Clough Genesis Lesson 66

Doctrine of Election continued

Throughout the past few Sundays we’ve been working further with the call of Abraham and we’ve looked down now, peaking into the third generation: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And in the period of the call of Abraham, at this point in the flow of revelation as God speaks His Word down into history and begins to work and to reveal to man the framework, doctrine, He gives man a series of pictures and it’s fundamental because God wants every believer to understand all of these doctrines. That doesn’t mean we all have to have graduate degrees in theology but it does mean that the Word of God was given in order to teach; the Word of God was given in order every believer might know all the counsel of God. Now it necessarily follows, that if that’s the case and that’s God’s intent, and if it also follows that if some people have trouble thinking abstractly and in a scholarly way, it must follow that the revelation takes form of something concrete and easy to see. Then for those who can carry on with the systematics and the abstractions fine, and for those who can’t, fine. At least every believer is within reach of the spiritual food of Scripture.

So this is why we’ve concentrated on the elementary pictures; a child can understand these pictures. Let’s review some of the pictures we’ve seen so far. We’ve seen the elementary picture of the Father/Son relationship inside the Trinity, very, very difficult to treat systematically but nevertheless very easily pictured by the father/son relationship between Abraham and Isaac. Then we dealt with the picture of the only begotten Son who was obedient to death, even the death of the cross; difficult to comprehend in the area of Christology but nevertheless easy to see in the life of Abraham and in his son, taking his teenage son up, laying him on a rocky altar and almost slitting his throat in religious murder for the sake of Jehovah God of the Old Testament. That’s a picture of Isaac passively obeying his father, laying there on the altar while his father would, had the angel not interfered, slit his throat. There is the only begotten Son being obedient unto a sacrificial death. Then we saw the picture of Abraham sending his servant away to get a bride for his son; just as the Trinity, God the Father sends a servant, God the Holy Spirit, to get a bride, the Church, for His Son, God the Son. And that story is easy to see and picture and a child can relate it.

Now we’re studying into the third generation, the birth of the twins, Jacob and Esau. Two twins, the same womb, same father, same mother but utterly different eternal destinies. And here we have a story that gives us a picture of election and gives us a picture of God’s sovereign work in salvation. We’ve studied the first point in the doctrine of election the last two weeks and we’ll just review some of the highlights of that point. And that is, that to comprehend the doctrine of election, if you’d like the text of this it’s in the third framework pamphlet.

The doctrine of election depends upon the creation and the fall. In order to treat, to think, to get the mental apparatus functioning we’ve got to visualize creation as Genesis 1 and 2 specifies; we’ve got to see the fall of man as Genesis 3 specifies. And if we don’t take time to do this then all the other efforts that we spend in trying to understand what it means when God calls someone, all of that is just so much wasted time. It’s wasted because of the fact that we are using the wrong thought categories.

Last time we dealt with the implications of creation and the implications of the fall. We’ll review those, some of these implications, implications that must be taken into account when we start thinking in terms of election. What does visualizing Genesis 1 and 2 contribute to my understanding of election. As I read Genesis 1 and 2 and I see that, “In the beginning, God created,” I begin to see the fundamental distinction between the Creator and the creature; I know that they are not the same, they are two different entities. And I know, therefore, that there must be a distinction in how they know; there is a distinction on how the Creator knows and there’s a distinction on how the creature knows.

Here are some of those distinctions that we studied. First of all we’ve recognized that all creature knowledge, that is all men who live in time which we represent by this circle, God we represent as an open box, He is infinite, all creature knowledge is time dependent. God’s knowledge is not time dependent, it never changes. There’s no shifting of it, there’s no learning of it. God perceives wholly and eternally, therefore there’s never any learning. Two people have never learned anything: a moron and God, for different reasons. But the point remains that God’s knowledge and His core of knowing is a static thing. Now if that Creator/creature distinction is valid, it means that you and I must pick up our knowledge as we experience in time. This has implications about Jacob and Esau; Jacob and Esau gradually became the elect and the reprobate through time. They gradually learned this; they gradually historically existed as those entities, only in a process of time.

A second thing is that we studied that the logic of God and the logic of man are different; not that we don’t think logically, but that man’s logic machine can never work far enough and long enough to reduce everything to a simple contradiction or non-contradiction. But there’s a gray zone, a zone which we call the zone of paradoxes: the problem of sovereignty and free will, that’s a paradox. Anybody that pretends to have solved that problem logically has just not understood the last 300-400 years of philosophic thought. That problem has not been solved and probably never will be solved, and it certainly is not going to be solved on the rationalistic basic that those who claim to have solved it work. So the second implication is not only is the creature dependent upon history to know, but the creature is dependent upon authority to know, because I can’t wait until I’ve got everything logically set in order to say ah, at last I know. I can’t do that, because there are some things I never can get logically together; what am I supposed to do, stop breathing until that happens? No, I have to go on living, and how do I go on living? By accepting those gray areas on authority of the One who reveals Himself and so therefore we say the Word of God is prior to logical demonstration. The Word of God, not logic and not experience, is our starting point.

Then we said also that the Creator’s knowledge becomes the base of creature’s knowledge. In other words, when you say you know something I ask you how do you know something. How are you for sure that it’s right? If you’re mathematician you run through your proof again to see that you’ve moved from step one to step two to step three to step four in your calculation, to make sure that calculation is right; you check it by the canon of logical procedure. Of if you’re a scientist and you work in a laboratory and you get one result of your experiment, I’m interested in the field you’re working in and I say show me the experiment and so I sit in my laboratory and I re-work the original conditions to see if I get the final condition; is that so or not? I check my knowledge against natural law. So the creature is always forever checking himself against some standard outside of himself. But God never checks Himself because His knowledge is self-authoritative; God does not need a standard above Himself. Therefore if we’re to think correctly, as the saying goes, we have to think God’s thoughts after Him.

Then the other implication of creation is that the only way I can know God is if He’ll first talk to me. I can’t walk out here and say I choose to know God, like I would say I choose to investigate the atmosphere. I choose to measure the relative humidity this morning. I choose to find out what the barometric pressure is. These are open to me but when it comes to God I can’t say I walk out of here and I’m going to choose to learn about God because He is inaccessible. The only way I can know about God is if He’s first spoken to me, and so now I’m shut up to the Scripture and only to the Scripture. The Scripture and only the Scripture must become the absolute authority.

Then we talked a little bit about history and we’ve said that history is a process of ethical differentiation. That is, you can take the two twins here, Esau and Jacob, and over a process of time the wheat and the tares become visible; the wheat and the tares become the wheat and the tares. If you turn to Romans 9:12, a verse that we discussed last week but you’ll see this very clearly implied in the way Paul cites Old Testament passages. In verse 12 he cites something about Jacob and Esau; in verse 13 he cites something about Jacob and Esau. Now what’s the difference between verse 12 and verse 13? On the surface verse 12 and verse 13 appear to say the same thing. Verse 12 is a citation from Genesis 25; verse 13 is a citation from Malachi. Between verse 12 and verse 13 lies 1400 years of experience… 1400 years of ethical differentiation; 1400 years of man choosing to rebel or to accept the Word of God. And so we start off with Jacob and we wind up 1400 years later with a nation called Israel. We start off with the other twin, Esau, and we wind up 1400 years later with a nation called Edom. 1400 years later between verses 12 and 13; we have two distinct national histories, and 1400 years later we have thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions that men have made down through the course of time. Verse 12 looks forward to the process; Romans 9:12 is a citation of God announcing His plan for the future. Verse 13 looks backward on the plan and describes what happened. But to read verse 12 as verse 13 is to collapse 1400 years of history, it’s to render history insignificant and it’s a very dangerous game to play when you’re talking about God and creation. So much, then, for the implications of the fall.

We said once again to remember that election depends upon the creation and it depends upon the fall. It depends on the creation and we just enumerated certain truths, certain implications, that if we’re really Bible-believing Christians that means we think certain ways and we don’t think other ways. Then we said that election is dependent upon the fall and when we worked with the fall we said it’s this way: election always looks upon salvation out of sin. Election looks upon the dying atoning savior; election is centered in a fore ordained redeemer, and you don’t have redeemer unless you have something to be redeemed from. So election, centering in the atonement of Christ and the justification that comes from that atonement of Christ, all of this has the fall as the backdrop. The objects we are talking about in election are all sinners; all created men who have in Adam fallen.

So election, therefore, conclusion: election is inherently gracious; election can’t be separated from God’s grace; it’s not just God’s sovereignty but His sovereign grace that is involved in election, and so thus we are protected against what we call symmetry. Theologians have debated this for a long time and that is that if God is sovereign and down here inside the creation we have good and we have evil, we have got to say and we must say honestly that only the Reformed group in the history of the Christian church has had the guts to honestly say this, that God is sovereign over both good and evil. In Proverbs 16:4 we mentioned last week that God has created the wicked for the day of evil. In Isaiah 45:7 He says I create the good and I create the evil, I make the darkness and I make the light. Clearly God is sovereign over both. But the more mature elements of the Reformed faith have always recognized that this is not symmetrical, it is not the same. The sovereignty of God over evil is not the identical to the sovereignty of God over the good. We recognize that in Paul’s language in the voices in Romans 9:22-24. We said last week when you look at verse 22, where it talks about the “vessels of wrath fitted for destruction,” that’s a different voice in the original language than in verse 23, “the vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand,” active voice. One is a passive voice; the other is an active voice. You see this in numerous other ways.

If you want a clear, physical, concrete picture of it that will be easy to grasp turn to Genesis 1. In Genesis 1 we have the same asymmetry; we call this asymmetry, because the point is that this relationship here is different from this relationship with evil. Why Christian teachers do this is because we’re trying to be sensitive to the text and the text is very delicate. Notice in Genesis 1, now here we’re talking about physical light and physical darkness; later these attain a connotation morally, I don’t, for one, believe that evil is present in Genesis 1, I believe these are just physical pictures that later are acting as categories and devices to explain good and evil. But if you want that, that’s the tape of Genesis 1.

But you’ll notice in Genesis 1:2, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Verse 3, “God said, Let there be light, and there was light, [4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness, [5] And He called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night….” Now it’s interesting and striking that in this first elementary picture of Scripture, with the light and the darkness, do you notice that the Scriptures are talking about the light and the darkness differently? Both are created of God; Isaiah 45:7 confirms that. In fact Genesis 1 confirms that, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God created all things; there’s no denying that He is sovereign over both good and evil, no denying whatever. But it’s also to say, having said that we have to have a second balancing statement, and that is, the Scriptures are very reluctant, VERY reluctant to talk about God directly creating evil; 95-98% of the text of Scripture that deal with evil cite that evil is the creature rebelling against God. Now why do the Scriptures go statistically that heavy? It must reflect something the Holy Spirit is trying to communicate and the way we express it is that God is sovereign over both good and evil in different ways in different fashion. God is sovereign over good that he gets the credit; God is sovereign over evil in that the creature is to blame. There is an asymmetry to the sovereignty of God and this has always been protected in mature Reformed theology.

Now what has this got to do with Jacob and Esau? Let’s pause for a moment on this first point of election, remembering that election, we said it is dependent upon the creation and the fall. We’ve listed certain things that means when we go to think about it. Let’s picture this in terms of Jacob and Esau; turn to Genesis 25, here we have the birth of those twins. In Genesis 25:24 the sins exist prior to the emergence in physical birth. The twins are treated identically; prophecy is made about them, but nevertheless the twins are treated as having something in common. Now in verse 27, as the boys grow… as they grow, then certain different characters become true of them; Jacob, for example in 29-30, Jacob is the one who gradually acquires an attraction for the promise and covenant promise of God and His Word. Jacob gradually is the one who fulfills the prophecy of holding his brother’s heel; Jacob gradually is the one who grasps after the Scripture. And Esau is the one who gradually decides the hell with it, it’s not worth it, I don’t care about the Scripture, I don’t care about what God wants for me, I’m more interested in eating the pottage because right now I’m hungry and I can’t eat Bibles.

And so the despising attitude of Esau grows, and grows and grows and grows and grows until in Genesis 27, finally at the time when his father is dying and he passes the inheritance on to his son, Jacob tricks the system and get it so he gets the blessing and Esau gets cheated. And Esau goes out and he cries and the New Testament says because this man had so rejected and so despised the Scripture at point after point after point after point after decades of living, he got to the point where he couldn’t find repentance, and so he cries about it. But the crying and all the tears don’t bring the blessing of God into his life; he’s rejected. It took time, it took each of those two boys time to become what God had prophesied they would become, but finally they did become it.

The point we want to make here is that they became so over a process of time. Jacob—Esau, same starting point, same womb, same home, under a process of time Jacob is more and more attracted to the Scripture; God works in his life and he becomes attracted to the text, to the promises. True, he maybe is unorthodox in some of his applications but basically there’s a hunger and a drive to submit himself and his future destiny underneath the authority of God’s sovereign work. On the other hand, Esau progressively goes negative, negative, negative, negative, negative, until the time comes when he can’t do anything else but be negative.

Or said another way, we’re saying that history has a start and it has a finish and we’re wrong…wrong to read all the narratives of Jacob and Esau through hind sight. Don’t read your Bible through hind sight. The Bible is meant to be read as you progress through time. When I have to interpret Genesis 25 I don’t interpret it by ignoring the difference between what’s going on in Genesis 25 and later on what’s going to happen in Edom. That’s a result of time and history. Don’t interpret it as finished products. The only finished products that exist in history right now are Christ, Satan and those who have died as of this morning. Today, 24 hours later, more people die, they’ll be finished products too, they’ve had their time and it’s all over. But for those who are still living, you are still in the flow of time and you’re still in the flow of becoming something. And that’s what we’re saying; the history is this process of becoming.

Jacob becomes elect in a real sense; yes, in the mind of God he always was, but in history if we’re to respect history he becomes elect. And Esau, conversely, becomes reprobate. That’s the only way you can do justice to history; the Bible doesn’t talk about unsaved elect people; it talks about elect people in the mind of God and reprobate people in the mind of God but they’re in the mind of God and the mind of God isn’t created existence. So therefore election does not take place in history until it takes place and you can’t argue always from the mind of God. You’ve got to disjoin these two things; there’s the mind of God and there’s history. Don’t confuse the two. So we’ve looked at this first point.

Today we want to come to the second point in the doctrine of election. We’re doing these points in the doctrine of election so that when we read the rest of the Jacob/Esau narratives you’ll be sensitive to watch in the text for these points. The second point in the doctrine of election is that election is God’s basic eternal promise. This point is far more practical than the first one. The first one, yes, you could kiss it off as just a bunch of theories, but not this second one. I’ll show you, and try in the time we have remaining, to give you some concrete illustrations what this means in everyday Christian living.

The idea of the second point is that if your final state is promised, out here in the time line of the future, here’s the final state, you are at the end of your personal history when you die, if your final state is promised and it’s certain, no way can this be altered, if that final state is promised then it must follow that your pathway to that final state is secure. If the final point is certain, then all points leading to the final point are also certain. If the end is sure, then the means to the end also must be sure. We don’t know what kind of a pathway our lives are going to take until the time we die but the assurance of election is that if you know your ultimate certainty you have an optimism, a powerful optimism about life itself.

Take some examples. The nation Israel; according to the promise the nation Israel can never be eradicated from history. The final end point of Israel is that she will become politically on earth in the community of international culture, the priestly nation that will function as a priestly nation. That’s her final state; that’s her certain final state. Nothing is going to change that final state. You can have the Haman’s, you can have the Hitler’s, but nobody is going to change the final state of Israel. The Russians may think they’re playing games in the Middle East, the Russians may hope to eliminate Israel from the international equation but the term will always be there because the end point is always there. And so we infer backwards from the final point to the intermediate points.

Now what does this mean? What it means and what it has to do by way of practical living is that if election is God’s basic eternal promise, then we have to do with this question of assurance. How do we know that we’re real believers? How do we know that we’re truly of the elect? Some would say you can’t know. In fact, there have been those groups down in the history of the Christian church who have argued vehemently that it’s wrong to even think about this. Take, for example, the Roman Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation; their theologians met in a Council of Trent, and the Council of Trent issued the decree that it is heretical to claim that you can know that you are of the elect or not. That is the official Roman Catholic position; you cannot know whether or not you are of the elect. And then there have been another group of men down inside Protestantism who have agreed with the Roman Catholic position in principle, and that is the group called the Arminians. We’ll get to who they are in a moment. But the Arminians and the Roman Catholics and many Lutherans would deny that you can know for sure whether you are of the elect. Over against that position is a position of the Calvinist, who argue that you can know that you are of the elect and this is an issue.

And this is an issue that we now face at this second point in this doctrine of election. Can you or can’t you? It has tremendous implications. Let me give you one objective historic example lest you think we’re talking about just religious things. A while back an economist and a historian, Max Weber, wrote an interesting history of the rise of industrial power in Europe and America. It was a commentary on the rise of capitalism in western civilization. And Dr. Weber had studied the past and he tried to answer the question, what was it that made under-developed nations take off, to use Kenneth Galbraith’s terms. And why is it today, now he didn’t answer this particular question but we could, why is it aids and other state agencies that pour millions of dollars into so-called under developed-nations never seem to get those nations developed? What is the secret ingredient that makes an under-developed nation take off? Weber’s thesis was concerned with this and here’s what he found: after studying all of the people and the kinds of things they though he discovered that the nations that took off and industrialized were Calvinist influenced nations. Well, said Weber, why is there this connection; why is there the connection between business prosperity and Calvinism. Now Weber misread Calvinist theology, he thought the reason was that it was because the Calvinists to find out whether they were elect or not and therefore they were hard workers, but we know that’s not right. So it’s something else. Weber was close but not quite close enough.

Here’s the point: the Calvinist future was certain and when a person’s future is certain they plan for the future, they don’t spend their cash in the present. The modern mentality of America, buy now and pay later, is anti-Calvinist ultimately, anti sovereignty, it’s arguing goes like this: I don’t know what tomorrow holds, I don’t know what the next day holds; I can’t plan for the future so let’s blow it all today—hedonism. How do you accumulate cash assets to capitalize to for industrial expansion with that attitude? You don’t, and that’s why no successful capitalist nation has arisen without future orientation. And that’s the rise of industrial development in northern Europe, England and Colonial America. It was the ability of people to settle down and have confidence about the future. No, it wasn’t naïve confidence, they allow for ups and downs and business cycles, of course, we’re not talking about that; we’re talking about this morbid panic, this idea… for example, young couples get this one every once in a while, oh, we can’t have children, we can’t bring children into this awful world. God says you are to bring children into this world.

And the point is that God has a plan for this world and God therefore lays forward certain things that you are obligated to do. But you see, you can’t really do them, can you, if you don’t have first confidence that He’s in charge. So therefore young couples blow it off, it’s easier to be single than undertake the responsibilities of being parents. That is difficult and it contributes ten-fold to your sanctification, believe me. And it’s harder; it’s a harder life but what does God want. And if we know our certainty, no matter what happens, that if we have nuclear war tomorrow and we are real believers in the Scripture we know that civilization will survive.

You see, we Americans have gotten a little quirky thinking. It’s only true of us; we are the weirdoes of the world in this point. And that is we have this thing that nuclear is the worst of all possible thing; the atomic bomb is a doomsday weapon. Unfortunately for you and for me, the Russian military doesn’t think so and the Russian military has good reasons for their thinking; they’re not just stupid. After World War II the Russian general staff seized and got hold of the documents of the American allied bombing surveys of Europe and these surveys were prepared by the Air Force on studying Dresden, studying Frankfurt, Tokyo, and the other air raids. And the survey attempted to answer the question, what ended World War II, was it the constant bombing and bombing and bombing or was it something else that ended into it? And they discovered a very hard thing, at least for an Air Force officer, which I happened to be, and that was that the allied bombing did nothing to suppress either German or Japanese productivity. In fact, if you take the productivity curves during World War II the German industry was cranking out more material in 1944 in the fall than it was in 1942. This, in spite of all the bombing; Dresden was flattened, more people died in the Dresden bombing than in Hiroshima, and it did nothing. And the Russian general staff took this into consideration. This is why the Russian war plan, right now, 1979, call for nuclear war and we can survive because basically bombing does not destroy the enemy. What destroys the enemy is a ground assault. And this is their thinking.

Now you can argue with their thinking all you want to but that’s their thinking. And so we can sign SALT agreements and we can do all the rest but I assure you, and it’s all written, you can research it yourself, the Russian general staff in 1979 is not snowed by nuclear war. To them a nuclear bomb is just another weapon and I’m beginning to think they’re right. I’m beginning to think that they are right and we are the ones that wrong; nuclear war is not a doomsday situation; you lose a percent of your population but you basically lose the same amount of resources so therefore it comes out pretty even, the survivors will have enough resources left to carry on civilization. So therefore we mustn’t panic like this and we mustn’t retreat.

This is a modern illustration of this powerful idea of God’s sovereignty. If the Russians come up and threaten, get out of Europe in the next 48 hours or we’re going on, we’ll say you come and if you want to go nuclear, we press the button. You can imagine what would happen in our country. Walter Cronkite would have a heart attack and the State Department would go bananas and so on. You say why? Because these people are faithless. Since 1945 American strategy thinkers haven’t thought through these things and they’re reflected an Arminian type of thought. Well it wasn’t so, thank goodness for our civilization, it wasn’t so earlier when industry had to start and Calvinism reigned and the people were dogmatic about the future; we save our cash for a better day in the future and we’ll use it then. We save our resources, we invest our souls with investments, not just holding money in land, not just holding money in stocks, not just holding money in commodities, but we hold our money in the wisdom we put here; that’s the best investment, because tomorrow that wisdom will be deployed to make a new society. That’s the powerful idea; unfortunately the only people that show that same tenacity today are communists who stole it from the Christian. So this is the difference in the mentality.

Now a word about Arminianism; where did this come from and what was its base? It came from a man; the name comes from a man, Jacobus Arminius. This was his Latin name, not his real one; he was a professor of Calvinist theology in Holland in the 16^th century. He was faced one time to defend… the story goes, we’re not so sure of the story but the story goes that he was asked to defend certain Calvinist doctrines. Some scholars hold that Jacobus Arminius was asked to defend double predestination which is what I called back here this symmetry problem that we deny. But nevertheless he was called upon, and if that story is true he was called upon to defend some extreme forms of Calvinist thought. And he discovered that these extreme forms were wrong and so he turned against it. He had some other problems, mainly he wasn’t a very honest individual, but then he went on, and later on, after he died in 1609 he was followed by people who were a lot more gung-ho rationalists than he was. And they finally issued a document called Remonstrates.

The Remonstrates attacked certain teachings that the Calvinists were teaching in Holland. We’ll go into that later, for this morning all we need know is one of those Remonstrates. And the one that we’re talking about is the fact that saving grace, once extended, could fail. The Arminians held that the Calvinists had never proven eternal security from Scripture. They held that it was an op en question whether or not you could lose your salvation. They weren’t dogmatic at first that you could lose it; they just said the Calvinists hadn’t proved that you could lose. Today, Arminian theology has spread, we can see it historically, it went in through John Wesley to the Methodist circles; from the Methodist into the Nazarene, and into many of your charismatic groups. Arminian theology is also characteristic of Church of Christ theologians; Campbellism is Arminian in this respect. So people who believe you can lose your salvation historically have been identified with the Arminian position.

But back to our question: Can you know whether you are of the elect or not. Turn to Luke 10:20, most interesting because it gives the application of all of this. The disciples have returned from a victorious mission; they’ve watched people become believers, they’ve watched miracles occur, they’ve cast out demons. And they come back and obviously, thinking like you and I think most of the time, we think of the spectacular rather than the mundane; we think of the temporal more than the eternal. So therefore they were really hot and really high, they said hey, look at this, demons are subject to us, look at the miracles we can do in the name of Christ. And Jesus’ answer to them in verse 20 is, “Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not,” in this don’t place your happiness, don’t place your happiness because you’re a miracle worker, for as he said elsewhere, there shall be in that day those who said Lord, Lord, did we not cast out demons in Thy name, and I’ll reply, I never once knew you.

So casting out demons and doing miracles is not a sign of being a believer. Jesus says so therefore, don’t rejoice in that, “that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” That’s the source of the joy, “that your names are written in heaven.” So therefore Christ infers that you can know. If you can’t then there can’t be the source of joy; the source of joy presumes that you can know that your name is written in heaven.

Turn to another place in the New Testament; in 1 Thessalonians 1:4 we have another reference to election. And it says very clearly, “Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God.” “Knowing your election of God!” Well, that seems to be quite direct, no great interpretation necessary there. Continuing through in the New Testament, turn to 2 Peter 1:10, he says, “Rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure; for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall.” Now that may be interpreted and some do, as threat to election. Not at all. What he’s saying is that let your confidence grow, let the awareness of your election grow and you can only be aware of it as you see the fruit of it. That’s why verse 4, verse 5, verse 6, verse 7, verse 8 precede this verse. In other words, he’s just been talking about the obvious evidences in a changed life of a work of the Holy Spirit and he says only and in proportion to the evidences of a changed life, the evidences of a love and attraction for Christ and His Word, then you make your election sure; not sure objectively before God but sure subjectively to yourself; you make this sure.

We can, therefore, know election. Well, don’t you suppose the Arminians have an answer to this? Obviously; they read these texts too, so what is their reply? Usually their reply is this: yeah, we believe that election can be known, we agree with you that election can be known but what we say is that that election is a corporate election. In other words, it’s corporate in Christ, but whether you as an individual can stay in Christ or not, that’s another story. As long as you’re in Christ you know Christ’s election is sure. So therefore they attach the surety, they attach the certainty to the corporateness. That is, there is going to be team, whether you’re on the team or not is another issue, that’s conditional. But there is certainty as to the existence and survival of the team.

We find this faulty on two grounds; number one, how can you be certain of the whole if you’re not sure of the parts. Doesn’t the surety of the whole imply the surety of the parts? And second, in the very example we’re studying, what do we find? Corporate or individual election in Jacob and Esau? Individual. They don’t have corporate election until the nation Israel occurs and that doesn’t occur until 1440 BC, we’ve got 400 years yet to go before we’re going to have any kind of a body that is elect. At this point in history we only have individuals who are elect. So now isn’t this striking?

If you turn to Romans 9, the very example that is used of election in the Bible, the very first time it occurs in the history of revelation, it’s individual and they’re said to be elect. Notice again in Romans 9:6, he’s talking about the corporate nation of Israel, he says: “Not as though the Word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel, who are of Israel. [7] Neither because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children, but, in Isaac shall thy seed be called.” Verse 9, “…at this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son,” a..A..A! individual son. And then in verse 11-12, there will be the elder and the younger, the younger one being Jacob, individual, not body, individual, and he is elect. So we have individual election.

Now you say well, this still strikes me as theoretical, abstruse and not too connected to my Christian life. All right, for the doubters and skeptics as to the practical application, now turn to Philippians 2:12-13. What good does this have as far as Christian living is concerned? Here is the clearest example that I know of in the text of the New Testament to show you the practical implications of this. “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” There’s the doing part, that’s what we’re responsible to do. On what basis? Because verse 13, “Because it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” Notice verse 13 logically precedes verse 12, again: verse 13 logically precedes verse 12. How can I have the confidence to work out my own salvation on the down time, during the times of adversity, during the times of pressure, when emotionally I am a zero, when everything else is arrayed against me how am I going to stand here with a straight face and tell you I’m going to work out my own salvation? Where do I get my motive power from? I don’t get it from myself because at that point I’m emotionally drained. I don’t have it within myself to keep on keeping on. There’s only one source I can get my motive power from and that’s verse 13, the knowledge that it is God who is doing a perfect plan through me; that’s the only place I can get adequate motive power to operate under high adversity conditions. That’s the only place where you are going to get any kind of kick power, is when you know that it is God that works in you, that is, when you know that you are plugged into His plan, when you know that God is working His certain work through you.

Well, that’s nice but now how do we know? How exactly do we know that it’s God who works in us, “both to will and to do of His good pleasure?” Let’s go back to two historical examples and just watch how they knew: Abraham and Jacob. Turn back to Genesis 13. What we’re studying once again is how do these great saints of the Bible know that it was God that worked in them? How, practically in their life, could they tell so that when they reached the pressure points they didn’t have that awful, morbid fear that they were abandoned, left, alone, without help. Genesis 13:14, here’s an example. We’re going to take five quick illustrations from Abraham’s life. “And the LORD said unto Abram, after Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where you are northward, southward, eastward and westward.”

Remember that incident, that was the case where he was in the ranching business; he had partnership with Lot. They couldn’t maintain the business partnership so they broke up their business, divided it into two ranching businesses. And he gave Lot the choice, which area of real estate to you want to set up your ranching business in. Oh, said Lot, I’ll take this area all over here, good irrigated pastures down there by Sodom and Gomorrah. He had the flukes and fairies that lived down there but that’s all right, I still want that area because that’s the place where I think I can make my profit. Okay, you take your sheep down there with the fruits and I’ll stay up here on the mountain. After he did this, which required a tremendous amount of faith, some of you business men, you put yourself in this position, here’s a guy walking off with 50% of the assets of your company and you’re going to be the one who’s going to be competing, he’s your competition and he walks over there with all the irrigation and you’re stuck over here in dry land farming. Now you know what kind of a pressure situation that would be. And Abraham did it on one basis: that God is behind me and I’m going to trust him. As a result, then in verse 14 it says, “Lift up now,” see that little word “now,” not before, “now lift up your eyes and look.” In other words “now” means after you’ve trusted me a little bit, now Abraham I want to reciprocate with you a little bit and I want to show you something. You thought you were being a big sacrifice and that’s nice, but it wasn’t quite that way, I’m behind you. All right; question: when did this assurance come? Before or after Abraham began to act? It came after he acted.

Let’s look at another position just so we don’t draw a wrong conclusion. Let’s skip a few of these events, turn to Genesis 15:1, “After these things,” what things? After the battle and the clearing out of Sodom and Gomorrah and the raiders, “After these things” God comes and says, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and they exceedingly great reward.” Isn’t it striking that didn’t occur before the raid, it occurred after the raid? Does this tell us something? Does this tell us something about this assurance? How do I know I’m of the elect? I know that I’m of the elect as I begin to respond to the call of God and His Word. That’s when I know I’m of the elect; that’s how God assures me. He assures me as He assures me that I am approaching Him, that I am being attracted to Christ, I’m submitting to Scripture. That becomes the basis of assurance. You can study it in Genesis 17 but let’s turn to Genesis 22:15, the same pattern, not accidental. I’ve looked at each one of these patterns and every one conforms to this system. After Abraham responds to what he knows is the will of God, then God grants assurance. God does not grant the assurance before the fact.

Genesis 22:15, “And the angel of the LORD called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, [16] And said, By myself have I sworn,” when did this happen? After the famous sacrifice of Isaac. So it looks this way: if you were to diagram assurance on a rising curve you get some assurance at the point of salvation and this stays with you, and then when you obey, when there’s a spiritual crisis and it might be a simple little thing where you just claim a promise on a little thing, then there’s added assurance, and there’s added assurance, and there’s added assurance, and there’s added assurance. The assurance gets added, you become more and more confident as you begin to respond to Scripture. Now people who are always forever wandering around trying to figure out where they’re at inevitably are people who are never serious about applying the Scripture they already know. That’s why they’re never assured. They never have responded. Now don’t ask God to give you assurance when there’s been no response; the assurance part of the bargain is that you respond, then you’ll get the assurance.

Turn to Genesis 25; watch how this happens, Jacob and Esau. They start out from their birth as twins. Then in Genesis 25:29 Jacob is cooking pottage, Esau comes in from the field, and Jacob, in verse 31 says I want that birthright. Well now just a minute, look at the attitude in verse 31 and compare it with the attitude in verse 34 at the end; verse 31 [“And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright,”] and the last clause in verse 34 [“thus Esau despised his birthright.”] you mark those two and mark the difference between them. One, I want the birthright; the next one, I despise it, I’m hungry today and frankly I could care less about birthrights when I’m hungry. Not Jacob, the birthright is more important. In other words, you see there is manifested in his soul an attraction for the righteous things of God’s Word.

Now if that sounds subjective, I’m sorry, but that’s what the Scriptures give as a basis of assurance. They also point out this results, this inner attitude, results in an overt behavior. Genesis 27, here’s where he rips his brother off of the inheritance. Yeah, it’s a little unorthodox approach but nevertheless it shows you the fact that this guy was serious about wanting the blessing of God; so serious in fact was he that if you turn to Genesis 32:24 he’s the only human being to take on the Lord Jesus Christ and wrestle him. This is the angel of the Lord in a preincarnate form. Now you name any other person in the Scriptures that dared Christ to a wrestling match. And that’s what’s going on in verses 24-25. You can’t get much more aggressive than that. You talk about wrestling with God in prayer; Jacob wrestled with Him right out there on the field, wouldn’t let Him go either, until He gave him a blessing.

Do you see the difference in attitude, which results in a difference in behavior? That’s how you know of the elect. The elect show themselves as the elect by their attraction to the Scripture. The elect do not show themselves because they have miraculous powers. “There will come to Me,” Jesus said, “in that day many,” … many “who in Thy name cast out demons and I will reply back to them, I never knew you” once. So it can’t be miracles, it has to be an attraction to the things of the Word and their spilling out into our life. That is the only basis of assurance the Scriptures give. The basis of assurance is not because you’ve been baptized, not because you’ve joined a church, not because you’ve done great things for God, the only thing is this constant ongoing attraction and submission to the things of the Word of God. That’s the basis of your assurance; no signed card, no raised hand, it’s much more subtle than that.

Biblical election: summary of the second point; refers to God’s basic eternal promise. The way we gain assurance is by watching develop in our life character that is godly, watching in our life the behavior that flows from that character. Now intuitively all of you ought to grasp this. You know the example we often used of evangelistic rally or something, and you have four people. Say one of your friends professes to accept Christ in an evangelistic service. Fine. What do you do? Do you take that prima facie value? Or do you say to yourself well, let’s just kind of cook on this and see, we’ll nourish it, see if anything comes. If nothing comes of it what’s your conclusion? It wasn’t a genuine conversion; maybe it was but you have no evidence it was and so therefore you doubt. It’s the same thing; there is no evidence of election unless there’s some conformity somewhere to the standards of Scripture. The conformity question is said by Paul in Romans 8 to be being led of the Spirit. He that is led of the Spirit is of the elect. So we’re going to sing hymn…