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"Foreknown by God" There are two striking and important matters raised in the opening address of this letter. The first is Peter's characterization of these Christians as "strangers." I am going to pass by that because it is raised again more comprehensively in 2:11. We will treat the description of Christians as strangers when we get there. The other is the strongly predestinarian strain in Peter's address. He writes his letter to "God's elect...who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father..." There is more of this to come in the letter, but it bears our notice and our thoughtful attention how artlessly Peter identifies the Christians to whom he writes as "the chosen of God." Now what Peter says is not difficult to understand, however unwilling some may be to accept what he says. He says that these folk were chosen by God for salvation -- for obedience to Christ and sprinkling by his blood -- and that God chose them according to his "foreknowledge." "Foreknowledge" in the Bible is virtually a synonym for predestination or election. In the standard dictionary of NT Greek, the word that appears here and is translated as "foreknowledge" is defined as "predestination." But the term is richer. The word literally means "knowledge beforehand." But, in reference to God, it is that knowledge that belongs to God's omniscience, his perfect wisdom, and his rule over the course of events as they unfold according to his will and plan. For example, in Acts 2:23, we are told that Jesus was handed over to those who executed him "by God's set purpose and foreknowledge..." Divine foreknowledge is not merely knowledge ahead of time of what is to transpire, it is knowledge based on the divine plan and purpose. As the Lord said through Isaiah,
God knows all things, all events, all history ahead of time, because he has determined the course of events and because history unfolds according to the counsel of his will. The Bible says this hundreds of times and in language so clear as to be impossible of misunderstanding. We see but one point along the road and understand what we see even there but dimly. He sees the entire road, from its beginning to its end, and every detail at every point with all of the connections linking one to another. What are past, present, and future to us, are all present to him -- he is the God who "inhabits eternity." But, the term "foreknowledge" may also carry in itself the idea of "love." As you know, often in the Bible, the word for knowledge is used to convey intimacy and affection, a deeper relationship. For example, it is often used as a euphemism for a sexual relationship. Adam "knew" his wife, Eve, and the result was a son, Cain. And when the Lord says to Israel in Amos 3:2, "you only have I known of all the families of the earth," he is saying much more than that he "knows about" Israel. He knows about all mankind and every nation, but He knew Israel alone. That is, he loved Israel, he chose Israel, he brought her into covenant with himself. In that sense he knew her as he knew no other nation on earth. And this sense is carried over into the idea of foreknowledge. Long beforehand, even before the foundation of the world, God had chosen his people, these very folk who were Christians in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, etc. He had chosen them for salvation by Christ and his Spirit, had set his love upon them, and had determined that he would bring them into fellowship with himself in due time. If words and sentences mean what they say, that is what these words and this sentence means. As Calvin summarizes it: "God knew before the world was created those whom he had elected for salvation." Now, most of you are well aware that, plain as these statements may seem to be -- and there are still many more such statements in the Bible even more blunt in the assertion of God's having chosen beforehand those who are saved -- there has existed through the ages a great controversy over these statements and this doctrine of divine election. From the beginning it was seen -- just as Paul, in Rom. 9 said it would -- it was seen that if we are to believe that God chose beforehand whom he would save, then, it follows by a rigorous necessity that he chose not to save others. Does this not impeach either God's justice or his goodness? What is more, if God has chosen beforehand who is to be saved, does that not make human decision and human freedom inconsequential? If the decision was God's what difference does man's choice really make, for who can resist God's will? These have seemed to be weighty objections to a great many Christians through the ages and there has hardly been a time in the history of the church in which Christians have not been divided and separated from one another over this doctrine of divine election and particular grace. In the time of Augustine, a great champion of sovereign grace and election, of God's choosing those who would be saved, there was a strong reaction against the doctrine and for centuries afterward the church taught a hybrid doctrine of salvation in which the final and decisive factor in the salvation of any man or woman was the free, unaided and unfettered decision of the human will. God's part was to make salvation possible; man's part was to choose to make that salvation an actuality in his own case by believing in Christ and by doing certain pious works. The Reformation of the 16th century marked a return to Augustine's doctrine of sovereign and particular grace, divine love pitched on particular individuals from eternity past and bringing them to life in Christ. On this score there was no difference and no division between Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Knox and Tyndale and Latimer and Ridley. They were all Augustinians to the man and resolutely and enthusiastically so. But soon thereafter another strong reaction set in, rejecting this sovereign grace and love of God and choosing instead a doctrine of salvation that was, again, a mixture of God's work and man's choice, with man's choice the decisive factor distinguishing between the saved and the lost. These latter were the Arminians, the followers of a Dutch theologian, Arminius, who lived into the early years of the 17th century and who rejected the Reformers' doctrine of election and foreknowledge. The 17th century, the century of the Puritans, saw great running controversies on the subject of the source and ultimate cause of salvation, with the Puritans championing sovereign grace and the election of God and their opponents laying stress instead on man's free will and decision as ultimately decisive. In the 18th century, the Great Awakening, the great revival was broken in two over these same doctrines and the historic parties surfaced again, the Wesleys following Arminius and Whitefield, John Newton, Augustus Toplady, and Jonathan Edwards following the Reformers and Augustine in their interpretation of the biblical texts. And so it has come down to the present day. If you want to start a fight, just raise the issue of election and foreknowledge in a room full of Christians. Francis Schaeffer believed in divine election and sovereign grace, C.S. Lewis did not. Charles Spurgeon, the greatest preacher of the 19th c. and Martin Lloyd Jones in the 20th c. preached sovereign grace with power and effect in their long ministries but Billy Graham is an Arminian and thinks the ultimate cause of anyone's salvation lies in the decision of that individual and not in a choice God made before the foundation of time. Lloyd Jones tells of a day, a short while after he had come to see the truth of divine election and sovereign grace, that in the matter of salvation all things are under the rule of God's eternal throne, he had a discussion about these things with his brother Vincent when they were both on holiday at the home of their Uncle. The argument began after lunch, was still going when tea was served, and finally concluded late in the evening, but only after Vincent had lost his voice! What is more, people feel so deeply, so viscerally, about these questions that you will find their perspective completely warped by their unwillingness to give any ground to the other side. Many scholars of Augustine, for example, are pained by the strength of his advocacy of divine election and predestination, but you will run into ardent Arminians who cannot bring themselves to admit that the great Augustine should have held such views and argue with great passion that he has been misunderstood all these centuries and never meant to teach that salvation is entirely God's gift and God's choice and is given to those God loved before the world was made and to no others. It is the sign of an invincible prejudice that makes Augustine an Arminian! There are many Arminians today who think very highly of Charles Spurgeon and would hotly resent the suggestion that he believed what Augustine and Luther and Calvin believed about divine grace and election being the ultimate explanation for any individual's salvation. They think Spurgeon is on their side because they know Spurgeon only from editions of his printed sermons published after his death in which Spurgeon's ardent advocacy of sovereign grace had been edited out! Certain of his editors couldn't stand the thought of Spurgeon's sermons spreading the doctrine of sovereign grace and so they changed the sermons accordingly. Spurgeon had no sympathy with Arminianism at all, but you wouldn't know that from many of his sermons that were published in altered form after his death. Here is the real Spurgeon:
Controversial as this doctrine has been and remains, let me remind you of several important considerations. 1. The greatest theological minds of the church have been champions of election and sovereign grace and often became so after first holding other views. Augustine's study of Romans led him to champion divine election. Calvin had little about election in his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion in its first edition, but after his further study of Romans the doctrine of sovereign grace became a major theme of the Institutes. Luther, Knox, Owen, Rutherford, Edwards, Hodge, Warfield and so many others all agreed that divine election was the clear, unmistakable teaching of Holy Scripture and the only doctrine that could be held consistently with the other teachings of the Bible. They were driven to this doctrine by what they held to be the clearest teaching of the Bible and the facts of Christian experience. I offer this as my own observation, but as some demonstration of the fact that these men were reliable interpreters of the Bible while many others have not been. The observation is this: You will run into many Christian people who used to be Arminians but who are now strong believers in the sovereignty of divine grace. But you will almost never run into Christians who used to believe in election but now do not. And the reason for that is this: the doctrines of election and God's sovereign and distinguishing grace lie on the face of the pages of Holy Scripture. Read the Bible with an honest heart and chances are you will soon not be able to evade the force of this teaching. It comes too often, in too many ways, too plainly, too emphatically to miss. 2. Two thousand years of theological history has proved beyond doubt that the alternative to the doctrine of divine election and sovereign grace is not some other form of salvation by grace, but some form of synergism, in which God and man cooperate in salvation and in which the final decision is left in man's hand, not God's. All alternatives finally reduce to the sovereignty of man in salvation. This is destructive of everything the Bible teaches about God, about salvation, about the bondage and death of man in sin, and about the thrill and amazement at the grace of God that ought to be found in a Christian's heart. For example, in regard to foreknowledge, the Arminian maintains that what God foreknows is whether or not a man or woman with unaided will will choose to believe in Christ. God looks down the corridors of time to see in advance who will believe and who will not. Those whom he sees will choose to believe in Christ he chooses. In that scheme -- a travesty of biblical interpretation by the way -- God chooses those who first choose him and so the real choice is not made by God but by man. God's election is only a ratification of man's choice of God, and at the decisive point, at the point where the greatest difference is made, man is his own savior. The difference between those who are lost and those who are saved does not lie in God but in the man himself. Christ made salvation possible, in this scheme, but when he finished his work he had saved no one, and, what is more, he has done the same thing for the man who is now in hell as the one who is now in heaven. But, the Bible doesn't say that God foreknows faith or anything else. It says that God foreknows his people and whom he foreknows, he predestines to be saved. He doesn't know something about them, ahead of time, he knows them ahead of time! Paul rests the hope of believers on the sovereign, conquering, immutable, and invincible love of God for his chosen people. "If God is for us, who can be against us?" But in these other views, if the truth be told, the sentence should read, "If we are for God, who can be against us?" But any honest Christian knows that resting his hopes on the strength and certainty of his own faith in God amounts to leaning on a broken reed. It was a man who believed ardently in divine election who wrote "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see." In the Arminian scheme, consistently held -- and thankfully, few hold it consistently -- grace is not really amazing and the man was not found. He found God, God didn't find him. God created a general possibility of salvation, reported the same to the world, and then left it to each man to decide whether he would avail himself of the opportunity of salvation or not. "Here it is, if you want it. It's up to you." No one who thinks that about salvation would write "Amazing Grace." Nor would he write: Now, that, strange to say, was written by an Arminian. But Charles Wesley wrote it very soon after his conversion, before he was educated in the dispute about grace and election. His hymn is a perfect account of what Christians know to be true about the dawning of spiritual life in their hearts -- it was God's work in them and God's gift to them and not their own decision. But what a Christian heart says about its own salvation and what it says when standing on its feet in debate can be two different things. 3. The doctrines of election, foreknowledge, and sovereign grace are doctrines for the encouragement and contemplation of Christians. They are, as the Bible itself teaches, high mysteries. A great deal of harm and foolishness has resulted from men exercising their tongues and their pens on these subjects before having been thoroughly established in the foundations of human sin and justification by faith in Christ. Election is no doctrine for the novice. As John Bradford, the English bishop and martyr of the 16th century, once wrote, "Let a man go to the grammar school of faith and repentance, before he goes to the university of election and predestination." 4. Fourth, the doctrine of election, of sovereign grace, of God's choosing man rather than man choosing God, has been so strongly objected to, as we said, because it has seemed to so many that it reflects poorly on God and renders null and void the freedom of man, the integrity of man's will. Now, as an aside, this is really an argument for these doctrines because Paul said in Romans 9 that those were the very objections he anticipated people having to his teaching about grace and election. That is to say, only a doctrine susceptible to objections on those grounds is the biblical doctrine, the doctrine that Paul taught. No one has ever objected to Arminianism on those grounds. It is a system precisely designed to avoid those objections. If, as they say, God made salvation a possibility for everyone and then leaves it up to man to choose to be saved or not, no one can think or would say that God is unfair -- he treats everyone the same -- and no one would think that human freedom is nullified. Human freedom, in this scheme, is the supremely decisive factor. But that all leads inexorably to the conclusion that Paul was not an Arminian, for he knew people would object to his teaching with the very objections that Arminianism is designed to avoid! But, the Bible makes it absolutely clear that divine election and sovereign grace do not, in any way, cast reproach on the character of God. He is pure, holy, just, and gracious and he is that in all his ways. Nor, does this doctrine of divine foreknowledge and election nullify human freedom. Man is free to do as he pleases, his choices matter, he is responsible for them. All of this the Bible affirms and we must believe. Many things can be said in the explanation of these things. Paul offers some responses and explanations in Romans 9. He reminds us that we are speaking of God loving his enemies, and being merciful to some. It is not a case of justice. No one is getting less than he deserves, even if some are getting much more than they deserve. And he reminds us that we creatures, sinful, small, foolish, finite as we are, are in a very poor position to pass judgment on the character and the actions of Almighty God, the Holy and Just God, who never does nor can do anything but what is perfectly right! "Shall the clay say to the potter, Why did you make me thus?" But, this morning, it is enough to say that the Word of God teaches both that God has loved and chosen his people for salvation before the foundation of the world and that human beings are fully responsible for their lives and that God does not treat any man unjustly. We may not know precisely how to harmonize all of this -- of course we do not. These are the deepest things we know and are mysteries far beyond our powers of comprehension. But we believe all of this to be true because the Bible so teaches. The Bible never seeks to reconcile sovereign grace and human freedom, for the Bible never regards these two truths as enemies of one another. You don't have to reconcile friends. But I wish to be and want you to be as much champions of God's goodness and justice and of man's true liberty as any Arminian. I want you to care as deeply as the best of those Christians do for the honor of God and the true freedom of man. I want you to have a love for and to have a respect for the freedom and responsibility that God has given to man second to no Arminian. But, I also want to be and want you to be champions of the sovereignty of divine grace and of salvation by the grace of God. I want you to think of Christ, as we are taught to think of him in Holy Scripture, as coming into the world precisely to redeem the people the Father had given to him, to love those the Father had given to them and to love them to the end. There are mysteries here -- to be sure. God is very great; his thoughts and ways are far above our own and past finding out and human life and its relationship to God's rule is very mysterious. But so the Bible teaches and the longer you ponder these things the more you will come to believe that nature, that reality itself, that the nature of God and the reality of man in sin absolutely require that God, and God alone, could be the Savior of his people, that he and he alone could be the reason why anyone is saved, and that man, dead in his sins as he is, enemy of God as he is by nature, could never and would never be saved unless God, with divine grace and divine power, should save him. I want you to believe in your bones and to confess with all your heart that your life is in God's hands, that the Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth stooped to love you! that you love him because he first loved you, that you owe him everything, absolutely everything for the hopes you have of everlasting life, and that you are secure in those hopes precisely because they rest not on the strength of your faith, but on the immutable, eternal, and unconquerable love of God for you. That love that sent Christ into the world for your salvation and then the Holy Spirit into your heart to make that salvation known. These doctrines of election and foreknowledge and predestination exalt God and humble man before God. They make all men low before God but high and strong before kings. They establish everything in our lives on the eternal rock of one absolute sovereign, to whose will there is no limit, but they level all other sovereigns in the dust. They render Christ great, as the King of Love, and the believing sinner infinitely secure in him. These doctrines establish the highest conceivable motives to obedience -- the infinite God loved you, before the world was made, you, your name was engraved on his heart --. They extinguish fear, make victory certain, inspire with enthusiasm, and make the heart and arm strong. [A. A. Hodge, Lectures in Theology] You stop and ponder that if you are a believer in Christ you were chosen by God before the world was made, you were foreknown by him, loved by him, and that in all the work of grace in this world, and in all the work of Jesus Christ who came into the world, you were in his view. And, I tell you, a whole world, bright, brilliant, beautiful, will open before your eyes! Here is Charles Spurgeon telling how it was for him.
After all, what does all of this controversial teaching amount to but this: he loved me and gave himself for me! |
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