A Potential Atonement
“It wasn’t a potential atonement actuated by the sinner, it was an actual atonement initiated by the savior”
John MacArthur
Did you hear from God?
Did you hear from God? Think this through:
1. The Holy Spirit reveals to us the sufficiency of Scripture.
2. The Holy Spirit downplays the sufficiency of Scripture so He can reveal to you something that is less sufficient and allows for no authority (since Scripture is no longer sufficient) to question the inerrancy of what is revealed to you?
Bible Study is Boring?
“The sober, careful exegesis of the scriptures would not be viewed as irrelevant, boring, or inadequate, if the majesty of God and the fearful danger of acting presumptuously in his Name were as pressing a concern today as they have been at times in the past.”
Biblical Love
“Here’s a simple way of summarizing sacrificial love: The Spirit filled husband loves his wife not for what she can do for him, but because of what he can do for her. That is exactly how Christ’s love works. He loves us not because there’s something in us that attracts Him, not because He gains any benefit from loving us, but simply because He determined to love us and delights to bestow on us His favor.
Did you realize that love is an act of the will, not a feeling? It is a commitment to the welfare of its object. It is a voluntary devotion. It involves sacrifice, consideration, chivalry, communion, courtesy, and commitment. It is precisely the kind of love you owe your wife. And if you are willing to obey God, by the power of God’s Spirit, you can muster that kind of love for your wife.” – John MacArthur
“LOVE is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others” – John Piper
“The measure and test of love for God is wholehearted and unqualified obedience, the measure and test of love for our neighbor, is laying down our lives for them.” – J.I. Packer
Spiritualizing the Scripture
“Is the Old Testament amillennial? Now I’ve got to stop here for a minute, take you off on a little bit of a detour, may I? A caution here…a caution here. To say that the writers of the Old Testament were amillennial when they were writing about a Kingdom is a strange thing to say, right? To say that they were writing about a Kingdom that they knew was not going to come, it’s a very strange thing. And one would have to ask, how could they be inspired to writing details about a coming Kingdom promised to Israel and through Israel to the Gentiles as well, a great glorious Messianic Kingdom, you can’t imagine that they were receiving this revelation from God, writing it down and at the same time they were writing it down they knew it wasn’t so. That’s absurd. Of course they would believe it was true.
Take that a little further. If the only way they could know that it wasn’t true was if they had the New Testament, which is what amillennialists have to do, and they knew that Judaism became apostate and Judaism rejected Jesus and crucified Him, if then the only way they could have a true interpretation of what they wrote was to have the New Testament, then what they wrote had no meaning to them. It is not legitimate to interpret the Old Testament only by the New Testament. It is not legitimate to say that the Old Testament is this oblique, mysterious, hidden book with all kinds of things that you can’t know about apart from the New Testament, that is to give the primacy of interpretation to the New Testament. This is what Walt Kaiser, a great scholar, says is having a canon within a canon, having a rule within a rule. This then means that the Old Testament can’t be interpreted on its own, that people who are writing it and reading it can’t have any idea what it is that they’re writing and reading. If Old Testament promises were actually for the church and not for ethnic Jews, ethnic Israel, then those Old Testament promises are meaningless, they are utterly unintelligible and they are irrelevant to the Old Testament reader. But this is essentially what you’re left with if you take an amillennial view. The New Testament is the starting point for understanding the Old Testament. And what you’ve just done is damage any meaningful interpretation of the Old Testament on its own.
And this is basically what leads to what we call spiritualizing the Scripture. That is, taking texts out of their literal sense, spiritualizing them into some other than literal sense.”
- John MacArthur, Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 2
The Cross Radically Disrupts
“The Cross does not give us a minor shift or two with regard to a few of our ethical and moral and religious values, the cross radically disrupts the very center and citadel of your life from SELF, to CHRIST. And if the cross has not done that, you’re not a Christian.” – Leonard Ravenhill
Quotes Regarding Man’s Free Will
Quotes Regarding Man’s Free Will:
Jonathan Edwards:
Edwards Law of Free Will
“Free moral agents always act according to the strongest inclination they have at the moment of choice.”
Anytime you sin, your desire is greater to sin than to obey Christ. If obeying Christ was a greater desire, you would not have sinned.
Objections:
1) There are lots of time people do things they don’t want to do (by external force or coercion). -> Even when our options are reduced, we will still do what we desire most.
2) What about Paul “I do what I do not want to”? -> Paul is not giving his opinion on the matter of free will, but rather saying that the desire to please Christ does not always win out over the desire for sin.
Moral Ability vs. Natural Ability:
Natural Ability: We have the natural ability to speak and think and walk, etc, but not to fly through the air (unaided by machines).
Moral Ability: The ability to be righteous as well as to be sinful. Man was created with the ability to be righteous or sinful. But man has fallen and no longer has the ability to choose righteousness. He has lost his inclination towards Godliness.
Augustine:
Man has a free will, but what man lost in the fall was liberty (what the bible calls moral liberty). We are in bondage to sin. We still make choices and have a free will, but now mans will is inclined towards evil and disinclined towards righteousness and cannot seek after God.
John Calvin:
“If we mean by free will, that fallen man has the ability to choose what he wants, then of course fallen man has free will. If we mean, by that term, that man in his fallen state, has the moral power and ability to choose righteousness; then free will is far too grandiose a term to fall on man.”
Martin Luther:
Regarding Free Will (paraphrased):
If it all comes down to your willing or not willing, accepting or rejecting, your choosing or not choosing, to cooperate with the grace of God, that is, God’s grace is give to this person and to this person, but in the final analysis, it’s up to your free will or his free will to determine your destiny. What is it, that is found in your fallen nature that will cause this person’s will to say “yes” and that person’s will to say “no”? There is something between the ability to will and the actual action of making the choice. It is the inclination or desire of the soul. If this person says “yes” to grace, it can only be because this person wants to say yes to grace. And if this person says “no” to grace, it can only be because this person wants to say no to grace. What determines WHY one person would say yes and another would say no? Obviously the person who said “yes” has a positive desire towards God before they are even born of the Spirit. The other person does not have a positive desire towards God. The person who has the right inclination will make the right choice; the person who has the wrong inclination will make the wrong choice. If it’s strictly on the basis of the operation of the human will that determines that in the final analysis, that means that this person has done the righteous thing, and this person has done the evil thing, this person has something of which to boast, and this person has nothing of which to boast.
What is the reason you are a Christian and your neighbor is not? You might say because I chose to be and they did not. But why did you choose? Are you more inherently righteous than your neighbor? You may respond “no”, but are you more intelligent than that person? If you say yes you are more intelligent, where did you get that intelligence? Did you earn it or did you receive it? Is it an accomplishment or a gift?
They say “it’s not because I’m more righteous” and I would say, Why isn’t it more righteous? Did you make the right decision? Yes. Did your neighbor make the wrong decision? Yes. Is it good that you made this decision? Yes. Is it bad that they made that decision? Yes. So why don’t you say you’re more righteous than that person? A person is forced to say they are inherently more righteous than their neighbor and that they had no source for their righteousness.
Regarding Necessity:
According to Erasmus, if God knows everything that will take place in advance, then all things that happen in this world happen by necessity. If all things happen by necessity then we can’t possibly be free at all. For Erasmus, necessity means coercion. If my actions are necessary with respect to God’s foreknowledge, then they must take place through some kind of coercion, according to Erasmus.
Luther responded “God does not force me to make the decisions that I make in my normal daily living, but they are necessary with respect to His knowledge. Because if God’s knows today what I’ll do freely tomorrow, without His coercion, will I do that tomorrow? Is it certain I will do that tomorrow? It is a necessity of certainty in so far as it will most certainly come to pass because God doesn’t make mistakes in His knowledge. That doesn’t mean that God is forcing me to do it or that I’m forced by chance or anything else. Because God knows in advance what I am going to do does not mean that He has to coerce me to do it. So Luther makes a distinction between the necessity of consequence and the necessity of the consequent. He was not teaching with the view of election, divine sovereignty, of the fall of man, that God coerces sinners to sin. People choose what they want, but what they want is wicked. It is certain they will choose what they want by virtue of God’s knowledge of it but God doesn’t force those who desire to do good to do bad. He doesn’t force those want only evil to do good.
R.C. Sproul:
“Every choice that we make is free, and, every choice that we make is determined.”
This is not determinism (things happen to someone strictly by external forces). Determinism is when something happens over which you have no control, by external forces (a suitcase that fell out of a plane hits you as you walk along the sidewalk and thereby causes something to happen to you). There are, however, internal factors that are determining factors. If my choices flow out of my disposition and desires, if my actions are an effect that have causes and reasons behind them, then my personal desire determines my personal choice. If my desires determine my choice, how can I be free? Remember, “every choice is free and determined”. What determines my choice is me (self determination)! Not only will we always choose according to our strongest desires, we must always choose according to our strongest desires.
The problem with the sinner is not that he lost the faculty of choice from the fall, but rather that he will always choose contrary to God. Sinners sin because they want to sin. Therefore, they sin freely. Sinners reject Christ because they want to reject Christ. Therefore they reject Him freely. Before a person can choose Christ, they must have a desire to choose Christ. Does fallen man retain any desire for the things of God? No!
Creating God in Man’s Own Image
“God created man in His image to glorify Him and man has responded by creating a god in his own image that he might comfortably sin.” – Pastor Dale Briggs
The Triune God Saves Perfectly!
“Down through the ages to come, we will praise God not for having tried real hard [to save people], but for having been perfect in the accomplishment of His will, because the Triune God saves perfectly!” – James R. White
Is the Old Testament Amillenial?
“Is the Old Testament Amillenial? Now a note here, please. It is not legitimate to interpret the Old Testament as secondary to the New Testament as primary. Okay, that’s not legitimate. Otherwise, the Old Testament was literally darkness, not light. If you say that the Old Testament cannot be rightly interpreted apart from the New Testament, then you have denied the perspicuity of the Old Testament. And as Walt Kaiser puts it, ‘Now you have a canon within a canon.’ The question must be answered, does the Old Testament itself propound an Amillenial view? You cannot remove the Old Testament from having a true interpretation on it’s own. And make Old Testament promises relate to the Church, which is by Paul’s own statement a mystery unknown in the past. You cannot there make the Old Testament unintelligible and irrelevant to the reader. The idea that the New Testament is the starting point for understanding the Old Testament is exactly where Amillenialism comes from, reading it back into the Old Testament, and of course you damage the perspicuity or the clarity of the sensibility of the Old Testament in and of itself. It leads, I think, to an even more grand kind of spiritualizing that goes beyond just prophetic texts and gives license to spiritualize all kinds of things and read New Testament Christianity and New Testament principles back into the those texts in the Old Testament where they do not belong.”
- John MacArthur, 2007 Shepherd’s Conference, General Session #1.
