Romans No.22 Predestination

Epistle to the Romans, and we're reading from the ninth chapter. The Apostle Paul is talking about the mystery of the elective love of God, and in the nineteenth verse he continues with his argument. One of you will say to me, Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will? But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, Why did you make me like this? Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy whom he prepared in advance for glory, even us whom he also called? Not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles, as he says in Hosea, I will call them my people who are not my people, and I will call her my loved one who is not my loved one.

And it will happen that in the very place where it was said to them, You are not my people, they will be called sons of the living God. Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth with speed and finality.

It is just as Isaiah said previously, Unless the Lord almighty had left us descendants, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah. May God help us as we come to examine this teaching from his holy, inerrant word. There is in the realm of human experience such a phenomenon as an optical illusion.

If, for instance, you were looking down the railway track from Worthing station, your eyes would tell you that the track in the distance meets. You know full well, however, that this cannot be completely the case, because that would mean that every train that went along the track would ultimately smash. You know, because you have other ways of perceiving information and making deductions, that what your eyes tell you is not exactly correct.

And so you use your faculty of reason to qualify what your faculty of sight seems to indicate. Now, that's the way in which we approach truth, not only in the illustration that I've given you, but also as far as Scripture is concerned. We bring to play the whole teaching of Scripture when dealing with any one specific subject.

Otherwise, you will distort Scripture. I made reference to the exuberance of the dog who accompanied me on my six or seven mile run this afternoon. One of my favourite tracks of land is the countryside between Cisbury Ring and Shanktonbury Ring.

I could have brought you a bit of that countryside back. I could have hewn out a square yard, shall we say, of turf, and brought it to you and said, here is Cisbury Shanktonbury Ring countryside. It wouldn't, of course, be all of it.

It would be a sample of it. I could perhaps have even gone one better and showed you a couple of photographs that I have of my favourite jogging area. That would have given you a greater insight into the terrain, into the beauty of the countryside there.

But it would have only given you a snippet, actually, although it would have been better than my first example, it would only have given you a snippet of what actually it looks like from the vantage point of Cisbury and Shanktonbury Ring. Now, as far as the Word of God is concerned, when you are dealing with difficult teaching, you have to have it within the context of the whole general sweep of God's revelation. That was put extremely well in an argument that I witnessed between Enoch Powell and the Bishop of Durham.

I thought that Mr. Powell actually had the Bishop of Durham on a piece of string and was running around him and showing him certain aspects of biblical truth that he ought to have been aware of before. The debate, actually, was on the virgin birth. Powell said this, you're starting, Bishop, because he was denying it, you're starting with the wrong biblical truth.

He said, before you understand the virgin birth, you've got to understand the doctrine of the resurrection. When you perceive who this man is that has been raised from the dead, then you will start to ask fundamental questions that will outline the uniqueness of this man, the Son of God. And when you comprehend his uniqueness in as much as he's been raised from the dead and there is evidence to demonstrate that this is fact, then you can go backwards through his life, understand something of the nature of his character, the miraculous supernatural feats in which his ministry was studied, and then you'll start to ask questions about his origin.

And it won't be to you a great difficulty to acknowledge the miracle of the virgin birth. It falls into line when you start with the miracle of the resurrection. Now, you see, what he was doing was saying to the bishop, stand back and see the whole gamut of the counsel of God, and then drawing close on the more difficult areas.

Now it seems to me that this is precisely what we must be doing when dealing with this particular passage of scripture which the Puritans, as I say in my notes, which the Puritans, as I say in my notes, call high doctrine, difficult doctrine. It has to do with the idea of predestination, of God calling to himself an innumerable company of people who have to say of their salvation that it is entirely as a result of God's initiative and not just human choice. William Berkeley is not my favourite theologian, though I take him as one up from the Bishop of Durham in terms of my checking out which of the two is more authoritative.

Berkeley seems to suggest when he comes to these verses in which Paul is making the comment that God takes the initiative in salvation, that the poor man really is in a bit of a dilemma. You see, he's been dealing with the Jews, has he not? He tells us in the first verse in a most impassioned way that his great longing, to the extent that he would lay down his life if he could barter for it, his great longing is for Jewish people to be saved, but they're not saved. Only a minority of Jews respond to the gospel of Jesus.

That was the case in the first century, it's the case today. So Paul, on the horns of a dilemma, he cannot really understand why it is that this great gospel that he sees so clearly as being the revelation of God's mercy to the world, he can't understand why Jews are not responding to it. Therefore he's trapped in the logic of his own argument.

He said that God takes the initiative. The Jews have not responded. Therefore, says William Berkeley, he's driven to the conclusion they haven't responded because, well, God somehow has programmed them not to respond.

And so says Berkeley, following some other commentators, this is a passage of scripture we wish the Apostle Paul hadn't written. Well, we need, I think, not follow Dr. Berkeley in his conclusions. We believe that the whole of scripture is inspired, it's all authoritative.

So what must you do when you're faced with this particular passage which seems to suggest that salvation is of God's initiative? Therefore, if it's of initiative that some must be saved, it also seems a logical consequence that it's God's will that some shall be damned. That's the hub of the argument around these verses. What must you do? First of all, you must stand back and you must remember one or two things.

First of all, the Christian gospel, hear me carefully, does not purport to describe God and his purposes fully. The Christian gospel reveals to you about God as much as you need to know for your salvation. It does not tell you all that there is to know about God.

There is that about God which is hidden. Martin Luther was quite right. The hiddenness of God.

The Apostle Paul says, now we see through a glass darkly, but one day face to face. Now I know in part, then shall I know even as I am known. Isaiah the prophet says, speaking for God, my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.

Job says, can a man by searching find out God? And the answer is no, he cannot. But God in his grace can come through to man and reveal something of his nature. Something of his character.

Something of his purposes. Not everything, but enough for you and me to go on to believe, to understand, to commit ourselves to the fact that God is a just God and a loving God and he will never do anything that cuts across the grain of his justice. The end of the age, the whole world will know that this God is a just and a fair being.

So there will come a time in our grasp of God's purposes when we will understand in part but not completely. Now this is not novel. On one occasion the disciples were told by the Savior, what I do you don't know now.

You don't fully comprehend but one day you will. Go to the cross, perish the thought, Lord not for you, get you behind me, Satan man. You're speaking to me the very temptations of the one who slid alongside me at the beginnings of my ministry.

Peter, you will back off from those words and wish that you had never spoken them. When you fully appreciate why it is I must go to Jerusalem and be nailed to a Roman cross, what I do now you don't know but one day you will know. And there is that about God that you'll not understand this side of eternity but you will take by faith because you have an insight into his character.

You have enough to go on to entrust yourself to him and to his purposes and you recognize that you're a finite being. You are far less than God yourself. Theology I declare is not a full study of the person of God.

It is a study of the information that God has bequeathed to us and there are certain aspects of it which will always cause us to wonder with that same sort of astonishment as is illustrated by Moses who when he was looking after you recall his father-in-law Jethro's sheep. He suddenly sees a bush that starts to burn. Now that's not a startling sight in itself.

It often happens in a hot country but the thing that was the line of demarcation as far as this incident was concerned that made it unique was it was burning but it was not burning up. And if a modern man had been there he'd have come along with his microscope. They'd have sent for the botanist.

They would have examined the texture of the leaf. They would have tried to work out what the source of the ignition was. They would have done everything in terms of analysis but nothing in terms of standing back in awe and wonder because God was disclosing himself to Moses.

Moses anticipating the modern moves towards the bush and from the burning bush comes the voice of God. Unshod your feet. You're on holy ground.

Yours is not to ask questions. Yours is to stop, accept and worship. There is a quality in the incident of the burning bush that reminds me, I think, of the ministry of Scripture.

This is the bush in which the Word of God burns. Well entitled The Living Bible by Kenneth Taylor in his paraphrase. And there are times when this bush burns when you don't come up close for a microscopic analysis and a sifting by the means of human logic.

You take off your shoes and you honor the God who speaks and you accept what he has to say. So as we look into these verses the Apostle tells us in a very blunt fashion that there is a way to answer God back which is admissible. You can work that out by a 19th verse.

Imagining some objector to what is already said about God hardening the hearts of those he wants to harden and having mercy on those that he wants to show mercy, he imagines his objector saying, then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will? In other words, if we're so programmed then there is no moral responsibility that attaches to us. Therefore it is wrong of God to call us to book. The Apostle Paul rejects the very insolence of that question.

You've got to understand why he rejects it though and you must listen to me very carefully this evening or else you'll be making some wrong conclusions. Look at the 20th verse which obviously follows the proceeding but qualifies his comment. Who are you, O man, to talk back to God? I don't know whether you have the expression down here but we certainly have it in Yorkshire.

A smart aleck is someone who comes up with a sort of clever question which is based on impertinence, on impudence. God never disallows you to question him when you don't understand his purpose in your life. When you have as your fundamental belief that God is righteous but you can't understand why he's allowing that, that sort of questioning is acceptable.

Jeremiah illustrates it, Job illustrates it, the Psalmist illustrates it, our Lord Jesus illustrates it. That's not the answering back of impertinence and impudence. That's the answering back, the questioning of God from a heart of love that is puzzled, that still believes that God is a righteous God but fails to comprehend why he allows certain things to develop in one's individual experience.

But you see what the Apostle Paul is here doing? He is denying the right for anyone to answer God back in a smart aleck fashion, as though they could bring God to judgment and question his ways, as though God is in the dark and here is this impertinent man questioning the Lord. The Apostle says, no, your attitude is wrong. Who are you, O man, to talk back to God? He will not be cross-examined at the judgment bar of a hard and an impenitent heart, but he will allow you who love him and sometimes are confused about what develops in your life to say, Lord, why? I don't understand.

I've been listening to an address during this day as I've been driving around. I have a little tape recorder in my car and so I get snippets of it as I go from one appointment to another. From a great Bible teacher in this country, but he was going too far.

He was asking too much. He was trying to deal with a whole doctrine of healing. Now I believe that God heals, but with my theology of healing I have to have a theology of suffering.

I must have that because the Bible testifies to it and I can't be a pastor in Worthing for 19 years without acknowledging the fact that some Christian people suffer. I don't understand why God allows them to suffer and I do believe in every circumstance that I can pray and ask God for the replacement of their sickness by health, but I will be less than honest if I said to you that that happens every time. So with my theology of healing I also have to have a theology of suffering.

Otherwise I think I am less than honest with the New Testament and certainly less than honest with pastoral experience. Now don't you understand that when you admit to the fact that God has called you to belong to him, as you must admit to this, you didn't take the initiative in your salvation. You remember the little preface that I wrote or the little ditty that I wrote in my old RSV Bible when I discovered about God's elective love as I was translating the book of Romans from the original, "'Twas not that I did choose thee, Lord, for, Lord, that could not be.

This heart would still refuse thee, hadst thou not chosen me." God took the initiative. Now I can believe that God took the initiative and yet still as I do or try to do Sunday by Sunday, morning and evening, plead with men, assault their wills and women who come into the congregation as though everything depended upon a so-called freedom of choice for them to accept the gospel or not. But I know, and you know, because we're in the family secret, that it's God in his grace who steals into the heart and prepares men and women to receive this good news.

You see, you've got to accept that. It's not even up for debate. The Apostle Paul earlier on in this chapter describes the pre-conversion state in terms of slavery.

When he's writing to the Ephesians, he describes the pre-conversion state in terms of death. What cannot a slave do? He can't be free. What cannot a corpse do? He cannot be raised from the dead, not of his own volition and initiative.

But God steps in and grants you freedom. Who the Son sets free is free indeed. God raises you in the power of an endless life when you commit yourself to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

Now, if God does that, then it seems as though we are favoured people over against others for whom he does not seem to deal in the same, with whom he does not seem to deal in the same fashion. Now, this is where we're in the territory of the difficult. This is where we need to stop and worship.

This is where we need to perhaps put our minds into neutral to realise that we're, if you please, going back to my early illustration, we're by Worthing Station and we're looking down the railway lines. And it doesn't seem logical. And at the human level, it doesn't seem fair.

But God never says in his Word, because he doesn't disclose how he goes about this whole process of bringing men and women to salvation. He doesn't disclose how it is that he initiates this rescue work on the part of some and seemingly doesn't on the part of others. It is enough for you, brothers and sisters, to know this, that you're told to go into the whole world and preach the Gospel.

And you never have a right to say of any man or to think of any woman that they cannot be saved. But having moved into the experience of salvation yourself, you look back and you say, though I thought I was deciding for Christ, I've discovered with greater maturity that Christ decided for me long ago and he gave me the ability to respond to salvation grace. So the apostle, having dismissed the idea of talking back to God in an impudent fashion, takes us to the imagery of the potter and the clay.

You can learn a lot in your workshop. I've always felt that people who believe that you can only learn of God if you've got a study like mine cased with books, I've always felt that that's wrong. Some of the greatest people who've known God have never read a great number of books, although I think reading books is helpful in the main.

God can teach you anything, anywhere, in your workshop as well as in the church sanctuary. So he takes us to the potter. He learns a lot from the potter, does Paul, as has Jerry Meyer and also Isaiah.

And actually it's to Isaiah that Paul specifically directs us as he quotes from that prophet who envisages the potter. It's a silly little illustration in some ways, I mean by that it's illogical. Here is this lump of clay and he spins round and he says to the potter, why did you make me like that? You're not going to make me like that.

It's an absurdity of course because clay is inanimate. And the Apostle Paul is not identifying clay and human beings as though they're one and the same. William Barclay got that wrong.

He's using an illustration, a metaphor. It's a good one but it must not be pressed out of context. All he is doing is saying this, that as the potter has rights over the clay to form some vessels for perhaps more noble use than others, so God has a sovereign right to do as he pleases in this world which he has made.

That's the bottom line, if you please, of the illustration in the 20th and the 21st verse. Now says the Apostle, you can understand this. You know that the clay is entirely dependent upon the mind of the potter and the skillful fingers of that craftsman.

Now what if God acts like that? He doesn't say in every detail that this is an explanation of God's technique or methodology. What he is doing is putting up suppositions. Verse 22, what if God? Verse 23, what if he did this? And when you read these two very difficult verses, it's most important for you to realize that what Paul is concentrating on is God's provision of salvation.

By and large, the Jews have not responded. By and large, it seems there's a hardness in their hearts as there was a hardness in the heart of Pharaoh. But as in the latter case, things turned out for the glory of God because, well, the whole saga of Moses and Pharaoh and the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt and the opening of the Red Sea, it became so legendary that even centuries afterwards, people were talking about the greatness of God, the God of the Jews, because of the hardness, if you please, of Pharaoh's heart.

Now Paul is homing in on this. The problems of the obdurate, that means the hard heart of his people. Tragic though it be, analogous almost to the vessels of ignoble use, nonetheless, it has had this positive spin-off.

The riches of God's glory, those gospel blessings that he wants to bequeath to men and women in our world, have been given to those who are the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory, even us whom he also called, not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles. You see the point? The apostle is now back with a more positive aspect of his metaphor. He's thinking of the vessels that are of noble use that the pottery is making.

He has loosely dealt with the ones of lesser value, but he is concentrating on what has happened as a result of Jewish hardness. Some have been saved, a minority of the people, and the glories of the gospel of Jesus have spun over, have over spilled, if you like, amongst Gentile people, so that many of them, alongside the Jews, have also been saved, called, chosen, prepared in the grace of God to receive the great and the glorious gospel. I, says the Apostle Paul, even us.

I said before, and I'll probably say many times while I'm here at the tab, I can understand God saving you. My problem is, why did he save me? I can give you, I can say this because she's not here, I could give you 200 reasons easily why he saved my wife. I'm beggared to find reasons why he saved me.

But this I have come to understand, that with the analogy that Paul gives of the potter making a vessel of honor. So, he has put me into that category and he's put you, objects of his mercy, prepared in advance for glory. Why me? I doubt whether eternity will ever divulge the answer to that question, but there are times when you don't want answers to questions.

You just want to stand back and glory in the wonder of the love of this great God who has so honored you. So, you don't understand the mechanics. Congratulations.

Nobody this side of glory will understand how it is that God saves, but he does. You say sometimes that it doesn't seem as though this is just. William Shakespeare sometimes had good insights into biblical truth.

Though justice be thy plea, consider this, that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. It would be just of God to condemn the whole world. You, me, every son of Adam, our aggregate sin sent Christ Jesus, the eternal son of God, to the cross.

He endured our damnation that we might have salvation. He became what we were so that we might assume by his grace the characteristics of righteousness and purity that belong to him. I don't understand that.

I do not ask God for justice. I'm scared of the justice of God. I ask him for mercy, and when in his great heart he displays mercy to Jew and Gentile, to an innumerable company of people, it ill behoves me to say to this God, I don't understand the mechanics.

He says, there are things about me you'll never understand. Yours is not to question, but to take the shoes from off your feet and worship. Yours is to go to the whole world and convince men and women with every persuasive bit of your personality that they, by your human effort, though you know that is inadequate, but coupled with the Holy Spirit, that they might become my children.

And that, my brothers and sisters, is my understanding. Inadequate though it may be, but it helps a simple-minded Yorkshireman to be able to continue. Not just limpingly to be able to continue, but it puts fire into my bones as I think that God in his grace has called me, and that out there, there is that innumerable company of people that he has called.

And in effect, if you'll allow the colloquialism, he's saying to the church, go and get them. This doctrine of predestination, rightly understood, has never caused people to sit in an armchair of lethargy, but it's compelled them to go, like William Carey, to the outback of India and to bleed and die that the Hindus might respond to the gospel of Jesus. Behind the great missionary movement of 300 years ago, it was this doctrine of the elective love of God, however feebly perceived, that caused men and women to leave our country and to go into the unknown world, and there tell others that amongst the objects of God's grace, they were to find themselves.

And the evidence that this was the case was discovered in the way that so many millions of them responded to the gospel. And you see, all this that Paul is teaching is not new. We've just time to dip into his illustrations from the Old Testament.

He'll take you to the book of Hosea. He'll do that in the 25th verse, and also in the 26th. Then he'll take you to the prophecy of Isaiah in the 27th and 28th and 29th verses.

As for Hosea, well, you remember, his situation was tragic indeed. Not novel, alas, in these days, because, well, we know the promiscuity of our society, how men or women play foul with their covenanted partners, as far as marriage is concerned. Hosea had the tragedy.

He was a pastor, and his wife went off with someone else. He was a great preacher. He was a Bible teacher of his day.

How horrid that Gomer should play fast and loose. The first child she bore him, well, he knew that he was a parent. The other two children, he questioned the parentage.

And so he gave them most extraordinary names, not my people, not my loved one. And Gomer, his wife, not only went into promiscuity, she ultimately became a slave prostitute. The day came when Hosea, with a God-given love, was able to find her in the slave market, and he brought her back.

Not back to be his housekeeper, but back fully fledged as his wife. And not just her, but also the kids. He accepted them into the family circle as though they were his own.

And God taught Hosea through that tragic domestic circumstance, how his great heart of love would envelop repentant Jews, and also repentant Gentiles, and those who were not the people of God, not the ethnic children of Israel, responding to the great message of forgiveness, they too could become God's own children, those who received mercy. Objects of his grace, the Gentile world, and the Jewish world. And Isaiah.

Isaiah lived in a day of terrible conflict. The whole future of the Jewish race was in the balance. The Assyrians were there with all their equipment, with all their regiments, with all their military force and might, and it looked as though little Israel would be crushed.

But God said there'd be a remnant. He would preserve Jewish stock. He would execute his judgment upon these people because of the way that they had played fast and loose with his law, and destroyed their covenantal promises.

But nonetheless, there would be a remnant that would be saved. And apart from that promise of God, then the Jewish people would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah. They would have gone into extinction.

But in God's grace, he preserved from the ethnic stock of Israel. He called, continued to call some to belong to him. Now Paul's going to pick up on that and develop it more in the 10th and the 11th chapter.

You've got to stay with him or else you're going to miss a very exciting episode. It's like a sort of theological series of programs that you might tune into on the radio or television, but of much better quality. And you need to be there for the whole program until you've seen the lot so that you can discover how Paul finally develops his argument.

But as they say in the States, the bottom line is this. God has called a company of people to belong to him. He's called them effectively, effectually.

That means he always achieves his purposes. He always achieves his objectives. He doesn't disclose his technique, his method, but he does indicate to us time and time again in Scripture that the methods he adopts are right methods.

He'll not take your smart-aleck questionings, but he'll also always listen to a person who's confused about any aspect of their own lives when they're trying to balance it against the fairness and the justice of God. So you see the wisdom of that great preacher George Whitefield's words. When speaking on the doctrine of predestination, he says this, let a man go to the grammar school of faith and repentance before he goes to the university of election and predestination.

We don't understand it all, but what we do understand we praise God for. Then let it be a stimulus to improve the quality of our witness and our service and our love for him till the day comes when time is no more and you and I are in his eternal presence. And at that point, come and ask me any further questions because then I'll be able to give you all the answers.

But until that event, you'll have to be content with what I've shared, or read and listen elsewhere. Father, we're loved with an everlasting love. We praise you.

We bless you. We worship you. Thou, O Lord, art all I want.

All my need in thee is found. Thank you, Lord. You chose me.

Thank you, Saviour, for your words. You did not choose me, but I chose you to bear fruit. Lord, may we live fruitfully as a result of the knowledge that we have of the family secret, that our salvation is as a result of your initiative.

Amen. We're going to sing, I keep looking at that clock and the light just hits the arrow there and as a result, I'm never quite too sure how long I've gone on, probably too long this evening, but we're going to sing a hymn, take a little break in the singing of the hymn and some friends may want to leave us at this point, but we will stay because...