Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson
41
We have three topics we’re going to talk
about by way of the truths that come out of this event called the call of
Abraham; the doctrine of election, the doctrine of justification and the
doctrine of faith, three great truths. These three great truths are the
foundation of the gospel, so that’s why we associate them with it. To review, last year we took up four events,
creation, fall, flood and covenant.
This year we prepared for the call of Abraham and now we’re on the call
of Abraham, and to each of these events we associate doctrines or truths. To review and comment on the importance of
approaching things this way, as I said before, this class is not a substitute
for a “Bible class,” nor is it a substitute for a class that gives more details
of these topics.
Rather, what we’re trying to do is learn to
get a panoramic view of the progress of revelation, to major on those events
which the Scripture majors on and to be able to, in our minds, conjure up
through the power of imagination, by concentrating on how God has reported
these events, to fill our minds imaginatively with what went on in these events
and connect them to truths, be able to draw out of these events the truths that
the Holy Spirit seems to associate with them. For example, the doctrine of
justification and election, we’ll see Paul in Romans over and over associates
those doctrines with Abraham. And there’s
a reason for it, because the things that are past are written for our
understanding, so history was designed to teach, history is doxological,
history is pedagogical, and because history is a divine pedagogy that means
that these events have teaching value to them.
By way of review I want to get a running
start to the doctrine of election. I
want go back and look at how we’ve tied doctrines to these events in the
past. To the event of creation we dealt
with the doctrine of God, the doctrine of man, the doctrine of nature. In other words, what is God, what is man,
what is nature, and that is the element of the whole Christian world view. If you get screwed up there you can’t build
anything else because the doctrine of God we said, plus the Creator/ creature
difference, we listed various attributes of God, we said He is sovereign, He is
holy, He is love, and that He is omniscient and to those attributes we
corresponded attributes of man, that man has a choice, man has a conscience,
man can exercise love, and man can know things. And we mentioned that that’s what makes man made in God’s image,
that’s a parallelism or similarity between man and God, and this is what is
denied by 95% of our society today.
Whenever the doctrine of evolution is taught man is nothing more than an
accidental arrangement of matter, that’s all he is. If man is nothing more than an accidental arrangement of
molecules, then there’s no such thing as real choice.
Let me review four things about man that
correspond to four things about God.
God has personal choice, we call it sovereignty; man has personal
choice, we call it choice, but when we say man has choice we’re one of the few
and last people in our society that really believe in choice. It’s ironic but the biology that is being
taught, the psychology that is being taught, the whole philosophy that is being
taught today basically makes man a mesh of molecules that are simply chemical
motions in action, it’s just stimulus response, that’s all it is. And what we think is choice really isn’t
choice, it’s just something that flows out of chemical determinism, physics,
chemistry, that’s all, there’s no real choice.
You can quickly see that if there’s no real choice, then what are the
implications? We’re not responsible. On
the Biblical basis we have to defend real bona fide legitimate choice over
against the chemists and the physicists.
We come to conscience and we have to defend the fact that man has a
conscience, that he seeks moral absolutes for judging purposes, and that is
because he’s made in God’s image and he corresponds to God’s holiness. It doesn’t mean that we have absolute
perfection; it merely means that we have an instrument aboard that seeks to be
oriented to some moral absolute some place.
That’s what the conscience is and that’s what makes man, man. We naturally seek moral absolutes. And the modern unbelieving pagan view is
that you don’t have any God so if you don’t have any God then you don’t have
any infinite, personally wise moral absolute.
Once that happens, the second thing that happens to man is that losing
his source of a moral absolute he has to get it some other place, and what is
the other place? There can only be, ultimately, one other place, himself.
You always have variations, some people say
51% of the people, blah blah blah, but ultimately it boils down to the fact
that it’s either you or God. But if
it’s you and me, then what do we do with each other, now we’ve got two would-be
gods in collision, and that results in chaos and violence, because if you’re
going to be your moral absolute and I’m
going to be mine, what do we do when we meet, we have no common ground. This is what is so terrifying socially about
abandoning the moral absolutes. People
think this is all theory; this is some theological, philosophical issue. It isn’t, it’s in the classroom, it’s out on
the sidewalks, it’s in the business world, that if you give up a moral order,
then there are certain ramifications that have to occur like night follows
day. So man loses his choice, man loses
his conscience.
Then we come to love, no man can really love
unless you’re secure. If I am insecure
I’m not going to be concerned about you, I’m going to be concerned about me and
after I have my security then I’ll get concerned about you. That’s the whole
problem with love. You can’t get love
going in an insecure environment, and if you don’t have an environment that is
controlled by a loving God as the background, then were do you get security
from? Men try to generate security
somehow, from insurance policies to the tower of Babel to socialism to Marxism,
etc. We want to generate some sort of
thing, that doesn’t mean all these things are ultimately wrong, the insurance
was started by pastors in this country.
But I’m talking about the wrong use of these things, the wrong use of
government, the wrong use of these things as 100% security devices. There is no security in this world;
therefore there can’t be any love. Love
can’t get going in an insecure environment.
So there goes the third characteristic of man down the drain.
Then we come to the fourth one, which is
man’s knowledge, and that corresponds to God’s omniscience, but again if you
do away with God you do away with omniscience, you do away with knowledge in an
absolute sense, you’ve got to do away with human knowledge. Now what we call knowledge is just neuro
activity in the brain. So you can
quickly see that once you abandon a Biblical world view there are some very,
very serious consequences that follow and set in, and we’re just seeing them
unravel in our society and we look at this and at something else and say oh
gee… well it is horrible to watch, it’s horrible to watch your country unravel
itself in front of your face, but unfortunately it’s given to us to live in a
generation in which this is occurring.
And the only thing we can do is go back and make sure that in our souls,
at least, we have it together; that’s enough, and hopefully here and there we
can make some changes, hopefully here and there we can act as the salt of the
earth, hopefully here and there we can hold some ground. But if we lose our bearings and orientation
we’re not going to be worth anything anyway.
This is the background. All of these things come out of this
creation event and to fortify our minds we can think of God speaking those
things into action. You can visualize
however your mind does it, visualize Adam and Eve, visualize yourself as being
in Eden with God creating Adam from a pile of sand, putting him together,
walking through the garden and breathing into his nostrils the breath of
life. Feed your imagination with those
pictures, then link them with these truths.
Then we went into the fall. Out of the fall
comes the idea that evil is bounded, this is a very new thought, this is
something you’re not finding outside of the Bible, that evil is controlled,
evil has a boundary, that there are certain true coping strategies and we went
through eleven patterns of evil, six that are direct patterns and five indirect
patterns.
Then we went into the flood and said there’s
a picture of salvation, and the reason that picture is so important as a
picture of salvation is in our time “religion” quote unquote, I hate that word,
“religion” is conceived psychologically, so when you use the word “salvation”
it translates to somebody else as, oh, you’re talking about how you feel,
you’re talking about some subjective religious experience. No, no, that’s not what salvation means, and
the way to correct it is in your minds eye imagine being at the flood, imagine
watching the whole surface of the planet disintegrate with this ark with the
genetic pool of animals and humankind aboard that little ark floating around in
a massive mess of water. That was
judgment/salvation, two words that occur together and it wasn’t just
psychologically. It was physical, it
was totally environmental, it was geophysical, hence therefore in the future,
the second return of Christ is not going to be a psychological event, it’s
going to be a physical event. We have
to fight this all the time, because the pressure of the world around us wants
us to make salvation just a psychological inside experience, when that’s not
true at all.
Then we came to the Noahic Covenant, and we
prepared and set up for the call of Abraham.
We mentioned that we are basically talking about from Gen. 12 to Gen.
50, that block of Scripture, and we’ve urged you to speed read it, don’t worry
about details, so you’re acquainted with the unfolding drama of Abraham, his
sons, etc.
We’re going to look at some of the texts to
deal with the issue of election. We
want to start by turning to Gen. 11 because we want to get the big idea first,
before we get into the details. Let’s
review by looking at the motif of the tower of Babel. Gen. 11:4 is a very, very
important verse because this gives the thrust of civilization in its pagan
form. The sin nature of man, man in the
flesh, Adam fallen, always produces a society that does this, and it’s done on
a very sophisticated and academic level or it can be done in a normal common
every day sense, but the thrust, the motive of the world system is described in
Gen. 11:4. “Come, let us build for
ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make
for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole
earth.” Which was exactly what God
wanted them to do, that last clause, “lest we be scattered abroad over the face
of the whole earth,” is a diagrammatic opposition to Noah’s covenant in Gen. 9
when God said I want you to go into all the world. That’s deliberate, emphatic, and total disobedience, that last
clause. Notice the phrase, “lest we,” there’s a negative purpose clause there,
in other words, I want to disobey God but I know that if I disobey His overt
command I’ve got to substitute something.
So the whole rest of the verse, ahead of that last clause, “lest we be
scattered,” is a replacement. There’s
where the idolatry comes in, you can’t disobey God without creating a vacuum,
the vacuum sucks in a replacement. So
every act of disobedience is really an invitation to some form of idolatry.
In verse 4 the key phrase is “let us make for
ourselves a name,” in other words, we are going to generate, so to speak, the
kingdom and a perfect security and everything out of our own finiteness. We
will generate it. Then contrast that
with Gen. 12:1 when God speaks to Abraham, “Go forth” and get out of the world
system, get out of that city that you’re in, and then He says in verse 2, “I
will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great,
and so you shall be a blessing.” Notice
“I will make your name great,” so there’s a deliberate contrast between Gen.
11:4 and Gen. 12:2, two different programs, one the pagan program and the other
God’s program. In one man tries to do
it all, man tries to generate the total answer, in the second program of God,
God says I have the answer, you may not know it all and I will take the
initiative.
You will also notice that Abraham doesn’t
initiate the action, even though Gen. 12:1 looks like it’s coming after Gen.
11:31, but 11:31 is just the prior history; 12:1-3 is a summary statement, and
we know from Acts 7 that the time of verse 1-3 actually is in 11:31. In other words, what I’m saying here is God
called Abraham, Abraham didn’t start any motion, didn’t respond until he had a
call. God’s initiative established this
whole program that’s begun in the Bible here in Gen. 12. It wasn’t Abraham looking to do it, it was
God who intervened. Last year we said
the series was “The Buried Truths of Origins,” this year we’re saying “The
Disruptive Truths of the Kingdom of God,” because here the theme is that God
disrupts, God interferes, God intervenes, man has his plan and then suddenly
God comes in and says no, this is the way it’s going to be. When we deal with the call of Abraham we’re
dealing with a divine interruption.
We talked a little bit about Abraham, now I
want to get background on the doctrine of election. I want to go to the New Testament where the New Testament
reflects back onto the Old Testament.
Let’s look at what the Apostle Paul does with Abraham’s life in
Romans. Ever been in a Bible class
where they never finished the book? In
a course in Romans they usually stop at the end of chapter 8 and never finish
it, and it’s because there’s some pretty stuff after Rom. 8. But I want to spend a few minutes to kind of
give you an overview of Romans 9, 10, and 11 by way of a perspective on the
call of Abraham. Look at Rom. 8:38-39,
the last two verses of chapter 8.
Everybody quotes these, it’s pretty well known, most people know Rom.
8:28 and everything following Rom. 8:28 basically is saying the same thing,
Rom. 8:33, “Who shall bring anything against God’s elect? God is the one who
justifies, [34] who is the one who condemns?” Then you come down to verse 38-39
and there’s a statement made in these two verses that’s pretty dogmatic. Paul says “For I am convinced that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor powers [39] nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord.” It’s that verse that leads into
this three chapter apparent diversion.
Why do you think Paul does what he does in
Romans 9, 10, and 11 when he starts talking about Israel? He hasn’t been talking about Israel in
Romans 8, why does he suddenly start talking about Israel and the Jew in Romans
9-11; what’s the story here, why the seeming discontinuity. If you think about verse 38-39, what is it
an assertion of, which if you were a Jew in the 1st century and
somebody had said that to you, and you looked around and saw the loss of
Israel, the fall, the exile in 586 BC and knew that as part of your Jewish
history, the nation went down, the Jews that were living in the Israel of Jesus
day were very aware that this was a ghetto compared to the nation that existed in
Solomon’s era. They always remembered
the great kingdom of the past. Why, if
you were a Jew, living and reading Romans 8, what might you think to challenge
the truth of verses 38-39? What would
be in your memory? What would be as part of your personal Jewish history that
would tend to argue, that you would say, well, Paul, I’m not quite so sure
about the statement you made in 38-39.
In 38-39 he’s saying that God is always going to be protecting His elect
ones, those that are in Christ. Now if
you’re a Jew, what are you going to assert?
Excuse me, what about the exile, You let the nation down, this was
supposed to be God’s elect nation, You let Israel be conquered. Even in this day was Israel free? She was under the foot, the boot of
Rome. So excuse me, if God can’t keep
His promises in the Old Testament, what makes us think He’s going to keep His
promises in the New Testament. So
there’s a Jewish argument to contravene verse 38-39. Hence, therefore, He’s got to deal with it, and that’s what
Romans 9-11 is all about. It’s to clear
away a misunderstanding of Jewish history that could have led to a very severe
doubt and a challenge that God always does protect His elect.
That’s why in Rom. 9:1 he says, “I am telling
the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience bearing me witness in the
Holy Spirit, [2] that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart, [3]
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the
sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, [4] Who are
Israelites…” etc. Now he deals with the
Jewish plight, the Jewish predicament here, which could have been used as a
counter argument. Notice in verse 6 how
he answers it, he says “But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for
they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel. [7] Neither are they all
children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but ‘through Isaac your
descendants will be named.’ [8] That is, it is not the children of the flesh
who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as
descendants.” He says I contravene the
opposition by saying that the promises of God given in the Old Testament were
not given to all Jews, those promises of endurance were given to those Jews who
were genuine believers. And it’s their
destiny that God has been faithful to keep.
So he says you’ve got your eyes on the wrong terms of the covenant, and
he goes back therefore to build a base to correct understanding of the
Abrahamic Covenant, Abraham being the first Jew.
He points out in verses 8-9 that Abraham had
two children, but it was Isaac that was the one who to whom the promise was
given. Then he goes on to the next
generation, verse 13, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau I hated,” that there’s a
division in the second generation.
Verse 14, “What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is
there? May it never be! [5] For He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I
will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
[16] So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but
on God who has mercy.” The whole idea
is that God promised to be faithful to those whom He called, and He says you
Jews, you think that God called the whole nation, perfect security for all
time; you didn’t read the fine print.
God called those who respond to Him, God called those who are the elect,
God called Isaac, He called Jacob, if you try to give me the counter example of
Ishmael and Esau, that’s not a valid argument, because they are not considered
to be quote “the elect” in the Old Testament.
What is an argument here is it’s a definition
to whom do these promises apply? Again
going back to Rom. 8:38-39, that is a promise to all who are “in Christ.” And he says if you’re a believer, obviously
you’re in Christ, and the promise applies to you, but you can’t use the Jewish
history counter argument because that counter argument is grounded on a false
understanding of the Abrahamic Covenant.
He goes on and describes the whole thing, and comes to chapter 10, then
chapter 11 and finally in Rom. 11:29, he goes through Israel’s history. He’s saying that Israel will not be erased
from history, he doesn’t say that every Jew is going to be saved, but he says
that the nation Israel will be saved, there will be a remnant of Israel that
will be saved. In verse 29 he says “The
gives and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
When God starts a work in history He finishes that work in history and
He’s not going to stop until He finishes it.
So “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. [30] For just as
you once were disobedient to God but now have been shown mercy because of their
disobedience, [31] so these also now have been disobedient, in order that
because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy.” In other
words, he’s talking about Jews and Gentiles and he’s saying in the future all
of the nation Israel will respond, there will come a day for Israel’s great
golden era, it’s not behind them in Solomon’s time, it’s ahead of them in
Messiah’s time. Verse 32, “For God has
shut up all disobedience that He might show mercy to all.”
Then after going through this very difficult
section of Rom. 9-11, look how he concludes, and I want to emphasize that
because he’s winding up this three chapter dissertation, and obviously there
are lots of questions, Paul knew there were lots of questions, and he concludes
by pointing to a characteristic of God that we mentioned last year. Verse 33, “Oh the depth of the riches both
of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and
unfathomable His ways!” There’s that thing called the incomprehensibility of
God. It’s a corollary of His infiniteness. It doesn’t mean there’s a contradiction, in
God’s mind there is perfect, 100% logical fit, the problem is we can’t load
enough in our computers, our finite limited computers, to understand how these
pieces all fit together, and so he says it’s unsearchable, His judgments are
unsearchable and His ways are unfathomable.
That’s a corollary to Christian doctrine. And we can’t say that we understand the whole plan of God, if we
understood the whole plan of God it would be claiming that we’re omniscient,
and that’s precisely the pagan agenda, the pagan agenda has always sought
omniscience for man. So we can’t slip back into that as we understand a little
bit about election.
Notice verse 34-36, “For who has known the
mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?” Did we give advice to God? [35] “Or who has first given to Him that it
might be paid back to him again? [36] For from Him and through Him and to Him
are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” This is the end of that three chapter dissertation.
He resumes in Rom. 12:1, which everybody
begins to read again because we skipped over Rom. 9-11 because those are hard
chapters. We slip from Romans 8 to
Romans 12 and we quote, “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is
your spiritual service of worship,” forgetting that there’s one introductory
word there in 12:1 that depends on the last three chapters, the word,
“therefore.” The whole command to give yourselves a spiritual sacrifice to God
is contingent on being able to do it by faith.
You can’t do it by faith if you doubt that He’s going to be honest to
His calling and His promises. And for Jewish believers particularly they’re
going to have a lot of doubts, because to them they’ve been the bad boys of
history, they’ve been kicked around, and it doesn’t really look like God kept
many of His promises. At least to the 1st
century Jewish world it didn’t look like He kept many of His promises.
So Paul deals with that because you can’t believe
if your conscience won’t let you. You
can’t work up faith, faith is the result of the Holy Spirit’s illuminating the
heart, and you can’t make yourself believe it.
The way you create faith is by listening to the Word of God, and
listening to it, listening to it, thinking about it, listening to it, thinking
about it till it clicks. When it clicks
you can believe it. So that’s why he
says “Therefore, I urge you brethren,” in light of the fact the calling and the
mercies of God are without repentance, the fact that God chooses to do a thing
and He’s going to bring it to pass, that’s why he says “I urge you to present
your bodies a living sacrifice,” it’d be kind of stupid to present your bodies
a living sacrifice to a God who never finished things. Hey, I’m not going to risk that, go play with
somebody else’s life, don’t play with mine.
So verse 1 that’s so popular in our evangelical culture is contingent on
an understanding of this doctrine of election, that God completes what He
starts.
Turn in the notes to page 30 we’ll look at it
under four points. The first one goes
back to something very fundamental, and I want to emphasize this at the
beginning because if there’s one time when a lot of people get bent out of
shape it’s in this area of the doctrine of election, and it’s because nine
times out of ten the whole discussion starts off on a wrong foot. Nine times out of ten when people start
talking about this, they talk about election as some sort of idea way over
here, separate from everything else.
The point I want to make as we start, that underlying little clause,
“Never try to learn one piece of revelation isolated from the rest, or you will
eventually at some point compromise the presupposition of Biblical faith.”
The Bible is a system, the Bible is a
coherent systematic revelation from God, and you can’t take a piece here and a
piece there and understand it apart from the other pieces. You say then, well how do I ever get
started? Very slowly, because there’s a
process here of learning this piece, and then reflecting on it, and it takes
time, it takes years of reflection, and then God through circumstances in your
life will take very practical pressures to force you back to where you have… we
get stripped out of all of our fleshly gimmicks and then you’re standing there
naked before Him, and then gee, maybe I should do that after all. Yes, after everything else has been knocked
out and then we decide we’re going to do that, and we think we’re so
spiritual. But it’s only because He’s forced
us into a corner, that’s why we did it, or that’s why we trust Him.
In this area of election we want to realize
that you have to consider it as part of the whole and the easiest way of doing
that is to think in terms of the literal call of one guy out of the city of Ur
in 2000 BC. It’s the easiest picture.
So I’m going to present it under four things to kind of help. The first one on page 30 is “Election rests
upon Creation.” So you can’t have one
without the other; read with me that paragraph. “Abraham came out of the pagan heartland of Mesopotamia. The two cities where he lived—Ur and
Haran—were known centers of worship of the moon God Nannar/Sin,” those are two
different names of the moon God. “As I
showed in Part II of this series, such paganism ‘buries’ the memory of ex nihilo creation along with the
Creator/creature distinction,” i.e., the nature of what God is. “All reality is viewed as one continuous
scale of being. History appears to be
run for a time by, say, a moon god until another god supplants him. Behind
these wars of the gods lies the ultimate mystery of the tablets of destiny or
fate or chance.” That’s the pagan
mind. If you can’t have a personal God
in charge because you don’t have an infinite personal God then you’ve got to
have something in charge and it’s either chance or fate.
Usually you read in pagan stories about the
tablets of destiny, you go into the famous film epic, 2001 Space Odyssey that was done, still
one of the great classic films of all time, and you’ll see at the beginning and
at the end of the film Stanley Cooper has this thing, it looks like one of the
tablets of the Ten Commandments going through outer space, as though that is
controlling man’s destiny. So somewhere
you have to have a controller, so usually in paganism it’s the tablets of
destiny or fate or chance. This [can’t
understand word] to horoscope business, etc.
“To respond to God’s call to leave the domain
of the moon god, Abraham had to have believed that God was Creator over all and
therefore that His message of election was secure from any interference.” Now let’s put some shoe leather on
that. You are a business man, Abraham,
you are in Ur, if your life is controlled by the moon god and what the moon god
decrees for your city and your city state and all your business transactions
are going on, you’ve lived your whole life there, you’ve got everything planned
out, what you’re going to do, etc. And
then God tells you what He told Abraham in Gen. 12, get out and go to a land
that I’m not going to tell you about, but I’ll show you how to get there. In terms of the pagan mind, what are you
doing when you leave the city that is controlled by the lunar cult? Leaving the
area what do you run into danger of? You’re going into another territory; the
moon god doesn’t control the other territory.
The gods in those days were geographically limited and everyone knew
that, so for Abraham to walk out of the city of Ur over to the city of Haran
over to God knows where meant that the God who he trusted had to have something
different about Him than the moon god had.
This God that called had to have absolute and total control over all
geography, over every area. His sovereignty
had to be universal, not local. Right away we know that to answer the call Abraham
had to have an idea; he had to have broken totally in his heart with the pagan
world view. He could not have believed in the Continuity of Being and operated
on the basis of that call.
Somewhere God the Holy Spirit illuminated his
heart to Who and what God was, and it’s this illumination that occurs at gospel
hearing. This has got to happen before
we can trust in Jesus Christ. Some of
the false conversions that we have in our churches I’m convinced that Jesus is
presented as some sort of guru, sort of a panacea, and what happens is that
people don’t ever think of Jesus as really God, or that sin is really a
violation of a legal relationship with this God of the universe, so having a
very trivial and low view of God, and a trivial and low view of sin, you’re
going to have a trivial and low view of Christ. So you can use the name “Jesus,” you can use the term “Christ,”
we can talk about trusting in Christ but if the content of who and what God is
isn’t there, you’re going to have a false conversion, it’s not going to last,
it’s going to fade away, it’s going to be a hip-ho for the moment.
Right away we’re faced with the fact that
election, the call of God, isn’t the call of a moon god, it isn’t the call of
chance, it’s the call of the Sovereign God of the universe. So it rests upon the existence of the
Creator/creature distinction. The whole
idea of election is simply that this, the ex
nihilo creator, is the ex nihilo
creator. And God chooses to do it this way.
He chooses to make the rainbow with those colors, that’s His
choice. He chooses to make chlorophyll
green, and He chooses to have Abraham’s around, it’s His right. We may not like that, we may feel offended,
but if we feel offended, that which is in our heart that feels offended, do you
know what it is? It’s a prideful desire to be God. A lot of people don’t get the point, the doctrine of election is
like a
2 x 4 that comes up along the side of the
head and bang, it wallops you, realizing that He calls the shots, not us. So that part of it rests upon election.
Now we want to understand what Paul meant in
Rom. 11:33 when he said “Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God! How unsearchable are
His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”
We want to remind you on page 31 about the fact that God, in His nature,
is incomprehensible. Last time we dealt
with the fact of the Creator/distinction. We said that God has certain
qualities and that we have to be careful about how we talk about God and His
qualities, His attributes. For example,
if you start talking about God’s sovereignty you have to remember that there’s
not some abstract quality called sovereignty shared by both God and man, that’s
not the point. Sovereignty is God’s
choice, and we are finite creatures and we have our choice, and this choice is
similar to but not identical. Our
choice is similar to God’s sovereignty, but our choice is not equal to God’s
sovereignty. We always have to
remember, every attribute of God is that way.
That’s what we’re talking about here. Our ideas are similar to God’s
ideas, they’re the creature version of them, but they’re not equal to God’s
ideas. If our ideas were equal to God’s
ideas and identical we’d have omniscience.
So when we talk about God causing things, etc. we have to be
careful.
Let me go through these paragraphs on page 31
on election. “Like Abraham we have to
leave our pagan notions behind when we face the doctrine of election. It must be understood against the backdrop
of creation: that there is a Personal Sovereign behind origins and history; and
that there are two levels of being—Creator and creature—not one. The Creator’s
(Q)uality of sovereignty cannot be identical to the human creature’s (q)uality
of choice. Our choice is only a finite
replica of God’s sovereignty so we ought not to visualize,” and here’s the
important point that gets stuck in all these arguments, “we ought not to
visualize God’s control over us like, say, some deterministic chemical
cause-effect reaction. Such
sub-biblical imaginations always erase personal responsibility because, like
Nimrod, they cannot conceive controlling real people without coercion.”
God can control us without eliminating
responsibility. How He does that I have
no earthly understanding. You’ve seen
glimpses of this in your life, if you’ve lived the Christian life any length of
time, you know that God puts you in a certain situation, in a certain time, in
a certain place, so that you’d run into this person who had that background and
all of a sudden you see three or four things happen. Did you feel a secret voice telling you, “go right 150 feet?” You
didn’t hear any call; there was no computer plug in telling you to get
there. You, in your consciousness just
did it, you were there, you just happened to be there, and this other person
just happened to be there. How did that happen? We don’t know how that happens, and that’s what we’re talking
about here with election. He pulls it
off, He does it daily. It’s how He
sovereignly controls without coercion.
That is what Paul means when he says “How unsearchable are His
ways.” The average person, if you talk
about God’s sovereignty they think, oh, if God is sovereign, then we’re just
puppets. Well, if God would be like us,
the only way we could get total control is have puppets. Do you see the fallacy in the
imagination? What they’re doing is
they’re trying to visualize how you can control something like you’d control
something. That’s not the point, you
aren’t God, the issue is how God controls someone without coercion. We can’t do that, God can.
The nearest illustration, in our own realm,
to sovereignty is to think of yourself as an author of a book, do you control
the plot of the book? Yes you do. But if I am a reader of your book, do I get
the impression that this character in your novel is being forced to do
things? No, because the book reports
that they’re free to do this and this and this and this, and this is how it
winds up. You, as the author are able
to somehow make your characters do the plot.
If you can do that with a book, why can’t God do that with history,
we’re in His book and He makes the plot come out that way. But He does it somehow without coercion. So that’s what we’re talking about in that
area.
[blank spot]
Look at Rom. 9:21, Paul uses an illustration that has in its background
the fall. In verse 21, “Or does not the
potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for
honorable use, and another for common use? [22] What if God, although willing
to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much
patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? [23] And He did so in order
that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which
He prepared beforehand for glory.” The image of the potter and the clay wasn’t
original to Paul. Paul got that out of
the Old Testament, so let’s go back to where he got it, Jeremiah 18. Again a Jewish reader of Romans would have
known this; the modern New Testament Christian wouldn’t.
Jer. 18:2, “Arise and go down to the potter’s
house, and there I shall announce My words to you. [3] Then I went down to the
potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. [4] But the
vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he
remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.” What happens
to the pot that’s being made, notice the text, he’s making a thing on the
potter’s wheel and it gets screwed up so he has to remake it. In the analogy
what’s the human race done, when it was first made in creation, what
intervening event happened? The fall
happened, so the human race got screwed up, it got marred, the clay has been
marred, so election has in view not only creation but it also presupposes a
fall, so you have the lump of clay, you have the event of the fall and now the
clay is all messed up. What election
asserts is that God comes in and he can remake the clay, so He remakes the
clay, and then He leaves some of it, that is what election is all about.
The question is how does that happen? Turn to Rom. 9 and we’ll see something about
the verbs that are used in that passage.
In Rom. 9:22-24, those who are hep on conjugating verbs notice
something. Verse 22, “What if God,
although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power know, endured
with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?” What is the voice of the verb “prepared” in
verse 22, active or passive? Passive,
in the passive voice the subject receives the action; the Greek also has a
middle voice which is reflexive. So you
have prepared for wrath, and it’s a passive voice, which in the Greek can be
also reflexive, prepared themselves.
They have been prepared; this is the damaged pot from that Jeremiah 18
illustration. It says in verse 23, “And
He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon
vessels of mercy which He prepared beforehand for glory.” There’s the verb again, “prepared” but now
what voice is it, active or passive?
It’s active. So over here we
have prepare, not prepared, God does the preparing; the vessels here, the
subject is left out, the subject and an indefinite verb or passive voice, you
have to kind of think about whose doing the acting here. It’s very strong and clear that God prepares
the ones that He prepared beforehand for glory, the vessels of mercy, but the
other verb doesn’t share that power.
What we have here is something you will
observe time and again in Scripture, we’ll see it again at the Exodus event,
where there’s an asymmetry about God’s sovereignty that somehow tells us
something. Here’s God’s sovereignty, He
controls good and He controls evil, but His control over the good is different
than His control over evil, He doesn’t go into a lot of details but there’s an
asymmetry here, it’s not the same. The
Bible has various ways of telling this, through verb tenses, voices of the
verb, there’s another thing like this in the Ten Commandments, I am the God who
visits the sin of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations of them
that hate Me, but then it goes immediately and turns around, and I visit
blessings on the thousands of generations of them that love me. There again is this difference that goes on,
saying that God in His active desire of His heart is to bless, but that He is
sovereign and He will leave that which has become foul, become disorganized,
become rebellious, He will often leave it in a state or rebellion.
If you want another glimpse of this, turn to
Deut. 4, it’s a comment on what’s going on here as He pulls Abraham out of the
pagan world; this is the Mosaic commentary on it. Notice how He talks about His elect nation verse the un-elect
nations, because the concept is the same even though here it’s nations and in
Abraham’s day it was the family. In
Deut. 4:19, He’s warning them not to worship the creation with idols and He
says, “And beware, lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and see the sun and
the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship
them and serve them, those which the LORD your God”
notice this clause, “has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.
[20] But the LORD has taken you and brought
you out of the iron furnace, from Egypt,” there’s the picture of the clay all
screwed up and what God does; He reaches down and redoes, but when He redoes He
doesn’t redo all of it, so the second element in the doctrine of election is
that it has in the background of the imagery of election is a fall has happened. God isn’t obligated to do anything, but He
reaches down and He calls people like Abraham out.
Let’s go to page 32, the third point, and
turn to Heb. 11, the great chapter on faith, and we’ll talk more about faith
later, but the third thing about election that I want to communicate: Election,
when it happens in history, is a revelation, it’s a revelation never before
seen nor being able to be predicted.
It’s a surprise event, so that what you have in the call of Abraham, if
you diagram it on a time line, would look like this, you’d have Nahor, Terah,
Abraham. Abraham lives in the city of
Ur, and then all of a sudden the call comes, and now Abraham leaves and he
starts his own pathway. At that very moment, when the call of Abraham comes
there is revealed the election of God.
It was not there before, nor could it have been predicted. There’s nothing inside history whereby you
can predict what God is going to do. This is a surprise event, sort of like
happens in the atom now, the [can’t understand word] quantum theory where you
suddenly have no rhyme or reason, all of a sudden you have this change of
state, you can’t predict it, it just is there.
So in history it’s the same thing, when you have this thing it’s a surprise
event. That has implications and the
implications for our faith are quite profound because in Heb. 11:3 we have the
statement that history is ultimately unpredictable, which, by the way, is an
argument why science will never be able to write a history. Science presupposes predictability, it
presupposes that events T + 1 are
the same in [can’t understand word] physics as a T, and that is an assumption, it can’t be proved, that’s
assumed, and then after we assume it, then we predict it.
In Heb. 11:3 we say, “By faith we understand
that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen as not
made out of things which are visible.” In other words, the steering wheel of
history is outside of history, and we are constantly surprised, time after
time, with the hand of God as he works in our lives. Carrying this further, down a few verses, look at what the author
of Hebrews says about Abraham in verse 8, “By faith Abraham, when he was
called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an
inheritance; and he went out,” and look at the last clause, “not knowing where
he was going.” “Not knowing,” was
Abraham therefore “not knowing” insecure?
What did Abraham know? That
tells us what he didn’t know, what did he know? He knew that the God of the universe was there, and the God of
the universe was calling him and that sufficed for his knowledge base. He knew those, he could do the other. But in all reality the Bible tells us we
don’t know a lot about what’s going on, and the key is visualizing Abraham as a
businessman. Any person that runs an
office, runs a business, can put themselves in Abraham’s position. How would you like somebody, God, to call
you, you’re going to move your business to some place, and I’ll show you where.
That doesn’t really give you a sense of comfort; it’s a big disruption to be
facing that. But that’s what faith is,
and election is this sudden intervention in our lives, this call that comes
in. That’s what we want to see,
election is always a surprise event.
On page 33, this is the comforting side of
it, Abraham didn’t know but he did know the One who called him. We want to look at the first paragraph under
point 4: “Election is God’s Basic
Eternal Promise To You and Me. In
Abraham’s case all three of the promises—land, seed, and worldwide
blessing—were still future when God called.
A very important implication of election is that every other promise God
makes to his elect is contained already in His election promise.” God’s promise to provide a child to Abraham,
God’s promise to protect Sarah to Abraham, that was all wrapped up in the
original call. “If the final state of
the elect is promised, then every need leading to that final state must also be
promised. Jesus used this reasoning when He deduced resurrection from the
Abrahamic Covenant.” We’ll see how
Jesus deduced the entire doctrine of resurrection from the Abrahamic
Covenant. Turn to Matt. 22, this was a
stunning thing that Jesus did, but if Jesus did this, it’s a model of how to
reason from the basis of the Word of God.
The doctrine of resurrection is not clear in
the Old Testament, obviously the doctrine of resurrection is very clear in the
New Testament, because Jesus rose from the dead, but Jesus kept insisting that
resurrection was predicted in the Old Testament. There’s only one passage in the Old Testament that talks about
resurrection clearly, and that’s in Daniel, but interestingly in Matt. 22:29,
when the Pharisees had an argument with the Sadducees about resurrection, in
verse 29 Jesus starts to discuss resurrection.
He says, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures, or the
power of God.” So He’s challenging their interpretation, He’s says, verse 30,
“For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are
like angels in heaven. [31] But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have
you not read,” so now He pins them down to an Old Testament passage, you guys
should have known about resurrection, “have you not read that which was spoken
to you by God, saying, [32] I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead but of the living.” What on earth does that have to do with the
resurrection? Can anybody see the
inference? First glance through here is not easy to see. Let me show you what Jesus apparently is
doing with this passage, and it was a surprise to the people of His day and
what it is to us, it shows us how serious Jesus took every word of
Scripture.
What Jesus is saying is there was the
Covenant promise. What was the Covenant
promise to Abraham? It was the land, the seed, and the worldwide blessing. Each one of these has a temporal fulfillment
and an eternal fulfillment, that this land wasn’t just the land of Israel in
his day, it was also to be the eternal temple of God, the new Jerusalem. The seed wasn’t just to be Isaac; it was to
terminate in the eternal One, the God-man, Messiah. The worldwide blessing was to ultimately be the worldwide kingdom
of God. All of these pointed to the
future. Did Abraham live forever? No,
Abraham on the time line looked like that, and he was dead. So the question is, if Abraham died here,
how do these promises pertain to Abraham?
You can say, well Abraham in his spirit, Abraham in his soul, after he
died he was blessed. But this isn’t talking about soul, this is talking about a
land, land is physical. How is Abraham
going to receive this promise if he doesn’t have a body to receive it in? And he says “God is of the life” and life in
the Hebrew means body plus soul, not just soul, body + soul. So God is the God of the living, and He
makes His promises, therefore if Abraham died Abraham must rise again from the
dead.
He expected, and this is kind of awesome,
because I wouldn’t have inferred that, maybe if you banged me over the head and
made me think about it a little bit I might, but He expected people to be able
to look at the Abrahamic Covenant and deduce resurrection from it. A pretty tall order, don’t you think. He didn’t rely on Daniel to prove the
doctrine of resurrection, He relied on the Abrahamic Covenant to prove the
whole doctrine of resurrection. He said
you read that, you should have understood it, why are you arguing about
resurrection, it’s all cleared up in the Abrahamic Covenant. Maybe it was to Him, but for most of us we
have to think about that one, don’t we.
And it gives us serious pause to the fact that when we look at these
Scriptures there’s a lot more in them than we’re willing to give them on the
first, second, third, or even fifth readings.
We covered in quick form the issue of
election and I want to conclude, on page 33, that last paragraph under election
because this is why this doctrine is so important in our Christian life.
“Election, then, is basic to all else in the Christian life. Contrary to Arminian claims,” those are
people who believe you can lose your salvation, “we must begin our new life in
Christ knowing of our election, that our names are written in the book of life
(Luke 10:20 cf. 1 Thess. 1:4; 2 Pet. 1:10; 2 John 1),” there are some verses to
prove it. “Without this assurance we
can never truly claim any of God’s promises because we can never be sure that
they are addressed to us! Knowing that
God has called us and works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure must
precede our faith walk,” so election is wrapped up with the fact that we can be
confident, we can be certain, we can be sure of God’s plan, and it’s a
marvelous source of blessing. This is
why Romans 8 and Rom. 12 was written that way, Paul wants us to be sure that
“all things work together to good to them that love God, to them that are
called according to His purpose,” from an election.
The most famous promises of all the Christian
life has election embedded in it. So that’s why the call of Abraham should be a
picture to us, of the fact that Abraham did not know the land, he did not know
the child, he did not know how he would be a blessing, but he did know God
called him, and he acted accordingly, and that’s what God wants us to do with
election, I call you and I expect you to respond to My call. And as we walk down the path together I’ll
show you this and I’ll show you that and I’ll show you some more stuff, but I’m
not going to show you the whole road map right now, you’re going to have to
trust Me, I have the map, you just follow me.
And that’s very frustrating because I’m the kind of guy, I want to see
the map first, then I’ll decide whether I want to go on this trip. I want everything laid out first so I can
decide. But you see, God’s designed our lives so that if we act that way we
can’t operate. He’s deliberately structured it so we have to believe.
---------------------
Next time we’re going to deal with the
doctrine of justification, and if you’ll look at that and Romans 4 because next
week it’s going to be kind of tough if you come from a Roman Catholic background
because we’re going to deal with the difference between Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism. Here’s where the watershed happens, because this is the
Protestant Reformation, what it’s all about.
You want to be careful, because Roman Catholicism does not believe what
some Protestants maliciously tell, you hear Protestants often say Catholics
believe in justification by works; Catholics do not believe in justification by
works, and you can prove it by their own catechism, so you have to be careful
that we be truthful to depict what Romanism says, on the other hand we want to
show you what Luther and Calvin discovered that launched the whole Reformation,
and why today in our evangelical circles we are in great danger of going back
to Rome by the way we’re preaching the gospel.
So the doctrine of justification is very, very important, so please read
the notes. Tonight was a very hasty
survey of a very difficult area, so I probably stirred up more questions than I
answered but I’m here so you can take some shots if you want.
Question asked: Clough replies: The answer to
the analog on God’s side to our conscience is His holiness, or describes
sometimes His righteousness or His justice, the analog on God’s side for love
is love; the analog on God’s side for knowledge is omniscient. Those attributes are key and the reason why
I mention those four is because those four turn out to be requirements for all
of life for man, and if you take God away, then they collapse, and that’s
exactly what we’re seeing, because man has to come up with a substitute. Man has to substitute some sort of a base
for choice, conscience, love, and knowledge.
And that’s where we as Christians can
counterattack, in other words, the pagan mind is very arrogant and it looks
upon us as the weaklings and we have to rely on faith, blah, blah, blah, and they’re
the people to be pitied because here they are, trying to build a doctrine of
choice, and all they’ve got is chemistry.
They’re trying to build a doctrine of conscience and rights, and they
don’t have any source for them. They’re trying to build an atmosphere where
people can love one another when ultimately there’s insecurity, and they’re
trying to build knowledge without any prior knowledge, without any absolute
controls, absolute standards of truth. So really the pagan is to be sadly
pitied. The Bible’s term for the
destruction of those four things is a technical term that occurs throughout the
book of Ecclesiastes, called vanity, and when you see that word in the New
Testament you want to be careful, because if you read it like I did for many years,
you just kind of read it over quickly.
You’ve done some reading in Christian
classics, Pilgrim’s Progress, and you remember Vanity Fair and all I remember
was growing up my mother had some cosmetic thing or something called Vanity
Fair, but when I became a Christian I realized what that’s talking about, it’s
talking about Vanity Fair is this pagan error, Vanity is the idea of lack of
substance, it’s sort of like in James, “what is your life but a vapor that
passes away,” ppffftt, on a cold morning. It looks like it has space and substance, but it turns out not to
have anything, it’s like cotton candy. So that’s the flavor of the word
“vanity” and “fair” is the old English word for beauty, and Vanity Fair in Pilgrim’s
Progress meant that there’s this attractive, paganism is attractive, it
wouldn’t be a temptation if it wasn’t attractive, so it’s an attractive vanity,
and this is why it seduces people, because it is attractive.
So the collapse of those four things is
basically vanity, and that’s what Solomon means when he goes over and over,
“all is vanity, all is vanity, all is vanity,” he says I had this, I had that,
I had did this experiment, I did that experiment, I bought this, I bought that,
and I tried to build my business and I had security, etc. and it’s all vanity.
And people think what went wrong with Solomon. Well, it was that he did all the
experiments, he tried everything, and he had the means of trying, he had the
brilliance most of us don’t have, none of us do, Solomon probably was one of
the most brilliant men who ever walked the face of the planet. He was probably on a par with Leonardo
DaVinci, all you have to do is read the book of Ecclesiastes and write down on
a scratch pad every area that guy did experiments in. He was in botany, he was in math, he was in physics, he was in
engineering, he experimented a thousand times with marriage, that would wear
anybody out, and he went on and on from one area after another with all this,
and his conclusion is that it’s all vanity.
So that’s what we’re trying to get at here,
so that we as Christians don’t become paranoid. We don’t have to be paranoid, the other people ought to be
paranoid, they’re the ones that don’t have any substance, and we ought to start
telling them that when they arrogantly deny they need Jesus Christ. What do you mean you don’t need Jesus
Christ, you don’t even have an idea of truth or knowledge or anything else,
don’t tell me you don’t need Jesus Christ, don’t give me that stuff, I was born
in the morning but it wasn’t yesterday morning. And that’s the way we ought to handle that kind of arrogance,
call it for what it is, graciously but nevertheless pointedly.
Question asked: Clough replies: That is
wrapped up with the fact that in Noah’s time, a good way of looking at that is
you have to keep in mind that election is a part of God’s sovereign control,
and when we’re talking sovereignty here, He never absolves or destroys somehow
in the process human responsibility. And
if you want to think about Noah, and think about He called Noah and his family,
He also preached to the entire world for 120 years, so no person who winds up
as an unbeliever can ever argue that they’re in unbelief because of election,
being not elected. The condemnation in
John is they have not believed, and their condemnation is that they have not
believed. Believed what? Believed what they knew of the Word of God
that had come to them, and that’s why we have to be so careful because
hyper-Calvinism gets hold of this and destroys it.
That’s why, I didn’t have time tonight, but
one of the things, maybe I can draw this diagram that’s helped me think that
through, because for a time I had some people that were intent on becoming
hyper-Calvinists and they almost took over the campus at Dallas Seminary at one
time, and they even came out with a statement that said, gee, if I knew who the
non-elect were I wouldn’t bother to witness to them. That is the ultimate stupid extrapolation of this, and the way to
think about it that has helped me is to think of the fact… this is time going
this way, and think of God’s existence up here, and history down here, God in
His mind has always understood who the elects are and who the non-elects are,
obviously because He’s omniscient. But
in history, what I’m trying to do is make the point that the elect do not come
into existence until the gospel is preached and they believe, so if this X
represents the gospel witness, somebody sharing the gospel, this is the person
believing, that’s the point where the elect ones exist, they don’t even exist
prior to that point. Now they exist in
God’s mind, but so did the universe exist in God’s mind before creation, didn’t
it? But it didn’t exist until God
created it.
If you get this idea here, what it does, it
means that every time you witness, or I witness, or we share the gospel, it
means that that sharing of the gospel, that evangelism is the very means that
is being used to create the elect. The
elect are never conceived as elect, you don’t have [can’t understand word]
spectacle in the Bible of unbelieving elect people, it’s not there. Elect are
already in Christ, we share Christ’s election, and we are believers. But you don’t EVER in Scripture, EVER see
the elect identified running around in an unbelieving state. The term is always reserved for
post-belief. And that means that this
act of witnessing, that “call” that comes through the gospel, is not an
impotent sorting device, and that’s why hyper-Calvinism historically has been
very weak evangelistically.
That’s what happened to the Reformation,
that’s what happened to the Puritans, they went down because they never had a
vigorous evangelism, and the reason they never had a vigorous evangelism, they
didn’t even evangelize their kids, what happened was they lost it, here they
were, they had created one of the most vibrant Christian civilizations known to
man and they lost it in two generations.
And it was because there was a defect in their doctrine, their doctrine
made this gospel witness really unnecessary, because after all the elect are
going to believe and we don’t have to help them, they’re going to just do it
themselves. That’s wrong. The elect are
called into existence by the gospel, and that’s why, I forget where the verse
is but it’s in Paul’s epistle where we cause condemnation and we cause life,
we’re saviors of death and we’re saviors of life, what he’s saying is that when
you evangelize somebody you’re pushing the envelope because what it means is
they hear the gospel, bang, it comes into somebody’s heart and if they believe,
what’s happened is you’ve had regeneration, here you have an elect creation,
but on the other hand, if they keep rejecting, rejecting, rejecting, every time
they hear the gospel, the gospel is hardening their hearts.
So the gospel evangelism does two things, not
one; it not only creates the elect but it damns those who do not believe, and
that’s the human tragedy of a church that preaches the Word of God. Because people can come into Bible-believing
churches and hear the Word of God and hear the Word of God, and hear the Word
of God, and not act on it, not act on it, not act on it, and finally their
hearts get hardened, and then you have some big blow up in the church or they
go off and do some stupid thing, and oh gee, look at the hypocrites in the
church, they were every Sunday. Yes,
but was going up here, that’s the point.
So the gospel preaching is tied to your question and the question about
God not willing that…. repents, that everyone repents, that is, but clearly He
has designed history in which people don’t all repent, and the question is why?
How do we get those two things together?
If you’re successful at doing that, write a book, because no one has
ever gotten those two together in history, we’re just told to witness to
everyone because that’s God’s desire and we’re told also that there are those
who from before the foundation of the world were chosen in Christ, in other
words, if you look at it another way, God knew where history was going to go
before He started.
Question asked: Clough replies: No, Abraham
wasn’t elect before he was called. No, the doctrine of election was implicit in
the Bible but what I’ve done in this series, I went through every speech in the
Bible, from Joshua, Moses, Stephen, and I built a graph, and I graphed the
events that these guys kept talking about, and that’s how I arrived at this set
of events. So the set of events was
distilled out of Biblical speeches. I
figured if these guys when they did their big long sermons were emphasizing
these events, then I ought to emphasize these events. And then I said okay, I
got, say 20 different events out of the Bible and then I said if you look in
the speeches, or you look in the discussions of the New Testament, how do they
handle, what do they talk about when they talk about that event, what does that
event show them, and clearly in this event, the call of Abraham, election is
being shown, in a way not true of other events, because when Paul goes to
expound the doctrine of election in Rom. 9-11 he doesn’t talk about Noah, he
doesn’t talk about Moses, but he talks about Abraham. So it must be that the call of Abraham is the clearest picture of
election, not that it didn’t occur before.