again, children for this; why? Because there’s theology involved, because they’re looking for the differentiation that’s going to take place and start.
Now let’s turn to Romans 9; here’s how this simple birth story becomes involved in one of the greatest theological discussions of the New Testament. We’ve said for many moons that as we go through Genesis and look at key events, these key events are inevitably associated with certain doctrines; not other doctrines. And the event of the call of Abraham in the early chapters of Genesis, there are three doctrines that come up again and again and again that are associated with this; the doctrine of election, the doctrine of justification and the doctrine of faith. These are associated all the time with this. Here, Romans 9 is an example, the doctrine of election, and what picture, what primary datum should Paul use but the birth of Isaac and the birth of Jacob.
Notice Romans 9:7, “Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they children, but in Isaac shall thy seed be called.” Paul refers to the fact that history is a process of differentiation. First you have Abraham, he differentiates through time into that which is Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael is dropped in the text; the text goes on, looks at Isaac, and he differentiates into Jacob and Esau, and God traces this line. Notice the process of gradual persistent differentiation. If you want to go back all the way to the beginning of history look at Adam; in Adam both elect and reprobate are included. And so you see this thing as history unfolds differentiation proceeds. And it’s this, why in verse 8 Paul says, “They who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but children of the promise are counted as the seed.” “…the children of the promise,” what promise. Well, al the children that are of the Messianic seed in this differentiation process were what? Miraculously born; Isaac was a child of promise and that God promised there would be this promised son; Isaac, not Ishmael was the promised son, and so here.
Romans 9:10-13 concern us most because here is the New Testament application of this Old Testament story and what an application. “And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father, Isaac [11] (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calls), [12] It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. [13] As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Two twins, same spot, the same mother, the same womb and the same home; one God loves, and one God hates. God is sovereign in history. Now this is very hard for modern men to take and so we must spend some time carefully going through the doctrine of election.
We want to go back to the doctrine of election and go through some of these points in the next few Sunday mornings using the Jacob/Esau story as our visual imagery, so we can get our teeth, so to speak, on something concrete and not just talk endlessly about abstraction. Now the doctrine of election as I teach it is the classical Reformed doctrine of election, contrary to what some Johnny-come-lately theologians around here think. The doctrine of election as I teach it is the classic Reformed doctrine. I’m going to explain this classic Reformed doctrine; I’m going to also show you where it differs from Arminian doctrine of election and I’m going to show you where it differs from extreme forms of Calvinism, both of which commit the same error in the end. So we’re going to go through slowly and I’m only going to be able to this morning take the first half of the first point in the doctrine of election; there’s five points in this doctrine as I teach it, and I can’t even get through the first one because I want to go slowly and I want to go thoroughly and I’ll explain this once again because it appear that this is a topic of contemporary interest.
The doctrine of election depends upon something; it has something that you must understand before you even discuss the doctrine of election and the thing that you must understand before you talk about election is creation. So the first point in the doctrine of election is that it is dependent upon you knowing creation; it is also dependent upon you knowing the fall but we haven’t got time to talk about that this morning. We’re just going to deal with the first thing. Right from the start this is where we get in trouble with some people because so people are so interested, bound and determined they’re going to crack this doctrine, that they do not spend the time necessary to let their souls soak up the images of creation first, then go on to discuss election.
The reason this is so important is because
in the doctrine of election we have had two views, basically that have come
forward. There are only two views
possible, ultimately, and that is that God is the final determiner, and the
other one is that man is the final determiner.
In other words, who is it that finally, in the last analysis, decides
Jacob and Esau’s fate? God or Jacob and
Esau? Now the theological systems that
tend to the first answer are called Calvinist systems, and there are a number
of them. And there are those that favor
the view that Jacob and Esau…Roman Catholicism and Arminianism tend in that
direction. Now this church and most
dispensational churches are basically Calvinist in position, articulated to
various degrees of if, but fundamentalism has always tended in
Now as we begin this particular doctrine we want to start looking at God Himself. The error of extreme forms of Calvinism, we’ll call this, as Van Til calls it, extreme Calvinism, extreme Calvinism tries to solve a dilemma here between how can God sovereignly choose Jacob and Esau without Jacob and Esau getting their responsibilities zapped out. Extreme Calvinism tends to solve this by simply eliminating man from the scene and all history with him. Arminianism tends to solve the problem by eliminating God and His sovereignty from the scene. Now this debate has been going on for four or five hundred years, so there ought to be a systematic problem that’s enveloping the discussion and it wasn’t until the 20th century, particularly with Van Til that it was discovered what the problem was.
In the 16th and 17th centuries when this discussion first got started in church history, the Reformers had just got into an area where they were beginning to reform thought by the Scriptures once again. For a long time thinkers had been molded in the tradition of Aristotle and before that the tradition was Plato. And most scholars had gotten all their tools from Aristotle or Plato or both. And when the Reformers finally came on with Luther and Calvin they said back to the Bible in every area. Unfortunately, most Reformers, Calvin, Luther, Zwingli and others never lived long enough to take the Bible into every area. They did a miraculous job in what they did. But one cannot retreat back to the fossilized theology of the 16th and 17th century and let that be the criteria, as I have said numerable times before, for to do that you are denying the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit to the church of Jesus Christ. Theology is progressive, it is not static. And here is an example of it.
Both the extreme Calvinist views and the Arminian views err in the fact that they adopt 16th and 17th century rationalism. We’ll show that in detail in just a moment; they are using logic, both of them the same way and both in an unreformed, unbiblical and unchristian way. There is such thing as a Christian view of logic an a non-Christian view of logic and the people in both of these schools, that fight each other all the time, ultimately are using logic in an unchristian, unbiblical way. Now let’s see what the Christian view of logic as, because as Van Til has pointed out and other men who have studied this matter, now we can… you know, hind sight is better than foresight, now we can see what went wrong.
What went wrong was that in the 16th
and 17th centuries the Cartesian school was strong in
Let’s look at God’s character. In God we have 100% rationality; that means that God can perceive truths and every relation of every truth to every other truth. Let’s draw it like this: a series of circles, each circle denotes pieces of truth, and let’s draw lines between each one denoting the relationship each piece of truth has with every other piece of truth. Then looking at this we can come and say that God knows the pieces of truth and He knows all relationships between the pieces of truth, because He’s omniscient. Now, the problem with 16th and 17th century rationalism was they thought that was attainable by man, and it isn’t. That is only a quality of omniscience; man will never attain to all truth and man cannot attain to all interconnections between pieces of truth. Man’s truth will be partial; he will perceive some pieces of truth here and there that are revealed to him, and he may see one or two relationships but he doesn’t know all the interconnecting pieces, for the reason that he isn’t God. And this is what’s heretical and where the theologians of the Protestant Reformation drifted. And we have to reform them a little bit here. They thought ultimately that they could, like conquistadors, enter the very essence of God and perfectly describe every other doctrine in relation to each other piece of doctrine. They thought that was attainable; we say it is not attainable and it’s blasphemy; it’s an idolatrization of logic and in effect what it does it puts the Creator below the creature.
Now let’s see how this works out. All we’re talking about, incidentally, for those in the family training program, is the mental limitations of man; we’re faced right with them here. Let’s take the situation involving two pieces of truth. Let’s look at this piece and this piece, and let this piece be the sovereignty of God and this piece be the responsibility of man. God knows the connection between those; we do not know the connection between those. We know that ultimately God’s sovereignty, of course, is over responsibility, but how God’s sovereignty works with human responsibility we do not know. So we are here, as it were, with God’s sovereignty, we are here with man’s responsibility and we can’t bridge between the two. Why can’t we bridge between the two? Because God has not given us enough revelation.
Let me say it this way. Let’s look at logic itself and how we think. All thought proceeds on what we call the law of contradiction. Now don’t think this is too theoretical; you use this every day in all your speech. Every thought you and I have uses the law of contradiction. I’ve just stated it one way, it can be stated a number of ways, A is not… where A is any idea or statement, A is not non-A in the same way and in the same fashion. Simple; all thinkers adopt this position; there’s no debate on this at all. In fact if you deny this then… you can’t even deny this, in fact, without using it, so it’s simply a truth that can never be denied, the law of contradiction. Now the problem with rationalists is, and every once in a while, particularly people that are new in studying theology think that it is a perfectly attainable goal to logically state all doctrines. They do so because they see this law and they say certainly I’ve got to show that all doctrine hangs together because after all, if there’s a contradiction how can I believe it, [can’t understand word] the contradiction might be wrong. So what do I do?
Let’s look at this. God’s Word revealed A and non-A. Let’s take A here being God is sovereign; non-A, man has responsibility. So those are two ideas; God reveals both of those ideas in the text of Scripture but usually does not reveal the same way and the same fashion. Let me give an example outside of sovereignty and free will. The Trinity: is God three? Oh yes. Is God one? Yes. But isn’t that a contradiction? Oh no, says the Christian, God is three in one way but one in another way, He isn’t three the same way the same time that He’s one. That’s right, and that’s perfectly okay to do but you see, you have denied the non-Christian the use of logic the way he wants to use logic because what you’ve said is the non-Christian has no right because he doesn’t have enough data here and here. That sentence cannot be applied unless all the red terms are known; there are four red terms in that sentence. The non-Christian who attacks the doctrine of the Trinity knows only two of the four terms and the Bible unfortunately doesn’t tell us the last two terms. Therefore that logical sentence may be as perfectly correct as can be and there’s only one problem with it, it’s like solving an equation with four unknowns and I’ve only go two of them, two equations with four unknowns. And I can sit there and say that’s a beautiful equation, symmetrical, it’s just absolutely stunning in its statement. The only problem is it’s absolutely useless and I can’t touch it because I can’t work with it, I don’t have enough data.
And so this is what we’re talking about in theology. You don’t come into theology building a tight rational system because you don’t have enough data. We are denied, almost inevitably in the Scriptures these two terms in that sentence. You can’t find them in the doctrine of the Trinity and you can’t find them in the doctrine of election. God is sovereign, and man has responsibility; that’s two truths but we do not know the same way and the same fashion. They are simply never given. In God’s mind they are but to us they haven’t; if you can find them in the Scriptures you’ll be a very famous person, I assure you.
Van Til uses this kind of an illustration: let’s go back to creation a moment, look at God an instant before the creation of the world. This is before Genesis 1:1, before He created anything. Here’s God alone. Question: Did God need to create? Is there something in God that was weak that He needed an addition called creation? No, orthodox Christianity proclaims with its loudest voice the self-sufficiency of God; God never had to create anything; God wasn’t lonely and needed company and so He created the universe so He could something to look at for eternity. That’s not the reason for creation. God is self-contained and didn’t need anything outside of Himself.
But then what to do we do? We come around and we say what’s the purpose of creation? To increase the glory of God; equally orthodox, essential to the Christian faith. The creation was given to increase the glory of God. Now what do we have? We have a self-contained God but yet He doesn’t seem to be self-contained; He seems in some way to need creation. How does this fit together? I have no idea how it fits together. Van Til has used the full bucket illustration. His illustration goes this way: hold the bucket full of water, so full of water that one drop that you add, beyond the water that you already have in the bucket, will make it spill. The full bucket is a picture of the self-sufficient God before the creation, the picture of one dot. Yet on the other hand, take the bucket and add water to it, that’s the picture of God who creates a significant history. Another illustration of this: the hypostatic union of Christ. Is it true or isn’t it true that the Second Person of the Trinity ends up history different from the way he began history? Didn’t He acquire human nature? But then didn’t we say that God was immutable and never changed? Then how can He be immutable and pick up a human nature? You see, once again we have something we can’t really explain and you’re really silly if you think you can try to explain it all.
But notice what we don’t have; there are three possibilities. The moment God creates we begin to have what we call paradox. We have unresolvable sentences that we cannot get our logic machines to totally put together. Paradox begins the instant of creation because we have the eternal plan in God’s mind that never changes. Esau and Jacob, from all eternity, one was damned and the other was saved in God’s eternal plan and that didn’t change, no matter what Jacob and Esau did in history it would not change that eternal plan of God. Jacob was elect: Esau was reprobate. “Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.” That is a statement of the eternal unchanging immutable irresistible eternal plan of God.
But then, we have history, and in history
we have Jacob and Esau making significant choices, producing that destiny. And we have God’s pleading with both of
them. We have John 3:16, “God so loved
the world,” Jacob and Esau, “that He gave His only begotten Son, that” both of
them “should not perish, but have everlasting life. We find in Acts
Now what we don’t have is a contradiction. There are two things; we can have consistency and we can have a contradiction, and we can have paradox. Now if the Christian position has a contradiction in it we are wrong and you are to reject. We’re not saying that we have contradiction; we have paradox and the paradox is due to creation. Election, the first point in election is that to understand the doctrine of election you must understand that it presupposes creation, and the moment you presuppose creation you have a biblical form of logic different from your pagan view of logic. So if you’re going to understand the doctrine of election you’ve got to understand it with biblical tools, not the old unreformed Aristotelian scholastic views of logic of the 16th and 17th century. That’s our first point in the doctrine of election.
Let’s look at Romans 9:20 for how Paul uses
this and to show you that he refused to be driven to use logic in a
rationalistic way. You can tell that the
people didn’t like what he had written in verse 13, “Jacob have I loved, Esau have
I hated.” And so they objected, but
Paul, you can’t mean that; do you mean that Jacob had a better chance than
Esau, that God didn’t love both of them, what about John 3:16, “God so loved
the world.” Don’t you go for this
extreme Calvinist thing that it’s the world of the elected. Most Calvinists don’t hold that to start
with; and the second thing is that there’s not one Greek scholar who has
written a lexicon that ever holds that John
God loved both Jacob and Esau but then God loved Jacob and hated Esau. The only conclusion we can come to is that God loves the two men but loves them in a different way, in a different fashion, and verse 20 is Paul’s ultimate answer to it. “Who are you who reply against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why have you made me thus?” Now as you read verse 20 what point in the divine viewpoint framework comes to mind? “…made me thus,” “formed me,” isn’t that creation? Precisely and that’s where Paul places the whole argument, back at creation. The Creator/creature distinction has got to carry, not just in the doctrines but it’s got to carry in the logic that’s used on the doctrine. The Creator/creature distinction carries into every area including the rules of thinking itself. Hence he stops and he says sorry, the Creator has revealed this truth and he has revealed this truth and I stand here with both of them.
Now I visualize it this way in my own thinking. I’ve thought a lot about how to visualize this and the best picture I can draw is something that looks like this. Here’s God and His revealed truths from His Word. When I look up at God I don’t see God, I see what He has revealed of Himself. Right? You don’t see God, you see what He has revealed of Himself, you see the Word. When I look in the Word of God what do I see? I see doctrine of sovereignty; I see the doctrine of human responsibility. I don’t see all the interconnections between those two doctrines. I take them as close to each other as I possibly can without engendering a contradiction and then I stop and I hold them that way as a paradox. I say this is the only way of avoiding a problem, spiritually.
People who do a lot of thinking are liable to a sin that other people aren’t. Thank God they’re not liable, a lot of people are just liable to the sin of laziness, but having gotten over that sin we are in danger of falling into a new sin and that sin is after all our studies and all our thoughts, intellectual pride of rationalism, that we are going to be the conquistadors to gain the very omniscience of God ourselves; we will know all doctrines and we will know all interconnections there between. This is not to say we shouldn’t push to understand every doctrine but it is to say that if we set that impossible goal for ourselves we are arrogant rationalists and that is a sin, just as much as the sin of the man in the streets who is the lazy person. And the way of thinking this way is it just stops, cuts off that sin of intellectual arrogance, because finally it tells you, okay, smart man, understand what I have said, but finally, smart man, understand there’s a boundary and I’m not going to tell you any more about it. And you’re not going to have to sit there, smart man, and say wait until I get it all together; then I’ll decide God, whether I’m going to believe it or not. Oh no, God doesn’t work His Word that way. He tells you one thing, He tells you another thing and He expects you to believe it. Maybe you can get added insight as time goes on but you can’t postpone bowing before the authority of His Word because of a false use of logic. The Word of God, not logic, is the starting point of doctrine.
In conclusion turn to Deuteronomy 29:29. This is the final answer and it helps us remain spiritual thinking people without becoming arrogant. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children,” notice, not for our entertainment, but “that we may do” them. On the one hand we learn that we may obey; on the other hand we stop and say the secret things belong unto the Lord our God. Who decides the secret things in the command? God does and the canon of His Scripture.
To conclude we’ll sing……