It’s strange what verses bring you encouragement. Sometimes they are utterly unexpected and seem to have on the surface a point that isn’t encouraging, and yet as I dwelt on this verse, which may not strike you the same way it struck me, it wound up having a very profound effect on lifting me up this morning. I’m reading through Exodus and the 10 plagues are happening and God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart so that he does not let the people go. The last plague is the Passover, where if you’re a believer, you put the blood on the door and the angel of death passes over, and if you’re not, you lose your firstborn son.

The Owner of Life

The summary statement after he describes the Passover in Exodus 13:15 is this:

For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt . . .

It was just so blunt. So I thought, my eldest is Carsten, and if I’d have been an Egyptian living out on the outskirts of town, he’d be dead. I’d also be dead because I was a firstborn son. In some houses the oldest son died, the father died, and the grandfather died. God killed them, it says. He just killed them. They didn’t even know what was happening. Now, as I reflected on that, I thought, “How does that sit with people today, to preach a sermon on that text?” The Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. Make that your sermon text. How would that sit with people? I think there would be an outcry of, “Why?” or, “He has no right to do that,” or, “How can you love a God who kills all these little babies and these teenagers and these dads and these granddads?”

Then I thought, “Now, life is entirely a gift of God.” God owns life. God gives and God takes. “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” Job said. It all depends on where you start. If you start from the centrality of man and our concerns and our rights as we perceive them and our preferences, the will rises up against God to intrude upon that, but if you start at the other end, namely with the creator God who has absolute creator rights over what he makes, there’s no objection. God does not owe anybody 70 years, right? I mean, who could say, “You owe me 70 years. You owe me 30 years. You owe me two years. You owe me”? He doesn’t owe anybody anything, and therefore, it isn’t murder when God takes the life of a person. It’s simply taking back what he gave in a time that he deems wise. It just revolutionizes your whole way of looking at the world if you let a text like that affect you.

That’s what was happening to me this morning. I had to ask again, “Do I believe in God? Do I believe in God or do I really believe in a big strong human in heaven who better live by the rules, my rules, and treat me equally?” One might think, “I mean, he can have a little more authority and a little more glory,” but do I believe in God or do I believe in humanity expanded to the nth degree? I just put my head down and I said, “Father, you are God.” I wrote to my son. Carsten wrote me an email today and got excited because he got accepted to a PhD program and he was interviewing for a teaching job in Japan and he doesn’t know what to do.

I just was talking about the will of God and then I just shared with him this moment in my life this morning, and the way I ended was that it is a comforting and sweet thing to say, “God is God.” Yes, just yes to the God-ness of God. He can take my son. He can take me. He can take my wife. We have absolutely no claim on God whatsoever that he should behave in any particular way of preservation of life on earth. It’s a sheer free gift that he can take back anytime he wants according to his wisdom.

A Summary of the Series

What I’m going to do is review quickly where we went last week and then come to the end with some practical questions, realizing that with a topic that’s huge we’ll leave some things unanswered, but maybe there’ll be time for questions too at the end.

What we did last week was get right down to the issue of the providence of God over individual human wills specifically in regard to salvation. I mean, that is the nub of the issue. We can talk about the providence of God in nature as wind blows and we can talk about the providence of God in nations and we can talk about the providence of God in larger groups and then we can bring it right down to the human individual. Does he actually providentially rule the individual will? Then you can bring it right down to the most important act of will, the will to believe and be saved. Does he control that?

Now, what we found is that there are scriptures that point to a universal desire of God for people to be saved, texts like this:

[He] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Or 2 Peter 3:9 says:

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

Or Ezekiel 18:23 says:

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?

God’s Decisive Choice

Those three texts would be texts that say God wants everybody saved. God loves everybody and his saving will is toward everybody. Then you have texts like these:

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.

So who comes to Jesus? All that the Father gives to him.

John 6:44 says:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.

Acts 11:18 says:

When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.”

Acts 13:48 says:

And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.

There is something behind this human action of belief, namely an appointment to eternal life.

Acts 16:14 says:

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

That’s what happened to everybody who believes. Second Timothy 2:24–26 says:

And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

That’s a rich text because it shows that a good way to do exorcisms — that is, to free people from the bondage of the devil — may not always be a confrontation that gets the devil’s name and then rebukes him in the name of Jesus. That’s real, but here you have another strategy for helping people escape from the snare of the devil who has held them captive to do his will. How? Well, don’t be quarrelsome, be kind, teach, be patient, be gentle, correct those who oppose. So it’s a loving teaching model. Isn’t that good news that if you’re faithful in being a certain kind of person and boldly speaking truth with correction into the life of people that they can actually be freed from the snare of the devil who has held them captive? This is why Neil Anderson talks about truth encounters as well as power encounters. I don’t think he would deny the validity of a power encounter.

I’ve been through a few power encounters and, nevertheless, there are truth encounters. This is one tonight, and they happen every Sunday morning, and they happen when you are in Bible studies, and so on. But the point here is God grants repentance. God may. He’s sovereign. He may grant repentance.

Understanding God’s Two Wills

Now, those two sets of texts — the first three that I looked at and these — set up the problem that we addressed last week and the problem was, can you think of God properly as having two wills that seem contradictory, a will for everybody to be saved and a will only to save some effectually? Now, my whole argument last week was that’s exactly the way we have to think about God and that was my first evidence. Those sets of texts are the first evidence. I had seven evidences and I think we got through four or five of them. So I want to run through them quickly to refresh you.

What I’m doing is trying to give you biblical reasons for believing that whether you can explain it philosophically or not, the Bible compels us to say that in a coherent divine, non-psychotic, non-schizophrenic God, he will some things that he forbids and he refuses to do some things that he would like to have done and could do. So that’s evidence number one.

God’s Sovereign Decree

Here is the next batch of evidences, namely the use of the phrase “will of God.” This is just to help us get the categories. On the one hand, the term “will of God” is like:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21).

So here clearly, some people do it and some people don’t. If you do it, then things will go well, and if you don’t, they won’t. Jesus also says, “Whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50). Some do it, some don’t. So the “will of God” here is the 10 commandments or the Sermon on the Mount or what moral things God wants to have done and tells us to do, commands us to do. There’s some other texts there about that aspect of the will of God.

On the other hand, there’s a whole use of the phrase “will of God” that is very different, all these texts. We’ll just take out one or two. Take Acts 18:21:

But on taking leave of them he said, “I will return to you if God wills” . . .

In 1 Corinthians 4:19, he says:

But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills . . .

And 1 Corinthians 16:7 says:

I do not want to see you now just in passing. I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits.

Now, that’s a very different use of the phrase “will of God” because here, that’s sovereign. Paul says, “My purpose is to come to see you, but how can I know if I’m going to live or die?” That’s what it says down here in James. It says:

You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes (James 4:14).

That use of the will of God is a sovereign accomplishment of what he decrees. I will get home tonight or I will not get home tonight if the Lord wills. See, that’s really different than saying, “Those who do the will of God please God,” because there you cannot do it or you could do it. You don’t have any choice in this one. This one’s going to be done. The will of God will be done. So “the will of God” is used in two different ways in the Bible, one — his moral will by which he commands what is ethically fitting for humans to do — and the other is a sovereign will by which he accomplishes whatever comes to pass, and there you have the tension again. He sometimes commands something that he then sovereignly forbids to happen, he forbids something that he sovereignly causes to happen. You have to find a way to handle that in your head because people will make fun of that when you say it. They’ll say he’s a schizophrenic or whatever. In order to believe it, you just need to see it enough in the Bible and then realize that God is God and not man.

A Hardened Heart

Now, that’s evidence number two. Here’s number three. These are texts like the one in Exodus where He says, Moses says to Pharaoh or God says to Moses, “Go into Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, let my people go that they may serve me.’” So what’s the will of God through the mouth of Moses? The will of God is, “Let my people go,” but we’ve already seen in Exodus 4:11:

When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.

That runs all through those chapters, from chapter four to 14. Just read it. It’s a mind boggling story. There’s no wonder that Paul quoted it in Romans 9. So he says, “Let them go, Pharaoh.” That’s the moral will of God and he will not let them go. God hardens his heart, so will not let them go. That’s the sovereign will of God.

Here’s another example. Isaiah 42:18 says:

Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see!

He commands them to hear and look and see. It’s command. But look at this word in Deuteronomy 29:2–3:

And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: “You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders. But to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.

They are responsible to hear and look and see. They are responsible to do that. He’s commanding them to do that and he’s not giving it in this case here. So the moral will is look, hear, see, believe, and the sovereign will is he withholds the gracious overcoming of their heart and blind heart. Here’s an example from Jesus. Mark 1:15 says:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.

He calls them to repent and believe. That’s their responsibility. We will be judged for not repenting and not believing, but he says something about his parables here that’s puzzling:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11–12).

There is a judicial blinding or hardening here. Even though he calls everyone to repent and believe, here he is taking a strategy in his earthly life that he knows is going to result in people not perceiving and not understanding and not being forgiven. So here you have the moral will of God — repent and believe the gospel — and here you have the sovereign will of God.

God’s Restraint of Evil

This is number four, which is a little different. These texts show that God has the right and ability to restrain sin in secular people. We sometimes think, “Well, God doesn’t do anything out there outside the church,” and that’s their will that he’s just given them up, but what we’re going to see here is the right and the power of God to intrude into the wills of secular people to keep them from sinning, and then we’ll see an example where he doesn’t do that precisely so that he can judge them. This is Genesis 26. Remember Abraham down there saying his wife is his sister and getting her in big trouble so that the king of Elimelech almost has sexual relations with her but doesn’t, and then he finds out the truth. This is what God says to him after he finds out the truth:

Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her (Genesis 20:6).

Here is God involved in the life of a pagan king, keeping his sin from being multiplied in a gross way that he himself would even disapprove of and God would be very angry with. So God can do that. God can do that. He can do it with abortionists. He can do it with unbelieving congressmen and mayors and presidents and representatives. Therefore, I always pray at two levels. We’re told to pray for our leaders in 1 Timothy 2. I find it difficult to pray for secular rulers. My first prayer is always that they would be saved. I don’t know if the ones I’m praying for sometimes are saved. I couldn’t tell you for sure where the spiritual condition of somebody like Paul Wellstone is or our governor or our mayor or whatever.

Start there, but I don’t think our prayers are meant to end there. That’s primary. I think we are called upon to pray for good and just laws to be made by people who aren’t believers. If you want a biblical warrant for praying those kinds of prayers, this would be one. If you’re persuaded, say, that Bill Clinton is not a believer — though he certainly professes to be a believer — you can also pray, “Lord, keep him from . . .” and then whatever you think is unjust that he might do or take some, I mean, whatever side you might be on in the debates going on in the budget and you believe God’s best for our country is that it go this way, you can pray that those kinds of things be urged upon our congressman. That’s one side.

Here’s the other side. Do you remember Eli, the old priest that little Samuel grew up with and who toward the end of his life had such a tragedy with his boys? Let’s read about that here:

Now Eli was very old, and he kept hearing all that his sons were doing to all Israel, and how they lay with the women who were serving at the entrance to the tent of meeting. And he said to them, “Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all these people. No, my sons; it is no good report that I hear the people of the Lord spreading abroad. If someone sins against a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?” But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death (1 Samuel 2:22–25).

In the first place, God had restrained a king from sinning against him. But here he refuses to restrain them because he’s already done with them. They’ve crossed the line. He’s going to judge them and so it’s over.

Now, the point there is that in this case, God’s sovereign will accorded with His moral will, right? Thou shalt not commit adultery. So God restrains him and doesn’t let him commit adultery. Here, God’s sovereign will is the opposite of his moral will because it says they would not listen to the voice of their father. So that’s a disobedience to the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt honor thy father and my mother.” So these boys were dishonoring and disobeying their father and, of course, they were disobeying the eighth command, which says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The reason they were in spite of all their father’s admonitions is because the Lord had refused to do this sovereign work. So His sovereign will was that they go on and make their sin complete and come into judgment.

Question and Answer

Question about that? I’m not asking you to figure this out, how this can be. I’m asking you to see whether it is so biblically or not. If we can figure it out, that’ll be good, and if we can’t, we will live another way. Did I see your hand, Andy?

How can you keep from throwing up your hands in the thought that God is so completely arbitrary?

The answer is to focus on texts that teach about his purposefulness and his wisdom. Behind all these choices that God is making is an inscrutable wisdom. Here’s a good text to meditate on. Romans 11:33–36 says:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Paul writes that doxology at the end of three chapters of inscrutable providence. I mean, you read Romans 9–11 and you see the way God is working by hardening the Jews until the full number of the Gentiles comes in and then when the full number of the Gentiles comes in, he takes the veil off of Israel, and so unbelief is leading to the belief, which is leading to belief. It’s all so unlike the way we would do it. At the end, he does not say, “Phooey on an arbitrary God.” He says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”

So my answer is it’s a very good question. It’s absolutely essential that we get this, that as you ponder the inscrutable choices of God, why does he give up on these boys and come back again and again to a Saul of Tarsus, or to David, or to you and me? The answer is inscrutable, divine, purposeful wisdom. He has reasons that are hidden. Deuteronomy 29:29 says:

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

The least I get from that verse is that there are some things that God keeps for himself. So please, if you feel like Andy and say, “This really looks arbitrary,” consider this. Now, the word “arbitrary” I take to mean “willy-nilly,” “whimsical, not having good reason or good purpose. I don’t think God ever acts like that, though it may look like it at times.

Delight and Destruction

These two last verses are evidence number five and evidence number six for the fact that there are these two kinds of wills in God. Deuteronomy 28:63 says:

And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you.

Now, that’s if they turn away from him. Now, the reason I include that here is because this word delight, I believe, is the word in Ezekiel 18:23 and Ezekiel 18:32, where it says, “He does not delight in the death of the wicked.” So if you only have one verse, you say, “God has no delight in the death of the wicked,” and you bump into a verse like this and he says, “You turn away from me and go after other gods, all the curses are going to come upon you and I will delight in bringing ruin upon you.” So you can say, “Okay, well, the Bible is just full of contradictions.” That’s one way to go. Or you can say that there is a sense and a level at which he delights in judgment, and there’s a sense in which he does not delight in judgment. I’ll bet you could think of analogies. They wouldn’t be perfect, but you can think of analogies in your life where there is some sense of rightness about judgment coming down on sin and there’s another sense in which you wish it weren’t happening.

This is Lamentations 3:32–33:

Though he cause grief, he will have compassion
     according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
     or grieve the children of men.

You see, in the context of Lamentations, he is afflicting sorely the apple of his eye, Jerusalem. He has brought them to horrid judgments. I mean, they’re boiling their own children, and it says here he doesn’t do this from his heart. Now, what that suggests to me in this issue of the will of God is that he does some things from his heart and he does some things not from his heart. The only words that I can find are that there seem to be depths perhaps of willing or kinds of willing, whatever helps you most. If it looks like he’s willing one thing and saying that it shouldn’t happen, then maybe he’s willing it in one sense from his heart and in another sense not from his heart, and he has reasons for why he would do something one way and not another way.

Against Hyper Calvinism

Now, this is a little book and we probably don’t have any yet in our bookstore. Ian Murray gave me this. It’s called Spurgeon Versus Hyper Calvinism" href="http://www.desiringgod.org/topics/calvinism">Calvinism-Battle-Preaching/dp/0851516920/ref=sr_1_4?crid=14NPVTZ2K007P&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.VH0ecvmy9e2bZxJYuRKm_5dfQjWpCCXLHQhHVs-TXF2ij1O-kMgG6wqne8FDr6beXA1fzejQL43BeOFu08JCcHdQLCV6IpgHlcreYlu0ZFp6HNEcTIqY3sTIbms0PnmYyiKzykBGb5opB-ZZ8OwzEw.JUVksDT2R2WSGDPuyuGHZKDac24jb5nxMiziHCJckFM&dib_tag=se&keywords=spurgeon+vs+calvinism&qid=1722548588&sprefix=spurgeon+vs+calvinis%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-4). Hyper Calvinism is not real, robust Calvinism, I used to think it meant that a real Calvinist must be a hyper Calvinist. That’s not right. A hyper Calvinist is a very technical phrase that means you believe that nobody should be called to repentance unless they give some evidence of being elect or another way to say it is it not the universal duty of human beings to repent and believe because you can’t make something the duty of someone who’s not elect to believe. That’s hyper Calvinism. It’s dead wrong and it’s unbiblical, and Spurgeon was not a hyper Calvinist. He was a biblical Calvinist.

There are quotes at the end of this and there’s one here called “The Free Agency of Man and God’s Desire for the Salvation of All.” It’s by TJ Crawford, the professor of divinity at the University of Edinburgh in 1875. It was so helpful, just five or six pages. Let me read you just a key paragraph:

It may be alleged, however, that the invitations of the gospel besides being expressive of the undisputed fact that whosoever complies with them shall obtain the offered blessings but they are also indicative of a desire on the part of God that all sinners to whom they are held out these invitations should comply with them, and how (it may be asked) can such a desire be sincere if it be the purpose of God to confer only on some sinners that grace by which their compliance will be secured?

He simply argues in these six pages, whether we can understand it or not, that is in fact the case. The invitations of God to people to believe, His holding out his hands all day long like it says in Romans 10, is sincere. Even though at another, and here this is my language, at another level he’s deciding who will and who won’t receive his invitations.

An Issue with Metapjysics

Can you handle that, that both are true? I can’t remember whether it was in the large group or in a small group afterwards I said this, so I’ll say it again even though it might have been in the large group. It has helped me when people make pronouncements about what is possible for God in these matters to think of analogies that we all believe and seem impossible. For example, my guess is every believer in this room believes that God is hearing every prayer that’s being prayed right now everywhere in the world.

How many would that be? 50 million, maybe, probably more. Those are prayers that are going up to God right now simultaneously. Let’s bring it down and say 30 million. Say 30 million prayers are being processed by the mind of God right now. According to the scriptures, He is a faithful high priest who is not unable to sympathize with us and thus encourages us in that confidence to come to the throne of grace. So we are to come with the expectation that he will sympathize, feel with us, weep for those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice.

Now, you have 30 million psychological states entering into the mind of God right now. Millions of them are weeping their eyes out over tragedies in their lives this very moment — ripping their clothes, crying out to God this very minute. They’re saying, “Save! Rescue!” Some horrible tragedy has just happened somewhere in the world. Some awful, awful thing has just happened, and there are 20 million other believers that are so happy right now they can hardly keep their caps on because somebody just got saved, and heaven is rejoicing because it says that in Luke 15. So can you begin to explain to me how God sympathizes with 30 million people and has integrity of personality? It’s just absolutely mind boggling.

Now, what I find is that this is not a logical issue. You see, I believe in logic. I can’t say that A and not A are both true in the same way at the same time. I mean, the law of non-contradiction seems to me to be the presupposition of all communication. So if I had mega logical problems, I’d be in trouble. Most of these things that we’re pointing out here, all of them that I see are not logical issues. They’re metaphysical. They’re being issues. They’re issues that make you say, “How can you imagine such a thing?” They’re not logically contradictory.

Question and Answer

Now, what I’m going to do for the last 30 minutes or so is to leave my evidences behind and talk about practical implications. We’ve been on this since September, and we’ve drawn out a lot of practical implications, but it’s good that we end the series tonight on some of those, but I do want to give you a chance right at this point just to if you want to ask a question or make an observation about just the observations that we’ve seen.

If we embrace what you’ve just been showing you, aren’t we vulnerable to being accused that the moral will of God becomes negated by the sovereign will of God and therefore we undermine the 10 commandments or the morality?

The answer is yes, we will be accused of that. What I would say to the person who says that is all I have to go on in understanding God is what God has been pleased to reveal of God. I cannot, out of my own head, design God. Nothing would be greater presumption than for me to say I commend to God that he be this way when his word says he’s another way. So the bottom line will be, do you see God commanding something? If so, is that not what we should do? Do you see God at times sovereignly preventing that from coming to pass, and should we not leave that in the secret counsels of God as to why he did that? If they say, “I don’t get it,” or, “I don’t like it,” or, “I don’t buy it,” I’m done. I’ll say, “I’ll pray for you.” But I don’t know what else to say except to keep pointing out more and more examples.

When I first came to this, it was the cumulative effect of these kinds of things that made me say, “I’ve got to stop trying to twist these texts to mean other than they are and let them be.” So prayer is important and pointing out that, yes, we could make the moral will of God negated by the sovereign will of God, but there’s no logical reason why we should do that, and biblically, it wasn’t done. God holds people accountable for doing what he commands.

Here’s another thought. God has prerogatives that we do not have because he has perfections and wisdom and power that we do not have. Therefore, to say God does this — namely, refuses to prevent Eli’s sons from sinning — therefore, we should follow God in preventing people from sinning like ourselves. Besides, it says in Ephesians 5, “Imitate God.” Imitate God. So you can imagine that argument.

The answer to that would be it’s a blasphemy to imitate God in His God-ness. The first sin with Adam and Eve was a temptation to be like God in a way they were never meant to be like God, knowing good and evil, calling the shots, knowing what’s good for them. So God set up the garden so that he would know good and evil and would as a good and faithful Father show them how to be blessed and avoid cursing, and they were to submit little children and say, “Yes, we trust you.” The devil comes along and says, “He’s withholding something really good. You can’t really trust him. So why don’t you be like him and decide for yourselves what will be good and evil?” That’s what a person would be doing if he said, “I will copy God in his sovereign will and I’ll leave behind his moral will, what he told me to do. I won’t do what he told me to do. I’ll do what he does behind what he told me to do.” That’s a deification of self. That’s making yourself God. So that’d be another avenue that I will take to respond.

Practical Implications of God’s Providence

Let’s go ahead with the practical stuff. I know there are lots of questions you could ask, but that will be true till you die. I’m not going to look at all these texts. I just want to say that one practical implication of believing in the providence of God is that he’s going to triumph in the end:

This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come (Matthew 24:14).

How in the world does God know that? I mean, that hangs entirely, that right there, on the will of preachers to go and risk the lives among Muslim peoples, several thousand people groups that aren’t yet penetrated, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim. It’s very dangerous. It’s going to cost martyrs according to Revelation 6:11. How does he know we’re going to decide to do that? Because he rules the will.

There’s this big debate about whether God knows the future today. Clark Pinnock and the others talk about this. I read you some of that article last week or last time. Frankly, I dream about it now. How should I respond to this? What should I write? What should I do? Because we’ve even got it I think in our own schools. It’s really hard for me to collect texts about the foreknowledge of God because to me, the issue is settled so long before I get to foreknowledge texts because in my simple mind, God knows the future because he writes the future. He knows the future because he makes the future. So I disagree with these guys at such a deep level that it’s hard for me to get worked up about dealing with them at the level where they’re working.

I think God knows this is going to happen because he’s going to make it happen. He’s going to see to it that John Piper in the summer of 1966 stopped being a pre-med student. Nothing’s wrong with being a pre-med student, but that was not the call of my life, though I thought it was in the summer of 1966 and he had to zap me in the hospital for three weeks with mononucleosis, make me drop organic chemistry, caused me to hear John Harold Ockenga preach, and make this explosion go off in my heart to fall in love with the Bible. That’s what happened. God did that. That’s called a call.

I just wrote to my son Carsten about it because he said, “I’m not sure I understand the call very well and I doubt that my curiosities and desires about Japan have very much to do with it.” I just wrote to him and said, “The call of God is the explosive upping of the ante behind desires until they become irresistible for holy things, a particular thing, and you’ll know it when it comes.” I gave him some suggestions on how he can open himself to it.

Nothing feels more practical to me in the ups and downs of my life than to know God is going to win. God is going to win. You’re a missionary slogging it out in Guinea over there with very little progress among the people, you need to know God’s going to win. You need to know that nothing is done in vain. There’s no guarantee that he can win if he doesn’t rule the wills of men.

Obey God’s Moral Will

Now, what I thought I’d do is look at one last text. It’s a long one, but it’s just full of six practical implications, and maybe I can point them out as we go rather than coming back to them. I’ll try anyway. It’s the event and then it’s the prayer of the church in Acts after the apostles get roughed up here. So let me just point out some things. This will be the last thing we look at.

So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:18).

Now, all authority is appointed by God. These are the ruling authorities. Romans 13:1 says that the powers that be are ordained by God. They say, “Don’t do this anymore.” The passage continues:

But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20).

God has ordained that there be rulers and leaders who make laws and prescribe and proscribe. Do not jump to the conclusion that the providence of God over the legal processes of any particular group must be submitted to because God’s doing it. The reason I say this is because it sounds rebellious to say God is providentially ordaining that this be spoken by these leaders who say, “Don’t speak about Jesus.” If God rules everything, then he’s ruling this command right here. God’s ordained that to happen.

This is the same issue that John and I were talking about. You dare not jump over a principle of morality into the sovereign disposals of God and try to align yourself up there with God, ignoring what is right according to his word, and what is right according to them is that they obey the command to preach rather than yield to the sovereign disposals of God in this wrong command. That’s the first practical observation.

So in our context, it might mean that if a law were passed in America that you couldn’t spank your children like there is in Sweden, I would go to jail before I would obey that law because the Bible says if you don’t use the rod, you hate your son. I frankly am going to obey God, and if they send me to jail, I’m not going to change on that. So even though God would be sovereignly ruling over the lawmaking process, the result of that sovereign rule may be very wrong and bad from a moral standpoint, and God has his purposes for bringing about such states of affairs.

Focused on the Character and Power of God

The passage continues:

And when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding no way to punish them, because of the people, for all were praising God for what had happened. For the man on whom this sign of healing was performed was more than forty years old (Acts 4:21–22).

Now they go back to their friends and they have a prayer meeting and I want you to see this prayer because some of you have asked, “How do you pray? Do you even pray if God rules all things? Why pray? How do you pray?” Then we’ve talked about it before, but we’ll just refer to it again here with this prayer:

When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God . . .

They came with “one accord.” I believe that is possible because they believed in the providence of God together because you’re going to see a theology here. This is one of the most theologically powerful prayers in the Bible. This one accord is rooted in this theology. This is why I teach. I don’t think we could ever be a church with one accord if we don’t come to a mind about some of these great things. It doesn’t mean you can’t be in process about them, but it means if we got people all over the map on this, nobody agrees with anybody on anything, or nobody’s thinking about it, this kind of praying will be impossible in Bethlehem. They say:

Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit . . . (Acts 4:24–25).

Here they are beginning their prayer. It’s going to go that long, that’s how much, and they begin it with a quotation from Psalm 146:6 about God’s creative power. Why? Why start this? Do you start your prayers that way? Do you say, “O God, who made the universe and the sea and every creature in it and the land and every tree and species of flower,” and then give him your request? Do you start that way? Why did they do that? If you go back and read the psalm, I think this is why they did it:

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
     whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
     the sea, and all that is in them . . . (Psalm 146:5–6).

The reason they quoted this here after their friends had risked their lives is because this God does this. It’s the combination of his creator power giving the punch behind his blessing his people and giving them hope that makes them want to dwell on that mighty, mighty power. It’s not just power in the abstract that they have in their mind here when they say, “O Lord, it is thou who didst make the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.” It’s because their hope for rescue and their hope for blessing is going to be made possible because this is creator power here. So the second implication is that if you believe in the sovereign creator rights of God, you begin your prayers that way and it’s like a foundation on which everything else in your hoping prayer is built.

Futile Plans Against God’s Anointed

Now, they got some more scripture they’re going to quote:

Who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit . . . (Acts 4:25).

They’re going to quote more Scripture. They haven’t gotten to any petitions yet. They’re just just reveling in something about God first and the first thing they revel in is that he’s the creator. He makes everything. Now, here’s the next thing they revel in:

[You said,] “Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed” (Acts 4:25–26).

Then he’s going to apply that to the present rulers who were gathered against Jesus, but why do they quote this? Tell me. What’s hopeful in that word? If I were to circle the hope-giving word or phrase, what would I circle? Tell me. Yes, people devised futile things. That’s what I would’ve circled, the word futile. What’s that mean? When they devise them, what’s going to happen? They’re not going to work. What they’re reminding themselves of here is that God has already said, “Anybody who devises a plan against his anointed, fails.” Period. Christ is the anointed. We are Christians, little anointed ones with him, in him, and therefore, who can bring any charge against God’s elect (Romans 8:33)? What can man do to us (Hebrews 13:6)?

A God of Great Providence

All right. Now, how do they apply it?

for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place (Acts 4:27–28).

That’s one of the clearest statements of providence. This prayer is a massive statement of belief in providence. So anybody that says to you, “There’s no point in praying if you believe in providence,” you just go to the Bible and say, “Then why do these people pray to affirm their belief in providence?” Not only do they affirm it, they’ve got some petitions they want to come true too.

Ordained Cause and Effect

All of that is great ascribing, acclaiming, reveling in the God to whom they pray and He’s a God of sovereign providence. “Now, Lord, take note.” It’s okay to tell God to take note.

You say, “Why tell him to take note if he’s going to take note?” Well, because he’s told us to do that, and in his inscrutable wisdom, he won’t take note if we don’t tell him to take note in many cases. You have not because you asked not. Isn’t that an amazing statement for a God of sovereign providence to say, “You have not because you asked not”? In other words, if the causality of your asking goes out of the universe, my response goes out of the universe because I ordained the cause and I ordained the response. If the cause doesn’t happen, the response doesn’t happen. There’s no contradiction here, but it’s mind boggling that a God of sovereign providence would say to us, “You have not because you asked not. I base much of my future on your praying.” They continue:

And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness . . . (Acts 4:29).

That’s what they want. That’s what I want. You pray for me Friday morning because there is a man I’m going to talk to Friday morning who doesn’t know the Lord and I’ve asked him many times to give me some time to talk to him and he said on Tuesday that he would give me some time. So on Friday, I’m going to try to set the time, lunch or breakfast. I’m going to say, “Let’s go talk about the Lord.” So my prayer is that I won’t chicken out and that he will be affected the way Lydia was affected with the opening of the heart. So this is really relevant here. If you believe in the providence of God, you can pray that the wills of unbelievers would be compliant to invitations to lunch. They pray”

And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus (Acts 4:29–30).

End of prayer. And then it says:

And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness (Acts 4:31).

Walking in the Reality of God’s Providence

My list of practical things is as follows:

1. Resist the very authority that God ordains if it is contrary to his moral will.
2. Build unity of mind through doctrinal commitments that you read about in the Bible.
3. Saturate yourself with Scripture.
4. Pray rather than be fatalistic.

Don’t let anybody push you into the notion that if you believe in the sovereignty or the providence of God, there’s no point in praying. That is a sophomoric response, a little sophomore trying to respond to the first glimpse of truth about an issue, when in fact if you were to go deep to the root of the issue of the sovereignty of God, prayers built into the very fabric of the universe and he responds genuinely to praying for the most practical things.

Here’s an example. I had trouble all last week with my computer. I was trying to get my Luther lecture ready and I kept getting a Microsoft Word system error. It said, “Ignore or discontinue.” I pushed ignore and nothing would happen, and it said it would shut down the program. Boom. It’s gone. It kept happening over and over. Well, today, I spent probably an hour writing a response to last night’s elders meeting. I worked long and hard. I got the same message from America Online. I said, “God, I don’t want to lose all this stuff. Please, don’t let me lose it. I don’t have any idea. I couldn’t figure any way to save it.” I just went, “Boop, boop, boop,” and it disappeared. I don’t know which button I hit right.

There’s nothing supernatural about it except that instead of giving up and hitting continue and losing it, I didn’t something else. God runs the universe. He runs the universe and he will hear. I mean, I cried to the Lord. I said, “I didn’t want to lose this hour’s worth of work,” and he heard my cry and lifted me up. The list continues:

1. Seek the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
2. Courageously testify.

Don’t say, “Since God is sovereign and he has providence over all people’s wills, if he wants to save them, he can save them. I don’t need to talk to my neighbor on Friday.” That is doing exactly what John and I were talking about, namely trying to crawl into God’s throne, conform your life to his sovereign dealings that you have no right to instead of simply obeying, “Go and make disciples.”