You’re Not Truly Living for Christ Until You Understand THIS - R.C. Sproul Message

Probably the strongest statement that we find anywhere in the scriptures that deals directly with the question of predestination is found in the ninth chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans. In that particular text, he deals with the election of Jacob rather than Esau. And not only does this text speak heavily to the matter of predestination in general, but it also has uh significance for the controversial question of whether or not predestination is double. So let's take some time in this session to look at the ninth chapter of Romans and uh give attention to what the apostle says in it.

I will uh begin in verse 9 of chapter 9. For this is a word of promise. "At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son." And not only this, but there was Rebecca also when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac. For though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose according to his choice might stand, not because of works, but because of him who calls, it was said to her, "The older will serve the younger." Just as it is written, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated."

Now here when Paul seeks to illustrate his understanding of divine election, he uh uses for purposes of illustration an example of two men. And I think that it's significant that the two that he chooses are brothers. And not only are they brothers, but they are twin brothers. And it is they have the same family, the same background, uh the same geographical location. Everything that could possibly be the same is the same. They are in fact womb mates. Thank you. I get a little punchy after we study predestination for this long. And in his consideration of these two men, he labors the point that one is preferred over the other before either is born.

Now that uh statement before they were born raises the question of God's fornowledge. The most popular view of predestination that rejects the Augustinian view is that view we call the fornowledge view of election which basic thesis is this: that predestination simply means that God from all eternity looks down through time and knows in advance what people will do and on the basis of that fornowledge then chooses them. Now we notice that chapter nine of Romans speaks very sharply to this question. We read that for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad. Let's just look at that phrase. Paul does not say here that they that for God had not known what they were going to do or that he had known what they were going to do. He simply declares that the twins hadn't been born yet and they hadn't done anything. So all the text explicitly teaches is that God's choice of Jacob over Esau was made before they were born.

Now the fornowledge view would agree that God's predestinating choice is done at the foundation of the earth before anybody's born. Everybody agrees that predestination is accomplished in the mind of God before people are born. But the fornowledge view says that the choice is made before people are born but in light of what God knows they will do after they are born. Now, we have silence in this passage with respect to that question specifically. But if ever in biblical content there was an awkward silence, here it is. What I'm getting at is this, that if the apostle had any desire to make clear that the electing predestinating actions of God are done with a view to the future actions of man, this would have been the place to say it. And in other words, if the biblical view is what the fornowledge uh view uh seeks to hold, namely that God always chooses in light of his knowledge of future decisions. First of all, why doesn't the Bible ever say that? It never says it. And if it ever had the opportunity to say it, here it is. But not only is it not said here, but Paul takes the time to say that though the choice was made before they were born, before they had done any good or evil, we have to ask the question, why does he include that? If his purpose was to communicate a fornowledge view of election, the addition of these words would certainly confuse the people of God, wouldn't it?

But let's go on further. Though the twins were not yet born, had done had not done anything good or bad. Now, what's Paul's concern here? In order that God's purpose according to his choice might stand. The emphasis again in the passage is on God's purpose. And that the what Paul is saying is that the reason why the decision is made before they're born, before they've done anything good or evil is the so that it's God's purpose who will stand. Do you see that? The flavor of this passage uh is totally opposed to the concept of a fornowledge view of predestination. Do you see that? I mean why what other reason could we give for the apostles emphasizing this fact that they had not done any good or evil not even had they not done it in space and time but by implication even in the mind of God that is from God's perspective there is no good or evil that is taken into consideration here because the conclusion is the reason why he states that the reason that the apostles gives for having said it this way is that the purpose of God might stand according to his choice, not because of works, but because of him who calls.

The fornowledge view says that God looks down into the future and he sees that some people will make the correct choice and others will make the incorrect choice. And what the forn knowledge view suffers from is that election in that view is based upon a good work. Believing this is the work of God to believe in the one whom whom he has sent. The supreme good work is to place one's trust in Jesus Christ in in one sense of considering the biblical concept of the good work. But Paul is saying here that it is clearly not because of human work but because of him who calls. The Armenian view and its very ver various uh styles and shapes and forms. bottom line makes the final decision for our salvation rest upon a human choice, not upon a divine action. And I think Paul is is annihilating that position here as strongly as he could possibly do it by emphasizing the fact that it is not because of works but because of the one who calls that the accent and the credit for your redemption is to be given to God. To God alone is the glory.

Now, in order that this purpose might stand, and that it not be because of works, but because of him who calls, it was said to her, "The older will serve the younger." That is, the reason why God made this choice was to demonstrate the supremacy of him and his purpose. As it is written, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." And I'll come back to that phrase in a moment because I know that provokes all kinds of problems with the idea of hate hatred.

But look at verse 14. Verse 14 is a rhetorical question. "What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there?" How does Paul answer his own question? Does he simply say no? There's no injustice with God. No, he uses the most powerful form of emphasis that he can. Some translators read, "May it never be." Or other ones, "God forbid." The answer to his question, "Does this indicate injustice in God?" The answer to the question is, "Absolutely not. That's unthinkable."

Now, I want to speculate for a second, and I want to ask you to think about this. Why do you suppose the apostle asks this rhetorical question? Paul's a teacher and when teachers teach they know going into their lessons that sometimes there'll be diff there'll be difficulty with the students understanding what the teacher is communicating. Uh a good teacher anticipates his opposition and where the problems will arise. Now Paul is obviously here as a teacher anticipating a protest from his hearers when he says, "What shall we say then?" And what what particular thing does he expect people to say when they hear this? "It's unfair." "It's not fair. There's not righteousness is is there injustice in God?" Now my question is why does he anticipate that objection? Well, there are two possible reasons really. He could be anticipating this objection because he's think he may be thinking there may actually be some people listening in to me or reading this letter who are muddle-headed enough to be of an Augustinian persuasion and find in my words an Augustinian view of election which would obviously be unjust. And so all I have to do to keep that from ever happening is to say, "Is there an injustice in God?" Well, obviously not. And so much then for Augustine and Aquinus and Calvin and Luther and so on. Maybe that's what he's anticipating. Or maybe Paul himself is Augustinian and he's had experience with teaching the doctrine of predestination where every time the subject is mentioned, the initial response of people is that's not fair. I have a sneaking suspicion that that is the reason why the apostle raises this rhetorical question because the thing I want you to understand is that nobody ever raises that question about the Armenian view. In fact, the Armenian view is designed in such a way that it that isn't a problem. I take comfort in the fact that the same questions that are raised about my view of predestination are the ones the Apostle Paul had to deal with.

"Is there unrighteousness in God?" Because on the surface it sounds like it. When you talk about a divine sovereign choice before anybody has done good or evil without a view to their future actions that strictly according to the sovereign purpose of God that God's purposes may be stand of grace not of human works then the obvious question we're going to ask is well how can that be fair? Well, Paul says, "Is there unrighteousness in God?" And he answers his own question with an emphatic no. "May it never be." For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion."

Again, if I can speculate, if I were the apostle and I were teaching a fornowledge view of election and I had these objections to deal with, what would I fall back on? If I were going to pull the plug once and for all of of any charge of God's being uh unfair, I would say, "Well, wait a minute. It's God's not unfair. God's not unjust." Because even though this decision is made before anybody's ever done any good or evil, it's with a view to their future choices. So the bed you make is the bed you sleep in. And that would pull the plug forever. But he doesn't do that. Instead, he falls back on what? On the divine prerogative? To exercise mercy upon whom he will exercise mercy. The whole point of the passage is that some people receive a measure of mercy that others do not. Again, no one receives injustice at the hands of God. Esau is not selected as an object of divine mercy. But that is not an injustice against Esau because Esau even before he is born is known by God as a fallen person. Because when God does do his electing, he always does it in light of the fall. God only chooses fallen sinners for salvation. All of God's choices about salvation presuppose the need for salvation. Otherwise, there'd never be any such thing as election. It would be a waste of time for God to elect unto salvation people who don't need salvation. And so, the whole process of election is with a view to a fallen, lost human race. And God considers the whole world. He knows that the whole world is fallen. And he knows that if he just gave justice, what would happen? If God only exercised justice to a fallen race, everyone would >> perish. But God chooses to grant mercy to some. Jacob receives mercy. Esau receives justice. Now, is there anything wrong with that? Well, we say it's not fair. What we mean by that is it's not equal. And what lurks in our minds is this problem. Well, if if God is going to be gracious, if we have two men who are judged guilty and they're under the sentence of death, and God is gracious to this one, shouldn't he also be gracious to the other one? I mean, is it fair for the governor to grant executive clemency to one prisoner and not to the rest? Well, it certainly isn't equal. But again, this person receives grace. This person receives justice. He has nothing of which he has any right to complain. There's nothing unjust about it. And God reminds us again and again that it is his right to grant his mercy upon whom he will grant his mercy. And he if he gr grants mercy to one, he is not obligated to give it to the other. Again, if he's if we think that God is ever obligated to be merciful, what does that mean? We're not thinking about mercy anymore because mercy by definition is not obligated. Mercy is something that God does voluntarily. He's not bound to do it. He doesn't have to do it. He's not required to do it. He does it out of the sheer goodness of his heart. And we can never say to a merciful God, and this is the thing that scares me. And I hope you will never say to a merciful God, "God, you are not merciful enough." That is blasphemous to charge God with not being merciful enough because that charge implies that there is sin in God. That God has not done what he should have done. He should have been more merciful. And who are you to say to your creator by whose mercy you draw every breath that you breathe? that he has been lacking in mercy. 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."

Now the coupra, the verse that I think should in all honesty end Arminianism forever. So then here's the conclusion. "It does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs but upon God who shows mercy." Now the Armenian view does not say that it depends all on man and not on God. But the Armenian view says that without God's mercy there'd be no salvation. That's true. But it also depends on our choice. It depends both on God's grace and upon our choice that we must exercise our wills, you know, apart from divine activity in order to be saved. So the election depends upon human choices in the fornowledge view. And Paul says, "No, it doesn't." How could he say it any more clearly? So, it does is not based upon the one who wills or upon the one who who runs, but on God. There's where the dependency is, who has the mercy.

Then he goes on to say, "For the scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I raised you up to demonstrate my power in you that my m my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.'" So then "He has mercy on whom he desires and he hardens whom he desires." Now that is a hard saying. Let's take a look at that for a moment. I mentioned earlier this problem of "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated." What does it mean that God hates Esau? When we use the English term hate, we think of of an attitude that comes from a posture of malice and we are forbidden to hate people. We are called to love even our enemies. But is there any way that the Bible uses the term hatred that does not carry that uh sinister connotation to it? Well, yes, there's the hatred of sin. But remember David in the Old Testament when he says, "I hate my enemies with a perfect hatred." There is such a thing as a holy hatred, a hatred of wickedness. Yes. But it doesn't just say here, you know, we have that thing, hate the sin but not the sinner. But if God doesn't say here, "Jacob have I loved, Esau's sin have I hated." It's "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated." Here you have anothetical parallelism going on in a Hebrew mode. And all that hatred means in this passage is the absence of this special divine favor. Where God is giving a special divine favor, a gracious action, a loving action to one, he withholds from the other. It does not mean that God has these terrible inward feelings of malice towards Esau. But God does withhold this particular divine favor from Esau. Jacob is given a gift that Esau does not receive. That's all the Jew means by that.

But uh this raises the question of whether or not predestination is double. I've heard many many people say, "I believe in predestination, but I can't stand double predestination." There are two different views of double predestination that have been presented throughout church history and have been vying for acceptance. The first is the view that we will call equal ultimacy or sometimes called the symmetrical view of predestination. Meaning that predestination has two sides to it: election and reprobation, salvation and damnation. And that the way God works on both sides is in a symmetrical way. That God works in the life of Jacob and he works in the life of Esau. Now we also speak in terms of what we call positive positive decrees. Now the positive positive schema looks like this. It would say that in the case of the elect, God so predestines certain people like Jacob to be saved that God ensures their salvation by unilaterally intruding into their lives and creating faith in their hearts. And in the case of the rep probate, God also so predestines their damnation that he intrudes into their lives by creating evil or unbelief in their hearts. So that there's a positive action in the lives of both people creating faith in the life of one man and unbelief in the heart of the other. See what we mean now by a symmetrical view? That view has been uh uh overwhelmingly rejected by Augustinians and Calvinists. That is not the Augustinian view. Some people call it hypercalvinism. I think that is a serious insult to John Calvin to call it hypercalvinism because it's not hypercalvinism. Subcalvinism or worst anti-calvinism. Hypercalvinism would mean supercalanism. Calvin would not appreciate that particular uh nomenclature.

Rather, the Augustinian view is that that the re that predestination is certainly double because not everybody is saved. That there are two sides to it. Some people are elect and some are not. So we have two sides of the coin and we have to deal with both sides of the problem. However, the schema is positive negative. Now what that means is that in the case of the elect, God does in fact intrude into their lives and sovereignly creates faith in their hearts. But in the case of the rest of mankind, he lets them to themselves. He does not come in and create evil in their hearts or create unbelief in their hearts. He passes over them letting them to themselves so that God God's activity here is negative or passive rather than active. Do you see the difference in this one? In the case of the rep probate, the reprobate do what they want to do on their own steam. God is not creating fresh evil in their hearts or anything like that. God is not coercing them to damnation. He is simply passing them over, leaving them to their own devices.

But the immediate question that comes up is, well then, why does Paul say here in Romans 9 that God gives mercy to some and to others he hardens? And the classical example of God hardening is the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in the Old Testament. That's a difficult one and I only have about a minute and a half to answer it. So I'll try to do it quickly. That even when we speak of hardening, we have to distinguish between active hardening and passive hardening or what we would call direct hardening or indirect hardening. There are two ways that God can harden the the heart of Pharaoh. One is that he could come down, intrude into Pharaoh's life, and create evil in the heart of Pharaoh. In order for God to accomplish his purposes, he could make Pharaoh sin. But if he does that, then what? How could God, if he's just and righteous, force Pharaoh to sin and then punish him for that sin? That would make God the author of sin, which is an absolute no no biblically. But there's another way Pharaoh can have his heart hardened. Remember that Pharaoh is a sinner and all of us are sinners. But all of us have our sin to some degree checked and restrained by certain opposition around us that keeps us from being utterly depraved. When men achieve levels of power where they become outside the bounds of normal restraint, their ability to sin freely increases. I mean, the only thing that's keeping Pharaoh from being utterly wicked is the restraining power of God. It certainly wasn't the government of Egypt that was keeping him in check. Only God's restraints were keeping Pharaoh from being more wicked than he actually was. If God wants to harden Pharaoh's heart, does God have to create fresh evil there? All he has to do is remove his hands and give Pharaoh all the space he needs. And that's how Pharaoh's heart is hardened, which is itself an act of divine judgment, a just act of divine judgment upon him. And the gospel does the same thing in the lives of the reprobate. The more people hear the gospel and freely reject it, the more their hearts become hardened. And so that you see that in this drama, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. All God does is remove the restraints. And so Pharaoh is responsible for the hardening of his heart. And so again, we see that in this scheme in the concept of election, all men are fallen, all men are wicked. God gives mercy to some as in the case of Jacob. And the others he leaves to themselves. They receive justice. This group receives mercy that God might be honored and that God's purposes might stand.

It's a cliche in our culture and in our language that there are two things that we cannot avoid and they are death and taxes. But I think all of us know certain people who have been clever enough or astute enough or crooked enough to avoid or evade taxes. But none of us has been able to find a method yet to evade death. That's one thing that we understand as adults that we are going to die if the Lord terries. And so the question is not if we shall die. And at this point I'm not even going to address the question why we will die. We've already looked at that a little bit. But the two questions I think that haunt all of us are these two: the questions when and how. One of the things that's been impressed upon me by my time here at MD Anderson is talking to Dr. Laterer and members of his staff. They've expressed to me their disdain for those who think that they can predict with certainty how long a patient will live after they've contracted a so-called terminal illness. That there's one thing that we can talk about uh uh mathematical tables of probability quotients and the like, but every human being is different. And more and more we're seeing people surviving diseases that in the past were thought to be certainly terminal. And we're saying that people respond differently in terms of attitude, in terms of how much they're willing to to battle and to to use all of the resources at their disposal that people just don't roll over and give up whenever they uh contract a dread disease because we don't know whether the disease we have right now will be the last one or whether or not we will recover from this one. But even if we recover and are stamped with a complete bill of health 5 years, 10 years, 15 years down the road, that does not mean that we're going to escape death. It's just that we still don't know when and we don't know how.

But I noticed when I read the scriptures that when the scriptures talk about the how question of death, it's not so much concerned about whether or not I will die through a heart attack or by an accident or through by a gunshot wound or by cancer or some other disease, but rather what the scriptures are most interested in in terms of The how question of our death is what will the state of our souls be when we pass from this planet. I remember the last words that my mother ever spoke in this world. I had come home uh is one of those ironic things that my mother happened to die the day that my son was born. Early in the morning of that day, our son was born. And I picked my mother up from her job and we went to the hospital and I showed her this newborn grandson of hers and she was thrilled beyond words and I brought her back to her apartment and uh she said she wanted to retire early that night. She was she was somewhat tired and and so just before she went into her bedroom to go to sleep, she looked at me and she smiled and she said, "You know what?" And I said, "What?" She said, "This is the happiest day of my life." and she went into her bedroom and went to sleep and died in her sleep. I mean, would you like to die like that? I would certainly like that. I know of a theological professor uh at Princeton University who had a distinguished career for many, many years. And the story is that he was out for his afternoon constitutional. He was walking down the street in Princeton and just quietly slumped over and left this planet. It was over just like that. And I thought, I wonder if it goes with the profession. Wouldn't it be wonderful as if this is the way God has ordained the theologians would die? I because that's how I would like to die. But my mother died peaceably without suffering without struggling saying "This is the happiest day of my life." That those were her last words. But when the scriptures talk again, as I said, about the how of death, they're concerned about what our relationship is to God at the moment we breathed our last.

I'm going to tell a little story here about two men who have the same last name. Their last name is Graham. Few months ago, I received a letter from my professor of theology that I had in seminary and he was reporting in that letter about a mutual friend that we had whose name was Tom Graham. Tom was a clergyman in the northern part of the United States and he'd been sick for the last couple of years with cancer. And I got this note from my professor and he said, 'I just wanted to write to let you know that Tom Graham passed away this week.' And then he wrote one more sentence in this note. He said, "Tom died in faith." See, my theological professor didn't wasn't concerned about whether or not Tom was going to die through heart failure, through suffocation, through whatever medical cause of death there might be. The how question that my professor was concerned about was would this man die in faith? And to say this was to echo a statement that is made again throughout the scriptures about heroic persons that are whose lives are set forth before us in the pages of the Bible when the scriptures routinely will say of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of David. "These all died in faith." That is they were people, men and women who trusted God not for a moment or not when it was convenient but for the long haul up to the very point of their deaths.

Now the other man named Graham I'm sure you've all heard of. His name is Billy Graham. And this past summer, I had to speak in North Carolina. And I had an opportunity that I never thought would happen to me that uh I had an opportunity to have dinner with Billy Graham. And I was impressed first of all by how big he is. Have you ever seen Billy Graham in person? I mean, uh, wow. He he was just huge fellow there. And then I'm not all that big. And we were sitting at the at the dinner table and talking over certain things. And I said, "You know, Dr. Graham, there's something I'll always remember about your ministry. Something that stuck in my mind that I'd like to ask you about." And he said, "What's that?" I said, "When when I was in college as a freshman in college, there were a group of of of us fellas that were gathered in the uh wreck room of our dormatory and we've been playing ping pong and pool and whatever else college freshman play." And the TV was on over in the corner. And the big deal of that night that the press was making uh something of a sensation over was that Billy Graham was going to appear on national television on the Jack Parr show. Now imagine it. Jack Parr and Billy Graham. I mean, that just didn't seem to fit together very well. And I thought, goodness sakes, Jack Parr is is such a master of reparte and and witicism and jcularity. He he's never serious for a second. How in the world is Billy Graham going to to relate to an interview by Jack Parr? Well, we watched it and uh as soon as Billy came out and was introduced, Jack Parr started messing around and playing all kinds of games and joking and keeping Billy Graham as far as arms lengths as he could about anything serious about religion. And right in the middle of all the jokes, Billy just stopped and looked him straight in the eye and said, "Jack, have you settled things with God?" You know, he started right in on him and that, you know, I thought he was going to say, "Look, Jack, if you came on a bus, it'll wait, you know, and they're going to sing a couple more choruses of Just as I am without one play." But I was I I just couldn't believe that Billy Graham would have the presence of mind on national television in a very polite and yet straightforward way, he sort of socked it to Jack Bar. And so on this occasion last summer when I had this opportunity to have dinner with Dr. Graham, I said, you know, that really left an impression on me and I wondered what ever happened to Jack Bar. His star had a meteoric rise and then he sort of faded from the scene. Johnny Carson came and took his place. I said, "Whatever happened to Jack Bar? Did you maintain a relationship with him?" And I'll tell you why it stuck in my mind. Because when the scriptures talk about death, they really are only concerned about two ways of dying. The scripture says there are those who die in faith. And it also refers to those who die in their sins. Those are some of the most tragic words that you'll read in the pages of holy writ to say that somebody died in their s. I mean we all are sinners and there's a certain sense in which we all die in our sins but the distinction here that the scripture is making is at the time of our death have we or have we not ever settled things with God. What the scripture means about somebody dying in their sins is that it describes that person who up until the very last moment of their lives until they pass over the line they refuse. They absolutely refuse to submit to their creator.

I had an uncle I mean I had an uncle who was one of the roughest toughest guys in all the world. He was a laborer. He had we used to call him meat muscles. He had muscles and he looked like a a Paige out of Street Car named Desar when he would come into our house with the with the old fashioned uh sweatshirt and the muscles bulging his fingernails all black and grimy. And when I decided to go into the ministry, my uh my uncle just about had apoplexy. I might as well I might have told him I had a sex change operation. He he said that uh you know for him anybody that went in the ministry had to be a a bonafide and had just uh completely abandoned all hopes of of manhood. And he said, "Oh, you're going to wear your collar around backwards and wear a little little dress and all." And he just he rode me unmercifully. He contracted a fatal disease. And in the last days of his life, I mean, the last weeks of his life when I would go to see him, uh, he would still laugh and mock the things of God and my profession, but I knew he loved me. I mean, that was that always came through all of the, uh, the fooling around and and so on. And then I remember the day we I was in his bedroom and things were rough for him and and I said to him, "Are you ready to meet God?" And he looked at me and all the joking stopped and he said, "No." And the tears came and he said, "But I want to be. Tell me about it." And I had one of those rare and unspeakably precious experiences with a dying man and he got things settled. And I I know that my uncle died in faith. I told that to Billy Graham and I said, "What about Jack Parr?" He said, "RC, I don't know where Jack Parr is right now with his faith, but we're still in touch and we stay in touch." And he said, "It's my prayer that when Jack Parr's time comes that he will die in faith."

Just this past Sunday, they had a litany in the newspaper in which they recorded the last words of famous people. I've already told you my mother's last words. "This is the happiest day of my life." And those are words that I remember with great joy and confidence. It's not the same way with my father's last words. When I was 14 years old, my father was stricken with a stroke that was severe. And that stroke left him paralyzed in half of his body. His one side was virtually useless. He couldn't use his arm. He couldn't use his leg. And his his mouth drooped. His speech was impaired. And he lost the vision in in one side, one eye. And with that devastating stroke, it was the end of his career. It was the end of his income. And the doctors told him and told my mother at that time that there was no cure for the problem that he had and that he would slowly die. Well, it took him three years to die and he had three more strokes in the course of that time before he finally did die. And he spent the last three years of his life confined to a chair in the den of our home. There was an over stuffed chair and he had weights there on on his legs and he had this great big magnifying glass that he used for the one good eye he had. And all he did in those last uh three years was to sit there and read the Bible, which was somewhat surprising to me because he wasn't a particularly religious fellow and I had no understanding of the Christian faith at that time. Uh I was as pagan as a young boy could be and uh a secular. Uh our family was not, as I said, a deeply religious family by any means. But in those last three years, my father began to think about the ultimate meaning of life. And he began to read the book and he used that magnifying glass.

Well, we had a sort of a ritual that went on is you know when a man is is paralyzed and loses his position of earning a livelihood and and taking care of his family, that's that's extremely difficult emotionally for a man. And as a matter of dignity to my father, he wanted to be able to sit at the dining room table at the head of the table every night at dinnertime. Now, to get him from the den up through the living room, up the stairs, it was a sunken den, you know, a couple stairs up in the living room, then into the dining room was a herculean task. But it was my task and I have to say it was my delight to be able to do this one thing every day to contribute to my father's dignity. When time came for dinner, I went into the den and I got myself in front of his chair. I sort of hunkered down and I I took his two arms and took them and put them around my neck and squeezed them together at the wrists and then sort of got up in a sort of a semifirman's carry, got him on my back and dragged him as it were out to the dining room table. And so then sat him down in that chair at the head of the table and he sat there with this useless one side and sat with the family every single night in his seat, the head of the house uh for three years.

Well, at the end of this three-year period after dinner, the dishes were cleared and I went back to the end of the table and I got him around my neck again and started back towards the den. Instead of just passing through the living room, he asked me to stop. He said he wanted to sit down on the couch in the living room. And so I sat him down on the couch. I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "I have something to say." Now you have to understand he spoke in very garbled words. It was difficult to understand him but he said these words to me. He said, "Son, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith." You know, friends, I had no idea where those words came from. I had no idea what their biblical and theological meaning was about. But as uninitiated in religion as I was at that point in my life, now I'm 17 when this is going on, and he's saying those words to me, I understood exactly what my dad was saying. My dad was saying to me, "It's over. I'm going to die now." And as a matter of fact, those words that he uttered that night were the last words he ever spoke in this world because within an hour he had his fourth stroke, went into a coma, and the next day he died. I think we've all seen it, haven't we? That that that time of realization that comes to people when they know the hour is near. And my dad as a father took his son. He said, "Sit me down. I have to say something to you." And he announced to me that it was the end. And he did it in triumph. "I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith." You know what my last words to my father were? Typical last words of a 17-year-old adolescent who can't stand to look death in the eye. It says in the Old Testament that there are few things that once they happen cannot be recalled. If you put an arrow in a bow and arrow and you you pulled back on the bow and the string and you let that string go, it's too late to call the arrow back. So it is the scriptures tell us that once you open your mouth and you say something and those words go out into the air and they strike somebody else's eardrum, you can apologize for them. You can say, "I didn't mean it." But those words have been spoken and there's no way you can recall them. And there are lots of things that I've said to lots of people in my life that I would give anything to be able to call them back. But the one sentence that I'd most like to recall is the statement that I made to my father. Very last thing I said to my dad in this world was, "Don't say that, Dad."

You know, when I was when we were going through this as a family, you know, one of the hardest things for me, I mean, a couple of things were hard. One was at 14 years old, I didn't know what finality was all about. I didn't know that there was such a thing as an insoluble problem. Anything that was broken could be fixed. Anything that went wrong could be made right was my understanding until this happened in our house. So I didn't understand all of that. But one of the things that that deeply disturbed me was that when my father became paralyzed and had to stop all the functions of his life, I couldn't understand what happened to his friends. And I would say to my mother, I said, "Mom, where's Mr. So ando and where's Mr. So and so? Why don't they come and see him?" And my mother said, 'Son, you have to understand they can't. They just can't.' I said, 'What do you mean they can't?' They said, 'Well, they don't want to see your dad like that. It frightens them. They don't know what to say. They feel inadequate. They're embarrassed.' I said, "They don't have to say anything. They just have to come, hold his hand, show up." And she said, "It's okay. He understands." I didn't understand. I still don't understand, tell you the truth. But when it came right down to it, I did the very same thing. I wouldn't let him tell me that he was going to die because I didn't want to hear it. And I didn't understand that he had it's almost like he made a decision. You know, today I've had all I'm going to take. I'm going home now and I'm telling you goodbye, son. And I want you to learn how to die. I don't know if he if he taught me how to live, but I sure hope he taught me how to die.

It wasn't for a couple of years after that that that I became a Christian. In my virgin reading of the New Testament, it's a long way through the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and Romans, and 1 and 2 Corinthians, and all those Pauline epistles and everything that I came to the second letter of Paul to his beloved disciple Timothy. And we get to the end where Paul is in prison and he's expecting now to be executed. And we know that he was executed by Neero in 65 AD. And at the end of this correspondence that he has to his young disciple, he writes these words to Timothy, "For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith." And I saw those words. I said, "Those were the words. Those are the last words." And now I understand what my dad was trying to tell me on his deathbed. And then I understood, ladies and gentlemen, that my father died in faith. That's how he died.

But what does that mean? What does it mean to die in faith? Faith is a word that has become so cheap in our culture. It's it's almost become a word that that conjures up magic and superstition. But the simplest meaning of the word faith in in New Testament language is the word trust. Which brings us full circle, doesn't it? It's one thing to believe in God. It's another thing to believe God. It's one thing to trust that there is a God. It's another thing to trust God for whatever is and for whatever happens and what happens to me. And I notice the way that that that the apostle brings all these words together. He says, "I fought the good fight." Usually Christians think about fighting as something evil. That that Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers." We're called to be people who are docile, who are who are meek, who are humble, not who are belligerent, bellose, people who are contentious and ready to fight at the drop of a hat. But there are certain struggles to which we are called. And when when when we get serious illness, God is honored when we fight it tooth and nail. When we fight it as hard as we possibly can fight it, we give it every shot we can. I again here at MD Anderson, they go and ask these physicians, they'll tell you. They said they can almost predict who's going to recover and who isn't. There are those who who when they get some of these diseases, they just say, "I'm going to fight this thing every inch of the way." And they're their spirit becomes contagious and inspirational to other people because the fight that they're engaged in is a good fight.

Then immediately the apostle changes from the imagery and the language of of the contest of fighting to that of a race. And this is something else I notice about the Christian faith that anybody can be a Christian for five minutes or for five hours or for five days or for five years. But again, the recurring theme in the scripture is he who endures to the end is the one who experiences redemption. And the race of which the apostles speak is not a hundredyard dash. It's a marathon. It's the kind of race that requires that extra courage to keep going when you don't.

feel like you have any strength. You know, the thing that Judy Greasie said to me in Miami was, she said, "RC, I can't take anymore." And I thought about when I joined Weight Watchers that they have this little hokey little thing that they do when you join this organization, at least in Florida, they give you a soda straw. They hand that out to you the first night. You say, "What's that?" You take that home and you put it on your refrigerator. And I said, "What is that?" They said, "That's the straw that breaks the camel's back." That every time you look at that straw, you ask yourself what it was that made you come in here and decide to go on this diet. The last straw is what it was. And I thought of the image of the camel, that beast of burden that's loaded down with this with all of this straw that they have to carry. And there's a certain point at which the camel just can't take one more piece of straw. One more piece of straw. And that camel collapses.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know where that last piece is for me, and I don't know where it is for you. And even Judy Greasie didn't know. She said, "I can't take anymore." And God gave her 30 more days to take and she took it. She finished the course and she kept the faith. That's how I want to die. I want to die trusting God. I want to die without abandoning hope in him. The New Testament tells us that the just shall live by faith, but it also tells us that the just shall die in faith.

When we speak of death, we also have to speak of the other side. The oldest question of all is the question, if a man dies, shall he live again? Is there really any reason to expect that beyond the grave there is life? That's what we're going to look at in our next session together. I can remember when I was in seminary the that there was a a great debate that spread across the seminary campus one year and it's it focused on this question uh can a person in this life really be sure that uh when they die they were going to go to heaven. It was the old question of assurance of salvation. And in in that particular uh dispute that was going across the the campus, uh not only were people uh saying no, we cannot be uh sure of our future destination, but that there is something suspect about somebody who has a kind of confidence to say, "Yes, I know for sure." Because it sort of has an aura of arrogance when we hear a person say, "Well, I know where I'm going. I'm going to go to heaven when I die."

Now I I think it is important that we recognize that there are different types of uh of assurances that people have about their future and some of them indeed are a manifestation of arrogance. If for example, the way I I think uh things work in heaven is that I believe that the way you get there is by living a good life and through the acrewing of merit and and good works and everything and then you come to me and you say, "RC, do you are you sure that when you die you're going to go to heaven?" I say, "Hey, I know I'm going to go to heaven because I live such a great life." That would be unspeakably arrogant to uh have that kind of assurance. But on the other hand, if God promises eternal life to people who put their trust in him, it would be arrogant not to have the assurance of our future condition because if I don't have the assurance, what I would be doing actually would be casting a shadow over the credibility of the promise of God. If God promises us eternal life and I'm not sure that what he promises he will do, I'm questioning his integrity.

But of course, that's not normally where our uncertainty resides. We I think most people would agree that God keeps his promises and that God will in fact do what he says that he will do. But the real question concerns the state of our own faith. Have you ever wondered whether the faith that you possess or you profess is genuine? I know that there have been times where I have been stricken, indeed smitten by a sudden fear that my own faith is so superficial that it's actually speurious. It's it's fraudulent. It's not the real thing. In fact, when I when I look at some of the things I do, I say, "How how in the world could a person of faith behave like that?" or why do I have the doubts that I have if I have true faith?

Now the place where that becomes most trying and most difficult to maintain is in the midst of suffering. Whether it's emotional suffering or physical suffering. There are times I'm convinced where emotional suffering is harder to deal with than physical suffering. At least for physical suffering, we can get a shot that numbs the pain or take some pills or whatever. But sometimes when the bottom falls out of our lives with a broken relationship or something of that sort, we feel so empty inside that we feel like anything but faith. Rather, we go through the threat of depression, of despair, and what the theologians call the dark night of the soul.

Now, let me ask you a couple of questions and ask you to discuss this among yourselves. Do you ever feel a void of a personal assurance? Are there times in your life when you're really not sure how your life is going to turn out ultimately? Discuss that openly among yourself. Or has there ever been a time in your life where you did have a sense of assurance about your future destination. Do you think it's possible for a person to know now what their state will be later on? Let the dis discussion be lively but also let it be uh sensitive because we all struggle with this whole question of assurance at various points in our lives and at various levels.

Now the other question I want you to do to discuss is this. What kinds of things shake your confidence, disturb your assurance, and make you wonder whether or not you really can put your trust in the promises of God. Discuss those together, and I hope not to to uh to stimulate argument, but so that you'll begin to see that you're not alone in the questions that you experience and the doubts that assail you. And I'm hoping that what will come out of this is a sense of mutual encouragement among those with whom you are studying at the moment.

>> Anytime we have a discussion about election or about predestination and the sovereignty of divine grace, we uh immediately have to face the question of what it is that God does when he intervenes in a person's life in order to bring that person to faith. uh we have a discussion throughout church history on this matter and the uh the historic distinctions between the Augustinian school that says that election is purely the sovereign activity of God and the semipolagian school which sees a cooperative venture between man and God. that that issue in the final analysis usually comes down to the question of at what point or how does a sinner come to saving faith and uh again both sides Calvinism Arminianism Augustinianism semiplagianism both agree that grace is an absolute fundamental necessity for salvation the difference is to what extent grace is necessary or to what degree is it necessary. And what it comes down to is at the point of regeneration. Remember we talked about regeneration as one of the works of the Holy Spirit. The question is in the first step of the turning of the sinner from spiritual death to spiritual life. Is that step accomplished through what we call monergism or synergism? I would say that the whole controversy between Armenianism and Calvinism, between semiplagianism and augustinianism boils down to these two words and their explanation.

Well, what do they mean? Well, monergism comes from, as the word suggests, the prefix mon, which means one. And the word urg in the English language refers to a unit of work or labor. It's the it's at the root of the word energy. And so that monism has to do with one worker where one person is doing the work. Synergism has to do with two or more people working together. The prefix sun means with or together with. And so this has to do with cooperation or a cooperative venture. Again, Aquinus understood it this way. Is the grace of regeneration operative grace or cooperative grace? When God quickens a person who is dead in sin and trespasses, when the Holy Spirit regenerates the sinner, does he lend power to an exercise or to an enterprise with which the sinner must add some of his energy, some of his power in order to bring about the desired effect? Or is the work of regeneration a unilateral monogistic work of God? Is it God and God alone who changes the heart of the sinner? Or does God offer his assistance to change the heart of the sinner? And that that gracious work of changing his heart in the final analysis rests on the willingness of the sinner to be changed on his cooperation with the offer of redeeming grace. That's what it comes down to.

And uh let's take a look at some of the biblical texts that are relevant to our concern here. We already looked, I believe, at the Ephesians text earlier, but I'll make another visit to it since it is so important. Chapter 2 of Ephesians. "And you he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience obedience, among whom we also once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, just and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others." Paul is looking back now and he's speaking to his uh friends and fellow converts among the Ephesian Christians and he reminds them of who it is who raised them from spiritual death that while they were dead in their sins and trespasses, God the Holy Spirit quickened them, raised them from the dead spiritually.

Now I remind you that dead people don't cooperate. My favorite analogy for what Paul is talking about here is the resurrection of Lazarus from the tomb. Lazarus had been dead for four days. And the only power in the universe that could bring that corpse out of that cave was the creative energizing power of God. And Christ didn't invite Lazarus out of the tomb. He didn't wait for Lazarus to cooperate. He said, "Lazarus, come forth." And by the sheer divine power of that imperative, that which was dead became alive. Then of course, he cooperates after I mean, he walks out of the tomb. But there was no cooperation at the point of the change of his nature from death to life. And in similar fashion, what what we hear Paul saying here is you're in a state of spiritual death. You're by nature a children of wrath. And according to Jesus, no one can come to the father unless it is given to him of the father. And in your flesh, you can do nothing. And that doesn't mean a little something. And that left to yourself, you will never choose the things of God. And while you're in this state of spiritual death, walking according to the course of this world, walking according to the prince of the power of the air, obeying the lust of your flesh, just like everybody else in the world, while you're in that state, God makes you alive.

Now, after he makes you alive, do you reach out? Do you stretch? Do you come? Do you believe? in all. Yes. But it's that initial step, that first step. Is it something that God and God alone does or does God just come right up to you and woo you and say, "Come on, entice you, encourage you, whispers into the ears of a deaf man. Come on." You know, speaks to a dead man to say, "Will you please cooperate with me? Choose this day whom you will serve." No, he intervenes to change the disposition of the heart of that spiritually dead person by his holy spirit.

Now Paul goes on, "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive." When does he make us alive? When we were dead. "By grace you have been saved and raised us together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." Again, this whole thing is an exercise in which Paul is extolling the marvelous wonders of divine grace from his opening paragraph here to the letter to the Ephesians where he talks about the sweetness of predestination and our being elect in Christ and all of this to the glory of the grace of God. And now he's showing how how God works this and shows the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Then he says it again. Listen to this verse eight. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." Now notice that he says it's by grace that we're saved through faith. And then he says and that is not of yourself. Now the question we have to ask is what is the antecedent of that? Is it the salvation? Is it the grace? No. Grammatically the antecedent of that is the word faith. You're justified through faith. But even the faith that you have is not something that you generate. That is not of yourselves. It doesn't come out of that hard heart. It doesn't come out of that fallen nature. It is the creative activity of God. That is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. And that's what we were saying when we were talking about double predestination that in the hearts of the elect. God intervenes into their lives, changes the disposition of their soul creates faith in a heart that was faithless.

Now that is absolutely repugnant to semipolagians of all time. They say that God is a gentleman. The Holy Spirit is a gentleman. And he would never, you know, unilaterally come in and change somebody's heart against their will. Remember that our will is always and everywhere opposed to God. And the only way we're ever going to choose Christ willingly is if God intervenes to make us willing by recreating the soul, changing the disposition of the heart, raising us from spiritual death and giving us spiritual life though that now we not only can choose Christ and will choose Christ, but we do it willingly.

I remember I've mentioned before somebody saying u asking a person about did they believe in Calvinism and the and the professor said no no no he says I don't believe in a god who would arbitrarily choose some people uh and uh to be saved and bring them kicking and screaming against their will into the kingdom of God while at the same time uh stiff arming those other ones who desperately want to be there. When I heard that, you know, I I just shook my head and I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. If that's Calvinism, I I'm as opposed to Calvinism as this man is. How could it be so distorted?" What he was saying is is that God arbitrary. God is never arbitrary. And just because the reason for your election is not in you does not mean that God is capriccious and whi and whimsical and arbitrary and that he has no reason for election. But he goes on and says that that God arbitrarily selects some people and drags them kicking and screaming against their will. The whole point of regeneration is the change of the will where the unwilling are made willing by the spirit of God. Where those people who hated the things of God because they were spiritually dead now have a whole new disposition, a new heart. That's what Jesus said. Unless you are born again, you can't even see the kingdom of God, let alone enter it. Jesus sees as the necessary condition for entering the kingdom of God. The absolutely essential first step for any response of faith is that you are regenerate.

Now the basic difference between reformed theology and nonreformed theology is the order of salvation with respect to the relationship of faith and regeneration. The vast majority of professing evangelical Christians believe that faith comes before regeneration. In other words, in order to be born again, you have to believe. You have to choose Christ. If you choose Christ, make your decision, then in response to that choice and that decision, God will make you reborn. And reformed theology has uh been after that since the days of Augustine or I should say since the days of Paul because that if that were the case I would have absolutely no hope of the salvation of any person in this world because no matter how persuasive you are, no matter how eloquent you are, no matter how powerful you are, no matter how influential you are, how in the world are you going to persuade a spiritually dead person who is at enmity with God, who is utterly in the flesh, who apart from regeneration and and being reborn, can't even see the kingdom of God. How are you going to persuade that person to choose Christ whom he doesn't want at all? I can't change the heart of another person. I can present the message. I can argue for it and try to be convincing. I can give them the case for it. I can be faithful to the gospel but unless God changes the heart. I can plant, somebody else can water, but only God can bring the increase. Only God has the power to change the nature of a human soul. And so we would say that regeneration precedes faith. That's the essence of reformed theology right there. That it's God the Holy Spirit who first changes the disposition of the soul before anybody has faith.

Now when I believe whose faith is it? Is God believing through me? No. I'm the one doing the believing. Do I choose Christ? Yes, I choose Christ. God doesn't choose for me. I'm choosing Christ. I'm responding. I'm not being dragged kicking and screaming against my will. The whole point is that my will has been changed. And so now that which I hated before, I love and I rush to the sun because that's what I want. Because God has given me the desire for himself in my soul. And then the other part of that distortion, God stiff arming people who desperately want to be in there. What a distortion of the biblical view of natural man that has the idea that natural man is running around desperately trying to find God, trying to enter in the kingdom. But God says, "Nope, sorry. You're not on the list. You can't come in." Remember that the whole human race is dead in sin. There's nobody trying to come to Christ apart from the grace of God, from the special grace of God.

Finally, the as I said both sides in this dispute agree that grace is a necessary condition. Where they really disagree on that point of monism and synergism is whether or not the grace of regeneration is effectual or to use the more popular language irresistible. There are those that say you have to have the grace of God in order to come to Christ before anything else has to happen. Grace must come first. It must be prevenient or coming before. But that prevenient grace that comes without which you couldn't even come to Christ is not irresistible. You have the power to refuse it. So again, that assisting grace is offered to you, you either cooperate with it or you don't cooperate with it. And in the final analysis, your entire salvation depends on whether you, while you're still dead in your sin and trespasses, while you are still unsaved, while you are still a child of darkness and in the flesh before you were born again, your whole salvation depends upon you cooperating. That's why I say it's a hopeless theology. I would have I I wouldn't spend five minutes in the ministry if I believed that. I would sleep in tomorrow morning because it doesn't take seriously the biblical view of the radical character of human fallenness that we are simply unable to convert ourselves and even to cooperate with it because that cooperation you see presupposes that a change has already taken place. And until that change has taken place, nobody will ever cooperate.

I say it simply to my friends. I say, "Are you a Christian?" They say, "Yes." I say, "Your friends or another neighbor or family were not a Christian?" Right? Why is it that you're a believer and that person isn't? Is it because God gave you grace that he didn't give them? Oh, no, no, no. God gave us equal grace. I said, "Okay, if God gave you equal grace and you're a believer and he isn't, why is it? Is it because you're more righteous than that person?" Now, what are they going to say 100 times out of 100? No, I'm certainly not going to say that. You better not say that because now you've not only denied election, you've denied the gospel as well. Say, well, is it because you're more intelligent? No, because if you say yes, I say, why are you more intelligent? Where'd you get your intelligence? Does God give you more intelligence g? I said, 'Well, why is it? 'Well, because I said yes and he said no. I said, 'I know that that's what we're that's what we are exploring. Why did you say yes? How can you not sit there and believe that it isn't because you're more righteous when you gave the right response and your friend gave the wrong response? I'm going to say the only reason you gave the right response is because God and his grace so changed and shaped you. You are the craftsmanship created unto conformity to Christ Jesus. God rescued you, changed your heart, that's why there's no righteousness in it. If he only offered you that and left the decisive uh the matter in your hands, then you do have something of which to boast. And it is because you're more righteous than the person who said no. Because the answer to God that is the right answer is yes. And to say no to God is a sin. You didn't sin. He did sin. You have something of which to boast. But people, that's at the point when they begin to say, "Well, maybe I shouldn't say that." Yeah. But don't wait till we get to that point before you don't say that. Don't say it ever at any point.

Now, one last text real quickly in Romans, the famous golden chain that we read about in Romans 8, everybody's favorite verse. "We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he forneew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Wherever whom he predestined, these he also called, whom he called, he justified. Whom he justified, these he glorified." There's a chain here, a sequence that begins with fornowledge. And from the fornowledge is predestination. And from the predestination there's what? The calling. From the calling to justification to the justification glorification. Now this is an elliptical statement where every commentator understands that there's something in assumed in the text that's not uh spelled out and that is the word all. All whom whom God has fornown has he predestined and all whom he is predestined has he also called and all of the called are the justified and all who are justified are glorified.

Now the point that is so important here is that people look at this text and they say well see fornowledge is first and that's why we believe in the precient view of election that God knows in advance who's going to accept the call and who isn't and on the basis of that knowledge he chooses us. Well, again, whatever view of predestination you have has to begin with fornowledge because God cannot predestin anything or anyone he doesn't know about in advance. So that there's no surprising that it starts with fornown. But notice that all that the who are fornown are predestined and all are predestined are called. So it's talking here about not everybody in the world but only the predestined who are fornown and all who are predestined are also called. Now the key point here is everyone who is called is justified. Which means that everyone who is called gets faith. Which means this text cannot be talking about what we call the external call of the gospel where everybody is called indiscriminately in the public preaching of the gospel. But it is talking about the internal call, the operative call of God the Holy Spirit. When God the Holy Spirit effectually changes your heart, that's what we call the effectual call of God the Holy Spirit who brings to pass in our heart what God has designed that he do from the foundation of the world that predestination may be fulfilled that all who are predestined will be called effectually by the Holy Spirit. All who are called by the Holy Spirit will be justified. All who are justified will be glorified.

If we if we applied Arminian categories to this uh golden chain, you would have to say some who are fornown are predestined. Some who are predestined are called or some who are called are justified. Some who are justified are glorified. And the whole text means nothing.

The Bible tells us that the glory of God fills the entire earth. And I don't know how many times I've read that in the scripture, but every time I read about the glory of God filling the earth, I I scratch my head a little bit and I say when I look outside, I don't see a whole lot of the glory of God. I see traffic jams. I see bright lights. I see people hustling to and fro, caught up in all of the activities of their daily lives. Just like the busyiness that you have to deal with every day when you go to school. I don't think that every time you walk in the classroom, you're overwhelmed by a sense of the glory of God. Are you? I'm sure not with my daily experiences. In fact, in my whole life, I can count probably on one hand, maybe two, the number of times that I've had an intense, heavy, profound sense of the presence of God. Now, I don't mean to suggest that any experience of the presence of God is that rare in my life. Every time I pray, every time I'm in church, just about I have some sense of the nearness of God. But I'm talking about those special moments, those weighty moments when you feel the almost palpable sense of of the presence of God. So overwhelming, so overbearing that you can't ignore it and you become intensely aware of his glory. And of course, one of the most uh intense moments like that that I've ever had was when I became a Christian, the night I first met Christ, where I was alone in my college dormatory room and on my knees in front of my my bed. And of course, that moment more than any other moment in my entire lifetime uh changed the direction of my life from then and thereafter. But most of us or many of us at least can pinpoint a a general time or place where we first became Christians. Though not all of us can be that precise. But a year after my conversion, I had another experience which was almost as decisive in shaping the direction of my life. And I want to take a minute or two to tell you about that one. It happened in the same college. Only this time it was a little bit different. I had gone to bed for the evening, but I couldn't get to sleep. And I tossed and I turned and my mind wouldn't shut down. And finally, uh, I had this overwhelming sense that I had to get up out of bed and get out of that dormatory. And I looked at the clock and it was 10 minutes to 12. 10 minutes before midnight. I got out of the bed. I got into my clothes. I put on my my coat and I went outside and I had my car parked in the parking lot. But I didn't get in the car. Instead, I just wanted to walk. It was a winter night up north. There was snow on the ground. The full moon was in the sky. And it was one of those eerie, quiet, still nights that I just had to walk. And I wasn't exactly sure where I was headed, but I wanted to be by myself. I wanted to think. I wanted to reflect on some things that had happened to me earlier that day. And so, I started toward town and toward the extreme north end of the college campus where I went to school. And while I was walking along that sidewalk that night by myself and it was unearly quiet, it was so quiet that the the main tower of the college had a a bell tower and it rang chimes every hour on the hour. And just before the chimes would go off, the gears in the bell tower would start to shift and move and get ready to move these huge bells that would uh chime. And it was so quiet that night that even though I was still quite a distance from the uh tower, I could hear the gears chiming in the tower. And then all of a sudden, the tower started to to climb 12. And while it was gonging, I walked around the front of the of the tower to the entrance of the college chapel, which had been built in the 19th century. And it was built out of stone. And the doors of the chapel were these very heavy oak uh arched doors. And I didn't know whether the chapel be open or closed, locked up for the night, but I just pushed on the door and it opened. And I walked into the northx of this uh of this chapel. And when the door closed, you could just hear it clang against the the wall. And the floor was stone. And I walked then into the sanctuary.

Now, I was in that chapel every day. We would have chapel, required chapel every morning. 1,500 students would come into this big building with the stained glass windows and the vaulted ceilings and so on for our chapel. And it was all busy and noisy and the students uh walking back and forth whispering to each other and so on. But this time when I walked in the chapel, I was the only person there. And I walked down the center aisle of the sanctuary to the chancel stairs and I got on my face literally in front of the communion table and was overwhelmed by the presence of God. And my experience that night was not the same as my experience of my conversion to Christ. But what happened to me that night that I'll never get over was that I had this overwhelming experience of the presence of God the Father. And we know that God is one in three, one being, three persons. But most of our attention in the Christian world focuses on Jesus, on the incarnation of God. And we sometimes forget that the purpose why Jesus came here was to reveal to us and restore for us our relationship with the father.

Well, what drove me to the chapel that night was something that happened in the classroom during the day. I guess I said I was a sophomore in college. I was had been a Christian for one year and uh I had decided to be a Bible major because I wanted to give my life to Christian ministry. So I signed up to be a Bible major. But in my sophomore year, I had to take a required course in introduction to philosophy. And I thought that philosophy was the driest, most boring subject that I'd ever heard of. In fact, I used to sit in the back of the of the lecture hall and I I hid Billy Graham sermons underneath my notebook so that when the professor would start to lecture on this dry as dust stuff about philosophy, I entertained myself or enriched myself by reading these sermons from Billy Graham. And I did that every day and just ignored what was going on. And then this one particular day, the beginning of winter, the professor was lecturing on a Christian philosopher whose name was Augustine. And he was speaking about Augustine's view of how the universe had been created initially and virtually against my will. As I'm trying to read this sermon and the and the lectures going on, my attention was drawn to what was being said in the front of the room. And so I put the notebook aside and I started to listen. And the professor started talking about what he described as Augustine's view of the divine imperative. Now you know what an imperative is. It's a command. It's an obligation, a requirement. And Augustine when he was thinking about how all of this universe came into being in the first place and reflecting on the first chapter of Genesis where we read in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Augustine said the only description that scripture gives as to the how of creation is that it speaks about the power of God's word. In the beginning when the earth was when the world was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep. The scriptures say that what changed all of that was a command from the mouth of God where God said let there be and instantly there was the lights came on the darkness receded. The planet, the world, the universe began to team with all sorts of energy and power and life all by the sheer power of a command from God. And I sat there in that classroom and I started to think about that and I said, "What kind of being is so powerful, is so transcendent, is so much greater than anything that I could ever conceive of that I've ever experienced in this world, can bring universes into being by speaking a single word." And I remembered reading about Jesus in the New Testament where by the sound of his voice, he could calm the sea and stop a storm or raise a man from the tomb by calling him out of the grave saying, "Lazarus, come forth." The power that is unleashed when God speaks brings things out of nothing and life out of death. And I said, "That's that's the character of God the Father."

Now, that wasn't the first time I had had thought about that because the previous year, the time of my conversion, which I said happened in that same uh school and in that same room that I had uh moved out of that night, that when I became a Christian, I was so turned upside down that I read the Bible through in two weeks. And not because I was diligent or disciplined, but it was like I was reading a page turning novel. I had never read it before. I'd never been exposed to it before. I was converted from paganism. And I picked up the first page of the Bible and I read the first page, read the second page. I I just kept going. Second, third p read Genesis, Exodus, Vicious, Numbers, the whole way through. But I can remember in that first two weeks of my Christian experience, walking up and down the halls of the dormatory at 3:00 in the morning, pacing like a caged lion because of what I had been reading in the Old Testament. Because even though I grew up in the United States of America and had frequent churches for social reasons and all the rest, I had never heard of this God that I was reading about in the Old Testament. Do you read the Old Testament much? Have you encountered the God of Israel? The God who opens up the earth and swallows those who rebel against Moses. The God who sends a flood to inundate the whole world of of rebellious people. The God who has the mountain at Sinai shaking with thunder and lightning and saying, "Don't you come near this. If you touch this mountain, you will die." I never heard about that God in the churches that I had frequented as a youngster. And so, this was my virgin exposure to the God of Israel these first two weeks. And I was getting it all at once. And so I would pace up and down like the cage line. I said, "Wow, if I'm going to be a Christian, I got to take this seriously because this God plays for keeps."

Now, I didn't understand the concept that I was wrestling with at that time, but really what was blowing me away in my initial reading of the Old Testament, in listening to this lecture about Augustine's view of creation was the holiness of God. It wasn't the love of God or the mercy of God. All of which are wonderful things dealing with his sweetness and his excellency. But it was his transcendent majesty that was coming across. And I was saying, "Wait a minute. I don't know what this is about. I don't understand it. I've never encountered it. But this is who God is. And I want to know more about a God who is that majestic, who is that transcendent." My professor took me on a trip to Philadelphia to a seminary where there was a series of lectures again in my sophomore year that were very weighty philosophical things and they were way over my head. I didn't know what was going on in these lectures, but I sat still and listened politely. And then after the morning series of lectures, we broke uh to the to the cafeteria for lunch and I happened to be seated across the table from the head of the philosophy department of this particular institution. And the first course of our lunch was soup. We all got our little bowls of soup. And I had my little bowl of soup in front of me. And this professor sitting across from me looked up and he said to me, "Young man, would you say that God is transcendent or imminent?" I'd literally spit the soup out of my mouth because I didn't know what the word transcendent meant and I didn't know what the word imminent meant either. But what he was asking me was he was asking me is God transcendent in the sense that he is a high above and beyond the normal sphere of human things that we encounter or is God nearby close at hand something that we can get our arms around being imminent. And he explained the difference between those two things to me and then pointed out to me that the biblical God is both transcendent and imminent. He is all at the one hand above and beyond everything creaturely. And yet in his exalted position, he still visits his people. He makes himself present in the terms of his holy spirit, in terms of Christ coming to pitch his tent among us, and in terms of intruding into our lives right here. And I thought about a passage in the Old Testament that I want to take a couple moments to direct your attention to that took place in the book of Genesis in the life of Jacob. Jacob had left his family and was leaving on this journey to pursue a wife and he was traveling in the middle of the desert and we are told that at the end of the day when darkness fell that's where he decided to camp. They didn't have holiday ins on every corner that you would travel and as far as you could until nightfall and after it became dark it was too dangerous to travel after that because of marauders and robbers and and wild animals or so on. So wherever you were in the desert just lie down and go to bed. So that's what Jacob did. He took a rock and he used that as a pillow and went to sleep there in the middle of the desert. And then the scriptures tell us that this deep sleep came upon him. And in his sleep, God gave him this vision of a ladder that stretched from the earth up to the heaven. And he saw angels ascending and descending on this ladder. Remember that story of Jacob's ladder? Jesus makes reference to it in the New Testament when Nathaniel meets Jesus for the first time. And uh Jesus sees Nathaniel coming and he looks at him and he says, "Behold, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit, no guile." Nathaniel said, "Wait a minute. How do you know anything about me? I've never met you before." And it's like Jesus said, "If that really shocks you, you haven't seen anything yet. The day will come when you're going to see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." He stopped for a second. Think about that. But Jesus says to Nathaniel, he said, he's saying, "Hey, Nathaniel, you read that story in the Old Testament about Jacob where Jacob had this ladder that bridged the gap between heaven and earth, between the transcendent realm, the holy place of God, and this place here of dirt and of dust that we don't seem to be able to make a connection between heaven and earth." He said, "I am that ladder. I am the bridge between heaven and earth." This is what Jesus was saying.

Well, in the meantime, back there on the desert floor, there's Jacob trying to figure this out. And he has this vision in the night. And in the vision, we read this. "And behold, the Lord stood above this ladder, and he said, 'I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your descendants, and also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth. And you shall spread abroad to the west, to the east, to the north, to the south, and in you and in your seed. All the families of the earth shall be blessed.'" Now listen to this. What he says. God says to Jacob, "Behold, I am with you and I will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land and I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you."

I don't know about you, but there's lots of times in my life when I do not feel like God is with me. Just don't doesn't feel that way. Feels like he's far away. Sometimes I think he's abandoned me or that there's something wrong with me. I remember one time preaching in a church where the minister was uh in the hospital across the street from the church. He had been the pastor of this church for 30 years. And now he was on his deathbed across the street, you know, fighting for his life. And the elders had called me and asked me if I would come to that church and fill the pulpit for this pastor. And they also said that this particular Sunday they were celebrating holy communion and would I administer the sacrament and preach? And I said yes. All week long I worked on my sermon because I realized that the people in the church were in a state of crisis. Their leader had fallen. Their leader was about to die. The person that they look to for their spiritual guidance was sick unto death. And I wanted desperately to minister to them, to give them an unforgettable sermon and to make the sacrament as meaningful as I could possibly make it. And so Sunday morning came and the people gathered there and I gave my sermon and I led them in the Lord's supper. And I have to tell you, I cannot remember a single time in my whole life where I was more acutely uh aware of the absence of God than that. I no more felt like preaching than uh than flying. And everything was flat to me. It just wasn't cutting. In fact, when I was finished, I wanted to find a hole in the ground where I could jump in it and pull in after me. And I last thing I wanted to do at the end of the service was go to the back of the church and shake these people's hand because I had this overwhelming sense that I completely let them down. And the weirdest thing, I get back to the back of the church and I'm shaking their hands and one person after another walks past me looking like zombies. Their eyes were glazed. They had this strained look on their face. And they would grip my hand and they would say, "Thank you." And one after another and told me how overwhelmed they had been that morning by a sense of the presence of God. And I walked out of there and I thought, "Wow." Everybody else in this place felt the presence of God but me.

Two things. From that day forward, I said, "I'm never in the rest of my life going to depend and rely upon my feelings to determine whether God was present. Rather, I'm going to trust that God says he will be with us. He says he will be with me. He promises he won't leave me. He promises he'll be there when I need him, even if it's in the valley of the shadow of death. And it doesn't matter if I feel him. In other words, I said, I'm not going to be a sensuous Christian anymore. But I'm going to trust that the Lord God when he makes a promise like that that he will not leave me or forsake me, that he means what he says and that he will keep his word. And the other thing I thought of exactly what happened here in this text with uh Jacob. Listen to what happens in verse 16. "Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and he said, 'Surely the Lord was in this place and I knew it not.'" And then he said, "How awesome is this place?"

Have you ever walked into a church, a cathedral perhaps, where as soon as you walked across the threshold, walked through the door, that you sensed what I sensed that night in that chapel, uh, in that wintry night where you were making a transition from the common to the uncommon, that you were walking over a threshold from the secular to the holy, from the profane to the sacred, where, you know, you walked inside and you had the ceiling and and the stone and the stained glass windows and you had that eerie sense of transcendence. Have you ever experienced that? Where nobody has to tell you to adopt an attitude of reverence. You know intuitively that reverence is the only appropriate response. That's what Jacob said. "How awesome is this place?" And he named it Bethl. Bethl, the house of God. The place where he met a holy God. And he said, "I was afraid." That's one of the things we're going to look at in our series here. What it is about the majesty of God that provokes terror and fear and why it is that in our day we seem to have lost our capacity to tremble before God. But if you look at the scriptures, every account of every person who ever meets the living God, that person trembles before him.