Feminism, Pt 2 - The Death of Distinction

What are your Thoughts on Free will

The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed by Anjela Paje of Spokane, WA, from the tape, GC 1301-Q, titled "Bible Questions and Answers Part 19." A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. ©1980. All Rights Reserved.

Question

I wanted your opinion on a specific doctrine that you hear both teachings. You hear the free-will doctrine verses the election doctrine as far as salvation is concerned. And, I wanted your thoughts on that.

Answer

Everybody in this room believes in predestination if they believe the Bible. Right? How many of you believe the Bible? You believe the Bible? That is good! God help the rest of you. You are either slow or heretics, I do not know which.

All right, everybody believes the Bible, right? Then you believe in predestination. You say, “No, I was raised a Methodist.” I don't care what you were raised, you believe in predestination, if you believe the Bible, because in Ephesians 1, it says, He predestined us before the foundation of the world. It says in Revelation, He has written our names in the Lamb’s Book of Life from before the foundation of the world. It uses the word predestination. Everyone believes in that, who believes the Bible. God predetermined who would be saved. Before they were ever born. That's in the Bible. You believe it. So, just accept that you believe it. Now, was not that easy? Absolutely painless. You believe that.

The Bible also says, “Whosoever will may come. Him who cometh to me I will in no wise cast out? You believe that? Okay. So, you believe that, too. So, you believe in man’s volition. Free will is not a biblical term, because man’s will isn't really free. It is bound by sin.

When you became a Christian, did you say to yourself, “Oh! I am elect! I think, I'll get saved.” No. No, you made a decision, didn’t you? You made a choice.

So, the Bible teaches God’s predestining plan, God’s electing plan. It says that over and over, "elect" according to the foreknowledge of God, "elect" in Him. You know, I have many people in that city, he said, you know, in the book of Acts who weren't even saved, yet, but they were already considered His people because they were elect. So, you believe all of that. Then, you believe in man’s choice as well. So, you believe both of those things.

The problem is not whether you believe those. The problem is how you harmonize them, right? You know how you harmonize them? No, you don't. You don't know how to harmonize them. Because there is no way to harmonize them. And, the way that I like to illustrate it is this, Is Jesus God or man? Both. Is He all man? 100 % man? 100 % God? How can He be 200 %? It is a paradox. Who wrote Romans? Paul wrote Romans? God wrote Romans. They alternated verses? Who wrote Romans? Was it Paul’s words from his vocabulary and his heart? Was every word inspired by the Spirit of God? How could every single word come out of the mind of God, and yet, Paul feel that every single word came out of his own heart? You know what is going to happen if you try to synthesize those things? Okay. You know what happened in the early church councils? They got so confused and said, “Okay, he is half God and half man.” And, you know what you have got when you have half God and half man? Nothing. What is half a man? There is no such thing. What is half a God? A nothing. So they come up with heresy. So, on the one hand they said he is all deity and the idea that he was a physical being is just a phantom. And, they came up with a phantom view. And the others said, “No. He was all man, and he is not deity at all. Because they tried to resolve it, they came up with heresy every time. They either said he is all God and not man, or all man and not God, or half and half, and that is a nothing. You have to leave the paradox.

Now, when you come to the writing of the Bible, some say that it can't be all Paul and all the Holy Spirit, so Paul just wrote what the Holy Spirit told him, and it all really the Holy Spirit. Is that true? You have just eliminated the Pauline authorship. But, on the other hand, if you say, “It is all Paul, like the liberals do and none of the Holy Spirit.” Then, you have eliminated God.

Let me ask you another question. Who lives your Christian life? Who? Do you? Do you? I hope you do. Is it just you out there living it up? "Not I, but," what? "Christ liveth in me. Nevertheless," what? "I live. Yet, not I, but Christ." Well, if it is all Christ, then I become a quietist: "Let go and let God." And, you have that movement. On the other hand, if you say, “It's me,” I become a pietist and a legalist. You just have to handle both and leave them in a paradox.

When it comes down to the whole area of sovereignty and will, you got to leave them where they are. And, as soon as you try to resolve them, you get all of the Calvinists who run over to this end of the seesaw and start screaming, “sovereignty, sovereignty! (bang) And, down goes the scale, right? And, they got God doing everything. One guy came to me one day and said, “God even makes you sin.” That is the ultimate...and, then on the other hand, you have got the Armenians who say, “No, no, no, it is all us, it is all us, it is all us.” And, if it is all us, folks, we are really in trouble. Why don’t you leave it alone?

Then you have the Baptists. Oh, the Baptists. And, the Baptists come together in the middle and they say, “Well, it is a little bit of predestination and a little bit of free will. You see, God looks down the road and He says, “Oh, that is what they are going to do. I see, so that is what I will choose..." No! Just leave it alone.

So, the best way to solve that problem is to believe both and let God resolve it. Now, if you could resolve all those problems, you would be God. And, then there would be other problems we have to deal with.

Now, let me tell you something. One of the greatest marks of the inspiration of the scripture is the fact that it has those incomprehensible paradoxes. Because, if a man or men had written that book, they never would have, number one, conceived them; number two, they never would have left them there. They would have resolved them. The fact that they are there and they stand all over the place in the Bible is one of the truest proofs that God of an infinite mind far beyond our own wrote those things. And, the very fact that there are those irreconcilable apparent paradoxes in scripture speaks of divine authorship. God understands how they harmonize. We don’t. And, that means God has a greater mind than we do. Aren’t you glad about that?

SRC

What Is Free Will?

The 3 Most Disturbing Words on TV

Not long ago, Justin Taylor linked an excerpt from a sermon by John Piper. The clip was about Piper’s fears that certain cultural attachments could cause this whole gospel-centered movement to unravel. Here are a few quotes:

• “There’s the giving of zeal for truth in biblical doctrine back and forth among young people, and I’m concerned that there are some loose wires dangling between the majesty of God that is sung about in the services that causes people to soar with the kind of emotional euphoria about the greatness of God and the wires of our daily, practical, detailed lives.” (2:08)
• “They dangle disconnected between big thoughts about God and big appetites for beer.” (2:40)
• “They dangle disconnected between infinite purity of God and the lure of pornography.” (2:46)
• “They dangle disconnected between the majesty of Christ and the carelessly attended default weekend movie, no questions asked, it’s just a thing to do.” (2:53)
• “They dangle disconnected between white-hot, all-satisfying divine holiness and hip-huggers and plunging necklines.” (3:06)

Several friends sent me the clip wondering what I thought. My initial reaction was concern over the collection of issues. There are differing degrees of moral ambiguity between “hip-huggers” and pornography. Other comments could be made regarding movies and beer, but Piper is too wise to simply throw these at us as blanket statements. The modifying phrases, such “big appetites” and “carelessly attended,” should be what catch our attention.

It got me thinking about the concept of “art facing the church” (how we as Christians respond to the culture of creativity around us). Much of our media consumption could be called “careless” or “mindless,” and the effect it has on our souls is little noticed. It reminded me, too, of the three most disturbing words on television.

Good Art Tells the Truth

As I’ve admitted here before, I grew up kind of a TV junkie, and remain to this day an avid apologist for television. I love TV for its ability to tell a complex, many-layered story, likeLost or Mad Men do, or like The X-Files did when I was a kid. Even formulaic shows likeThe Mentalist, which essentially repeat their premise week after week, are telling a larger story about a man haunted by his wife’s murder, wracked with guilt, and in spite of his charming exterior, seething with vengeance.

To me, the problem with our television viewing, like our movie viewing, has less to do with content than it does with our hearts. In our tribe of evangelicals, the conversations tend to focus on lust and sexuality. But there’s far more than sex happening in our hearts when we watch TV and movies.

Let’s take a fairly friendly show like The Amazing Race. I’m not a huge fan but watched a few episodes several seasons back, and I catch glimpses of it now and then. I remember when it dawned on me that the casting directors on the show are the true geniuses. Like any good story, they give you sympathetic characters, underdogs, and villains. It’s with the villains that we need to examine our hearts. There’s almost always a verbally abusive alpha-male, dominating his poor wife or girlfriend throughout the show. It brings out the bile in us, and we hate him. In fact, this sort of slimy weasel character shows up on a lot of reality television.

Now why would casting directors consistently put people on TV for us to hate? You’d think our tendency would be to change the channel when they were on TV. On the contrary, we love the villains. We love to hate them. Having a villain, an enemy, a monster to watch puts us as the viewer on the judgment seat. We’re empowered to stare down our noses at these villains, and the contempt feels great.

The villain role was so successful in reality TV that it gave birth to this whole second-generation of shows like Rock of Love, I Love New York, and Jersey Shore—houses full of contemptible people doing dehumanizing things for a moment of fame. The phrase, “I’m not here to make friends” has become a mainstay of all reality TV shows, indicating the moment when the villain is revealed, the contempt pours out, and things get ugly.

Why do we watch them? Why do we have “big appetites” for contempt? Because it fans the flames of our self-righteousness. The fall has left our souls without gravity, adrift, looking for any indication they can find of their security. Reality TV’s villains present us with the minimal assurance that, no matter how bad things may be, at least we aren’t eating animal entrails for a chance to date a washed-up rock star.

Other Terrors Lurk

There are other terrors that lurk in primetime slots of our national networks. Few Christians would openly defend viewing a show like Rock of Love, but who doesn’t get teary-eyed watching the final moments of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? Never mind that it’s a spinoff of a show about radical plastic surgery, EMHE pulls together a whole community to give a deserving family a new, grandiose home. Who could argue with that?

Which brings me to the three most disturbing words on television: “Move that bus.”

Again, there’s no arguing with the warmth and altruistic sentiments of the show. The families who have been profiled always seem to be wonderful people, I don’t impugn them or the show’s creators with secret evil intentions. But a disturbing thing happens in the final moments of the show. After profiling the family’s suffering, after talking about hardship and perseverance, after recruiting an army of volunteers, the family is brought in front of the new home, which is hidden from view by a large touring bus. They count down and call out those three words, and the reaction can only be described as worship. There are tears and shouting while people fall to their knees, hands raised in the air.

Here it is on bold display: the ultimate hope of most Americans. It’s as though a phantom voice is responding to their suffering with the words, Well done, good and faithful servant. Here is your reward: dreamy bedrooms, big-screen TVs, privacy fencing, and wireless internet. We watch. We weep. And we hope for ourselves. It’s yet another gospel alternative, this one packaged as a heart-warming vision of the way life is “supposed to be.”

Instead of just asking yourself about lust when you watch a film, ask yourself about hope. What’s the hope being proclaimed? What other desires are being stirred? Does it feed your sense of self-righteousness? Does it give you cause for contempt? Or does it give you a call to worship at the feet of the American dream?

Good art tells the truth, and sometimes the truth is ugly. Sometimes people who suffer don’t receive a reward. Sometimes the truth involves sinful people doing sinful things, and in telling a story (even a redemptive story) it’s necessary to talk about that darkness. Sometimes what appears to be good for the heart and the family is actually an idol in disguise. At all points in the spectrum, individual tolerance for media should be constrained by a Scripture-soaked and gospel-informed conscience and by the input and feedback of our community in the church.

Mike Cosper is pastor of worship and arts at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He writes on the gospel and the arts for The Gospel Coalition.

Sexual Sin

Don't Play Games - Tim Conway

The Myth of Neutrality

Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer. You know Hitchens, of course, as one of our era’s most infamous atheists. He is the author of God Is Not Great and makes frequent appearances in the pages of Vanity Fair and Atlantic Monthly. Hitchens was recently interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about his battle with cancer. He told Cooper that despite facing death, he still doesn’t pray and he will not pray. So, he said, we shouldn’t believe any reports about a deathbed conversion; he is secure in his nonbelief. When asked about the reports of groups of Christians who are praying for his health, Hitchens expressed gratitude for their kind thoughts but said that they shouldn’t waste their breath praying to a God who does not exist.

Hitchens, a former socialist turned conservative commentator, has spent the better part of the last ten years as an advocate for what has become known as the “New Atheism.” The so-called “New Atheists” are not just blandly agnostic or politely atheistic. They are militantly atheistic, relentlessly in-your-face with their rejection not just of Christianity but any form of theism. They present a special challenge to American Christians who have long enjoyed a place of privilege: even where Christianity was rejected, it has been given a place of honor among competing religious philosophies. It has had a sort of first among equals approach that has lifted Christianity above the fray and removed it from the kind of criticism that it must now bear.

With the rise of the New Atheism and the willingness of writers like Christopher Hitchens to actively and relentlessly criticize Christianity, we have entered into a new era. I, for one, welcome it: not least because the New Atheists have done us all a significant favor by deconstructing the myth of neutrality. By the myth of neutrality I mean that belief that asserts religion is a personal matter, that it doesn’t matter if you are religious or not, and that being religious or nonreligious makes no real difference in one’s life. The New Atheists have not been satisfied with saying that religion is banal or meaningless. They believe that religion is a menace. Because of this belief, it is not enough for them to not be religious themselves. They work hard to convince others not just of the foolishness of religion but also of its danger.

Unfortunately as our interview with Kenda Creasy Dean revealed, the church is facing an epidemic of unbelief and apostasy among its teens and young adults. As a pastor, I see evidence of this trend first hand: teens flirting with unbelief, thinking about rejecting Christianity because they wonder if it really matters what they believe. When I ask, “why are you considering walking away from what you once professed?”, the response is usually an apathetic shrug. “It just doesn’t matter,” people say. “It doesn’t matter if Christianity is true. I just want to live my life my way without reference to God.”

And this is why we must be forever grateful to the New Atheists. They say, it does matter: it’s a matter of life and death. According to writers like Christopher Hitchens, religion (Christianity, even) is hateful, violent, and dangerous. It is not enough in their view to be apathetic toward it, you must actively resist and reject it; you cannot be neutral.

This is what the Bible says, too. There is no neutrality when it comes to God.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:18-23)

According to the Bible everyone, everywhere has an innate knowledge of God. Everyone knows something about God (specifically, his eternal power and divine nature). That knowledge, however, is suppressed. Humankind attempts to bury that knowledge beneath a sea of false worship. This means that apathetic agnostics and atheists old and new are not merely ignorant of God, they are actively resisting and defying what they know to be true.

I’ve been thinking about this as I work through the Book of Exodus with my congregation. Specifically, I think that this truth gives us insight to how Pharaoh answers Moses in Exodus 5:2. In Exodus 5, Moses and Aaron are making their first appearance before Pharaoh, requesting time for Israel to travel into the wilderness to worship the Lord. In response, Pharaoh asks, “Who is the Lord?” What sort of question is this? Is it a reflection of Pharaoh’s ignorance of his Hebrew slaves’ religion? No, this isn’t ignorance. Pharaoh is defiantly rejecting God. He not only claims to not know the Lord, he refuses to obey his voice and asserts his own authority in response to the prophet’s message from God. Although the original Hebrew lacks emoticons, it’s not too difficult for us to hear Pharaoh sneer as he asks, “Who is the Lord?”

Pharaoh is a clear example for us of those who not only refuse to acknowledge God but actively resist him. Pharaoh’s unbelief is an expression of rebellion against the God that he innately knows. But Pharaoh doesn’t just reject the natural revelation that he can observe in the creation and that is written on his conscience. Pharaoh is also rejecting special revelation from Moses and Aaron. The prophet of God has spoken, giving Pharaoh a direct and personal message. But Pharaoh compounds his guilt by rejecting not just the shadow of knowledge he has of God, but even the clear knowledge.

This defiance of God leads to the brutal oppression that Pharaoh unleashes against Israel. It isn’t enough for Pharaoh to dismiss two crazed prophets of a deity he doesn’t know. He must also persecute and torment the people who did profess to know this God. In so doing, Pharaoh shows us how the “myth of neutrality” gives way to the tragic trajectory of unbelief: Unbelief cannot stop at a mere intellectual rejection of God. Since such intellectual rejection isn’t neutral, you must fill in the vacuum with something to worship. In Pharaoh’s case, he had plenty of idols to worship, but more than anything was his own enthronement of self-determination: rejecting God’s voice and directive he asserts his own authority, and he unleashes his power in defiance of God. That final act of aggression is the end result of intellectual rejection.

If you are toying with belief in God, thinking about rejecting him in order to determine your own life, know that in the end you will not be mildly opposed to Christianity or even apathetic toward it. The path of rejection leads to oppression and persecution. Unable to quiet the persistent testimony of nature and conscience, those who reject God must unleash their rage against God and his people. This is why Christians are persecuted around the world. This is why you are mocked and made fun of by your nonChristian friends. Those who lash out against God and his people are demonstrating how Exodus 5 is still relevant to us today: there is no neutrality with God.