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"The
Purpose of This Gift (The gift of the elect given to the Son
by the Father)
It
demonstrates God’s sovereignty. And we should not pass
on without a word or two concerning the designs of this election. First, God
demonstrates His absolute sovereignty in His act of election. Proud and
arrogant man cannot abide this and regularly objects. Paul in Romans 9:14, 19 offers up man’s
complaints and decisively indicates the divine reply to human rebellion against
the sovereign good pleasure of God. In these verses the apostle lays as the
foundation of God’s counsels about man’s eternal state His sovereign will and
pleasure (cf. vv. 19–23; Job 32:12–13).
The natural man, like the Arminian theologian, likes
to think and say that God loved Jacob, because He foresaw that he would be a
holy wrestler with God and a great believer, and that He hated Esau, because He
foresaw that he would be a profane man, would sell his birthright for a mess of
pottage, grieve his father with an unholy marriage, and seek to slay his
brother, the holy-to-be Jacob. How contrary to Paul’s reasoning in verses ten through
thirteen!
In basing election upon foreknowledge
the evangelical Arminian makes a fatal concession that destroys his case.
For, if God foresees the faith of the
elect, He also foresees the unbelief of the nonelect. Why, then, does He
create those who He foresees and knows will be lost? He is under no outside
power to force Him to create them. If He desires the salvation of all men and
is earnestly desiring to save them, He could at least have refrained from
creating those who should be lost. Why
does God, then, create those He knows will go to hell? Even a man knows
enough not to try to do what he positively knows he will not, or cannot, do.
But if the Arminian in this impasse should deny the foreknowledge of God, then
he would have only a limited, ignorant, finite God, one in reality not a God at
all in the true sense of the term God.
Further, if election is based on foreknowledge that
some will elect to believe, then why elect the ones who will believe? What
sense is there in God’s election of those who He knows with certainty will
elect to believe, that is, will elect themselves? Thus, one can see the
hopelessness of the Arminian case, the saddest feature of which is the fact
that it is the prevailing view of evangelicalism today, taught in evangelical
seminaries and preached in their pulpits. To what a sad end evangelicalism is
on the way to coming. May God arrest the course of things in His sovereign
grace!
Three Reasons Why Christians Should
Relish the Doctrine of Unconditional Election.
1) It magnifies
God’s love. A second design
of the election, the giving of men to Christ by the divine sovereign
determination, is to glorify His free, infinite, and everlasting love to those
whom He gives to Him (cf. Eph. 1:4–6). Traill says: The love of the Father shines in giving us to Christ
to be redeemed; the love of the Son shines in His receiving of us; and these
two loves (if I may call them so) do not eclipse, but enlighten one another,
and make a glorious light to the eye of the believer. Election is always in
love, and from it, or with it. And this love hath no cause, but in the heart of
the lover: He loves because he loves,
Deut. vii. 7, 8. It had no beginning, it hath no intermission, and it shall
have no ending.
These sentiments should do the heart of us all good.
2) It gives us a sure salvation. A third design is that we may have a
sure and glorious salvation, given in the divine sovereign pleasure, one that
more than restores that lost by the first Adam in his rebellion.
3) It bring glory to the name of Christ. And, finally, the design of the
election of the saints of God includes the rendering of great honor and glory
to the name of Jesus Christ, the repairer of the gap which sin made between God
and man. All the concerns of the redeemed for salvation, and all the roadblocks
to their salvation—their sin, the broken law, the holy justice and
righteousness of God, the power of hell and death, and the eternal wrath of God—are
laid upon Christ, and He has removed them by taking them upon Himself
completely (cf. Heb. 1:3; 9:26; Gal. 3:13; 4:4–5). And all the “parts and
pieces of salvation are in Christ’s hand, and do come to us by him” (cf. Eph.
1:6–7; 2:4–6). And the distinguished
Scot, denounced in his own country as a “Pentland rebel,” concluded that
eternal life “is too great, and too good a gift, to be given by any but blessed
Jesus.”
This excerpt is from S. Lewis Johnson’s article in Emmaus Journal, 7(2), 208–210.
