Category Archives: The Doctrines of Grace

For whom did Christ die?

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Dr. John MacArthur:

Transcript:

We come tonight to a wonderful theme in the Scripture, again the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. And for those of you, most of you, who are with us in our study of the gospel of Luke, we have been looking closely at the record of Luke, the historical record, as well as comparing the account of Matthew and Mark and John on the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have looked at the details of His dying.

Tonight we want to talk a little about the theology of His death and ask the question and answer it from Scripture, “For whom did Christ die?” This is a very, very important question.

Now I know you people very well and you are noble Bereans. You search the Scriptures to see if these things that I say are so. And I also know that if I don’t cover every verse that weighs on this subject, you will line up afterwards to ask me about that verse. So in dealing with a subject like this, if I can borrow a French phrase, this needs to be somewhat of a tour de force(?), I need to cover the ground extensively so I can put your mind at rest because you are so incurably biblical. That, in case you didn’t know, is a great commendation. I expect that, I rejoice in that.

To begin with, what I want to say is what I am going to teach you tonight about this application of the atonement, answering the question, “For whom did Christ die?” is the view that has reigned supreme in the true church since the New Testament. It, along with the other essential doctrines of Reformed Theology, or Augustinian, or Lutheran or Calvinistic theology, has been affirmed by the church since its inception. What I am going to show you tonight is essentially what the early church believed, of course, because you’ll see it coming out of the New Testament. It is what was affirmed in the fifth century as being a true representation of New Testament teaching under Augustine against Palagius. It was again affirmed during the time of the Reformation by Luther in his conflict with Erasmus and further affirmed by Calvin in his conflict with Arminius. It has come down to us in our heritage which is Baptistic through the London Confession of 1689 and the Philadelphia Confession of 1743, being the substantial foundations for Baptists in America. And that is our tradition, our ecclesiology is baptistic rather than sacramental and Reformed. That’s why we baptize adults who believe and not infants.

And so, what I’m going to say to you is not anything new, it is something that the church has affirmed. In fact, the view that opposes what I will show you tonight has been labeled as heresy. It was so labeled at three councils early on in history, it was reiterated again during the time of the Reformation that the view contrary to this view is in fact unbiblical.

Now the question might at first seem an easy one, For whom did Christ die? Most people, I’m confident, in churches would quickly answer, “Well He died for everyone.” Most people in the church believed that on the cross Jesus paid the debt for the sins of everyone because He loves everyone unconditionally and wants everyone to be saved. That is not what the church has historically believed, but that is what the present version of the superficial church believes. Sinners, all of them, have had all their sins atoned for potentially. And that’s the key word. If they will acknowledge Christ and accept the gift. So we have then only to convince sinners to receive the salvation which has already been fully purchased for them at the cross. Since Christ died for everyone, everyone can believe and should believe and must believe if they’ll only will to believe. And in a contemporary concept, we work on the sinner’s will believing that the sinner has both the responsibility and the ability to activate a saving faith on his own and believe. If nowhere else, this is certainly indicated in the most popular of Christian books, The Purpose-Driven Life and The Purpose-Driven Church where Rick Warren says I can lead anyone to Christ if I can find the key to that person’s heart. It’s just a matter of moving their will.

That is the popular idea and that means that hell is full of people whose salvation was purchased by the death and resurrection of Christ. It means then that everybody in hell and everybody in heaven had the same thing done for them on the cross. The Lake of Fire will be filled with eternally damned people whose sins were actually atoned for on the cross, so the people in hell had the same atonement as the people in heaven. The difference was the people in heaven activated their will to accept that atonement. The people in hell did not.

Now if that sounds strange to you, it is…it is, that Jesus died for, paid for in full the sins of the damned, paid the penalty of divine justice for them just as He did for the redeemed is a very strange notion. And the sinner then determines whether that universally potential death is applied to him or not. This view would say Christ died to make salvation possible, not actual. He died to make it possible, the sinner then makes the choice. He didn’t really purchase salvation for anyone, He actually died on the cross and in some way removed a barrier to make salvation a potential. You will not find such language anywhere in the New Testament or the Old. The message that this would send to sinners goes like this…God loves you so much that Christ died for you, won’t you let Him save you? The final decision is up to you. In fact, God loves you so much that He gave His Son and hopefully when you see the sacrifice that Christ made, you will be moved emotionally to love Him back by accepting Him.

Now the problem with this is glaring. Here’s the problem. According to Scripture, sinners are dead…dead in trespasses and sin, separated from the life of God. They are blind. They are perishing. They’re in a state of perishing eternally. They are double blind because the god of this world has blinded their minds. In their natural state, they cannot understand the things of God, they are foolishness to them. Or to borrow the language of Romans 3, there is none who seeks after God, there is no fear of God before their eyes. This then affirms another doctrine that the church has always established as true and that is the sinner’s total inability. Luther’s great classic, The Bondage of the Will is still preeminent reading for anyone who wants to understand how bound the fallen human will is and how impossible it is for the dead double-blind sinner cut off from the life of God with no desire for God and no ability to seek after God and no fear of God before his eyes to all of a sudden pull himself up by his own bootstraps and take hold of a potential salvation that is hanging out there for him. Continue reading →

Does Effectual Grace Make People Into Robots?

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Robot-EthicsVisitor to monergism.com:

Sovereignty is king, but the Holy Spirit works on ya.

Response from John Hendryx:

John Wesley may have taught prevenient grace but the Bible only speaks of two states of man, regenerate and unregenerate. Wesley had to create this doctrine, apart from Scripture, entirely with human logic (which creates a third state in-between regenerate and unregenerate) in order to maintain his theological system. However, the Bible speaks of no additional in-between state. We are either “in the flesh” (which can do nothing) or “in the Spirit”. As such, Jesus declares, “the Spirit quickens, the flesh counts for nothing … that is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me grants it…[and] “all that the Father gives me will come to me”…. John 6:63, 65,37. No one can come to faith in Jesus unless God grants it and all to whom He grants it will come to faith in Him. This does away with prevenient grace altogether. Jesus left no room for it in these clear statements.

The Bible indeed calls us to declare the gospel to all people … but, left to themselves, none of them will respond to it. All have turned aside. They remain stiff-necked in their opposition to God’s loving plea to come to Christ for life. Yet, in His great mercy, God still saves a people for Himself out of all the ill-deserving people of the earth.

Does this make us robots? .. no it makes God a God of love and mercy. If your child ran into traffic would you only save him if he first met your condition? No a loving parent would run out into the street to scoop up the child at the risk of his own life to make certain his child was safe…regardless of the will of the child at the time. True love gets the job done.

Would you consider a parent who who saved a child’s life without any conditions unloving? No that is love. To save the child’s life trumps the child’s will because the parent knows better than the child what is good for him. How much more God?

God’s love for His people is not conditional as Wesley believed.. a loving parent does not first make his child meet a condition before he will love him. Rather, a loving parent is like Jesus who met all the conditions for us, giving us everything we need for salvation including a new heart to believe (Deut. 29:4, 30:6; Ezek 36:26).

He did not have to save anyone since we all rejected him. He could have left all men to their own devices and swept them away in judgment and it would have been just. Yet he is merciful to many saving them through the blood of his precious Son Jesus. To the rest he simply gives them over to what they want – their independence from God. So some receive God’s mercy, others get God’s justice but no one received injustice.

Your prevenient grace doctrine is simply sleight of hand. It does not solve the problem of grace, it only exacerbates it. Salvation is by Christ alone, not Christ plus our meeting some condition. If it were then it would no longer be grace alone, would it? It would depend on who was more wise, humble or who has the most sound judgment and not grace alone. Why did one man with preveneint grace believe and not the other?

It was not grace, since both has grace. No, what you really believe is that it was something innately good or better in one person over the other. One had a good will and the other did not. Who makes the will good?

To conclude, man indeed has a will, but he has a heart of stone, and he will use his will wrongly until God lovingly changes that heart of stone to a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26).

Effectual Calling and Regeneration

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lloyd-jonesFrom Great Doctrines of the Bible: God the Father, I would remind you that I am not insisting that the order which I shall follow is of necessity the right one, and certainly not of necessity the chronological one.

‘So how do you arrive at your order?’ asks someone. My answer is that I mainly try to conceive of this work going on within us from the standpoint of God in eternity looking down upon men and women in sin. That is the way that appeals to me most of all; it is the way that I find most helpful. That is not to detract in any way from experience or the experiential standpoint. Some would emphasise that and would have their order according to experience, but I happen to be one of those people who is not content merely with experience. I want to know something about that experience; I want to know what I am experiencing and I want to know why I am experiencing it and how it has come about. It is the child who is content merely with enjoying the experience. If we are to grow in grace and to go forward and exercise our senses, as the author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it (Heb. 5:14), then we must of necessity ask certain questions and be anxious to know how the things that have happened to us really have come to take place.

My approach therefore is this: there is the truth of the gospel, and we have seen already that it is a part of the work of the Holy Spirit to see that that truth is proclaimed to all and sundry. That is what we called the general call — a kind of universal offer of the gospel. Then we saw that though the external or general call comes to all, to those who will remain unsaved as well as to those who are saved, obviously some new distinction comes in, because some are saved by it. So the question we must now consider is: What is it that establishes the difference between the two groups?

And the way to answer that question, it seems to me, is to say that the call of the gospel, which has been given to all, is effectual only in some. Now there is a portion of Scripture which is a perfect illustration of this. The followers of Christ who were even described as ‘disciples’ were divided up into two groups. One group decided that they would never listen to Him again. They left Him and went home. And when He turned to the others and said, ‘Will ye also go away?’ Peter said, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the word of eternal life’ ( John 6:67–68 ). The one group disbelieved and went home, the others, who had heard exactly the same things, stayed with Him, wanted to hear more, and rejoiced in it. What makes the difference? It is that the word was effectual in the case of the saved in a way that it was not effectual in the case of the unsaved who refused it.

This, then, is something that is quite obvious. We can say that in addition to the external call there is this effectual call, and that what makes anybody a saved person and a true Christian is that the call of the gospel has come effectually. Let me give you some scriptures that establish that. The first, Romans 8:28–39 , is a great statement of this very thing. ‘We know,’ says Paul, ‘that all things work together for good to them that love God … ’ Not to everybody but ‘ to them that love God ’. Who are they? ‘To them who are called according to his purpose,’ and Paul goes on: ‘For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ The saved are described as those who are called . And they have been called in a way that the others have not. That is, therefore, a scriptural statement of this effectual call. Continue reading →