Justice, Mercy, & Grace

It's fair to say that most Christians believe that God is sovereign. People mean by saying they believe in the sovereignty of God that they believe that God has authority over His creation, but as soon as you ask the question about the sovereignty of grace, that's when people start jumping off the boat, because they don't want to believe that God has the authority to grant His mercy and grace as He wills. Yet it was God who said to Moses, I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

So early on in Scripture, God is declaring His sovereignty over salvation. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Monday. I'm Lee Webb, and this week we are pleased to bring you several messages from Dr. R.C.

Sproul's series on predestination. And if you're tempted to jump off the boat, as R.C. mentioned in that brief clip, we urge you to stay on board. We think you'll find this study helpful and encouraging.

Let me give you a little commercial to start off with, because so many people have been asking me about this in the studio audience after the lecture. I have written a book for laypersons on this doctrine of election entitled Chosen by God, and I've been really surprised about that book for this reason. When I wrote it, I felt like I'm probably speaking to the choir here and that the only people who ever will read this book will be people who are already persuaded of the doctrine of predestination, and maybe it will have some value to shore them up and help them go a little deeper into it.

But what has actually happened has completely amazed me. I have literally, and I'm speaking literally now, heard from thousands of people who have told me that the reading of that book persuaded them to change their mind on this doctrine, and that they now embrace the historic Augustinian view of it, and that has pleased me greatly. And what they have said, and this is the feedback I'm getting from the layperson, is that the book has helped them understand many of the difficult questions that attend this doctrine, so I just mentioned that to you in passing. But I mentioned in our last time, as we were looking at Romans 9, that Paul anticipates the biggest objection that people raise against the doctrine of election, namely that this would cast a shadow on the righteousness of God. It would make God seem to be somehow unjust, and Paul raises the question in Romans 9, is there unrighteousness in God?

And he answers his own question by saying absolutely not. And then verse 15 of Romans chapter 9 says this, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion. So then, this is the conclusion, it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. Now, in circles in which I travel and hear about discussions on the doctrine of predestination or of election, sometimes the lingo, the language, the nomenclature that I hear out there is that the Augustinian doctrine of election, notice I'm not calling it the Calvinistic doctrine of election because that raises the hackles on everybody's neck because Calvin has been so maligned.

But again, I want you to know that Calvin really did not write all that much on this doctrine, and what he did write had already been written in greater detail by Luther and earlier by Augustine, and it's more appropriate to identify this historic position with Augustine than it is with Calvin. But so often in the nomenclature of those who discuss this doctrine, they will refer to doctrines surrounding the concept of election as the doctrines of grace. I like that designation because it puts the accent where it belongs, because the focal point of the biblical doctrine of election is the concept of the grace of God.

And let's start there today. What are we talking about when we're talking about grace? Grace is defined most simply by the phrase, unmerited favor. That is, when we receive grace from God, we receive a blessing or a favor or some benefit from His hand that we have not deserved, we have not earned, we have not merited. It comes gratuitously simply from the wideness of His mercy to us. Now again, this is where Paul directs our thinking when the question is raised, is there unrighteousness in God?

And he says, absolutely not, and then he immediately reminds the Roman Christians who are to receive this letter, this epistle from his hand, of what God had already revealed in the Old Testament to Moses, where God said, I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion. That the first thing we have to understand about God's grace is that grace is sovereign. Grace is something that God is never obligated to give. God doesn't owe anybody grace.

Think about this for a moment. If God owed us grace, it wouldn't be grace. It would be justice. Justice is something that is due as a reward or as a punishment for certain forms of behavior. Grace is not required, and God always and everywhere reserves the right of what I call cosmic executive clemency.

This is executive privilege on His part. He can be merciful to whom He wants to be merciful, and He can withhold His mercy or His grace from whomever He decides to withhold that mercy for whatever reason He is inclined so to do in order to accomplish His purposes, not our agenda. Now, Paul, at least in the English translation I'm reading from, asked this question, and we're going to look at it again. Is there unrighteousness in God? Again, is there unrighteousness in God?

And to ask that question is to answer it. The answer is absolutely no. There is no unrighteousness in God. But let me just play with this, tweak this a little bit, and ask the question somewhat differently. Is there nonrighteousness in God?

The answer to that question is yes. There is nonrighteousness, or more specifically, nonjustice in God. Now, notice I didn't say unrighteousness or injustice. I said nonrighteousness or nonjustice.

Now, I'm not just playing games here with this, but I want to take some time to explain what I'm talking about here. I'm going to my blackboard, and I'm going to ask my students out there who are listening on the radio to use their visual imagination now and try to imagine this handsome man going—the people here are laughing. I'm going to the blackboard, which is really a green board, and I have my piece of chalk, and I'm going to draw a circle as if I were going to make a happy face. And I'm going to put this word in that circle, justice, or if you want, I'll put in parentheses inside the circle, righteousness. Now, this circle in which I've put the word justice or righteousness represents a concept, the concept of justness or righteousness, if you will. Now, if we have a category called justice or righteousness, then anything that is not a part of this circle, anything that falls outside of this circle would be what we call nonjustice or nonrighteousness.

That's simple, isn't it? We have these two categories, justice and nonjustice, or righteousness and nonrighteousness. Those are mutually exclusive categories. Those circles cannot overlap or intersect because nonjustice refers to everything outside of the circle or the category of justice.

Are you with me so far? Okay. Now I'm going to put a second circle on my board, only this time I'm going to put that circle on the outside of the perimeter of the first circle so that the first circle is now inside the second circle.

Okay. Now, everything in the second circle, the outer circle, is still nonjustice or nonrighteousness. Now I'm going to do just a little bit more artwork, and this is all you'll have to do now with your imagination, is that I'm going to draw a vertical line at the top of the two circles of the two circles that splits in half the outer circle, just a short little line that divides the top half of the outer circle. I hope that's descriptive enough for you to visualize it. And then at the bottom, I'm going to draw another vertical line like that so that now my outer circle has been divided into two half circles. Looks like a crescent moon.

Now I've done that for this reason. Even though this outer circle represents the category of nonjustice, there are different kinds of nonjustice, two kinds of nonjustice that are most important for our consideration. In the crescent to the right, that is one half of that outer circle, I'm going to write the word injustice. In the other crescent on the left, I'm going to write mercy or grace.

Now if you can visualize this little diagram that I've made for you, let's talk about it for a minute. The whole point of this picture is to explain this simple idea that there are different kinds of nonjustice and different kinds of nonrighteousness. Injustice or unrighteousness, those are categories of evil, and they are absolutely antithetical to righteousness or justice. If God ever did anything that was unjust or unrighteous or unjust, if He committed an injustice against anyone, He would no longer be a righteous God.

He would no longer be good, would He? Now the other side of my second circle has the category of mercy or grace. Is there anything wrong with a holy, righteous God being gracious or being merciful? That would not be evil for a just and righteous being to grant mercy or grace, because grace and mercy are good things.

They're not bad things, whereas unrighteousness is bad. Now if we're going to erase that picture, I'm going to make another picture on the board, and this is going to be real simple. I'm going to write a bunch of stick figures on my blackboard and display my artistic skill or lack of it, where we have a group of, say, seven or eight little stick men on the board, and these figures represent a group of people. Now when we talk about the doctrine of election, we understand that some people receive the grace of election and some do not. So I'm going to just take my piece of chalk and draw a circle around four of these people in the group, and then I'm going to put a circle around the rest. Now in the first circle are the folks who receive grace. The other group receive from God's hand justice. That is, the elect receive the grace of God. The non-elect receive the justice of God.

Am I going too fast? The elect receive grace or mercy. The non-elect receive justice. Now so far has anybody in my picture been a victim of God's injustice or unrighteousness?

Of course not. And this is what Paul is getting at here when he asks the question, is there unrighteousness of God? The question is asked because God's grace is not given equally to everybody. And since God gives a gracious gift to Jacob that He doesn't give to Esau, this seems like it's not fair because the protest goes like that. If I give grace to one person, then I must give grace to everybody else.

Right? Isn't that the way we think? That's the American way.

That's the democratic way. But let's take an analogy drawn from prisoners who have been convicted of murder in the first degree. And the governor of the state decides to execute executive clemency and to pardon one of those criminals. Now that criminal does not deserve to be pardoned. He deserves to be executed. He has escaped justice, and he's received mercy. Now suppose the governor does not choose to pardon the other convicted murderers, and they are punished. Have they been unjustly punished?

Of course not. They receive justice. The other person received grace.

Now I ask you this. Is it necessary if the governor pardons one that he must therefore pardon all? I would ask you, by what law is it so that if one receives mercy, everybody has to receive mercy? That would be true only if justice requires it. But we're not talking about justice here.

We're talking about non-justice. We're talking about mercy. We're talking about grace. And this is what Paul is reminding the readers of Romans very emphatically that God had already said this to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion. And that's what Paul said. This is one of the most crucial concepts to understand about biblical Christianity, and it's one few of us really ever grasp. Because as I've said before, I've never met a Christian who said to me they did not believe in the sovereignty of God. Every Christian will say, yes, I believe in the sovereignty of God. But when you begin to probe people and ask them how they understand the sovereignty of God, it takes about five minutes before there's not very much sovereignty left. People mean by saying they believe in the sovereignty of God that they believe that God has authority over His creation or that He has power over His creation, and those are aspects of God's sovereignty. But as soon as you ask the question about the sovereignty of grace, that's when people start jumping off the boat, because they don't want to believe that God has the authority or the right to grant His mercy and grace as He wills.

And that's what's at stake in this discussion. Now, if God were committing an injustice in all of this, I could understand the wailing and the protest of it all. And if God looked at a world filled with innocent people and decided to save some and damn others, there would be injustice in God.

There would be unrighteousness in God. But only once in all of history has God ever punished an innocent man, and that was only after that innocent man willingly, for the sake of the elect, assumed the culpability of the sin of his people. And once the sin, your sin, my sin, my sin was transferred to Jesus, Jesus in the sight of God is no longer innocent.

He's innocent in and of Himself, but by imputation He's now the quintessential embodiment of evil. In one sense, the most obscene concentration of wickedness that ever occurred on this planet was on the cross when Christ took sins of millions of people on His own person, on His own back. And it was only after that transfer for which He was willing to submit that God punished Him. So in reality, God has never ever punished an innocent person because it would be unrighteous and unjust for God to do that. God doesn't do that. And so when we think about this difficult question of election and of God's choosing, you have to understand that when God makes His decision and He is contemplating those whom He will save or not save, He is contemplating them as fallen people. God's question is not, am I going to rescue some innocent people and allow other innocent people to perish, but His question is, just like the governor's question, am I going to exercise grace and mercy to some guilty people and the rest of the people allow them to receive my justice? You see, the beauty in this is that in God's sovereign election, both His marvelous grace and mercy are manifested, and His relentless commitment to justice is also made manifest. The biblical doctrine of predestination. It perhaps is the most difficult theological concept we have to wrestle with.

It seems to pit what we think is fair against the perfect sovereignty of God. But as we heard Dr. R.C. Sproul explain today, those objections fall flat.

God is never unfair. We're airing portions of this helpful series by Dr. Sproul this week on Renewing Your Mind. I hope you'll be able to join us each day.

R.C. had the rare ability to take complicated theological concepts like this and make them easy to grasp. His series on predestination is no exception. We'd like to send you the complete series. Just contact us with a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries, and you can do that by going to renewingyourmind.org.

And for today, this is an online offer only. Again, the web address, renewingyourmind.org. Every two years, Ligonier Ministries conducts a poll to see what Americans think about Jesus, the Bible, truth, and ethics. The results of our most recent State of Theology survey are in, and they bear out what Dr. Sproul was talking about today. One of the questions we posed was this.

God chose the people He would save before He created the world. Fifty percent disagreed, while 26 percent agreed. That means that a majority of Christians in America think that God limits His sovereignty when it comes to salvation. That's why we emphasize these theological concepts that are greatly misunderstood in the church. We encourage you to explore the results of our most recent poll.

You can do that by going to thestateoftheology.com. And before we go today, here's R.C. with a final thought for us. Grace is an easy concept to define as unmerited favor. But to get that idea from our brains into our bloodstream is one of the most difficult tasks in the Christian life.

And to get it to stay there, to stick there, is even more difficult. And I like to say to my students in the seminary that the minute you begin to think that God owes you mercy or owes anyone mercy, let a bell go off in your brain. Let an alarm buzzer sound, a warning that says to you, tilt, you're no longer thinking about mercy.

Because again, mercy that is required is not mercy. If we think that God owes us grace, we've stopped thinking about grace. We're now thinking about justice. And the other thing I say to my students is I've said to you, don't ever ask God for justice.

You might get it. Because the worst thing that could ever happen to me would be to receive the full measure of God's justice from His hand. The only way I can draw a breath in this world, and the only way I can even hope of going to heaven, is by His sovereign grace. Some argue that if God's election is not based on anything we do, it must be fickle and cruel.

Those are serious accusations. That kind of thinking questions the very goodness of God. So join us tomorrow as R.C. examines the reasons why God gives grace to some and not others. That's Tuesday on Renewing Your Mind. you