OK, so we're going to begin in our second session here, talking about God's election. And now we're going to spend a lot more time getting into scriptural texts. And tomorrow, we're going to spend a lot of time really doing an extended Bible study on one key passage out of Romans. So the key question that we're going to try to ask and answer in the next 20, 30 minutes or so is, is election conditional or is it unconditional? OK, so what does this mean? It's a confusing term.
So the word election simply means choice. So election sounds grandiose, but if someone goes and votes in an election for a president, well, they're making a choice for this person or that person to be president. So it's very simple. So don't be deterred by the verbiage here. Election just means choice. And so a very important debate concerns God's choices. Are they unconditional or are they conditional? So you can imagine that the Calvinist position is going to say that God's choices are unconditional.
They don't depend on anything in us. They're purely from His decree. And the question that a Calvinist would pose is when God chooses what is he looking for? Is he looking for height, size, intelligence, morality, faith, works? What exactly is he looking to, or is it according to his pleasure, to his inscrutable will for unknowable reasons to us? And there's a passage that Calvin actually quotes and many people quote from Deuteronomy. There's actually a few in Deuteronomy that say basically the same idea here.
So Deuteronomy 14:2, it says, " For you are a holy people to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. " Okay, so it sounds like, if I read this, and certainly John Calvin would say, that God, because of His pleasure, because of His good reasons that we can't really know, He chose Israel to be His people. And in fact, what's the nickname that you usually hear for Israel?
There's a nickname that a lot of people will say Israel is? Yeah, God's chosen people, right? You hear that a lot. Israel is God's chosen people. And so, one of the things that Calvin does is he cites passages like this, and he says, " Okay, well, you see how God picked Israel. " As far as we can tell, and in fact, there's places in Deuteronomy where God says, " I didn't pick you because you were more powerful, more numerous. I picked you because I loved you. " There are other examples of this.
So this is a really interesting passage in Psalm 78, where it says, " Moreover, he rejected the tent of Joseph and did not choose the tribe of Ephraim, but chose the tribe of Judah. " Okay, so this is talking about obviously how the kings would come through the line of Judah. And it's an interesting passage, right? It's an interesting passage because when you read in the book of Genesis, Joseph is a pretty amazing character.
If you were to guess, out of all of the 12 sons of Israel, which is the one that is going to have the line of kings and all the blessings, I would guess, hey, it's probably going to be Joseph. There's a lot of space given to him. He's a righteous character. And you look at some of the other ones, including Judah. Judah does some pretty shady things, right? What are some of the shady things that Judah does? Anybody remember in Genesis? Yeah, that whole episode with Tamar and prostitution.
It's like, ugh, I don't know if I like that. And yet he is mentioned in the prophecy that Jacob gives before he dies that the scepter won't depart from him. And so Calvin is saying, well, what about Judah? And then what about Jonah? Jonah is a really interesting story, right? So we all know the story of Jonah. And again, you look at this character. He doesn't seem to want to obey God.
And even after this amazing revival happens in Nineveh, he's kind of griping and just sitting over by this tree here under the shade. And he's just an unhappy, grumbling person there. He's not even happy that God has saved all the Ninevites through the preaching that he's done. And you look at this story and you think, " Why did God choose Jonah? " Like this very unlikely person who, in fact, it almost looks like Jonah is taken to Nineveh almost against his will. He goes the other way.
He goes on that ship and he goes the other direction. He doesn't want to go to Nineveh. He hates the Ninevites. They are the sworn enemies of the Israelites. And so Calvinists look at someone like Jonah and they say, " See, this is a great example of what God does in salvation. " He takes people that are undeserving, unworthy, in the case of Jonah, seemingly against their will and chooses and chooses them. And so I give the page numbers here in case anybody wants to look it up. But Calvin looks at these verses.
It's on pages 926 to 930 from the McNeill edition. The McNeill edition is the standard edition of the Institutes of Christian Religion, which is his Magnum Opus. And he says, " Do you see how God chose these different people in the time of Israel and in the Old Testament? " And he concludes, " Therefore, God's choice about us, about our salvation, " we'll talk about this term predestination later, is unconditional.
It's as unlikely, it's as unexplainable as the choice to choose Judah over Joseph, or Jonah over some other Israelite. What we're going to do is we're going to look at one passage today in this session. It's Matthew 22, verses 1 to 14. Try to read it with me. If you have a Bible, you can read along. This is from the New King James. It's a passage that people don't spend a lot of time on, but it's an incredibly important passage.
It says, " And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said, " The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding. And they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants saying, " Tell those who are invited. See, I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and fatted cattle are killed and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.
But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious, and he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, " The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. " Therefore, go into the highways and find as many as you find, invite to the wedding.
So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. So he said to him, " Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment? " And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, " Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
" And Jesus ends by saying, " For many are called, but few are chosen. " Okay, so this is kind of an interesting story, right? What does this parable mean? Why is Jesus telling us this story? And I'm going to give a book recommendation here. I'm going to give a handful over our sessions. This is one. It's called The Potter's Promise by a guy named Leighton Flowers. You know Leighton Flowers? OK. So he was another person who was a Calvinist.
He was actually a professor of theology and was in that whole John Piper world and ended up leaving Calvinism and wrote several books, but this is one that documents what he calls traditional soteriology. It's called The Potter's Promise. And I'm going to give some insights that I've gleaned from him. He's got a podcast as well throughout our sessions here. He's got a lot of excellent material. So let's now talk about this parable. So let's talk about who all the different characters seem to stand for.
And most of it is pretty straightforward. So let's do the easy one. Who does the king represent? It should be easy. Who's the king? God, obviously. So the king obviously here represents God. What about the wedding feast? What does the wedding feast seem to represent in this parable? Yeah, something like that. Eternal life, kingdom of God, something along those directions. So don't overthink it. This is not hard. So yeah, eternal life, I put.
But yeah, you could say Marriage Supper of the Lamb would be an equally valid and good response. The first nation that the king sends out his servants to call in, who do you think that represents? Israel. It's again pretty obvious. This is like other parables that he's taught, where there's a group of prophets and others that go out to speak to Israel. Who do the servants represent? I just said it. Yeah, the prophets.
So the servants represent the prophets, and the ministry of the prophets is they go out and they're trying to call Israel back to faithfulness to Yahweh. They're trying to call Israel back to the Mosaic covenant. And the prophets are rejected. We all know our Bibles. We know that time and time again, people like Jeremiah are rejected by their own people. This one's a little bit harder, but I don't think it's that hard. What do you think the clothes represent?
So there's this funny story of this person who comes in and he's not wearing the right clothes and he gets thrown out of the wedding hall. Yeah, I put righteousness down. I think that's probably right. Righteousness, maybe we say putting on Christ, something like that. So it's pretty clear that Jesus is talking about salvation here because he talks about the gnashing of teeth and the darkness and he's talking about some kind of place of utter doom when it's all said and done.
So it's a mostly straightforward parable. But what I want us to do is think for a moment and think carefully about some of the choices that are going on in this parable. So there's really three choices in this passage. So the first choice is choosing messengers to send out invitations. The second choice is choosing to send messengers to his own country first, then the others, and then choosing to allow only properly clothed guests into the wedding feast.
Now, the first two choices, they look, as far as we can tell from the parable, fairly unconditional. He's got his servants. We don't know exactly why he chooses these particular servants. But I think it's reasonable to say that at least the text doesn't specify it, and he just chooses these servants to go out and spread the message. Now, what usually happens is that Calvinists assume, therefore, that all of God's choices relating to salvation are unconditional.
Calvin definitely makes that leap in the Institutes of the Christian religion. He looks at these choices of the nation of Israel, for example, and he says, " Aha! See, salvation is unconditional. " But the final choice, the third one, is conditional. What was the condition here that the king made to go into the wedding feast? Obvious. Yeah, to be properly clothed, right? So he had a condition in that third choice that you had to meet if you were going to come into the wedding feast.
And so, we can't fall into this mistake that if some of God's choices are unconditional, then all of God's choices are unconditional. It's a classic mistake that people make is they'll interpret one set of decisions and impute that onto others. This is very, very, very, very important concept. Any questions on this? I want to make sure everybody gets this. Seemingly God's choice of the servant and how he's going to call them in. As far as we know, it's just God's good pleasure there.
But there's a clear condition at least on the third one. Okay, so in addition, we can say that not all of God's choices are to save or damn forever. We're going to see this tomorrow is very important, particularly when we get to Romans. So let's look again at our three choices here. Which of these three choices that we saw in this text are about saving or damning forever? Is the first choice when God says, " Okay, Messenger Bill, Messenger Bob, " is that a choice to save or damn them forever?
You were shaking your head no. Obviously not, right? He's choosing them for a job, for a task, a service, right? What about the choice to send his messengers to his own country first and then to others? Is there some statement there that he's making about saving or damning in that? Yeah, I wouldn't say so either. It doesn't seem like it. The third one is the most interesting one. Does that choice involve saving or damning forever? Yeah, I would say so.
It certainly seems like it seems like that man who doesn't have the right clothing is damned forever as a result of his choice. The first choice is, we're going to use this term here. It's a term that was coined by, as far as I know, coined by a guy named a man named Jack Cottrell. He calls it election to service. So choice one and choice two. These are choices. Again, the word election, what does it mean? Choice, really simple. Nothing fancy here.
So the first choice is about God choosing to take a certain group of people for a particular vocation, a particular task. The third choice, and only the third choice, is a one that involves eternal damnation or eternal salvation. Very, very important point. And you're going to think like, okay, this is like so simple.
The simple lesson that we just learned here, I want us to just hammer home and really get this down, because it's going to radically affect how we read tomorrow, the absolute cornerstone passage of Calvinism, which is Romans 9-11. So the take homes are very simple from this lecture. Some of God's choices are unconditional and some are conditional. So we have to recognize that we can't be blanket in our statements here. Some are unconditional and some are conditional.
We have to look at the context and we have to look at Scripture to tell us which of the two that it is. Matthew 22:1-14 is a beautiful parable that highlights the riches of God's choices. There's all kinds of things going on in this parable, but I want you to just grab onto this idea for a minute that God can send out and elect people for service unconditionally for no reason that we can tell. And I'll give Jonah as an example of that. God elected Jonah. He chose Jonah.
As far as we can tell, not for any virtue in himself, not because he was some incredibly moral, amazing person, but because God chose Jonah to go to the Ninevites and preach the gospel to them, preach repentance to them. And then the third is not all of God's choices or elections are to save or damn eternally. God can choose a people to carry out a ministry or a purpose. Is everyone with me here, okay?
So as simple as these are, I promise you that tomorrow, when we apply this to Romans 9-11, it's going to completely redo the way that you look at Romans 9-11, just with these simple concepts here. I've just got two more slides here, and then we're going to close. So, there's an interesting dilemma that we're in, is what do we call people who are not Calvinists? So a lot of people will say non-Calvinist. I don't like like that term, saying like, " Oh, I'm a non-Calvinist.
" That's like defining yourself by a negative term. It's not very exciting. Well, some people say, " Oh, you must be Arminian. " Well, I don't call myself an Arminian either. I think Arminian is much closer to biblical truth, but I don't call myself an Arminian for reasons we may be able to get into. So if you're an Arminian, hey, you can call yourself that, but not necessarily the term that certainly encapsulates the diversity of views outside of Calvinism.
So there's a couple of proposals that have been made, and there's a number of people that have been responding to the YRR New Calvinism and said, " Okay, we need to try to define ourselves on the other side. " And most of it has been led by a lot of people within the Southern Baptist community. So the Southern Baptists have been taken over progressively more and more by the Calvinist wing. And the more traditional group of Southern Baptists have been saying, " Okay, we need to try to take it back.
" And they've been actually quite prolific at proposing terms here. So there are several proposals, and I'll probably use all of them in various points here. So the one is traditionalists. So the Southern Baptists have successfully used this term a lot. They'll say there is the traditionalists and there's the Calvinists, because they would make the case, and it's accurate, that the traditionalists were originally, certainly historically, if you go back, were the ones who were in the Christian faith.
And even in the Southern Baptist community, they were the ones that were around before the Calvinists took over. So they're traditionalists. And I kind of like that because it communicates this idea that traditional salvation, traditional soteriology, is not Calvinist. There's another person, Leighton Flowers, who I just mentioned, he has proposed the term provisionist. And he's not trying to say that all provisionists are Arminians. He's trying to come up with a term that encapsulates a wide group.
And he would say that for the provisionist, God is glorified in His love and provision for all. And I really like that. I like that idea because he's trying to distinguish between provisionism and the very narrow particular salvation where God only gives grace to a small number of people. And then the final term that is a little bit newer has been proposed by a guy named Ronnie Rogers, who says he likes the term " extensivist. " And that's in distinction to exclusivist.
So, the way he describes it is, " Extensivism means men cannot be saved because they will not believe, whereas in Calvinism, men will not be saved because they cannot will to believe as decided by God. " Do you see that distinction there? So in extensivism, men cannot be saved because they will not believe. Simple, right? Whereas in Calvinism, men will not be saved because they cannot will to believe. Do you get that? It's a subtle distinction, but it's really important.
It gets back to the ideas we've been saying before about total inability and total depravity, unconditional election, all of those. So you can pick whatever you like. I'm just showing you that there's other terms that have been proposed now to try to get a fair representation. I'm more of an early church person there. And so a lot of people ask me, I say, oh, I kind of like the way the early church looked at salvation. But I like these terms as well. So if those speak to you, you can use those.
All right, my last slide here is some homework. So I think this will take us about 45 minutes to an hour to do. And it's going to help a lot for tomorrow. So I want you to do three things. So the first one is just to read three verses. The first one is Genesis 12:1 to 3. And I want you to look at this. This is the call of Abraham or Abram. I want you to consider the purpose of God's election or God's choice as it relates to eternal salvation.
So I've just told you that election can be for salvation or it can be for service. And I want you to look and read carefully Genesis 12:1-3 and ask that question. What exactly is the election of Abraham here? Next is to read Exodus 7-12 and look for any patterns that you can find about Pharaoh's heart being hardened. So we all know this passage is a famous passage, but there's actually a very interesting pattern that you probably have not seen about this hardening of Pharaoh's heart.
And then the last thing I want you to do is read Romans 9-11. Now Romans 9-11, and I'll show you tomorrow some quotes on this is easily, not by a little bit, but by a lot, is the most important passage for Calvinists. By far, John Piper said that this was the passage that converted him to become a diehard Calvinist. So Romans 9-11.
And when you read it, and I introduce some concepts here today that I'm hoping you're going to import into your and use in your reading here, what do you understand this passage to mean about salvation? So do all three of these things, and feel free to do them in a group as well, and to bounce ideas off of each other. You will get a lot more out of tomorrow's session. We're going to tackle head-on Romans 9-11. We're going to go for the jugular, you know that expression, right?
We're going to go for the absolute center of Calvinism here. And I'm going to show you, and after tomorrow's session, you will hopefully never read Romans 9-11 the same way again. There's a way that you probably all are reading it, which is a natural way that might be read, which is a little bit more Calvinist. But I'm going to show you that, in fact, there's a far better way to read Romans 9-11 that honors the context better, that honors some of these principles we just looked at from Matthew.
And once you see it, I'm hoping it gives you excitement about God and what He is doing in the world today because it really is a tremendous passage.