Calvinist's Central Doctrine - Romans 9 Part 3 of 3 - David Bercot

Lesson Transcript

Romans 9 is what we're going to be talking about today. I had originally intended, yeah, this to be a time for questions. This is our last Sunday talking about Romans. So, boy, Romans 9 is so misused, like I say, entire books are just written on that chapter, so it's really hard to cover it in even three Sunday school lessons. So I want to make sure if you've got any specific questions, we address them today. But, yeah, one reason this matters, you may think, well, it's just theology.

And yes, if you don't ever understand Romans 9, you can certainly walk faithfully with Christ. It's not, you know, the central doctrine, although Calvinists have kind of made it that. I'll just give you some examples. Okay, Mark Talbot or Talbot, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, said, "God brings about all things in accordance with His will." It isn't just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those that love Him. It is rather that He Himself brings about these evil aspects.

This includes God's having been brought, having even brought about the Nazis' brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz, as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader. He was a serial killer. And even the sexual abuse of a young child.

I mean, wow, if this doesn't get you like fired up, like I feel like David when Goliath was out there, you know, taunting the God of Israel and is like, "Who's going to speak up for him?" You know, not that I'm the one, I don't mean that sense, but I was just like, wow, someone needs to defend this kind of stuff that's out there. Gordon H. Clark, this is in a book explaining, supposedly explaining why we have evil. And it's a great explanation.

I wish, very frankly and poignantly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do it. Let it be unequivocally said that this view certainly makes God the cause of sin. God is the sole ultimate cause of everything. There is absolutely nothing independent of Him. He alone is the eternal being. He alone is omnipotent. He alone is sovereign. Some people do not wish to extend God's power over evil things and particularly over moral evils.

But the Bible explicitly teaches that God creates sin. I guess I missed that verse in the Bible. Does anyone know what verse says that God creates sin? I've totally missed that. I'll have to reread the scriptures. I'm sure he's basing it on Romans 9 because that is pretty much the chapter. I mean, there's other verses here and there, but that's the one that Calvinists particularly focus on for their doctrine is Romans chapter 9. And we've been talking about it the last two weeks.

So before we go any further, does anyone have any specific unanswered questions from the last two weeks? I know some of you weren't here about Romans 9 that, yeah, we left unsaid that you were hoping to get some clarification on because it's a long chapter and we had to zoom through it. Would you be able to summarize very briefly what we talked about? Because I know I had questions, but I forgot what they were. Fair enough. Yeah. Fair enough. And yeah, for the visitors, for those who weren't here.

So what we're going to look at some of the proof texts. There's really four. The first week we talked about the verse on Jacob and Esau. And what we first saw that the whole chapter is dealing with two nations, with literal Israel or physical Israel and spiritual Israel. And that physical Israel, fleshly Israel, you know, by the time Paul wrote Romans, yeah, they were not accepting the gospel. Some were. I mean, it's always open to everybody. And the Jews were preached to first. And certainly a lot came in.

We can see there in Acts chapter 3 and 2, you know, just 3,000 in one day and then it grew to 5,000. Those would have all been Jews. Maybe some Gentile proselytes in there who had adopted Judaism. Yeah. But then when it went out to the Gentiles, then yeah, the Jews sort of withdrew. So Paul is dealing with this reality of the Gentiles flocking in, the Jews feeling like this isn't just, not necessarily the Christian Jews, but the Jewish nation.

So when we looked at Jacob and Esau, we saw that the prophecies that the older would serve the younger, that was never fulfilled in Jacob and Esau. That was not a prophecy about them. Esau never served Jacob. Esau really had as much or probably more material prosperity than Jacob had. The prophecies were about two nations. In fact, God explicitly told Rebecca, "There are two nations in your womb." And then he said the older would serve the younger.

So he's talking about the two nations which ended up being Israel and Edom. And yes, the Israelites did conquer Edom and they served the Israelites, were subjugated by the Israelites for a long time. And we also looked last week at just the whole conclusion that Paul is driving at. And when you read the last seven or eight verses of Romans, you can see, okay, all of this he's talking about again, fleshly Israel, spiritual Israel.

It's about two groups of people, two nations, not about how God deals with individuals. But you can read it. If you don't pay attention to the context, you could easily, particularly if you just jump to one of those verses, it sounds like he's talking about us and that, wow, we're just whatever God wants to do with us, that's the way it is. And if we're evil, it's because God wanted us to be evil. And if we're faithful, it's because God made us faithful, chose us to be faithful. We have no say in it.

You can get that out of Romans 9 if you don't pay attention to the context. But yeah, that's not what Paul is saying. So that was the summation, I think, Zach. Did that help? Yeah. I feel like we talked about something else last week, but that's fine. Okay. Well, we will be covering some this morning then. So we'll get back in that and that may jog your memory. So this will be partly review, but we're going to look at the we won't be talking about Jacob and Esau today. Is that up on YouTube yet, Daniel?

I don't believe so. Okay. So at some point that will be posted. Or I guess they could get the recording before then if you wanted to hear what we talked about on that passage. Which one would that have been? Are you talking about 9:1? We have three parts of 9 now. Right. It's the first part. Yeah. Yeah. I can get that up soon. Well, no, I didn't mean you had to rush, but I'm just saying it'll be up there if you want to review that. So I'm going to jump to 15 and 16. 15 is on my brain.

So 15 and 16 is where we started last week. And 16, let's talk about a little bit more. Like I say, the application that he was talking about fleshly Israel and spiritual Israel, but it's usually applied to individuals. And we can apply this on an individual level and it makes sense. I don't think that's what Paul was intending, but let's just look at that.

So Romans 9:16, "So then it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy." And so let me ask you, how would you answer Calvinists who say that this verse shows that everything is of God, that we don't have any free will? What would you say to a Calvinist? More than one verse. What? There's more than one verse in the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. And that is the answer. You just can't take one verse and that is everything.

Here's one, 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, that I think sheds a little light if we're going to apply this individually. Paul says, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither is he who plants anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth." Okay. So he's not saying that it was pointless for him to go out and preach, that no one was saved through Paul's preaching or from Apollos. He's not saying that. He's just saying that in the end, God is the one who plays the bigger role.

But otherwise, what was the point of Paul going out if that was nothing? Why did Apollos preach? Why did any of them? It's just a waste. And the illustration he's using of planting and watering, the growing of crops is not the work of the sower alone, nor of the one who irrigates or waters. It's primarily the work of God. So let's just look at it in the natural world. Okay. We see a field of wheat. Okay. Lovely field. But you don't get this without this. I mean, someone has to sow. It doesn't grow naturally.

Wheat obviously was something God created and it was out there somewhere, but man had to cultivate it. You don't get a nice field of wheat. You might get some wild stalks of wheat here and there. But yeah, some human is working. I mean, God doesn't have to work that way. He could do it all without us. He doesn't need us. But that's his way of working is he requires us to do our part. So about planting and watering, if somebody doesn't go out and plant, then yeah, you're not going to get a field of wheat.

You know, if no one evangelizes, a few people are going to come to the gospel. We can't just say, "Well, God's doing it. What's the no point in me planting?" That's not what Paul is saying at all. But now let's look at this picture. Okay. Years ago, and this was oddly enough, a Christian who said this, it was supposed to be funny. And at the time, I wasn't sure what to say in response. Anyway, the story was some guy was there working in his garden.

He had his beautiful garden, rows of tomatoes and peas and corn, whatever. And a friend stopped by and he said, "Wow, you and God have done a great job with this garden." And the gardener said, "Yeah, you should have seen what it looked like when it was just God's." And it was supposed to be a joke. And yeah, the point is, yeah, if you don't do anything, yeah, it's just going to be a pile of weeds. I think the import was, like I say, it's more of something you'd expect to hear from the world.

The import was, "Oh, God doesn't do anything, see? I mean, you got to do it all." But that is not the reality. Like I say, it would appear that way to an unbeliever. But just looking at this picture, okay, he's out there casting seed. Did he create that seed? I mean, he went and bought it somewhere and it would go back all the way to Eden. But somewhere, God created that seed. I mean, it didn't just get here. What about the dirt? Did that guy create that dirt? I mean, someone obviously plowed it.

If you didn't plow it, yeah, sowing, you wouldn't get the same nice harvest. But you didn't create the dirt. He didn't create the sun. Without the sun, that's not going to ever grow. That's God's doing that. He didn't create the air with the oxygen and carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all of these things. So yeah, it looks like man's doing it all. But you take away the part God has done, you have nothing. You don't have any seed. You don't have any earth. You have no water to water with. You have nothing.

So what God does is far greater than what the farmer does. That gardener, yeah, he thought, "Yeah, I did all this." But yeah, he didn't create that dirt. He didn't create the sun. Yeah, all that was provided by God. But see, in his mind, well, I'm doing it all. Okay. So there's two sides to that. Okay. We don't want to have this idea, "Oh, I'm doing it all. I save myself. I'm the one who's doing this." Because we cannot save ourselves. Without the role of God, none of us could be saved. It begins with Christ.

Well, I don't know if it begins, but it centers on Christ's blood, his death on the cross. I mean, without that, we are all lost. I mean, that we did nothing other than to put him there. But we played no role in that except a wicked role. So God does the greater part, but we have to still do our part too. It's like the farmer. We do our part. God does his part. He could do it all, but he doesn't want a bunch of robots here. Okay. Does that make sense? So back to what was the verse.

So then it's not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. He's not saying we shouldn't have a will, that we shouldn't run because he tells us to run the race. But it's God who's showing mercy. We could do all of that, but without God's mercy, we would be lost. Of course, his biggest point was for the Gentiles and the Jews. It was God who showed mercy, both on the nation of fleshly Israel and on the nation of spiritual Israel. Okay. All right.

So in salvation, yeah, we have to repent and believe. God doesn't do our repenting for us. He doesn't do the obeying for us. He will give us power to obey, but we have to crucify our own flesh. We have to submit to his will. And anybody who is living the Christian life knows it does not come automatically. Yeah. It'd be nice to sit back, "Well, God does everything. I can't do anything." If you do that, you're not going to do anything. Nothing is going to happen.

But we don't want to get proud and think, "Oh, we're doing it all," because like I say, God is doing the greater part. Okay. So that's one of the arguments the Calvinists use. The second one is hardening Pharaoh's heart. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show my power in you and that my name may be declared in all the earth. Therefore, he has mercy on whom he wills and he hardens whom he wills." So the Calvinists say, "See, God does it.

So the evil comes from God. He hardens people and they go out and shoot their family or become serial killers or start wars." Yeah. That's all from God. He does evil and he does good. And he gets glory from that. It's a very perverted teaching, but you can see if you just took that verse, and that's the danger when you just take one verse of the Bible. Now, they want to say, he says, "For this purpose I have raised you up, that for this purpose I created you." That's not what he's saying.

He raised him up, that he became Pharaoh. He maybe was in line. Maybe God just did nothing to stop him. But God knew what kind of person he was going to turn out to be. Or maybe there was a rivalry and God saw that Pharaoh God in that position, whatever. But God let him come to the throne or allowed him or actively put him there on the throne. But in his foreknowledge, he knew what kind of person Pharaoh was going to be.

And he made the decision, "I'm going to use the hard-heartedness of Pharaoh to accomplish my will." And because of what happened there, you may remember when the spies were in Jericho, what did the people, what did Rahab say? Not her exact words, but does anyone remember the gist of it? They were all afraid of him. Yeah. They were all afraid. So they had all heard. They had all heard about these things that God had done.

So because of Pharaoh, because of the hard-heartedness of one man, see, God, through the plagues, through what he had to do dealing with Pharaoh, then his name was spread throughout the whole Middle East ancient world. So yeah, he had a purpose in that. He didn't just haphazardly let him get on the throne. Okay. What does it mean that God hardened Pharaoh's heart? Okay. God could see what an obstinate man Pharaoh was. And he could see that this guy is going to lie.

He will give his word and then turn right around and take it back. Okay. So it didn't catch God off guard or by surprise. Now, what did God do? Pharaoh said, "Okay. I'll let your people go. And okay, I'll withdraw the plague." And then Pharaoh says, "No, I'm not going to let him go." Okay. All right. Did God strike him dead when he did that? No. See, God could have just struck him with blindness and say, "Okay. You're blind. You let him go now or the next step, I'm going to kill you.

I'm going to strike you dead next time. So you either let him go and that's it, and you're going to stay blind." I mean, he could have just played hardball with Pharaoh. Instead, he let Pharaoh keep doing this. "Okay. I'll let him go. All right. I'll withdraw the plague. No, I'm not going to let him go." Well, he knew by doing this, Pharaoh is saying, "This God is weak. I can get by with this." He says things. He has no punch to his words. And God saw what was happening.

So yeah, he hardened his heart by, yeah, just playing the cat and mouse game with him because that was accomplishing his greater will. But he didn't have to do that. I mean, like I say, he could have done whatever with Pharaoh that would have made him right away let the Israelites go. But yeah, he chose to work that way to serve his purpose. But he didn't make Pharaoh this wicked, obstinate person. He was already there. God saw what was there. Okay. This is from Origen.

I remember reading this, whatever, 35 years ago, and I thought, "Man, this is one of the best explanations I've heard." He likened God's actions with Pharaoh, bringing the 10 plagues to the effect of the heat of the sun on wax and on clay. Okay. The exact same sun, the exact same heat beating down. If you got a lump of clay there, what's it going to do to it? It's going to soften it. Okay. If you've never put wax out in the sun, maybe you don't know, but it gets hot. It softens. Okay.

You put wet clay out in the sun, what's going to happen with wet clay? It's going to harden. Okay. So it's not quite this dramatic. But I guess living in Texas, growing up in Texas, it happened more than once. I left my crayons outside and he'd come back and they don't melt quite like that. But yeah, they're all out of shape and everything because crayons are made out of wax. So yeah, heat melts wax. The 10 plagues melted the hearts of the sincere people in Egypt.

And a whole bunch of them went out with the Israelites. They were saying, "Wow, this is really God." Okay. So it softened their hearts. Pharaoh, it hardened his heart. Now, when I first started going down to Honduras in 1969, you saw this everywhere. Most houses were built out of adobe bricks. And there were several brickyards there in Suwatapeki where we go. Now it's all concrete blocks. You don't see this. There's still in Honduras a lot of adobe, but you don't see it very much in the towns anymore.

Now, that same sun that melted the crayons, which are wax, is going to turn those wet clay bricks into that. They're not quite as hard as a kiln-fired brick, but yeah, they get really hard in the sun. And that has been the building material for thousands of years. But see, it's not the sun. It's the composition of the material. The same sun, the sun is the same, but the wax melts, the clay hardens. Okay. Pharaoh hardened his heart when he saw the 10 plagues.

The other Egyptians, or many of them, softened their hearts. Yeah. God's actions were neutral. I mean, what would most of us do if God was doing these miraculous things? I think everyone in this room would be on our knees. "What do you want from us, God?

We'll do whatever you say." It took a pretty wicked heart to like, "Oh, I'm going to stand up to this guy." He's like, "Wow, you turned an island to blood." It's like, I mean, it's almost unbelievable that some human king would have that gall to see that kind of might and just keep pushing God like God was just another human. God didn't have to put up with that. But like I say, he let these things. He knew it would harden Pharaoh's heart.

And so that's why sometimes it says, "Pharaoh hardened his heart," and then later says, "God hardened his heart." I mean, yeah, he gave up Pharaoh to that. He knew what was going to happen to him, that this would have this effect. Okay. All right. So the third verse, and this is all real quick, but anyway, that's the best we can do in Sunday school. Okay. The third one is the potter and the clay. "But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God?

Will the thing formed to him, say to him who formed it, 'Why have you made me like this?' Does not the potter have power over the clay from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?" Okay. So Calvinists take this passage and say, "See, God decides you're going to be a vessel of dishonor. I'm going to turn you into a wicked serial killer. And this other person, I'm going to turn them into a Christian. And we're just lumps of clay. We can't do anything about that.

It's just whatever God decides to do." And that's why those Calvinists were saying, "Yeah, the evil is from God. Everything is from God. He controls every last thing." Now, some Calvinists will back off saying that. But I mean, John Calvin himself said that. I mean, it's not like some errant people who are saying something that, no, Calvin would have never said that. Calvin said that himself. God is the author of sin. That because everything comes from God, whatever we do is God made us do it.

Every single thing we do. So that means every crime committed is something God decided to happen. Which means you take it back far enough, God is the one who invented evil. He thought of it and he decided, "Okay, all these people, Satan, everyone, they're going to do these things." I mean, it all, I mean, it's horrible. That is so wicked that anyone could think or say that. And that's why we need to know enough to be able to respond. Okay. Again, he's repeating the same point he made over and over in this chapter.

The Jews didn't like how God was now dealing with them and how he was granting salvation to the Gentiles. So they were finding fault with God and criticizing how he was doing things. So the one bringing these objections is the Jewish unbeliever. It's not an Armenian, somebody who doesn't believe in predestination. But Paul isn't saying that God purposefully makes some of us wicked for dishonorable purpose and that God arbitrarily decides to glorify and bless others. That's pagan thinking.

Now, the pagans, they had these gods who did all kinds of things, good and bad with people. I mean, their gods were often more wicked than humans are. But yeah, that's a pagan thinking that God does that sort of thing. I'm just going to give you one quote, Chrysostom. "Paul is not speaking about man's will, nor about why some men are good and others not. Otherwise, God himself would be the cause of these things, and man would be free from all responsibility." I mean, that's the obvious conclusion.

If everything is from God, then it's not our fault if we commit a crime. God made me do it. I couldn't do anything else. Remember, God works nothing at random or haphazardly, even though we are ignorant of the secret of his wisdom. So again, he's talking about how he's dealing with the Gentiles and the Jews. And it's like, we're in no place to question God why he deals this way with different groups of people. We were talking this morning earlier about the paradoxes of Christianity. Why are certain things this way?

Why here on this earth, if you are going to be a believer, you're going to be in opposition to the very place you were created to live? You're created to live here on the earth. God created human society, and yet we're not of the world. He wants us here, and he wants us in a place where the world's going to be against us. Well, God makes those decisions. It's not our place to say, "Well, God, why did you do that?" Well, I mean, if people want to serve you, you should make it easy.

Bless them, give them all kinds of things, and more people will serve you. God knows what he's doing. It's not our position to question things. And as Kevin brought out, these passages, you have to bring all of scripture to bear on any particular verse. It is so absurd to just pick and choose Bible verses and say, "See, it says that." And boy, if that verse was all you had, well, yeah, it looks like we're just lumps of clay and God does whatever. But look at everything else.

Now, the early Christians bring, I think, almost all the writers who discuss Romans 9 also bring up 2 Timothy because it shed so much light about the potter and the clay. Listen to this. 2 Timothy 2:20-21. "But in a great house, there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honor and some for dishonor." Now, this is the key part.

"Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from the latter," meaning dishonor, "he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified and useful for the master, prepared for every good work." Okay. So who does Paul say he has to cleanse himself? Who bears the responsibility of being a vessel for honor or dishonor? Yeah. We bear that responsibility. Okay. He says, "If anyone cleanses himself." Now, again, we know even in cleansing ourselves, God does the greater part of the work. But he won't do it all.

He's not going to cleanse somebody who doesn't believe. He's not going to cleanse someone who doesn't surrender to him, who doesn't die to themselves. And so those are all the things that we do. And then the power of the Spirit will help us to cleanse ourselves. But see, we determine whether we're going to be a vessel of honor or dishonor. So you've got to look at this verse when you're looking at Romans 9.

And if anyone quotes Romans 9 to you, we'll say the potter and the clay, say, "Yeah, have you ever read 2 Timothy 2:20-21?" Paul says, "Yeah." We play a key role in which kind of vessel we're going to be. And it's the whole Bible. It's so absurd about Calvinism. It's built on three or four verses against all the rest of scripture because every single verse in the Bible, and there are lots of them, where God commands humans to do something or he forbids them to do something, it's a witness that we have free will.

I mean, how can you command someone to do something if they don't have the power to do it? Or why can you tell them, how could you tell them, "Don't do that," if they don't have the power to object to doing it? I mean, we obviously have free will. Every verse where obedience or faith is praised or in which disobedience or unbelief is condemned, it's a witness to man's free will. Think about when you're just reading Matthew or Luke or any of the Gospels. Okay. There was a woman with the flow of blood.

She came up and touched the hem of Jesus' robe. And he turns around and he praises her, her faith. Well, if that faith didn't come from her, at least partially, why is he praising her? See, the Calvinists say, "Well, he gave her that faith." Okay. So then why do you praise somebody if they're no different than anyone else, just God happened to put faith in them and didn't other people? That's absurd. He's praising her because, no, faith, we do play a major role in whether or not we're going to believe.

God plays an even greater role than we play. But we have an essential role to play. The same way the Roman centurion, who came to, or he came to Jesus and asked Jesus to heal his servant. And then Jesus said, "I'll come to your house." And he said, "Lord, I'm not worthy that you come under my roof, but just say the word and my servant will be healed." Jesus said, "I haven't seen this kind of faith in all of Israel." Well, why is he praising him if God made him do that?

It's like it would turn the whole Bible into kind of an Alice in Wonderland world where God says to do this, but people can't do it. He says, "Don't do that." Well, they can't help to do it. And he praises this person for just being a robot that God made him do something. And then God made you do something bad, and then he comes and condemns you.

"Why did you do that, you wicked person?" It's like, "Well, you're just a lump of clay." And yeah, it turns the whole Bible into an absurd book when you approach it that way. Okay. I think we have used our time up then. So we will stop there. And like I say, these will be posted if you want to review them. Again, beliefs do have consequences. It may seem like, "Yeah, it's just theology." And yeah, I'm personally ready to be done with Romans. It's a heavy book that's almost all theology.

But theology has consequences. And when people believe certain things, it does affect the way they act and they live. Or just the very fact of Calvinists teaching this has turned hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people away from God. Because like in New England and in other places, yeah, they grew up hearing about this God who makes people evil and then he punishes them forever for doing the evil thing that he made them do.

And it's like, "If that's how God is, I don't need anything to do with Christianity." So I'd say that's probably the greater harm it has done is just turned millions of people away from God when they hear that kind of theology. So it's important we stand up and preach the truth about it.

That, "No, that's not the kind of God that we have." That in fact, he expressly says, "I'll flip to Bill's not here yet." "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." So God wants everyone to be saved. And Calvinists say, "No, certain people are already chosen for salvation.

Some God chose for destruction." Well, he says, "No, he wants everyone to come to salvation." But he puts conditions. Everyone doesn't come because they're unwilling to meet God's condition. But his desire is for everyone to be saved. He hasn't arbitrarily chosen anyone for condemnation.