The Divine Initiative

To say that R.C. Sproul admired Martin Luther would be an understatement. Hello, this is Lee Webb, host of Renewing Your Mind.

R.C. loved Luther's passion for the biblical gospel and his courage to defend it. That's why I think he would thoroughly enjoy a new podcast from Ligonier Ministries coming October 10. It's called Luther in Real Time. Take a listen to this.

I think you'll want to subscribe. A man places a document in the hands of a monk by the name of Martin Luther. The most powerful person in the world has declared Luther to be a heretic. And Luther has 60 days to recant. Take him captive.

Exactly 500 years after the events occurred, join Martin Luther week by week in real time as his fate draws closer and closer. They excommunicate me for the sacrilege of heresy. So I excommunicate them in the name of the sacred truth of God. It cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.

I am a violent physician for violent times. I often wish that God had called another. Luther in Real Time, a new podcast from Ligonier Ministries.

The clock starts ticking on October the 10th. If it's true that God sovereignly predestines a certain fixed number of people to be saved, and it's by an immutable decree, then why should we be involved in evangelism? That may be the most asked question when the topic of predestination comes up. If God is in charge of salvation, does He really need us to share the gospel with people? As we'll hear today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C.

Sproul has a compelling answer. In fact, it's one we can't ignore. We come now to the last of our series of lectures on the theme of predestination, and throughout this series I've made references from time to time to Paul's teaching on this matter in his letter to the church at Ephesus. In this session I want to consider further what we call in theology the divine initiative, referring to that first step of salvation that is brought to pass in our lives unilaterally and exclusively by the power of God. And we see this in this passage in Ephesians 2 that I have made occasional reference to, and I'd like to spend a little bit more time on it now. Let's look, if we may, at chapter 2 of Ephesians and where Paul says, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. And among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest. What we find in this passage are descriptive terms of the radical character of man's fallenness. We've talked about moral inability. We have avoided the use of the language of Calvinism, which describes man's situation as that of total depravity. A term that has become very, very controversial in Christian circles and is part of the famous acrostic that Calvinists use to delineate the so-called five points of Calvinism. TULIP, T-U-L-I-P, T standing for total depravity, U for unconditional election, L for limited atonement, I for irresistible grace, and P for perseverance of the saints.

But usually you don't get further than the T before the controversy boils over. And here's one of those occasions where acrostics, which are little devices that function as aids for our memory, sometimes do more damage than they're worth because total depravity is a very misleading term. People confuse total depravity with what we would call utter depravity, that is that man is as bad as he could possibly be.

I don't know anybody who believes that. No matter how sinful we are, we can always conceive of ourselves of having done worse sins than we have done and even sin more often than we in fact do. So there's none of us who is utterly depraved. And remember when we speak of sinners and of human corruption, we're talking about the fall of a creature who was created good. And our being created in the image of God is not annihilated or erased even by our sinfulness.

There's still tremendous value to human beings, and we must do everything we can to protect the dignity of a human being. The term total depravity was coined to mean that sin affects the whole person, that the total essence of our humanity is fallen. That is our minds are fallen, our wills are fallen, our bodies are fallen. The whole person is caught up in this fallenness. I prefer to speak of radical corruption, but the problem is that turns tulip into rulip and ruins the acrostic. But I like the term radical corruption because the meaning of radical historically is that it comes from the Latin word radix, which means root. And the point of radical corruption is that our fallenness is not just a tangential thing or a peripheral thing, an accidental blemish that's merely on the surface of our humanity, but sin is something that goes to the very core of our existence.

It penetrates to the root of the tree. Now here in this text Paul is giving some statements that indicate the seriousness of our fallenness where he says, you were dead in your trespasses and sins. Elsewhere he speaks of being under the power of sin, in bondage to sin, children of wrath, children of the devil, that sort of thing.

It's not a very pleasant picture of natural fallen man. But again he says that this was our previous state, that we were dead in trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked. How did we walk? We walked according to the course of this world. We walked the way the world walks, which is not in the way that God would have us to walk. Earlier Paul had spoken of the fact that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. There's none righteous, no not one. There's none even who does good.

There's none who seeks after God. We are all together unprofitable. We have all gone out of the way. Do you remember that Christians were first called people of the way? But our natural way is not God's way. We walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air. That is, we were being obedient and loyal to whom? To Satan.

He's the prince of the power of the air. And we walked according to the Spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh, of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as the rest. That's a very, very grim portrait of man's fallenness. Now, the next word I believe is the most important word in the New Testament with respect to this doctrine of God's sovereign grace. I think it's so important and I've harped on this theme so many times that in one class I was teaching a woman went to the trouble and the bother to embroider a sign that spelled out this word for me.

This word. The gospel is only good news when we understand the bad news. The gospel is only gospel when we first understand the law and our situation under the law. Here we are, dead in sin and trespasses, walking according to the flesh, the lusts of the flesh and so on, walking like those who are under the spirit of disobedience, children of wrath, but God, but God who is rich in mercy, not but we who still had an island of righteousness, finally lifted ourselves up from our bootstraps or inclined ourselves to change our ways, but man who is powerful morally said no to this wicked course and quickened himself from the dead. That's not what the Bible says. It says, but God who is rich in mercy has made us alive, quickened us, even when we were dead in our transgressions.

Now when I hear evangelical Christians talk about what happens in conversion, I hear two analogies frequently, illustrations, designed to communicate to our minds what really happens. Maybe you've heard them. The first goes like this, that fallen man is not healthy. He's very, very sick. Indeed, he is sick unto death, and he is in the terminal illness ward of the hospital. There's nothing that man can possibly do to heal himself.

He's almost comatose. Death is certain. Unless medicine is administered to that man, he will surely die. So God provides the medicine. God himself pours the medicine on the spoon, and God himself comes to that man in his parched lips in his semi-comatose condition as he's lying on his deathbed, and he puts that spoon right at the lips of the man. But at that moment, the man can either accept the medicine or refuse the medicine. And if he opens his mouth, God will pour the medicine in his mouth, and it will save him.

But if he keeps his lips clenched tightly, then he will not receive the necessary cure. So that analogy shows that man is in very, very serious condition, but he's still alive. What I hear God saying is he comes into the room after the doctor has pronounced that man dead, and he brings him back to life.

The second illustration is like the first. How many times have you heard the evangelists say that fallen man's condition is like a person who does not know how to swim, who has fallen overboard and has been removed a distance from the ship over which he's fallen, and he can't swim, and he's gone down under the water twice, and now he's going under for the third time. In fact, the only thing that's above the surface of the water are the tips of his finger, and unless God throws him a life preserver, he will surely drown. And so God throws the life preserver and positions it perfectly so that the life preserver comes right against the man's fingertips as he's going under the water for the last time.

And all the man has to do is bend his fingers to grasp the life preserver, and God will haul him to safety so that God does 99 percent, but man still has that 1 percent left that he must do before he is born again. What I hear Paul saying here is that God quickens us when we are dead. A better analogy would be that the man has gone under for the third time, and he's at the bottom of the sea, and God dives in the water, and he takes that dead man, that corpse from the bottom of the sea, and brings him out onto the dry land, and he leans over, and he gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and he breathes his life into that man, and that man is restored from the dead. That's what the Bible is saying about the divine initiative, that that first step of quickening from the dead, from the flesh unto spirit, transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, is accomplished by God, not by man. And of course, after God quickens us, then we choose, then we believe, then we embrace Christ, we repent, we do all of those things because we're alive now to the things of God. But the first step, the initiative, the being made alive from the dead, is the work of God and the work of God alone. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works that no one should boast.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Alright, well one of the deepest questions that this raises when we think about this divine initiative, if God is the one who has to rescue that dead man from the bottom of the sea, if God is the one who has to not merely administer medicine, but resurrect a corpse, then what in the world is the purpose of evangelism? Isn't that a question we all think about and raise, that in light of God's sovereignty and in light of the whole concept of predestination, if God has decreed from all eternity that certain people are saved, then certainly those people will be saved with or without my bearing witness, with or without my preaching the gospel. Why then should we be concerned about evangelism?

My favorite story about this took place when I was in seminary when I was studying in a classroom with Dr. John Gerstner at Pittsburgh Seminary, who is the king of the predestinarians, and there were about 20 of us in the class and we were seated in a semi-circle. And he said, alright gentlemen, if it's true that God sovereignly predestines a certain fixed number of people to be saved, and it's by an immutable decree, then why should we be involved in evangelism? And now he left that question hanging in the air and he started to call on the students to answer the question.

And I'll never forget how relieved I was because I was at the extreme right of that semi-circle and he started on the left side. And I thought, oh boy, am I glad I don't have to answer that. So he looks at the first student and he says, well, Mr. So-and-so, what would you say? And he said, gee, Dr. Gerstner, I don't know.

I've always wondered about that myself. And so he struck out. He goes to the next fellow and the next fellow says, beats me. He goes to the next fellow and they were all the way down the line and they were getting perilously close to me and there was this sense of expectation mounting in the classroom. I felt like Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues, where after all these other people, these lesser mortals give answers to these profound questions and they sound okay until Socrates speaks and then he blows everybody away. And I thought, uh-oh, I'm going to be on the hot seat here.

Well, sure enough, they went all the way around the room. Nobody could answer Dr. Gerstner's question. And so he came to me and I'm squirming. So I tried to answer it. And I said, well, you know, I'm sure this isn't what you're looking for, Dr. Gerstner.

I know that there's something far more profound than this that must be the answer to this question. But one small reason why we ought to be involved in evangelism is that, I said, well, you know, well, Jesus commands us to do evangelism, doesn't He? And Gerstner started to laugh, you know, in his diabolical way. He said, of course, Mr. Sproul, what could possibly be more an insignificant reason to do evangelism than that Jesus commands you to, that the Savior of your soul and the Lord God Almighty should honor a command?

And you think that that may be possibly one small reason why you should be engaged? And boy, the more he went on, you know, the smaller I was going in that chair. And I said, whoa, wait a minute.

But I never forgot the point. He said, the chief reason why we do evangelism in light of the sovereignty of God is because God is sovereign. And God has not only sovereignly decreed the end, that is, the goal of the redemption of people, but He also has sovereignly decreed the means toward that end. He has chosen the foolishness of preaching as the means by which He will bring people to salvation, and He has commanded His church to carry out that program of evangelism.

And He said, look, I'll take care of the election, but you do the preaching. You do the witnessing. That is your responsibility. Now, does He need me? No, He doesn't need me. God doesn't need me to fulfill His plan. He could do it without me. He has the power to do it without me.

He could do it without me. But He has chosen to do it with me and by me and through me and with you and by you and through you. So we see here that evangelism is first of all a duty. But second of all, and we need to understand this, evangelism is an unspeakable privilege. What a privilege. I was reading a book on fundraising. I need to read books like that every now and then.

They're dreadfully dull and boring. And this fellow who was writing the book had been the head of the fundraising campaign for Harvard University. And he said there are some fundamental principles you need to understand about fundraising.

And he said the first law is this. You have to be aware of the fact that every human being wants to have a significant part in a significant enterprise. So if you give the people the vision for what you are doing and let them become a part of it, then they will respond because they want to be a part of a significant cause, if you will.

And so of course the author of the book was saying exploit that, use that, keep that in mind. Well, I think it's true though, isn't it, that we want our lives to count. We don't want to be meaningless ciphers in this world. We want to participate in significant things. It would be something if we could say, look at my left hand and say, see that ring? That ring indicates that I played for the Super Bowl champions in 1975. People would look at me and say, really?

Isn't that, wow, that's significant. I don't have a ring like that. All I do in my life, I don't play for the Pittsburgh Steelers. I'm not a member of the president's cabinet. All I do is work every day for the King of Kings. That's all I do. What could be more insignificant than that?

All I get to do in my work, and I get paid to do this, is to work in the most significant enterprise that God has ever created. In the ancient world, the word gospel first meant good message or good news, and communications of critical events was a very, very serious matter to the ancient person, where the armies would go out into battle and not come back for two years, and the people would wait for two years and not know whether they won or lost. So any time there was a pivotal battle, if the forces won or if they lost, they would dispatch a messenger, a marathon runner, who would run back to the hometown. And as he would run into the town, then he would announce the outcome of this decisive battle to the people. And the townspeople would have lookouts posted at high points to scan the horizon to watch for the coming messenger. And they would see the dust start to fly long before they would see a person.

And that would get their attention, and they'd stare into the distance and watch the configurations of the dust cloud. And they would watch, and the first thing they would see would be the way the feet were pumping up and down, as they ran up the mountain and down the other side of the mountain. And those who were good at being lookouts could tell before the messenger arrived whether it was good news or bad news, because the man that was running to declare victory would run with his chest out and his arms pumping and a smile on his face and his feet really going. How many of you are joggers? Do you know what the survival shuffle is? That's when you're going jogging like this and the feet aren't even getting off the ground. You say, yeah, I'm running. I'm still running.

It's the survival shuffle, is what it's called. And I have experienced that more than once. And that's the way guys who came with bad news would approach the city gates, forlorn, discouraged, cast down. But then you see somebody whose feet were flying, his socks were on fire from a distance with good news.

And the lookout would throw his hat into the air and say, we won! And so the prophet says, how beautiful on the mountain are the feet of Him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace. I know that it was God who brought me to Christ, but He used the man who told me the gospel. And I will never forget that man.

And no matter what that man ever does, I will always love him. Because humanly, he cared enough to be the instrument that God was pleased to use to bring me to Jesus Christ. How would you like to know that God used your testimony, your act of charity, your bearing of witness to your neighbor as the catalyst for that person's eternal salvation? Why evangelize? Because it's a command, and it's the highest privilege that God can give to us. Amazing to think about that, isn't it? Our meager efforts are used by God to introduce the good news of the gospel to others.

It really is a privilege. But as we heard today, it first has to be a work of God. All week on Renewing Your Mind, we have aired Dr. R.C. Sproul's classic series, Chosen by God, and we'd like to help you in your study by sending you the entire teaching series. When you give a donation of any amount, we'll send you the two-DVD set. Our telephone number is 800-435-4343, or you can make a request and give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org.

You may have picked up in listening to today's message that R.C. was writing on a chalkboard, and that really was one of his trademarks. And when you receive this series, you'll actually see him writing on that chalkboard. So call us today with your gift of any amount at 800-435-4343. We'll send you the series, Chosen by God. Our web address again is renewingyourmind.org. Well, the doctrine of predestination can only be understood when we rightly grasp who God is. With that in mind, next week we welcome Dr. Stephen Lawson as he teaches his series, The Attributes of God. We hope you'll join us right here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.