Tim Suffield.com

I recently entered a small discussion on sovereignty/free will etc etc on Facebook, of all places, because Gareth asked me to. Anyway, because it saves me writing another article, I’m just going to whack it in here! I think it makes sense without follow-up or context.

(Yes, that analogy isn’t mine. Shh)

Anyway, here we go:

I’m going to have a go at answering/discussing this, but please ask questions to make me clarify myself. I’m not really sure how clear I’ll manage to present this. This also might get a tad long.

Essentially my short answer is: some people believe in God and others don’t almost because as you say they’re “more predisposed to have said faith than others.” Because God calls them.

If you’ll allow an analogy for a second, if Jesus is to actually be a ’saviour’ then this means that he actually actively saves. He doesn’t stand outside the fiery building and shout people’s names, willing them to come to him to save themselves, he runs into the flames and finds the child hidden under the bed who doesn’t even know where to go, who doesn’t even want to move, and then carries them out of the flames.

Why is this so? Well, firstly in order for ‘grace’ to actually be grace then it must be so. If Jesus saves us graciously, that is: apart from our own efforts, apart from ‘works,’ entirely freely so that we can rely on him for righteousness and salvation … if that’s true, here’s the crux, if that’s true then it can in no way contain anything of us. It must all be of Christ and Christ alone. It’s what theologians would call ‘monergism’ instead of ’synergism’ - that is, we don’t co-operate with God in our salvation, in no way do we save ourselves, because we can’t. God saves. It’s all of Christ and all for his glory - we have no leg to stand on since we did none of it. We have no self-righteousness, only an ‘alien’ Christ-righteousness.

The second reason is that is this the direct witness of the Bible, as opposed to just being a Biblical worldview like I just laid out, but we’ll come back to that in a bit.

Why can’t we save ourselves? This again is the teaching of the Bible, that man is both literally dead in sin, (Romans 6:13; 8:10) and that unregnerate man (that is: Man before the Holy Spirit turns him towards God - a non-Christian if you will) is profoundly an enemy of God. (Romans 5:10) Sometimes humanity is described by Christians as being ‘totally depraved.’ This pretty much covers it, not that every person is really really bad in a relativistic moral sense, but that sin touches every aspect of life and as a result man is cut off and alienated from God. (Colossians 1:21-23)

The Bible most definately describes salvation as a call or a draw. Examples: 1 Peter 2:9; Romans 8:28-30; Acts 2:38-39; John 6:37, 44; John 10:29 - these seem to me to be good examples of the Bible’s testimony to salvation as ‘call.’

It would be fair to see a ‘call’ as being synonymous with an ‘election’ the way that the Bible speaks of it. It is an effective call, a drawing to Jesus - a command not a choice.

To come back to you mentioning God hardening Pharoah’s heart, this gets a little bit hard. Yes, that’s in the Bible. Paul references it in Romans 9 as part of his argument about this very thing. I’m now going to whack a large quote from there in, since I think it’s fairly important. To my mind this is the word of God addressing your questions directly:

As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use?

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory– even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

- Romans 9:13-24

This is somewhat unarguable. The Bible teaches that God hardens the hearts of some and calls others.

This can be read wrongly. God is not the author of sin. God does not ’cause’ people to sin in an active way. Man’s natural state is rebellion from God, so that when God hardens a heart he is not making a person sin, he is ‘giving them over to their sins.’ (Romans 1:28)

Why stress this? Let’s go back to Pharoah. God, in hardening Pharoah’s heart is not making him sin. God is ‘merely’ letting him sin. Pharoah is already (like us all) a sinner. Pharoah’s heart is in fact hardened as a result of his sin. We all deserve this, we all deserve wrath for our sins. The shocking and scandolous thing is in no way that God would do this to a sinner. This is exactly what we should expect a holy and righteous God to do to a sinner.

The shocking and scandolous thing is that God saves sinners. That he declares the ungodly and unrighteous to be godly and righteous. The paradigm-shattering offense of the cross is that God himself provides himself as a substitute for man in order to satisfy himself.

As I hope and pray that my words convey, salvation is all of God, all of Christ. God saves us. Nothing of ourselves would in any way actually do anything. It wouldn’t work. Because it is God that saves us, we can be assured of our salvation in every way. He isn’t going to mess it up! He already hasn’t messed it up!

God actively, sovereignly, graciously, irrestibley and effectively saves sinners and declares them righteous by his grace through our faith, which is itself a gift of God.

Apologies again for my lack of brevity, please ask for clarification or refute what you think needs refuting.

And a tiddle bit more:

I don’t think God’s main focus of creation in Man was the ability to choose. I’d say God’s main focus was in glorifying himself. He creates man to glorify him and to enjoy him forever … roughly the same reason God always acts in a certain way. We can see cut throughout the Old Testament especially God acting for the sake of his righteousness, or the sake of ‘his name’ (c.f. Romans 3:25-26), or: for the sake of his glory. This is God’s prime motivation and concern - that he be seen, recognised, savoured and treasured as ultimately glorious.

As to why God only started in the middle east (note: not the west) - I don’t precisely know. I can make guesses. Biblically we see that God loves to use weak instruments to do his work, because it brings more glory to him as it points more readily to him and his grace as the worker of all this. (2 Corinthians 12:9 et al)

In other words, the gospel is ’spread’ by us because God wants to do it that way. It might be worth noticing that large parts of Africa, South America East Asia are in revival with massive numbers of Christians and more growing every day. The majority of Christians in the world are not in the west.

As to free choice/will… it depends on how we’re defining it. If free will is man’s ability to control his own destiny then I believe it to be a profoundly unbiblical concept. I don’t see any reason that we need to keep the language, but if free choice is man’s responsibility for his own actions, then the Bible is again clear that we definately do have this. The fact that everything happens according to the council of God’s will does not, according to the Biblical witness, do harm to man’s free choice. We are still responsible for our rebellion etc.

So yes, there we go.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Theology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.