Wednesday Evening Prayer Meeting
July 15, 2009
Reformed
Theology and the Natural Man
Dr. Tom Elkin
Since we are dealing with a
fairly heavy topic tonight, I’m going to pray again.
Let’s pray.
Father, we ask You to be with us now.
Give us clearness of thought, give us a dedication to Your Word, and give
us the courage to be Your people.
We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
Last week I told you we had
gotten, to say, the non-offensive things pretty much out of the way and we were
coming to what I call the more offensive things.
Our topic is Reformed Theology and the Natural Man, or Natural Man’s
Reaction to Reformed Theology, and that being the case, some of what we talked
about in the earlier lessons were fairly understood Christian precepts/concepts
that most Christians will sort of agree with.
But when we get to hard core reformed theology, we have a dividing line.
Now, this is my conception.
If you think about the acrostic, TULIP, most of you know exactly what
that is: Total depravity, but when
you get to the next one – T-U – Unconditional election, my presupposition that
I’m giving to y’all, my assumption is that this is the most critical point of
conflict with the natural man and the world today.
Total depravity – everybody accepts that as long as you’re talking about
everybody, that’s okay, I may disagree with you, but the minute you start
claiming something unique and special for you and not giving it to
everyone else, we have a problem in today’s world.
So, if you have a graph, total depravity, unconditional election, limited
atonement (whatever that means!), irresistible grace (whatever that means!),
perseverance (yeah), but unconditional election!
Do you realize how offensive that is in today’s world?
Well, that’s what we are going to be talking about tonight.
We have shifted gears. We’re
going into the mountainous terrain in terms of the obstacles most people in
today’s world see when they think about this 1 % over here on the right side –
reformed theology. Okay, you know
basically what it is, but let me just lay out some of the core precepts of
unconditional election. You also
know that unconditional election is one of the cardinal dividing points between
the Armenians and the Calvinists.
You’ve heard all this kind of stuff most of your life, but let’s just lay out
some of it. I love this little
introduction that Spencer has in his book about TULIP and I’m just going to read
it to you. He quotes a Baptist
confession. You know the Baptists
tend to believe, used to believe in this too, but let me just read what he says:
“The second of the five points of Calvinism is easily remembered under
the letter “U” – the acrostic poem of the word TULIP.
That “U” stands for unconditional election.
This doctrine is set forth in the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 in
terms almost identical to those of The
Westminster Confession, in The 39
Articles of the Church of England, as well as the
When I first moved to
Now, just some biblical
references – I happen to believe that this is the most important thing in terms
of our culture and the world today that I’m going to say to y’all in this whole
series, so bear with me, okay?
Romans 8:28 – you know it; let
me read some of them – “We know that all things work together for good to them
that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose, for whom He did
foreknow, He also did predestinate.”
Romans 9:11 – “For the children
being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of
God according to election might stand, not of works, but of Him that calleth.
It is written: ‘Jacob have I
loved, but Esau have I hated.’”
2 Timothy 1:9 – “God has saved
us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according
to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the
world began.” (referring to that
covenant)
John 15:16 – “Ye have not chosen
Me, (Christ says) but I have chosen you.”
Ephesians 1:4 – “According as He
has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world.”
John 6 – “No man can come to Me
except the Father draw him.”
Acts 13:48 – “And when the
Gentiles heard this they were glad and glorified the Word of the Lord, and as
many as were ordained to eternal life believed.”
Now I could go on, but you get
the picture. This is why we
believe this. And then that passage
in John 6: “The Spirit gives life,
the flesh counts for nothing, the words I have spoken to you, they are spirit
and they are life. Yet there are
some of you that do not believe, for Jesus had known from the beginning which of
them did not believe and who would betray Him.”
He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to Me
unless the Father has enabled him.”
This is unconditional election, and of course, the next verse down there:
“From this time, many of His disciples turned back and no longer followed
Him.” - a reaction to the sovereignty of His body and His blood, but also a
potential reaction of His talking about the unconditionality of God having to
work in the person. So,
unconditional election – salvation is of the Lord; works do not play in it.
The reformed position says that the Bible over and over attributes to God
His election of humans, not based on what they have done or on what they might
do…it is unconditional.
Now, we have heard that; we
believe it, but we live in a world today that is a little bit different than the
world of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
I have referred to this book before,
In Defense of Elitism.
I’m gonna read a couple of things to you from it tonight.
By the way, the author of this book is a liberal democrat. He states so.
He says he is a card carrying member of the ACLU.
Now, I’m saying this to you to let you know that there are folks out
there beginning to understand that some of the things going on in our world
aren’t right – and I mean our world as this country.
He’s saying something:
“Talent, achievement, practice and learning, are no longer common differences.
Everyone is a star. We have
foolishly embraced the unexamined notion that everyone is pretty much alike, and
worse (and should be), that self-fulfillment is more important than objective
achievement – that the common man is always right, that he needs no interpreters
or intermediaries to guide his thinking, that a good and just society should be
far more concerned with suckering it’s losers than with honoring and encouraging
its winners.” Ahh – that’s a
liberal democrat talking! We’ll
come back to what he has to say in just a little bit.
Our world today – it is
unacceptable to claim uniqueness.
Later on in that book, he quotes a passage right after Rudy Giuliani has been
elected mayor of
Now, I want to give you some
illustrations of the thinking of our world today.
I could come up with dozens more, but just to pick a few.
And I’m not picking on any group, please, I’m not.
It’s the mindset, the thinking, that I’m trying to get across.
University of Maryland Department of Social Work has an organization that
is sponsored called People for Gender Equality.
The mission of People for Gender Equality, PGE, is to educate women and
men of our community on gender issues affecting the professional social family
and personal lives of all women, to advocate for the eradication of biases
including gender, sexual orientation, and racial in school policies, curriculum,
and all other issues influencing the wellbeing of women, to work toward a more
equitable distribution of men and women among faculty, staff and student body.”
Everybody needs to be okay, and any distinctiveness of any group is
unacceptable. They have sub-groups:
Social Work for Asian Awareness, The Christian Social Work Fellowship,
The Lesbian/Gay Bisexual Gender Union – I could go on in reading them but you
get the picture, right?
Another organization that’s
flourishing relatively well in the world today is the Equality Project.
“Welcome to the home of the Equality Project” – if you happen to look
them up on their webpage. They wish
to encourage the public to support equal rights for all humans as well as to
encourage the general public to educate themselves about different sexualities,
genders, religions, races, cultures, physical and mental abilities, etc.
The reasons behind the creation of this project are many.
People have been forced to endure blind hatred, misconceptions, and
prejudice. Many people who are
deemed different, sinful or second-best, have long been tormented by our
society, including: lesbians, gay
men, bisexuals, transgender, transsexual gender, transsexual persons, people of
non-Christian religions, non-white people, people who speak other languages,
people who come from other lands or cultures, older citizens, persons of
different degrees or physical or mental ability, those suffering from mental
illness, economic – I could read it on, but you get the picture, right?
This Equality Project is so designed that there is to be no distinction,
no differentiation amongst any people for any reasons.
And notice, they include religion in there too – a little caveat that
they throw out in the Equality Project is:
“This project, however, wishes to make it known that the problem is not
the blame of white, rich, heterosexual, well-educated, upper economic class men.
They have been discriminated against too.
Sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ageism, etc. like all other forms
of blind hatred are reactions (listen to this) to an unknown or the religiously
devalued, which are taught to our children by both women and men, gay and
straight, of all races, ages, cultures, and languages.”
We’re teaching our children.
This is another paragraph.
“We teach” - and they’re saying what we are currently doing - “We teach our
children that only the religion that they grew up in is the right one – the
people who practice a different religion, or people who embody some religiously
forbidden characteristics or way of life, are sinful and wrong and are to be
shunned, treated as second best. We
teach our children that the religion that they grew up with is the one and only
true religion. Those who do not
believe and support that religion will suffer.
We teach our children that the religion they grow up with, alone, should
dictate the morals and behaviors of all people, regardless of their own personal
belief.” Again, we do, don’t we?
Isn’t that what we’re doing with the
Catechism every Sunday night?
Aren’t we trying to educate our children that there is one way, one
truth, one God, one salvation?
We’re guilty – here I be! The
problem is they say that is terribly wrong.
The statement is made – “This has to stop.
We, as a global society, have to learn to allow our children to be who
they are, to accept them as they are, and to learn what we can from them.
We teach our children how they will view the world and we have the power
of teaching them to celebrate the diversity that does and is going to surround
them in life. We have to learn (and
they use a split infinitive – I don’t know whether I should point that out or
not – I guess I’m being judgmental!) we have to learn to not judge another
person’s worth or validity as a human being based upon one aspect of who they
are.” Oh, okay, we have an equality
project that is taking place and that’s going on, and the subtlety of this is so
pervasive. We’ll get to
illustrations of others in just a minute.
The mayor of the city of
Now, you should be aware also,
that Islam is taking a position that it is accepting of all races and people.
This is a statement made by the Imam of the Islamic Center of Raleigh,
North Carolina – I’m not going to read the quote from the Koran here…”But with
this verse, Islam declares equality among people.
That is because Islam respects a human being for being human, not for any
other reason. Islam does not
distinguish between two races or two groups of people or between two colors.”
Then it quotes a rather obscure passage where Mohammad makes a statement
there’s no preference given to Arab or non-Arab, as a background for saying
“Islam accepts all people.” Okay,
so what does all this mean? On this
side, we have a cardinal pillar of the Reformed Faith saying God unconditionally
elects His own and passes over the rest.
On this side, we have a world galloping toward a position of no
difference between any individual or person and if you do make a difference,
there is to be a problem. We have
grown up with a certain set of values that permeated our thinking and in order
to sort of illustrate this, I’m going to read a real quick passage from
In Defense of Elitism again:
“It is fashionable these days to
deride Calvinism as having been a force for smugness, or for the comfortable and
dismissal of the afflicted. But if
one strips away the theological component, early Calvinists left us a residue of
acute perception. In general, the
world is a rational place, in which winners on a whole deserve to win, and
losers on a whole deserve to lose.
It is only for the exceptions, the lives that are strikingly unfair, that we
maintain the mediating devices of social welfare.”
Well, that was the case; it’s
not anymore. Now, indulge me just a
minute. I don’t know whether I
should do this or not, but what the heck, why not?
Predictions. It wasn’t that
many Sundays ago when we had Gideon Sunday and we had a Gideon in our pulpit and
the person speaking pointed out that they could no longer go down to the
recruitment center and pass out Bibles to the new inductees into the military.
You heard that from our pulpit.
How long will it be until there will be no telecast of a worship service
from a reformed church? I raise
that as a question, but I also make a prediction – you have heard in the news
that there is already a movement under foot to limit religious broadcasting and
also to limit talk radio, because the conservatives have too much control and
they have to be reined in and so something has to be done about it.
I wonder, if we’re up here talking about unconditional election and we’re
saying that either God chooses you or you go to hell – now, I’m saying this in a
most abrasive fashion, so forgive me.
I’ll let Derek talk about theological election in its theological purity,
okay? But if we’re preaching that,
may I give you an illustration?
Suppose a couple comes in for
premarital counseling and let’s suppose that she is a devout member of First
Presbyterian Church. And let’s
suppose that he is a member of a different denomination that doesn’t believe in
unconditional election, and let’s suppose God speaks to her heart and in the
counseling the minister mentions that you should not be unequally yoked.
And let’s suppose that she, because of a pricking of her conscience, says
maybe I shouldn’t marry this person because even though he claims to be a
Christian, he really doesn’t hold to the sovereignty of God and he really
doesn’t believe in a Reformed tradition, and she calls off the wedding.
And then suppose the young man commits suicide in grief and despair.
How far away are we from the church being sued because of its compliance
in his rejection to cause him to do what he did?
It seems illogical, it seems impossible, that that could happen – but how
far away from that are we? I don’t
know, but that’s one question. If
churches teach an exclusive theology, i.e., unconditional election, how long
until it will be labeled as illegal?
When will that become a legal issue in our culture?
It could happen. It could
happen. Now, does that mean we stop
teaching it? No, it does not, we go
ahead. By the way, just to set the
record clearly straight, I am optimistic about what’s going to happen.
I am not pessimistic, because I believe in the sovereignty of God.
I believe that God’s in charge, He’s not surprised by what’s happening,
He knows exactly what’s going on, but we need to be aware of what’s going on.
At what point, if churches teach that one should not be unequally yoked,
how long until we are challenged legally with some form of
defamation?
The church, by the way, and I do
say this, the church should never tell a couple “You should not get a divorce.”
What the church should say to the couple in the midst of a divorce
situation is - it has two rules and responsibilities.
Number one, it has the responsibility through its elders to speak to the
couple and determine whether or not what is going on is in line with biblical
teaching. Number two, to what
degree do we feel like is there a probability of God blessing you in what you
are about to do. What if a church
says to a couple, “You cannot get a divorce.
You do not have biblical grounds,” but let’s suppose that everything
hasn’t been said, and let’s suppose the wife is beaten up by the husband
(although I have seen it both ways) and the family of the wife sues the church
for making her stay in the marriage?
I have to tell you one – it’s a
true story, okay? In 37 years of
doing what I do, I have had two situations occur in which I observed a wife come
in and talk to me and tell me of having discovered a second husband – you know,
divorce and remarried – having discovered a second
husband videoing her daughter, not his, taking a shower.
And one was for the purpose of selling it to the porn shop.
It was purely for monetary gain.
He was going to sell it. And
by the way, neither wife got a divorce, because they felt they didn’t have
biblical grounds. My comment was,
“Don’t you dare let your daughter go back into the house with that guy!”
But neither one saw fit to do that.
Now suppose you tell her she can’t, he can’t, and suppose there is
domestic violence. What is the
liability of the counseling parties of the church?
We have had legal cases in
Now, to pull back to what we’re
talking about – unconditional election.
All of these are relational issues and they have very valid reasons to be
dealt with, don’t get me wrong - but what about our theology?
What happens if we are challenged in our theology?
What happens that, if in today’s world in diversity and accepting of
difference, and in today’s world of equality, what happens if we stand firm?
I’ll tell ya, I believe God will bless, and I believe that’s what we are
supposed to do. But as we look at
the modern man’s struggle with reformed theology, part of his struggle is:
“It ain’t fair! What you’re
taking about is a non-loving God.
What you’re talking about is not the thing that I want to worship.”
So that of this 85% of our population that say they have some affiliation
with Christianity, it’s a little sliver over here that believe what we’re
talking about. I say this to you
because I really believe that we are about to face a different world - different
only in that we haven’t been through this passage before.
There’s a sense in which we’re going back to the first century
Christianity, where Christianity was not the accepted religion of the day and
was even persecuted, and the legal authorities did not honor the precepts of
Christianity. God blessed, didn’t
He? From 12, we have a whole world
shaking movement that came, but let us not be deceived into thinking
that we have a nice comfortable retirement in front of us for the church,
waiting for the second coming.
Sometimes we think a parallel
here – the church had to work real hard, sort of attained its high production
years, and now we’re into our retirement waiting for the Lord to come.
I don’t know if that’s the case.
I don’t know if that’s the case at all.
But let’s understand – we have a sovereign God, we have the Scripture, we
have theology – let theology be our comfort, let theology be our guide, let
theology be your friend, don’t let it be a haughty enemy.
Don’t be afraid of your Reformed Theology, but do understand, it is not
exactly a popular theology in today’s world.
Therefore, only God can change a human heart.
“Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath, but because of His
great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ even when
we were dead in transgressions. It
is by grace you have been saved.
And God raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms
in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable
riches of His grace expressed in His kindnesses to us in Christ Jesus.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from
yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, again, I claim no expertise, but I
do claim a strong desire to honor You and have Your people stand firm in the
face of what is happening all around us.
You are Lord over all. You
are sovereign, and we believe firmly that You will come again, bodily, and there
will be a resurrection, a bodily resurrection, and that You will take Your
people, the elect. “Jacob, You have
loved. Esau, You have hated.”
We cannot fathom the way Your mind works, but we can understand how You
have set Your mind down for us in Your Word.
Make us faithful to Your Scriptures, to Your Word, and give us the
courage and strength for the tide in which we have been swirling along.
If it turns against us, and we pray is doesn’t, but if it does, give us
the confidence of the hope we have in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In His name we pray. Amen.
Let’s stand for the benediction
and we’ll be dismissed after the benediction.
May grace, mercy and peace, from God the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, rest and abide upon you and all of yours.
In Christ’s name we pray.
Amen.
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