Clough Genesis Lesson 65

Doctrine of Election continued

 

On Abraham and his call we have watched certain pictures that have been developed by the Holy Spirit down through history.  These pictures that we’ve seen in this section on Abraham’s call so far have encompassed many of the great doctrines of the Christian faith.  We’ve had the doctrine of faith; then justification and regeneration, in that order, pictured by the faith of Abraham and then back to the justification and then finally the bringing of life from the dead.  Then we’ve had the picture of the father and the son and here we have the picture of Abraham and his relationship to Isaac; we’ve had the picture of the only begotten son and the only begotten son that is obedient unto death, even the death of a religious sacrifice.  We’ve watched how, in this case, Isaac becomes a counterpart or an easy to visualize type of Jesus Christ on the cross.  We’ve watched how the father, meaning Abraham, gives a bride to his son, we’ve watched that.  And also now with the twins we are looking at the doctrine of election.

 

The doctrine of election is a very important doctrine and a very difficult one and for that reason we have tried to go very, very slowly and we will continue to go very, very slowly through this doctrine that all can follow.  The points in the doctrine of election in summary form are given in the second chapter of the third framework pamphlet. 

 

The first point of the doctrine of election which we studied last week has to do with the fact that election rests on creation and the fall.  The Creator/creature distinction, the Creator and the creature is the first major distinction in election.  Election depends upon both the creation and the fall, both of these.  And it’s foolish for anyone to even discuss the doctrine of election without dealing with both of these events.  You just have got to see these two events and you’ve got to let both the creation and the fall color everything else that you think about; everything else, even controlling how you think.

 

Last week, under this first point we dealt with the Creator/creature distinction in the area of knowing.  So because this is difficult material I want to go very slowly through this material and hopefully communicate to you the Scriptural position here.  The Creator/creature distinction in the area of knowing looks like this; here’s the Creator, here’s the creature.  The Creator has a knowledge.  He has truth; we’ll call that capital “K”.  The creature, he has truth, we’ll call that little “k”.  Now the Creator/creature distinction means that God, the Creator, knows in a different way than we creatures know.  The Creator/creature distinction in knowledge consists of these elements.  I’m going to try to list them so they’ll be very, very clear.

 

The first element of difference between how the Creator knows and how the creature knows is this: the Creator knows by direct perception, constant direct perception that never changes.  The creator doesn’t learn; he doesn’t observe and learn.  The Creator always has access totally to all knowledge.  So in the first sense, if we diagram it with the Creator and the creature, the first sense is in how they perceive.  The Creator perceives directly and immediately; He doesn’t learn, it’s direct perception.  The creature, on the other hand, perceives through temporal chunks of history; we call that empirical perception or experience perception, that is, you and I, we have to experience only as we go through the motion of time and as we have this experience we learn from it, we go to the next experience, we learn from it.  We call that kind of learning learning from experience, experience learning, empirical learning.  So we perceive through experience.  That has to do with what we call the experience side of knowing; that’s how it’s different between the Creator and the creature.

Now let’s go to the logic side of knowing.  In the logic side of knowing the Creator has 100% rationality.  That is, He knows all pieces of truth and He knows all the relationships between these pieces of truth.  He knows all the relationships and interconnections between these pieces of truth.  In the area of knowing logically the Creator knows in 100% sense, He knows every chunk; He knows every relationship between the chunks.  The creatures don’t know all the chunks of truth and we don’t know all the relationships between the chunks of truth.  So if we were to diagram our knowing it would something like that; we know part.  The fact that this difference occurs carries tremendous implications as far as logic is concerned and how the Christian uses it. 

 

Traditional logic says that something is contradictory or non-contradictory.  That is, I can show that this statement agrees or disagrees with this statement.  That sounds very nice, this is how we all learned logic.  Unfortunately, in the real world, in the real universe it doesn’t work quite so simply as that and the Christian therefore comes up with a different view of logic than his non-Christian colleague.  Logic can never fully be deployed in the universe of God’s creation because we don’t know all the connections.  In classical logic we have a contradiction or we have a non-contradiction.  We think we can show this but let me give you a little problem from arithmetic and this problem will show that that’s not quite true.

 

Let’s take the letter p that is used in arithmetic as a constant to get circumferences and diameters of circles.  Suppose we convert p to a decimal, and we learn in school that p is 3.1417 etc. etc. etc.  Now let’s just suppose we pose the following problem:  is there any point in the decimal expansion of p where if I keep writing numbers I can have four sevens in sequence. To this day nobody knows the answer to that question.  The only way to find it out would be to have a computer that would make an infinitely long decimal expansion of p to just check but then we couldn’t be sure either because if we stopped at the one thousandth decimal point then we can always argue that the four sevens would begin 1001th  decimal point.  And so we move our computer over to the 1001th place and then someone could say but it starts at the 1002nd place and so you can see a finite computing machine can never answer that mathematical problem.  So now the question is: is this right or is this wrong and we have to answer we don’t know.   We can’t prove it’s right; we can’t prove it’s wrong. 

 

Now there has arisen in the history of mathematicians, particularly in the last 100 years, a movement of mathematicians called the intuitionists.  And the intuitionists have a very solid, non-biblical view of logic.  Their idea is that if I can’t show it’s right and I can’t show it’s wrong, it’s irrelevant, it’s not true, it’s not part of truth, unless it’s either a contradiction or a non-contradiction.  But as a Christian who approaches mathematics can I follow this rhyme and reasoning?  Absolutely not because in my belief God surely knows whether in an infinite expansion of p there are four sevens that occur sequentially.  I may not, my computer my not be big enough to find it, but God surely knows it, therefore I can’t agree with the intuitionists; therefore it shows you mathematics is not neutral, mathematics itself is a victim of religious presupposition at every point.

 

So we find, then, that logic under the Bible means something can be in conflict, something can not be in conflict, or we can have what we call a paradox; two truths that are just as true as can be but darned if I know how to explain how they fit together.  Now that’s the condition of logic.  Once you accept seriously the doctrine with the creature here and the Creator here; the Creator fully knows, 100% rationality; the creature doesn’t, and so right here we find a difference in how we view our logic machine. 

 

So now we have two differences between how the Creator knows and how the creature knows.  This is why, a month or so ago you heard me say so much from the pulpit that traditional Reformed thought was fossilizing theology at the 16th and 17th century level. What I meant was that they had simply failed to see that logic has inherent limitations.  They had used the old medieval scholastic idea that logic could be inevitably applied to any and every situation and they hadn’t thought through their own biblical presuppositions.  And this is what has happened with some hyper Reformed people; they have simply not been reformed enough; they haven’t taken their Reformation presuppositions to the field of logic but have allowed logic to dictate to them.

 

A third difference between the Creator knowledge and the creature knowledge is that the Creator’s knowledge is always authoritative.  Our knowledge always has to be checked by a standard outside of it.  You can’t say THIS IS TRUE without referring to a standard of truth.  God never says this is true because of a standard of truth outside of Him.  God’s knowledge is inherently authoritative.  If God says all circles are squares, and He’s created the universe this way, that’s the way it is.  God’s knowledge is inherently authoritative.  The creature’s knowledge never is authoritative.  What does this mean?  Whereas the second difference, this difference spelled out a completely different view of logic, this difference spells out a completely different view of starting point.  What this means is that as a Christian I can’t start with logic and I can’t start with experience, I must start with the Word of God.  My starting point has got to be the Word of God first and logic and experience must conform to the Word of God.  So this has tremendous implications as far as starting point is concerned.

 

Now a fourth difference between the Creator’s knowledge and the creature’s knowledge, and that is that the Creator’s knowledge is inaccessible.  I can’t discover God’s knowledge like Newton discovered gravity.  It’s inaccessible to me; I can’t get at God’s mind.  And therefore the only thing I know is God’s Word, what God has chosen about this to reveal to me in His Word.  I am shut up completely in my knowledge of God to what He Himself has revealed of His mind.  Luther put it well when he said man can only know God if God has chosen to reveal Himself through Christ and man can know God no other way.  That means if Bahaullah, Mohammed or the one thousand and other religious teachers in history do not act as channels of God apart from the living Word which is Jesus Christ and the written Word, the Scriptures.

 

Now for some verses.  Turn to Deuteronomy 29:29, a verse we looked at last week but these four verses will show us features of this Creator/distinction and knowing that has such awesome implications on how we think.  You see if men would just think this through it would revolutionize education.  Just think what I’ve told you in these four short differences between the Creator’s knowledge and the creature’s knowledge, and those of you who are school teachers, you think through how this would affect your whole presentation of truth in the classroom.

 

Deuteronomy 29:29, toward the end of Moses spelling out the do’s and don’ts he said this is what God wants us to do, this is not what God wants us to do, this is the will of God, this is not the will of God, finally in verse 29 he concludes with this:  “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”  Now verse 29 makes a distinction in what we’ll call potential creature knowledge and actual creature knowledge.  The potential creature knowledge is things that God could reveal to us if He chose to but He hasn’t chosen to and those are the secret things, and they belong to Him.  Maybe later in the future He’ll reveal some of His secret things to you and to me, but He hasn’t yet.  In the course of the New Testament He revealed some new things, He revealed the hypostatic union of Christ, He revealed the nature of the Church; these are mysteries [can’t understand words].  But “the secret things belong unto the LORD; but those things which are revealed belong unto us,” so Deuteronomy 29:29 testifies to the fact that our knowledge of God is a victim or totally, totally dependent on His choice to talk or to be quiet and if God doesn’t choose to speak I know nothing about Him; I stand in darkness.

 

Turn to a second Old Testament text, Isaiah 55:8, here Isaiah was interested in cutting down the tendency toward autonomous rationalism an in Isaiah 55:8-9 God speaks through the prophet and He says this, to the people who were prone to think they had it all together.  You know the expression we use in our society, “get it all together?”  You can’t!  You can never get it all together, that’s what we’re saying here, only the Creator has it all together. We, as creatures, can’t have it all together because the “all” is infinite complexity and since we’re limited we can never get infinite complexity all together.  So if you have the feeling that you don’t have it all together, join the creation.

 

Isaiah 55:8, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD. [9] For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” So there is a disjunction in the way God knows from the way His creature knows, and it’s as high as heaven is above the earth. 

 

Turn in the New Testament to another verse, a third verse; turn to the Gospel of John, the fourth gospel.  John 1:18.  John 1:18 confirms Luther’s point that the only thing we know about God is what God has chosen to tell us.  God’s knowledge is inaccessible to us; we only know it as God shows it to us in His Word.  And so in John 1:18 what do we read?  A very, very dogmatic statement.  “No man” including Moses who saw God face to face we would add, “No man has seen God at any time;” but John, don’t you know about Moses, didn’t the Bible say in the Old Testament Moses saw God face to face?  John answers, “No man has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted” or “He has declared Him.” 

 

What does that mean?  Theologians down through the history of the Christian church have taken this as evidence that whenever you have a theophany in the Old Testament, like for example Moses talking to God face to face, he’s not talking to God in His essence, he’s talking to God in a preincarnate manifestation of God the Son. Of the Trinity only God the Son stands in the known-ness to man.  God the Father remains in the background as the unseen sovereign Father and God the Holy Spirit stays in the foreground but is the unseen technician.  This is what is wrong with the liberal who emphasizes God the Father or the charismatic who emphasizes God the Spirit, they’re both wrong.  It’s God the Son of orthodoxy that ought to be the center of revelation.  Verse 18 confirms it; only do we know what God the Son has taught us; if we don’t see anything in God the Son, then there’s nothing to see. 

 

Finally one other text; 1 Timothy 6:16; here we have another extremely strong statement that cuts us off, as it were, from God.  God “Who only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man has seen,” and now notice the next assertion, “nor can see,” I’ll repeat that, “nor can see,” no man can see it, “to whom be honor and power everlasting.  Amen.”  The point Paul makes once again is that God’s knowledge is inaccessible to the creature.  The Creator’s knowledge remains known only to the Creator and is totally different from the creature’s knowledge. 

 

And so all of this, this is the first point that we’re trying to point out in the doctrine of election, that election rests upon the creation and the fall. We’re looking at how election rests upon creation.  We’ve shown the Creator/creature distinction, it shows up in at least four areas where His knowledge is different from ours.  It means we use our logic differently; it means we start in a different starting place and it means we are shut up completely to the Word of God and nothing else.  This molds how we go on to discuss the whole area of election and if we’re not going to be molded by this there’s no sense discussing election any further.  We either agree to these ground rules or we disagree and I teach agreeing to these ground rules.  And if you do not agree to those ground rules you’re free to speculate on your own but we simply can’t discuss the doctrine of election apart from these ground rules as far as I’m concerned.

 

Now a second feature about learning about election from the doctrine of creation is this: that creation, the moment creation starts we have a paradox, something strange happens.  This wasn’t clear to me for a long time but I observed in all my activities in the creationist movement that the non-Christians were hostile to the idea of God creating; not just on the basis of Darwin, not just because of geology, not just because of chronometry problems, not because of biology, not because of any of that; they were also hostile to creation on the basic of a philosophic problem.  And what was this philosophic problem that the non-Christian saw that he resented so much when I went to teach that God created the universe by His Word at the beginning. Why did that hit the thinking non-Christian so hard; why did it cause him such agitation.

 

Turn to Genesis 6:5; it says in Genesis 6:5-6, talking about God, looking at man in the days of the flood, and in those days God was angry with man and it says, “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  [6] And it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.” What are we to do with the statement of verse 6, “And it repented God.”  This is not talking about God feeling sorry; it’s talking about God changing His mind.  It’s talking about the fact that if you were there and you were talking to God and you had access to God and He was talking to you through Christ, God the Son in His preincarnate form, the conversation would go something like this.  You would hear God say I wanted to create a human race on the face of this earth; I wanted to make man the lord of creation and look at him, and I’m tired of him, and I’m going to do away with him.  God changed his mind. 

 

Now there are those that get upset with verse 6; there are those who read verse 6 and all of a sudden say God can’t change His mind; isn’t God sovereign from eternity to eternity, how can God change His mind?  Surely we must read something into the verse; we must kind of dismiss it as just God’s conforming to man, sort of an anthro­popathism kind of thing.  Well, that it is but it’s a lot more than that.  Doesn’t verse 6 reveal the mind of God?  Why should we kiss off verse 6 as some sort of irrelevant statement of Scripture and then on the other hand turn right around and accept Genesis 1:1 at face value; why don’t we dismiss that one as an anthropomorphism or anthropopathism?  It’s simple, because this one really gives us trouble, that God changed His mind, is God unstable, the immutable God? 

 

Turn to Exodus 32:9-10, another case of God changing His mind.  I show you this because some people think this stuff isn’t in the Bible.  Surely the God of the Bible doesn’t change His mind—oh yes He does.  “And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people.  [10] Now therefore let Me alone, that My wrath may burn against them, and that I may consume them: And I will make of thee a great nation,” and we have the famous prayer of Moses in verses 11-13 and finally in verse 14 after Moses finishes praying what do you read.  “And the LORD repented of the evil [which He thought to do unto His people.”]  God, in verse 10, was going to destroy; by verse 14 God says I’m not going to destroy.  Did God change His mind?  Yes, God changed His mind.

 

But how, you say, can an immutable sovereign God from eternity to eternity that has an immutable plan change His mind?  I don’t know, but the Scripture says God changed His mind.  You say well, that’s not really true, that’s just kind of an appearance.  Oh, talk to Moses about it, see what he would have done.  Do you want to sit there and pray to God and argue with him; it was pretty real to me, Moses would reply, I don’t know about your hyper Calvinist theology but I was just talking to God and I saw Him, I’m sorry I don’t have my doctorate from Germany in theology but all I did was talk to God and I report what God said and He said He changed His mind and I tend to take His word over your professor’s words.  So we have God changing His mind. 

 

So this is the problem; the moment we have creation begin at a point in time we’ve got something changeable begin, and we’ve got the immutable God who never changes interacting with the creation that does change.  And that’s the source of the hostility and why the non-Christian hates the idea of a creation from nothing; he says it’s foolish, you on the one hand talk about your God that never changes but on the other hand He’s constantly active in a changing history.   How can this be?  Let me spell this out for you in three sentences: God is immutable but the creation adds to His glory, Revelation 4-5, the full bucket analogy that I mentioned last week.  The second sentence: God is immutable but doesn’t the Son acquire human nature that He didn’t have at the beginning of history?  The Second Person is immutable but yet somehow He does change; He’s not the same now that He was before.  The third sentence: God is immutable but He responds in history as in Genesis 6 and Exodus 32.

 

Now faced with these two pieces of information we have to admit paradox.  We can’t penetrate the situation logically.  On the basis of the creature I sit here and I say I’ve got two chunks of truth, I’ve got one that says God is immutable; I’ve got the second chunk of truth over here that says God responds and I confess I can’t get them together; I challenge you to show there’s a contradiction.  You can’t show there’s a contradiction here, if you can show there’s a contradiction we have a heresy.  A paradox is not a contradiction; a paradox is when you can’t prove either a contradiction or a non-contradiction, you have to hang with both.  And you hang with both because God says both: He says that and He says that, and therefore since my starting point is not logic but the Word of God, I submit and I am content.

 

Now there’s a danger and there’s always been a danger for Christians in this situation.  On the one hand we have truth number one that God is immutable; on the other hand we have truth number two that He isn’t, that He changes, He changes His mind from time to time.  Now the question is, how do we avoid, personally, how do you, how do I, sitting here watching the Scriptures, how do I protect my soul against mistakes.  Here’s a way of thinking about it.  Any time we’re going to make an error it will be of the same kind; if we drift to the left or we drift to the right we can label it, not just as an error but by this word: a reductionism.  That is, what we’re doing is we’re denying either one or the other to get rid of that tension feeling, and every error will consist of a reductionism somewhere in the system.  Look for where something has been lost and there you’ll find where you made your mistake. 

 

Those who demean the reality of God changing and responding in history to His creation would be men, for example, like Plato and his disciples within the church, the Docetist who were people who said oh, God is so glorious, so sovereign, so immutable, so holy, that He couldn’t partake of a human body really, now yeah, Jesus walked around the face of the earth but He really didn’t have a human body, Jesus really didn’t have fingernails, not really, it was just apparent that God had fingernails; fingernails grow and change, God is unchangeable.  And so we call those people heretics and they were thrown out of the church; they denied the full humanity of Christ and they’re called Docetist.  So the Plato people, the Platonists and the Docetists and there’s a tendency in extreme forms of Calvinism in the same direction.  Calvin made a very unguarded statement one time when he wrote: time is only a mirror of eternity.  Sorry, with all due respect to Calvin’s tremendous contributions to Christian theology, time is not a mirror of eternity.  There’s got to be a difference between something existing in the mind of God and the creature.  And the Hindu, the Hindus believe that all is illusion, all is Maya, it’s very similar. 

 

Well that’s a reductionism in one direction.  That denies the creation, but then there’s a reductionism in the other direction. See if you wind up over here if you don’t wind up in the other camp; test yourself, are you a reductionist?  Do you demean the reality of the Creator?  For example, in the early church there were the Arians, who were so convinced of the humanity of Christ, why here’s a man who walked around who ate, He grew, He slept, He had fingernails, and the Arians said surely God can’t be in this man, not really fully. And so they focused on the creature nature of Christ they demeaned His deity and they were thrown out of the church—heresy, a disrespect for the equality of the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ.

 

Here’s one closer to home, some of you border on this one, and that is the Arminian.  Jacob Arminius was a professor of theology in Holland; he reacted against Calvinism and he argued that God elects people like Jacob, for example, over against Esau, because He looks forward in history and He sees what Jacob is going to do in history and seeing what Jacob is going to do in history He elects him.  But that is to make God a passive approver of what man does. That makes God the responding agent and man the initiating agent; it is man, then, that finally determines history.  And once again we have the Creator reduced to nothing—Arminians. 

 

So we have this second area; we’ve looked so far under the creature at the difference between the Creator/creature knowledge; we’ve looked at this problem of paradox and reductionism and now one more little feature that we’ll see time and again in the Jacob/Esau story, and that is what is history after all. Ever ask the question? What’s different after history’s happened and before history started.  Let’s see the idea; it’s given in the New Testament parable, very easy to see, Matthew 13:24-30.  You’ve all read this parable before, we remind you in six verses an easy to see picture of history.  “Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.  [25] But, when men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.  [26] But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.  [27] So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, did you not so good seed in the field?  From where, then came the tares.   [28] He said unto them, An enemy has done this.  The servants said to him, Well, then, you will that we go and gather them up?  [29] But he said, No; lest while you gather up the tares, you root up also the wheat with them.  [30] Let them both grow together until the harvest; and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the whet into my barn.” 

 

Now this parable shows the essence of history, one feature of history from the Christian point of view and that is what we call ethical or spiritual differentiation.  That is, history starts out and diverges; there are those that go on negative, those on positive.  There are the Esau’s of this world, born in the same womb with the Jacobs, of the same weight, of the same appearance, identical twins perhaps, or at least fraternal twins and Jacob, born in the same womb at the same time, same mother, same father, and yet there’s an eternity and infinite gap between them, finally.  But does this take place overnight or does it take place over a process of time.  Does Jacob become elect or is he elect in the womb?  And the same with Esau; is he reprobate in the womb or does he become reprobate in history?  And the answer is they become so.  True, in God’s mind they always were; in God’s mind there’s been no change but they don’t actually become elect, and they don’t actually become reprobate until there’s choices made in history.  And in the final harvest of history, when they are finished products, we speak of them as the elect and the reprobate.

 

If you don’t believe this turn to Romans 9 and let me show you how Paul describes and how carefully he quotes.  If people would simply look up quotes in the New Testament they’d see this.  In Romans 9:12-13 there are two citations about Jacob and Esau.  I went through both of these quotes last week; now let me show you something about the time of the quotes.  In verse 12, “It was said unto her,” Rebekah, “The elder shall serve the younger.”  Verse 12 quotes Genesis 25:23; verse 12 happened close to 1800 BC during the pregnancy of Rebekah. That’s when verse 12 is occurring, “the elder shall serve the younger,” not “is serving the younger,” but “shall serve the younger.” Verse 12 is a prophecy of the future looking forward at a process of differentiation about to take place but not yet has taken place. Verse 13, “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated,” past tense, is quoted from Malachi 1:2-3 approximately 400 BC.   Now look, that’s 1400 years, one thousand four hundred years of differentiation have occurred.  Verse 12 looks ahead and prophesies; verse 13 looks back and confirms.  Paul brackets the differentiation process and the differentiation process occurs not only with Esau and Jacob, the individual, and then Jacob the nation Israel, Esau the individual and then Edom the nation, two different men, two different nations, two different sets of descendants and two different differentiations.  We have a process by which Edom exists in history and confirms it.  So we have a philosophy of history implied in a biblical view of creation.

 

Let’s try to pin this down with some statements that we can follow here.  This ethical differentiation, what does it really mean?  Here’s what it means.  It means that we can’t say that Jacob and Esau are elect and reprobate in their existence in the womb.  Then they were undifferentiated; then they were merely two boys in a mother’s womb.  In God’s mind, yes, but we’re not talking about God’s mind.  We’re talking about them existing in the womb; they didn’t exist as elect and reprobate; they became elect and they became reprobate by their choices down through the stream of history.  God in His mind, obviously God in His mind, saw them as elect and reprobate, and God in His mind determined that it’d be so in His total sovereignty, but in existence they didn’t exist until they existed, did they? 

 

The creation, if this bothers and you don’t follow this, forget Jacob and Esau a minute and go back to Genesis 1:1.  Remember Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created,” it doesn’t say in the beginning was election; it says “In the beginning God created.”  Now did the creature exist before it was created?  No.  Did God have a plan to create?  Yes.  But did the creature exist until it was created?  No.  But did it exist in God’s mind?  Yes.  But did it exist in history?  No.  So we have a difference, don’t we? We have an existence in God’s mind and we have a difference of existing between that and it actually existing down here in space/time history.  God created the universe and only then did it begin to exist. 

 

Now that’s the difference we’re talking about.  Jacob and Esau from all eternity were elect and reprobate, but they didn’t exist until the flow of history forced them out and made them exist; that’s a fundamental point that we’ll see.  And furthermore, another warning about this: don’t take a finished product of history and use it for all your deductions. Satan today is a finished product, there’s no chance that Satan is going to be a good boy tomorrow; Satan has hardened himself till he’s locked down to being the theme that he is.  The antichrist, when he appears on the face of the earth will not get converted at a Billy Graham crusade.  The antichrist is a historically finished product but what do people do, naïve students of Scripture go into the text of the Bible, they pick out the historically finished products and they make all these speculative deductions but what they fail to realize is that the historically finished product took time and history to finish.  You don’t deduce what goes on with those two little boys as they’re being born from Rebekah on the basis of what happened 1400 years later, you can’t compress time, you’ve destroyed it.  It took God 1400 years to produce this difference between Jacob and Esau, now don’t compress it down and pretend it doesn’t exist.  So to simply deduce, like some of our hyper Calvinist friends, on the basis of finished products of history and then they draw all these speculative conclusions, wait a minute.  That denies the process that caused Jacob and Esau to do the things they did over a 1400 year period. 

 

Now we have talked about the role of election and we said that it depends on the creation; we’ve shown the Creator/creature distinction and knowledge.  We have shown the fact that creation itself produces a paradox.  We have shown that there’s a philosophy of history; all these things so important in our thinking under the act of creation.  Now we want to conclude by showing the other part of the first point in the doctrine of election, and that is that it also depends on the fall.  We’ve got to think through the fall.

 

Now it always turns out that theologians love to make things more complicated than they really should, and this matter of the fall is not without its complicators, but down through history, particularly in the Reformed group, there’s been a great debate between these two people; big long names: supralapsarian and infralapsarian.  You don’t have to remember that, I just put it on here to show you how theologians can complicate simple matters.  The supralapsarians and the infralapsarians, as you might guess if you take a careful look at that word, have something to do with the fall.  You se the word “lap” in that title, the lap, the “laps” refers to the fall.  And you see the word “supra” which means above, and “infra” which means below. 

 

So what the theologians thought they could do for a long time was to say that here’s the fall, these group of people said, and God chose to elect the saved to salvation and the damned to hell; then He chose to create, then He chose to permit the fall, the doctrine of divine decrees in that order.  But the infralap­sarians, also good Reformed people, said no, no, no, no, no, because once you’ve made the election to heaven and to hell you’ve made God the author of sin, you’ve made God force people into hell and then they’re not in hell by their own choice, they’re in hell because God chose to drive them there and that makes God the author of evil.  So the infralapsarians reversed the divine decrees and said God first chose to create; God then chose to permit the fall, then God chose to elect.  But the supralapsarians came back and said but look what you’ve got; now you’ve allowed the fall to take place autonomously; now man is the chooser of history, God now becomes the passive agent, he sits by until man does his thing, then He rewards the men that are the good boys.  And so the infralapsarians and the supralapsarians argued and argued and argued until finally in the 20th century the leading Reformed thinkers, the conservatives, basically are throwing this thing out as insoluble; it’s a paradox that should never have been involved in the first place.  Here’s what Berkhouwer, representing the European Reformed thought says: “This problem of succession is insoluble,” end quote.  On the American side of the Atlantic Van Til says: This represents the imposing of the reach of human logic beyond where we should have and so therefore it’s dismissed. 

But the theologians were grappling with something, though they tried to make it complicated.  Here is what they were trying to do: they were trying to say if there was a fall and men sinned, how do we keep God as sovereign without making Him the author of evil.  That’s what they were trying to grapple with and so they worked on it and they worked on in and they worked on it. 

 

Turn to 1 Peter 1:19-20; can we go back before history and see what was on God’s mind?  1 Peter 1 does that.  Verses 19-20 show clearly that in eternity past, God, when he chose to elect, had sin on His mind.  It wasn’t that He chose to elect just out of the clear blue.  Notice verse 19-20 and the language very, very carefully.  It talks about Christ and it says, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, [20] Who verily was foreordained,” or “foreknown before the foundation of the world,” that is, before creation, “but was manifest in these last times for you.”  Who?  Christ.  What about Christ, “a lamb,” “the precious blood” of the lamb.  Why do you need a Savior if you don’t have anything to be saved from?  Quite clearly the Lamb crucified before the foundation of the world involve sin; quite clearly, then, election presupposes sin.  If you want to see this again you can think of the potter/pot illustration in Romans 9.  In that illustration you remember the potter has the right to make his pots any way he wants to or change it.  That comes from Jeremiah 18 and we had the time we could study Jeremiah 18 and find out that the pot changing is a picture of men falling. 

 

And so we find ample biblical data to suggest this: when God thinks in terms of election He thinks in terms of people who are already identified as sinners.  Therefore, election is an act of grace.  Therefore, election is an act of grace!  God does not have to elect anyone; He could let all the human race fry forever in the lake of fire if He wished.  But God, because He’s a God of grace, chose to save and that’s at least a picture of part of the thought of election. 

 

But what do we do about this problem that the theologians are struggling with and supralapsarian/infra­lapsarian controversy. Turn to Isaiah 45, we can state their problem and leave it in two sentences.  We don’t have to fiddle with the doctrine of divine decrees; we don’t have to get involved in all sorts of hairy logic, we simply acknowledge that there’s a paradox, we go as far as we can and we state our doctrine under two points; the relation of the fall and election.  On the first point we say that God is sovereign over good and evil; God is not sovereign over just good but He’s sovereign over good and evil.  If He’s not sovereign over all He’s not sovereign at all.  Isaiah 45:7, God says, “I form the light, and I create darkness: I make peace, and I create evil; I, the LORD, do all these things.”  God is sovereign over both good and evil. 

 

If you turn to Proverbs 16:4; I’m showing you verses that confirm God’s sovereignty over good and evil.  If God isn’t sovereign over evil you’d better not trust Him because our problem is with evil and if He doesn’t have control over it then what are we doing listening to His Word.  He’s helpless before evil like we are.  “The LORD has made all things for Himself, yea, even the wicked, for the day of evil.”  God is sovereign over both good and evil.

 

Now the Reformers, rightly so, and particularly the Reformed part of the church, they’re better in that all the other Protestants were very weak here and we can thank our stars that the Reformers put this statement in here.  That’s what they were trying to do.  Unfortunately some theological amateurs get hold of this and then they say: Do you believe in the doctrine of double predestination?  And the answer is no.  The word “predestination” is not a synonym for sovereignty.  This is why I was arguing about a bunch of people here about regeneration and why I said you don’t get regenerated and then believe, it’s the wrong use of the word “regenerate;” if you want a work of the Holy Spirit before faith fine, but don’t call it regeneration.  Regeneration isn’t used that way in the Bible.  And predestination isn’t used this way in the Bible either.  There’s no such thing as double predestination or even double election.  The words “election” and “predestination” have only to do with part of this sovereignty.  God is sovereign over good and evil; God elects and God predestines only the good. 

 

So these are the two statements that balance: God is sovereign over good and evil, but yet on the other hand, God’s relationship to good is different from God’s relationship to evil. 

 

Turn to Romans 9, you’ll see how delicately Paul protects this second statement.  In Romans 9:22 it all shows up in the way he writes his verbs. When Paul tries to assert that God is sovereign, and he does assert that God is sovereign over both good and evil, look how he does it in verses 22-24.  He says in verse 22, “What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.”  What voice is this?  It’s middle passive voice; that means the subject neither participates or receives action; the cause of the action in verse 22 is not given.  Notice verse 22 again, “the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction” refers to all people who finally go to hell.  And they are “fitted for destruction.”  Who fits them for destruction?  Find the subject in verse 22—you can’t, it’s not there, they are simply said to be “fitted for destruction.”   But conversely, Romans 9:23, “And that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He has prepared unto glory,” now what’s the clear subject in verse 23, “He,” God has prepared them for glory, whereas in verse 22 God is not there, well, you know He’s sovereign but yet He’s not put in the fore view in verse 22 like He’s put in the fore view of verse 23. 

 

And so therefore we have what theologians call asymmetry, that is, God is not sovereign in the same way in the same sense over good as He is sovereign over evil.  Professor Berkhouwer writes this, and I cite this because some think what I am teaching is determinism.  Some think that Reformed thought of Scripture is determinist; you are wrong and here is a voice of one of the great professional Reformed theologians.  “The Reformed doctrine of election has always avoided symmetry,” …”has always avoided symmetry!”  Why?  Because symmetry would make God as, in the same sense, in the same way, sovereign over God as He is over evil.  And then if He gets the credit for grace and salvation He would also have to bear the responsibility for human sin. So therefore the Reformed doctrine, the proper Reformed doctrine, not the amateurs that run around but the proper, professional, high classed doctrine of election has always avoided symmetry.  “Determinism,” that’s the wrong view, “deduces everything from one causality of God’s election, and then all differences,” that is between good and evil, “within the predetermination are only relative and unimportant.  The Scripture,” says Professor Berkhouwer, “speaks of God’s rejection as a divine answer in history, a reaction to man’s sin and not the cause of man’s sin, and therefore we ought to stop here; we ought to respect the Scripture’s boundary and we ought to go no further,” (end quote).  Now that is a professional, exceptive, mature statement of the biblical doctrine of election.  It is saying that God is asymmetrical in His sovereignty, in one sense He is sovereign over good; in another sense over evil.  Don’t you dare say God is sovereign in the same sense over good and evil.  If you are you violate the Scripture.

 

Another verse on this would be Deuteronomy 4 which has directly to do with Jacob/Esau story so let’s conclude with Deuteronomy 4.  Summarizing from Moses’ perspective this whole Abraham narrative that we’re studying, looking back and how God called forth His elect nation, Moses has got to do something.  He’s got to show that God is sovereign but he’s got to show that somehow God is sovereign over Israel, the elect nation in a way that’s different than He’s sovereign over the heathen non-elect nations.  So in Deuteronomy 4:19 he says, he’s warning about idolatry, and then he says: “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when you see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the host of heaven, you should be driven to worship them, and serve them,” now that’s interesting but the meat of the verse for our perspective this morning is the last clause, “which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.”  That means God has left the nations in their own idolatry.  They chose idolatry; God leaves them in their idolatry.  That’s God’s sovereignty over evil.  But more actively in verse 20, “But the LORD…”  “BUT the LORD has taken you, and brought you forth,” there’s a more active sovereignty over the good. 

 

Now you see, both Paul and Moses make this distinction; both hold that God is sovereign over both but they both insist yet He’s not sovereign in the same way in the same fashion.  God’s Word confirms, then, that the doctrine of election must be colored and learned, point 1, which we’ve studied this morning, is that you must know the creation, you must know the fall.  As you think about everything that comes out of all this, then you are starting to be prepared to understand God’s election.  Let’s reform our use of logic, let’s reform our idea of sovereignty, and then let’s sit down and reason together about the doctrine of election.  We’ll do that in the coming Sundays.

 

Practically speaking Luther had one of the best insights into applying in the every day Christian life this doctrine. We’re going to conclude by singing [A Mighty Fortress Is Our God]; look at the stanza where it talks about Jesus Christ and is says “Were not the right man on our side,” comma, “the man of God’s [on choosing]” election, and then at the end of that stanza it concludes, “and He must win the battle.”  Luther had it as together as a creature could.