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 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 give attention to what
the Apostle says in it. I will begin in
verse 9 of chapter 9. "For this is the
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 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. That is they have the same
family, the same background, 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 statement,
"before they were born," raises the question of
God's foreknowledge. The most popular view
of predestination that rejects the
Augustinian view is that view we call the
foreknowledge 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 foreknowledge,
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 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 Foreknowledge 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 Foreknowledge
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. In other words, if
the biblical view is what the foreknowledge
view 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 foreknowledge
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 and 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 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 so that it's God's purpose that will stand. Do you see that the
flavor of this passage is totally opposed to the
concept of a foreknowledge view of predestination? Do you see that? I mean why, what
other reason could we give for the Apostle's
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 Apostle 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 foreknowledge 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 foreknowledge
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 He has sent. The supreme good work
is to place one's trust in Jesus Christ, 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 works,
but because of Him who calls. The Arminian view - it has very,
various 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
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.'"
I'll come back to that phrase in a moment because I know
that that provokes all kinds of problems with
the idea of 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 will be
difficulty with the students understanding what the
teacher is communicating. 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 particular
thing does he expect people to say
when they hear this? "It's not fair!" There's not righteousness -
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 may be thinking,
"There may actually be some people listening to
me, or reading this letter, who are muddleheaded 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 injustice in God? Well, obviously not!' And
so much then for Augustine and Aquinas 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 Arminian view. In fact, the Arminian view
is designed in such a way that 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 that 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 into their future actions,
that strictly according the sovereign purpose of
God, that God's purposes may be seen 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 foreknowledge 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 any charge of
God's being unfair, I would say, "Well,
wait a minute. God's not unfair. God's not unjust because
even though this decision is made before anyone's
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 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 if He grants
mercy to one, He is not obligated to
give it to the other. Again, 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. 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 coup de grace, 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 Arminian
view does not say that it depends all
on man and not on God, but the Arminian 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
apart from divine activity, in order to be saved. So the election depends
upon human choices in the foreknowledge view. And Paul says, "No it doesn't." How could he say it
any more clearly? This is not based
upon the one who wills or upon the one who
runs, but upon 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 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, but Esau have I hated." What does it mean
that God hates Esau? When we use the
English term "hate," we think 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 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 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
antithetical 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 toward 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 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 that
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 reprobate, 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 "symmetrical" view? That view has been
overwhelmingly rejected by Augustinians and Calvinists. That is not the
Augustinian view. Some people call it
"hyper-Calvinism." I think that is a serious
insult to John Calvin to call it "hyper-Calvinism" because
it's not hyper-Calvinism, it's sub-Calvinism, or
worse - anti-Calvinism. Hyper-Calvinism would
mean super-Calvinism. Calvin would not appreciate
that particular nomenclature. Rather, the Augustinian
view is 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's activity
here is negative, or passive, rather than active. Do you see the difference? In this one, in the
case of the reprobate, 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 here, 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. And that's a difficult one. I only have about a minute
and-a-half to answer it, so I'll try to do it quickly. But 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 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
could 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 restraints, 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.
