Friday Round Up

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(1) Does the Doctrine of Unconditional election make God a “respecter of persons”? My friend John Hendryx of monergism.com writes, “The charge we often hear from those who reject God’s unconditional election is that it makes God a respecter of persons. As is the case with most protests against unconditional election it is important to point out that this is a moral rather than exegetical argument. And if this is the basis for their rejecting the doctrine of salvation by grace ALONE, rather than appealing directly to the Scriptures which repeatedly declare unconditional election (Eph 1:3,4; Rom 9), then one is basing their theological future on shaky ground… Nonetheless I still think it is important to face up to this charge to see if it has any validity. To do this we need to understand how the Bible uses the concept of “respecter of persons” and then let it interpret itself as to what it actually means, and then determine whether or not God would be guilty of it if unconditional election were true. Below is a wide sampling of its occurrence in the Scripture: More here.

(2) There’s an interesting selection of resources in this week’s Friday Ligonier $5 sale! The “Willing to Believe” Conference Series is highly recommended. Check out today’s $5 sale here.

Concerning Redistribution of Wealth

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Excerpt from Dr. Wayne Grudem’s short book “Business for the Glory of God”:

Some inequality of possessions is fundamentally good and provides many opportunities for glorifying God, but also many temptations to sin; and some extreme inequalities are wrong in themselves.

It may seem surprising to us to think that some inequalities of possessions can be good and pleasing to God. However, although there is no sin or evil in heaven, the Bible teaches that there are varying degrees of reward in heaven and various kinds of stewardship that God entrusts to different people. When we stand before Jesus to give account of our lives, he will say to one person,

“You shall have authority over ten cities,”

and to another,

“You are to be over five cities” (Luke 19:17, 19).

Therefore there will be inequalities of stewardship and responsibility in the age to come. This means that the idea of inequality of stewardship in itself is given by God and must be good.

In a similar teaching, Paul, speaking to believers, says, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Cor. 5:10). This implies degrees of reward for what we have done in this life. Many other passages teach or imply degrees of reward for believers at the final judgment. Even among the angels, there are differing levels of authority and stewardship established by God, and therefore we cannot say that such a system is wrong or sinful in itself.

Inequalities are necessary in a world that requires a great variety of tasks to be done. Some tasks require stewardship of large amounts of resources (such as ownership of a steel mill or a company that manufactures airplanes), and some tasks require stewardship of small amounts of resources. And God has given some people greater abilities than others, abilities in artistic or musical skills, abilities in mathematics or science, abilities in leadership, abilities in business skills and buying and selling, and so forth. If reward for each person’s labor is given fairly and is based on the value of what that person produces, then those with larger abilities will naturally gain larger rewards. Since people are different in abilities and effort, I don’t think there could be a fair system of rewards for work unless the system had different rewards for different people. Fairness of reward requires such differences.
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