Transcription
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Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery? God, having out of his mere good pleasure from all eternity elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery and to bring them into the estate of salvation by a redeemer.
In the last session, we ended by reinforcing the fact that the bad news about the misery of this sinful estate in which mankind finds themselves drives us to the good news that God has graciously provided a redeemer; that there is a way out of both sin and misery through the work that Christ has brought about. You can see how this is now being reinforced in the very next question—in question 20. All of these things are tied together; one question leads directly into the next question.
So here in question 20, it’s saying, well, given the condition we’ve described, is everyone stuck with that? Does God leave everyone in that estate of sin and misery? Are they just going to perish in the pains of hell forever? The answer that the Catechism gives is no.
The answer is no; God does not leave all mankind to perish in their estate of sin and misery. When we come to this question, the Catechism begins to address—and it addresses more fully later—what we call the doctrine of election.
Now, what does the doctrine of election mean? What do we mean by election? Election refers to God's choosing. So, we talk, you know, people talk about electing their prime minister or electing a president or senator. What they're saying is the people have chosen this particular person to serve in that capacity, to be the Prime Minister or whatever.
And so this is the concept: God is electing a people; he’s choosing to save a people for himself. That’s all that the doctrine of election means—God's choice by His grace, by God giving something that people don’t have, giving to them something they don’t have freely out of his own resources and abundance, giving them salvation and bringing them to himself.
So the Catechism is saying God determined not to leave everyone in this estate where they’re gonna perish; instead, he chose—he elected—some to come to him.
I mentioned in a previous session, in passing, what I'll discuss a little more detail right now: what we call the five points of Calvinism. I said that it can be—it’s easy to remember by remembering the word “tulip.” Each of these stands for one of the five points.
Right, you’ve got one, two, three, four, five. This is total depravity, which we've already talked about, at least mentioned. The second one is unconditional election. The third is limited atonement. The fourth is irresistible grace, and the last one is perseverance—the perseverance of the saints.
All right, this should be easy enough for children to memorize, right? They can remember the word “tulip,” and if you can at least memorize these five points, it'll give you, it’s like a hook to hang a doctrine on. We have to explain what each of these five things mean, but if you can remember the labels for the five points, then hopefully that will trigger your memory to then remember what they refer to, what the content is, what it is that they’re discussing.
So the first point is addressing what we've already covered in previous questions—the fact that man is in a state of sin and misery. Every part of him, his whole person, is affected by, stained by, the presence of sin. The next three are addressed in this Catechism question, and what the Catechism does is it’s stringing together a whole number of points or of actual biblical texts.
So it says that God has elected some—so he’s chosen some to life. You can see this, for example, in Acts 13 and verse 48, and we're told that he chooses or elects some to life. How or why? Out of his mere good pleasure, so this is Ephesians 1 verse 4—he chooses out of his mere good pleasure.
And he does so, we’re told, from all of eternity, same passage, Ephesians 1, the next verse, verse 5. And so he didn’t choose them because they met certain conditions—“Well, these seemed to be a little better than others” or “These are going to do that and something else.” There was nothing in mankind at all that influenced his choice.
It was merely out of his good pleasure from eternity, and he chose them so that they would enter into a covenant of grace. We'll come back to later and to deliver his people and bring them into the blessings of an estate of salvation by a redeemer.
So we said that first of all we have unconditional election. This refers to the fact that God has graciously chosen a people by His grace. All of this finds its source in God himself, so God is choosing a people.
And when it says that he's choosing to save a people, he is doing everything that is necessary to save them. So from the beginning to the end, all of it comes from God and His grace. God is the one who brings them from death to life, gives them a new nature. God is the one who gives them the gift of faith, enabling them to believe and to close with Christ in the gospel. God gives them the gift of repentance.
God gives them the gift of being clothed in Christ's righteousness and made acceptable to him. And we can go straight through even to the end, when God is the one who, having perfected our souls in holiness at death, raises our bodies and renews them in perfect life as well.
So that at the glorification, the completion of our salvation, it's God still giving to us. So the Lord is the one who does all of it. The fact is that man is so totally depraved; man is so sinful. Only God can do it. If anything was left to man to contribute to his salvation, no one would ever be saved because man can't do what’s good, and they can't seek after God. If they were left to themselves, they would perish.
So if God just left everyone in the situation they found themselves in—a state of sin and misery—everyone would perish. It’s only because God is the one who undertakes to do all for his glory.
So God is choosing a people; he’s electing them unconditionally. It's not based on anything that he finds within them. When we talk about limited atonement, some people prefer the words "particular redemption." In other words, he’s redeeming a particular people, and that communicates the same idea.
What we’re saying is that Christ did not come to die in order that it would be possible for some to be saved, that it would be hypothetical that some could be saved. But rather, when Christ died on the cross, he was actually securing the salvation—the complete salvation—of his elect people, those whom he had chosen from all of eternity. Christ came to redeem.
So it's not as if God—you know, the Lord Jesus Christ dies for everybody and then some come to him and some don’t. He dies to secure the salvation of the people that he's chosen and to ensure that their salvation will be secured.
Irresistible grace refers to the fact that when God chooses to do something, nothing can stop it. So it’s not as if man has power that somehow can either curb or change or affect the power of God. When God comes to save someone, he sends his Holy Spirit to give them new life and to give them a new heart and to give them faith.
And so on, that will come to pass. The Lord will bring that to pass. It is impossible to resist, fight against, or undo the things that God has determined to do. So his decree, as we saw earlier in the Catechism, is unchangeable; it is eternal; it is unconditional.
So we sometimes, you know, we sometimes talk about predestination because the Bible talks about it. And there are really two parts here: we have the word election up here already; there’s also the word reprobation.
So predestination consists of two parts: God’s choice to save a certain people and consequently God’s choice to not save other people—to actually choose to send them to hell. And so both of those things are part of this doctrine of predestination.
So we’ve noted that it’s unconditional, it’s God alone; there’s nothing in man that can contribute to it. That means predestination is not God’s foresight, where it’s not as if God looks down through the tunnel of history and, as he looks down through the tunnel of history, he sees some would be more inclined to believe; some would be less inclined to believe, and he chooses the ones that would be more inclined to believe.
That’s not what predestination is. No, if that were the case, he’d be looking down through the tunnel of history and no one would believe, so no one would be saved. But rather God is deliberately choosing whom he’s going to give faith to and whom he’s going to redeem.
So faith itself, as essential as it is— as we’ll see more later—is not the cause of election. Faith is the consequence or the result of election. Faith isn’t what causes someone to be elect; faith is a result of someone being elect.
God’s Christ, when he died upon the cross, purchased even the faith of his people in order that they might believe on him and be received by him. So it’s not foresight or foreknowledge; you’ll have a lot of recurring errors on this point.
So over against these five points of Calvinism, I’ll just mention briefly: the five points of Calvinism came as a result of the Synod of Dort in 1618. So they weren’t written in English, but they were in response to a group of theologians called the Remonstrance, who were many in some ways who actually believed the exact opposite of these five points.
And so they bring their five points to the Dutch Church, and there’s an International Synod that’s organized to address it, and these are the conclusions that they reach. This is what the Bible teaches, and it’s what the Bible teaches.
But it’s not as if Arminianism went away, so we still see it; it’s still around us. It’s in churches all over the place, and there are also different variations that come up. Right?
There are people who talk about—we can’t get into this now—but middle knowledge, Molinism, and that's a form of Arminianism. Or you’ll have open theism, this idea that God can’t know the future because man is free to do what he wants, and God doesn’t know what he’s gonna do until he does it.
Right? That’s an error; that’s a serious error against what the Bible teaches, and it’s actually an attack on the attributes of God himself.
And so here we see man begins in a state of innocence; he breaks God’s law, and there’s sin. The sin of misery results in death. That’s supposed to be a tombstone. But God doesn’t leave everyone confined to perish; he brings them out. Right? By way of Christ the Redeemer, he gives them a new heart and ultimately he saves their whole being—body and soul—which is kept for all of eternity in heaven in fellowship with him.
And so the question is: Is everyone left to perish? No! God has chosen people for himself.
So did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery? God, having out of his mere good pleasure from all eternity elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery and to bring them into a state of salvation by a redeemer.
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