Lecture 9: The History and Dangers of Proof-texting

Lesson Transcript

All right, so we're going to talk in this ninth session here about how we can learn from history and some of the dangers of proof texting. And then we're going to spend some time looking at a variety of the proof texts that are used in Calvinism there. So let's jump right in. So let's talk about history. We did touch on history a little bit in our first session. This is that person that I mentioned in our first meeting. His name is Loraine Boettner.

He's a famous Calvinist who wrote in the early part of the 20th century and made some very important contributions to the rise of Calvinism. And he has a section here that I want you to read with me on the history of Calvinism. So it says, " It may occasion some surprise to discover that the doctrine of predestination was not made a matter of special study until near the end of the 4th century. " So he's a Calvinist. I'm showing you what even Calvinists write.

The earlier church fathers placed chief emphasis on good works such as faith, repentance, almsgiving, prayers, submission to baptism, et cetera, as the basis of salvation. They, of course, taught that salvation was through Christ, yet they assumed that man had full power to accept or reject the gospel. Some of their writings contain passages in which the sovereignty of God is recognized, yet alongside of those are others which teach the absolute freedom of the human will.

They taught a kind of synergism in which there was a cooperation between grace and free will. It was hard for a man to give up the idea that he could work out his own salvation. But at last, as a result of a long, slow process, he came to the great truth that salvation is a sovereign gift which has been bestowed irrespective of merit, that it was fixed in eternity, and that God is the author in all of its stages.

So, putting this in just ordinary language, here's a Calvinist saying, the early church fathers, they put all this emphasis on faith, repentance, almsgiving, almsgiving is giving to charity. It's in the Sermon on the Mount. Prayers, baptism. And he says, " They kind of missed the centrality of predestination. " And when does he say that predestination finally was figured out and the church came into the light? What time period? End of the fourth century.

And so he goes on to say where it really starts with Augustine. This cardinal truth of Christianity was first clearly seen by Augustine, the great spirit field theologian of the West. In his doctrines of sin and grace, he went far beyond the earlier theologians, taught an unconditional election of grace, and restricted the purposes of redemption to the definite circle of the elect.

It will not be denied by anyone acquainted with church history that Augustine was an eminently great and good man, and that his labors and writings contribute more to the promotion of sound doctrine and the revival of true religion than did those of any other man between Paul and Luther. So it's pretty interesting. So he pictures that basically the early church got it wrong, kind of missed the mark, and then this person comes out of nowhere, Augustine, and he's the one who kind of revived true Christianity.

And then there's another jump to Luther. And then the final block here, " Prior to Augustine's Day, the time had been largely taken up in correcting heresies within the church and in refuting attacks from the pagan world in which it found itself. Consequently, but little emphasis had been placed on the systematic development of doctrine. And this is very interesting here.

And that doctrine, the doctrine of predestination received such little attention in this age, was no doubt partly due to the tendency to confuse it with a pagan doctrine of fatalism, which was so prevalent throughout the Roman Empire. So there was another teaching that was and we'll see this in a moment that was dominant in the first centuries of Christianity that the early Christians were fighting against, which here he calls it fatalism. So let's talk about Augustine. So he lived, he was born in 354 AD.

So you can see by the time he was a grown man, it would have been late fourth century. When was the Council of Nicaea? 325. Yeah, everyone should know that number. That's one of the few numbers that I think everyone should memorize. Council of Nicaea was 325. That's kind of the watershed between early Christianity and later Christianity. And so you can see he was born 25 years after, and I see it even happened. So he's definitely late. He spent 10 years as a Manichean. Some of you know that term, I hope.

The Manicheans were a Gnostic group. In fact, some people say they were the pinnacle of the Gnostics. And he famously did not know Greek, although he tried to learn it near the end of his life, but he started quite late and certainly was not his native tongue. And he writes about how he struggled to learn Greek and how he was kind of behind the ball, so to speak. And so it's very interesting that the first person to kind of come up with all these doctrines was not a native Greek speaker.

So the New Testament was written in Greek. And I think that's significant that here you have someone who's dealing with translations. His theology changes in 412 AD. Initially, he believed and taught free will, and then he spent all the time with the Manicheans and had a couple of I won't go through the whole story here, but eventually his theology changed.

And what he did was he championed not just original sin, but original guilt and began to teach that babies were guilty and he had a whole debate with someone named Pelagius. And they would have believed and taught that if a baby were not baptized, then the baby would die and go to hell. So it's not just some kind of taint there, but original guilt. So again, lots to say there which we're not going to do. And of course, he and Ambrose were the ones who introduced just war theology to the church.

So before that, for the first three centuries of the Christian church, there was no just war theology, but it was he who did that. So he's adding a lot of new doctrines to the history of Christianity. And it's funny because a lot of people will say, " Oh yeah, the early church taught XYZ. " And a lot of times what they mean is they mean Augustine. They'll put him in that category. And I think like, whoa, you know I don't mean early church, Augustine. But a lot of people do because that's just old, right?

Anything like before the year 2000 is like early church or something. So that's really, really poor form. And as it turns out, Calvin admired Augustine greatly. So there's a picture of Calvin again. And this is what he says. If I were inclined to compile a whole volume from Augustine, I could easily show my readers that I need no words but his. Augustine is the one we quote most frequently as being best and most faithful witness, the best and most faithful witness in all antiquity.

Augustine is so holy with me that if I wish to write a confession to my faith, I could do so out of his writings. So there's clearly a lot of links here. He doesn't exactly replicate Augustine, but the key ideas that he has of particularly unconditional election and predestination come right from him. Now let's read just a couple of quotes. I'd be remiss because we've done so little with the early church in any of my sessions.

I've been wanting us to just stay centered on the Bible, but I want to put just a little bit in here. This is a fascinating individual. His name is Clement of Rome. You can see he was born in 35 AD and died around the year 99 AD. So very, very early, overlapped with the apostles. And here's what he says in the book of First Clement. He says, " It is therefore in the power of everyone since man has been made possessed of free will. Whether he shall hear of us to life or the demons to destruction.

He who is good by his own choice is really good, but he who is made good by another under necessity is not really good because he is not what he is owned by his own choice. For no other reason does God punish the sinner either in the present or future world except because he knows that the sinner was able to conquer but neglected to gain the victory. So i mean this is common sense, right? Anybody who didn't know anything about Calvinism would say, yeah, that makes sense.

If someone's forcing you to be good, if they're compelling you to be good, that's no credit to you. And so this is a beautiful quote that illustrates how the early church taught. This was written around the year 95 AD. It's one of the first documents we have by a Christian after the New Testament. And interestingly, a lot of people believe and there's a long tradition in church history that would name him as being one of the companions of Paul.

So in Philippians 4:3, it says, " And I urge you true companion to help these women who labored with me in the gospel with Clement also and the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the Book of Life. " So can't be 100% sure, but it's likely, at least, that this is the same individual. And so it's pretty valuable that we can have somebody here who native Greek speaker, probably a companion of Paul, and understanding in totally different documents and words how this is done. All right, Tertullian.

So what is his most famous term that he introduces into the church? Anybody know? Trinity. Trinity, yeah. So the word Trinity is not found in the Bible. And Tertullian coins this term, Trinitas in Latin, as a way to synthesize what the Bible teaches about God. And we would all here, I think, agree with the concept of the Trinity.

So he was a man who lived in Africa and Carthage, and this is what he says, " Entire freedom of will therefore was conferred upon man in both tendencies so that as master of himself, he might constantly encounter good by the observance of it and evil by its spontaneous observance of it. But the recompense for good and evil could not be given to the man who was found to be either good or evil through necessity and not choice.

" So again, very similar sentiment as to what we heard from Clement of Rome here, but it's a little bit later. And this is a very important writer. His name is Origen, who a lot of people don't like Origen and malign him for complicated reasons. I think he's an incredible author. He was probably one of the most learned men of the second century, some would say the most learned man of the entire world. And you can see he lived in the late second century, early third century. And this is fascinating.

So he says, talking about the Gnostics. Certain men, Gnostics who hold different opinions misuse these passages. They destroy free will by introducing ruined natures incapable of salvation and by introducing others as being saved in such a way that they cannot be lost. What does that sound like? Destroying free will by introducing ruined natures incapable of salvation and by introducing others as being saved in such a way they cannot be lost. Does that sound like any views that you've heard?

What does it sound like? What? Calvinism. Sounds just like Calvinism, right? But of course, this is what the Gnostics were teaching at the time. And so many people would say that the Gnostic influence moved through Augustine, and then he transmitted that. And both Luther and Calvin were very influenced by Augustine. In fact, Luther was an Augustinian monk. All right, one more from Lactantius, and then we're going to jump to a different topic.

The Son clothed himself with flesh so that the desires of the flesh being subdued, he might teach us that to sin was not the result of necessity, but of man's purpose and will. So again, he's saying like, sin is not what you're born into. It's not just some necessary result of being human. Okay, so now let's talk about what is proof texting? What is the definition of proof texting? Having an agenda and then going through the Bible and finding, picking out verses that support that. Right. Exactly.

So you have an agenda. You have something you're trying to prove. And then you go to a document and you grab things that seem to suggest whatever it is you're trying to prove. And it's not really honoring the intent of the author. It's not reading something from start to finish and saying, oh, this is what I think the author is trying to say. It's taking your agenda and trying to cherry-pick ideas. So this is my definition that I came up, but very similar to what you said.

Cherry picking isolated verses or ideas and presenting those as evidence for a position, even when contradicted by broader themes, the context, other verses, or author intent. So it happens often. And I'm going to give you an example from a movie review. I haven't read the movie. I haven't seen the movie. I just grabbed this off of the internet because I thought it was an interesting example. So it was in the LA Times. Here's a movie review that somebody wrote.

Even Lawrence Fishburne's incendiary performance can't ignite hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. Fishburne's bumpy is fierce, magnetic, irresistible even. But even this actor can only do so much. While the scenes that are supposed to create audience involvement are easy to spot, they don't play as intended. And the result is a plodding epic that tends to the lethargic and lackadaisical.

So if you go online and read the review, you'll see that the person's not really that wild about the movie and just thinks that, yeah, there's some good things, but in general, it's pretty poorly done, a plodding epic that tends to be lethargic and lackadaisical. So the company that promoted the movie, though, they made an ad based on this. And here's what they said in the ad. Irresistible. And did you see that? And that actually was there. There was one word in here talking about the performance of this actor.

But that's literally what they said on the poster, irresistible. Can it turn from the LA Times, right? So this is a great example of proof texting. They're trying to make money off of this article there and clearly going against author intent. So there are many, many, many problems with proof texting. It either shows dishonesty or laziness, one of the two. It's hard to imagine that this can be done out of a good heart and someone who is truly diligent.

On top of that, it's trying to draw authority and credibility for a source, but it's actually using that source for a predetermined agenda and against that person's intent. So in that movie ad, the LA Times, that's a well-known publication. And so they want to leverage that credibility. They want to borrow that credibility and put irresistible author from the LA Times. So they're trying to take someone else's brand name and use it for their purpose. So we want to really strive against that.

So how do you avoid proof texting? So you want to read the whole of a book and let the whole inform the parts. And as the world becomes lazier and lazier, I think proof texting is going to become more and more prominent. People today, just with Twitter and all the sound bites and all that, it's just people want really short quotes. Whereas if you can actually read the whole, it'll help you so much to avoid proof texting.

And I think you should really make it your goal to learn how others, as early as you can, have read a book in history, especially native speakers of that language. So I think I mentioned this the other day, but I grew up in a bilingual home where my parents spoke an Indian language. And they would talk to me and my brother in this language. We would usually talk back in English.

But it was funny because sometimes there would be people that would come to our house and they would hear my parents speaking in Malayalam and they would say, oh, what did you just say? And someone would attempt to translate it. And whenever I would hear a translation, I would say like, ah, that just doesn't really get it. You kind of got it, but it doesn't capture really what was the richness of what was intended there.

And right now, I teach English every other week at the bridge, our ESL Center, which I think you were at, some of you were at earlier this week. And it's really interesting because I have to get up and try to explain different words here. Wow. Especially, you don't even think about it when you're a native English speaker, but then you have to explain words to people who are non-native and it's very confusing. So I'll give you some examples. Think about the word dust. So the verb dust.

So if you want to dust something, you clean it off, right? You get like one of those feathery things and you get the dust off of it. But then if you're making a cake and then it says to dust it with powdered sugar, you're applying dust on it. And you're like, man, that's like the exact opposite meaning. And we just figure out spontaneously, we don't even think about it, about what sense the word dust is.

But when you have to explain that to another person who doesn't speak the language, you're like, wow, that's kind of odd. And they'll ask you, like how do I know which of it is? I don't know, you just figure it out from the context, I guess. The word original. The word original can mean like normally I think of it's like the first thing. It's the very beginning. But then people also will use it and they'll say that was a very original idea, which means creative or fresh or brand new.

And so again, we use that word original and we don't even think about it. Do you mean origin, like original from the very beginning, or do you mean original that was like a creative, exciting idea? What about the word left? So if I say he left, so that means he went on, he moved someplace else. But then if I say who's left, that means who's remaining, who's stayed behind. And again, we don't even think about this when you speak English, but it's literally the exact opposite meaning there in that word left.

I'm guessing none of you ever thought about that. We use the word left, and it means the exact opposite sense, depending on the context. The word clip. So if I'm going to clip something, I clip this microphone to my shirt here. So this is a microphone clip, and you can buy lots of clips on Amazon. But then if you want to clip something, you get a scissors out and you cut it. And so again, it's the same word that means the exact opposite thing, depending on the context. And so we do this all the time.

We don't even think about it. And we forget how language is a very complex, nuanced thing. If you're a native speaker, you have vast advantages over someone who's trying to learn it from the outside. So Augustine, who's trying to learn Greek when he's an old man, is never going to be remotely as good as Clement of Rome, or Irenaeus, or Justin Martyr, or these people who grew up speaking it natively and fluently. And we have an amazing advantage.

If you can claim unanimity of the native speakers on a position, that is a powerful, powerful advantage. And especially those of us who grew up in bilingual homes appreciate that. And people who have lived in a monolingual setting don't normally get that. But I'm telling you, it's very, very, very powerful. So this is why you should all learn church history, particularly the early church. Anybody know who this is? Yeah, David Bercot. You should all know who he is. So born in 1950.

I'm going to highly recommend a course that's his. It's on thehistoricfaith.com. It's called Salvation, Mechanical, or Relational. And he goes through predestination, a lot of the topics that I covered here in much more depth. You have to subscribe to this, but it's very, very worth it. We're going to put on my lectures from this Calvinism course onto this website as well. It's $10 a month to subscribe. You won't regret it.

And he has, we're going to put more and more of his content up on there, but he's got, I think it's 140 hours, something like that. Do you know the number? Something like that of content that we're going to put up there and wow, it's so valuable. And I listened to him quite a bit, and then I'll listen to the same message a year or two later, and I'll get more out of it. And I thought like, wow, I didn't even remember that. I totally forgot about that. So very, very powerful.

So before we jump into some scriptures here, this is a diagram that I made a while ago that I try to keep in my mind here. So when you think about the popular worldview of the day, so I think of like Oprah Winfrey or Ellen or something like that. So in America, that's what you would find that most people hold to. It's typically very muddled, very incoherent, hedonistic, shifting.

It's like what Oprah says today compared to what talk show people were saying in the ' 80s is different, say on gender and things like that. And it's a mess. And what often happens when people first come into Christianity, say, they'll find a more plausible worldview, but it's still kind of incomplete and defective. So a lot of very sincere, but just I would say amateurish churches and places are just kind of blah, right?

There's some truth there, and it's better than certainly the popular worldview of the day, but it's still very incomplete. And what happens often is that people will then jump into something like, say, Calvinism, where that feels a lot more rigorous. And you have all these scholars using big words, and they're dominating the seminaries, and it just feels very, very enticing. And so that's more plausible there, right? And so people get excited about being here.

And then a reaction will happen because people will see the errors over here. We talked about this the other day. And they jumped over here. So here you have this fatalist unconditional election over here. And then you'll jump to something over there, which is much more graceless, man-centered. They're overreacting to what's over here. And if you think about it, this is like exactly where Satan wants it to be. Because if you think about it, let's take, for example, prayer.

So on this side over here, it's hard to really get excited about prayer when you're on this side because everything's predetermined. The elect that's a secure number, no matter what you do or don't do, it's not going to affect the salvation of the elect. Yeah, Calvinists would say it's a privilege to work with God and all that, but still it doesn't meaningfully do that.

But over here, if you live in a more graceless, man-centered view, you're not going to be praying either, because it's going to be more just your work. I actually think that most churches are in one of the two places. And the outcome is the same. In both cases, you get a prayerless kind of non-dilligent striving there. And like I said, I think most places tend to fall into either place.

And what's very rare is to find the best worldview that's historically grounded, that actually incorporates the totality of what Scripture says into a truly coherent worldview. And I've traveled, my dad's a missionary, so I've been to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of churches all over the world and had gotten to see all different kinds of Christians from Protestants to Anabaptists to Greek Orthodox, you name it. And the number of churches that are up in this category are very, very, very, very small.

Okay, so let's now jump into some text on Calvinism here. I wanted to try to use our time here to get into some specific verses. So we looked the other day at Romans 9 to 11, we looked at Ephesians 1, we looked at John 6 and 10. Those are the four main passages that Calvinists plant their flags in. However, there are a bunch of scattered verses throughout the Bible that people will take, and they're all over the place, and they're just kind of these random passages here and there.

So what I decided to do, and I did this late last night, was or this morning, actually, I took a website where they crowdsource basically concepts. And so you type in a concept, say it's forgiveness, or total depravity, or the atonement. And then people vote on which verses are the most supportive or helpful for that concept. So I kind of like those because you get to see what the masses think are the verses that best address or contribute to a subject.

So I typed in total depravity, and you can see how many people voted for the different verses here. So about almost 100 people said the most compelling verse that, quote, " proves total depravity " is Jeremiah 17. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? 1 Corinthians 2, the natural person does not accept the things of God, the Spirit of God for their folly to him, and he's unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

Psalm 51:5, " Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. " And then you can see that one in Ephesians 2, where it says, " And we're going to talk about this in a minute. You were dead in the trespasses and sin in which you once walked following the course of this world. " John 6 usually comes up. " No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. " We talked about that yesterday.

Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, which I wasn't sure that didn't seem relevant at all. But it goes to show that the top five there, that's what the crowds think, are the ones that show total depravity. Now keep in mind what total depravity in the Calvinist sense is that you can't respond to God, you're dead in your sins, and there's no hope unless you are first regenerated by God and then you respond in faith.

Okay, so let's just really quickly, how would you answer that top verse there? Do you think that's something like does that really seem to be something that you would say, wow, that just blows me away. That seems like that's a strong proof text for Calvinism. What do you think? I think it's the context of the verse. Isn't it in a prayer to God? I don't think that one is. I think Well, it might be. Although I didn't actually look it up, so it could be. Someone can check that. I think I heard that somewhere.

Well, what you might be thinking of is our righteousness is as filthy rags. That one is in a prayer. But what do you think about this? So is this one that when you see that, you think, yeah, that convinces me of total depravity? Anybody? I'm seeing people shake their heads, but nobody's speaking. Someone speak. No, by itself, it doesn't in my mind. Why not? Because it says deceitful above all things are desperately sick. So it puts the responsibility back on your heart or back on nuts in a sense. OK. Yeah.

Other thoughts on this? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways you can take this. Like I read this and I think like, yeah, I agree with that. I like that verse. We should be very suspicious of our hearts and we're very sickle people and we are sick. And I agree with that. And it is hard to understand. It's hard to understand ourselves, much less other people.

And I don't see this as certainly saying anything like, " You're completely unable to respond to God and you have no capacity whatsoever to respond or to confess that you are desperately sick. " Even the Calvinists would say, " Not only are you in sin, you can't even confess to God that you're in sin. You are just so hopelessly trapped. " And that's a leap that I wouldn't necessarily make. What about that second one?

Natural person doesn't accept the things of the Spirit of God for their folly to him, and he's not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. What do you think? It's kind of similar to the first one, but anybody have any? How would you respond if someone said, " This proves total depravity. " The prevenient grace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So we would all agree, certainly, and what Chloe said is right, that left on our own, we're hopeless.

And if God were to withdraw His Spirit from this world, I would be the first to say, " No chance for us. " But what it doesn't say is, " Who gets the Spirit of God? " It doesn't say anything here about that. And I would say that someone who has not received, who has not accepted God's grace in their life, it is going to seem like folly to them. The cross, all those things. I totally agree with that. We need the Spirit of God to understand the things of God. There's no doubt there.

But this doesn't say anything that God doesn't give that to everyone or anything like that. Psalm 51 is an interesting one where it's David. Anybody remember the context of Psalm 51? It's a famous Psalm. Yeah, after he commits adultery with Bathsheba, he kills Uriah, her husband, and Nathan calls him out, and then he confesses, and Psalm 51 is David's confession there. And he says, " Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me.

" And so a lot of people say, " See, aha, he was like in sin, dead from the day he was born. " Well, you know we would all agree that there's some sense in which we are as humans, our flesh has fallen. But Psalm 51 is also, like most of the Hebrew poets and Isaiah and the Psalms, you have to be really careful because they tend to use hyperbole. In the same Psalm, he says, " Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.

" So you think about that and you think, " Okay, against you, you only have I sinned. " Let's think about that. David, let's just see what you did. Well, you killed a man who, because you wanted his wife, you committed adultery. She didn't come to you. You sought her out and you slept with her. You committed adultery. You were neglecting your job because you were supposed to be out in war, and instead you were just hanging out on your roof, messing around instead of being where you were.

You sinned against a lot of people here, David. But really, what he's doing is, again, hyperbolically saying like, God, you're the most important person that I sinned against. And we tend to do that in our own language as well. We tend to use hyperbole. But we have to be careful in poetic passages especially about drawing too much theology out of that. And so I would take that just generally as a statement that he sees sin in his life from the earliest times that he can remember. Something like that.

And he's saying it in some poetic way. Ephesians 2, we're going to talk about in a second. John 6, we talked about yesterday, and then that Romans 3 one. That to me just seems irrelevant. I don't even see what help that does. So let's now talk about, there's two kinds of dead. So this is a famous distinction. There's the Lazarus dead. So we all know Lazarus was dead in the tomb. And when you're dead, like a corpse like Lazarus, you're dead.

And then there's another sense that the Bible uses the word dead, which is like the prodigal son dead. And I misspelled prodigal there. But the prodigal son dead is what the father says when the boy comes back is he says, " For this my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. " And what he means there and you hear this again, especially in certain cultures, the Father will say to the Son, " You're dead to me. " That means like we have no relationship.

Does he literally mean that his heart's not beating or that he can't hear him or anything like that? No, he doesn't. It's just an expression that you're dead in the sense that you're relationally cut off from a person. And so the question is, is which of the two senses is meant in that Ephesians passage when it says that we were dead in our sins? So there's many problems with this Lazarus dead. Because what a lot of Calvinists will say is that they'll say, " Oh yeah, you were dead.

Just like Lazarus was dead in the grave. You couldn't hear. You couldn't respond. That's the total depravity. And the only way that you could even hear God is if he first regenerates you supernaturally, unconditional election, and then now you can respond. So that's one of the main arguments that is given by True Calvinist is that Ephesians verse that we just looked at. But there's a lot of problems with this. And we don't have too much time. I'm just going to give you a high-level view of why it's so problematic.

So the first one is 2 Corinthians 4:4, the Bible says that the devil has blinded unbelievers. I think most of you know that passage. So here's the problem. Here's the problem with this. Does it make any sense to blind a corpse? Does it make any sense to blind a dead man? No, because they're dead, right? And what this shows is that if Satan is going to the trouble of blinding unbelievers, he must know that there's some capacity that that unbeliever has still that requires some active suppression of that capacity.

And here's another one. So Mark 6:6, it says, " Jesus says that he was amazed at their lack of faith. " So he does all these miracles, people don't believe, and he's amazed. And I love Leighton Flowers puts it elegantly. He says something like, " If this were true, if total depravity were true, Jesus should not be amazed at their lack of faith because they're all dead in their sins. " And when they see this, they shouldn't be responding.

And that's what dead people do, is they don't have faith, because they're dead. You might as well be amazed that the frogs croak. That's just what frogs do, right? In the same way, dead people don't respond. And yet Jesus is amazed. And so it sounds like there's some capacity that they had to respond, but they didn't exercise that.

And in fact, this whole idea of judicial hardening that we saw, we spent a lot of time on in Exodus, Jesus uses the same thing when he talks about the parables and the use of parables, where he says that I can't speak plainly because of this judicial hardening. And we talked about that briefly. So judicial hardening doesn't really make sense if there's not more of a sliding scale. So the way that I tend to think of this is more of a spectrum. It's not like you're dead or alive.

Like in the Calvinist system, it's one or the other. Whatever is true about our humanness with respect to our ability to respond to God, it's more of a many shades of gray in between. And Jesus even talks about how children apparently seem to have an advantage in that they're humble and more supple and responsive to God. And so children seem to be over here, and as you get older, you get crustier and harder. Another reason why you could even say that this is true is empirically.

Empirically, we know that people, by the time they're like 20, 25, 30, that tends to be how they're going to be for the rest of their life. So however you are when you're that age, most likely you're not going to change your faith till the day you die. There are exceptions. But if unconditional election were true, you would expect that it would be this random distribution in people of all ages and it would be just unpredictable and very difficult. But in fact, it's the exact opposite. We see these trends.

We see predictable patterns that occur there because it seems like there are certain dimensions in the natural world that we experience. Interestingly, it's not taught in Genesis after the fall, this total depravity.

You would think after Adam and Eve's sin that remember the curses that happen about Eve and childbearing and her desire being her husband and Adam with his toil and all that, you would think that God would say, " And you all are now just going to be dead and unresponsive to me, and that's the curse of the fall. " But there's nothing mentioned about that. Nothing. And wow, that's a striking omission that that would be there. Okay, so let's look at another crowdsourced one here. I'm going to do a couple of these.

Unconditional election. So first one is Ephesians. So we looked at that yesterday, and we won't go over that again. So this is really misunderstood. I won't repeat our comments there. Acts 13:48, " 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.

" This is actually a really interesting one, and this is one that I would say of all the ones on here is the one that I would actually think about as being supportive of Calvinism. John 15:16, this is another interesting one. " You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, He may give it to you.

" 2 Thessalonians 2:13, " But we ought always to give thanks to you, to God for you, brothers, my beloved and Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits to be saved through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. " It's very similar to the Ephesians 1 reference. And then Romans 8:29, " For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined.

" I was surprised this one was on here because this is like the opposite of unconditional election, because this is the one that we talked about the other day where it says, " God is predestining those whom He foreknows. " So it's conditional election in this verse. So this is like I don't know why people are voting for this, because it's not helping their case. So it's a little like that Romans 3 all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It's irrelevant. If anything, it hurts your case.

So these first two are this one, number one and number four are very easy. And we mentioned that yesterday. Acts 13:48 and John 15:16, these are a little harder. So let's spend a couple minutes on each of these. Let's do John 15:16. How would you answer that one? It says, " You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you. " Actually, a funny story. When I was young in college, there was a young man who refused to sing the song, he was Calvinist.

He refused to sing the song, and it's not even a popular song anymore, but Refiner's Fire. Do y'all know the song " Refiners Fire? " " Purify My Heart. " Let me be as gold as Precious Silver. And the chorus goes, " I choose to be holy. " And I'm not going to sing that song. That's unbiblical. I did not choose that. Only God chose that. So hardliners will reject songs over that. So anyways, he would probably point to this verse and say, " That's why I don't sing Refiner's Fire. " It's unbiblical.

How would you answer that? Yes? Well, in a way, if God did choose us before we chose him. Yeah, there is a certain sense in which God did choose us before him, so that's absolutely right. And then also, try to use what we learned in day one and day two, and think about the context as well. Yes. Referring to not as much salvation, but the disciples. Exactly. So this is what's really interesting.

So John 15:16, if you read it in your context, Jesus is talking to the twelve, and many people have pointed out that Judas is in the group as well. And so if Judas is there, well, surely he wasn't chosen for eternal life.

And even Calvin, just to show you that even Calvin concedes this point, Calvin writes, " True, this does not refer to the ordinary election of believers, by which they are adopted to be the children of God, but to the special election by which he appointed his disciples to the office of preaching the gospel.

" So Calvin concedes, he says, " Don't really use this to talk about salvation because it's about that sense that we meant before God's unconditional selection of who are going to be the messengers and those who carry the Word of God. " And elsewhere he says, " Yes. " I agree that he is talking specifically about the apostolate. His intention is to move the disciples to perform their office diligently. So that's pretty interesting that Calvin himself says, " Don't use that verse. It's bad context.

" And he's talking about here the disciples. And if you want to say this is true, then you've got the Judas problem there. Acts 13:48 is the one. This is probably the verse that I would say Calvinists in the whole New Testament, if I had a case to make. And it's one bear verse. This is where I would probably go to. But I'm going to give you a couple of responses here. So one is from John Wesley. So Wesley was a famous preacher and amazing person who lived in the 1700s in England. And he hated Calvinism.

He despised it. And he wrote often against it. Here's what he said about this passage. There's a couple of ways to understand it, but he says, " As many as were ordained to eternal life, St. Luke does not say foreordained. " He's not speaking of what was done from eternity, but of what was then done through the preaching of the gospel. He's describing that ordination and that only which was at the very time of hearing it. During the sermon, those believed, says the apostle, to whom God then gave power to believe.

It is as if he had said they believed whose hearts the Lord opened, as he expressly used it in a clear parallel place, speaking of the same kind of ordination, and he compares that to Acts 16:14. It is observable the original word is not once used in Scripture to express eternal predestination of any kind. It's an important point. The Greek word is tasso. It's never used anywhere to describe predestination. The sum is, " All those and those only who are now ordained now believe.

" Not that God rejected the rest, it was His will that they also should have been saved, but they thrust salvation from them, nor were they who then believed, constrained to believe. But grace was first copiously offered them and they did not thrust it away so that a great multitude, even if Gentiles were converted. In a word, the expression properly implies a present operation of divine grace, working faith, in hearers.

And there's a bunch of other, I'm not going to go through this, but there's a bunch of other people who have said that there's a tremendous bias in our Bibles. The King James, the New King James, NIV, most of these were translated by Calvinists. You have to keep that in mind. And certainly the ESV. And so there's a lot of biases there.

As it turns out, we won't get into it, but the Greek word is a passive middle, and many have made the case that if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it, but you should translate this as being in the middle, which has a totally different sense to it, and it's much more in line with the rest of the New Testament there. And so if you want to read that, you can do so there. So the problems of unconditional election are vast.

So the Bible never speaks of unconditional regeneration occurring first, and then we express faith. So here's an example. So here's what Jesus says in John 5:40. " You refuse to come to me that you may have life. " So notice the sequence. It's not that Jesus says, " Okay, first I give you life, and then you come to me. " The order is, " You come to me and then you get life. " That's mentioned all throughout. The close of the book, John 21, where he kind of explains why the book of John was written.

He says, " These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. " So in Calvinism, what happens first? Yeah, God gives you life, right? He regenerates you, and you're like Lazarus in the grave, and you're like dead, and then boom, he wakes you up, and then you believe, and you have faith. But this is totally different. First you believe, and as you believe, then you gain life in His name.

As it turns out, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of verses and passages that say that our salvation is by faith slash faithfulness. And I say that because the Greek word for faith means either faith or faithfulness. It's kind of the combined word and you can't really separate the two. I could spend a whole hour just on that, but we won't. I often like to jab my Calvinist friends and say, " I don't even think you believe in salvation by faith.

" And they're very offended by that because one of the cries of the Reformation was sola fide, which means salvation by faith. And nominally, they adhere to that. But then I say, " Okay, you believe salvation by faith? " They say, " Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. " But then I say, " Okay, is election by faith? " I say, " No way. That's heresy. Election is unconditional. " And so wait a minute. So election is unconditional, but salvation is by faith.

And all of a sudden, most people have never had that thought before because they've severed the link between election and salvation. And in fact, the problem is that if the model is an unconditional election, you're just, boom, you wake up from the dead. God raises you up. And then you have faith. And all Calvinists say that as you have faith, then works follow as well. Well, faith and works are on the same platform there, the same level.

Because as soon as you're regenerated, as a response to that, then faith and works both flow. And they're very quick to say that they believe that true faith generates works. And so their whole platform actually undercuts even salvation by faith. And I've yet to have anybody give a decent response to this, and they're normally just flummoxed by the whole question, because they've never thought about it. All right, well, the P, the Perseverance of the Saints, which is the last point.

So they crowdsourced this one again. And by the way, notice the passages here. John 10, John 6, John 10, John 5, John 3:16, Romans 11. So what did I tell you, right? Romans 9 to 11, Ephesians 1, John 6, and John 10. This is like where everybody goes. All right, so John 10, we talked about, John 6 we talked about, John 10 we talked about. John 5, we did not talk about, but we'll talk about this. And actually John 3:16, we should talk about both of these.

" Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life. " John 3:16, we all know that. I want to quote that one. And then we'll address these in a second. Romans 11:29, " For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. " So if you take that in isolation, that sounds pretty compelling. But what does that mean in context? We looked at this on Tuesday. What are the gifts and calling of God that are irrevocable here?

Yeah, it's election of service. It's talking about Abraham and the call that God made on Israel there. And remember, right after this, he gives the olive tree a picture, and he says, " Okay, Gentiles, remember, if you are proud, you're going to get cut off. " So whatever Paul means by this, he is not meaning that you can't lose your salvation. And in fact, this is clearly in context about Abraham and the election to service. OK, these two here are interesting. So let's talk about this.

So a lot of people will say, ah, you people just deny the literal meaning of the Bible. It says eternal. And if you believe, eternal means eternal, and it's forever. So how do you respond to that? As long as you actually believe it is eternal, but that's conditional upon your belief. On your continuing belief. Yeah. So what I like to do and that's good. I appreciate that answer. What I like to do is I like to go to John 3:36. And I like to keep it in John because most of these passages are clustered in John.

So it's a famous verse a little bit after John 3:16 where he says, " He who believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. " And so I say, " Okay, let's use your same hermeneutic here. Let's look at the second part of this verse. " He who does not believe the Son shall not see life. " Okay, so let's take some non-Christian out there and I'm going to go to that person and they say, " You don't believe in the Son, do you?

" And they say, " No. " And so, therefore, you are not going to see life and the wrath of God is going to abide on you. Okay, so how would you if we literally mean this, right? Everybody who's currently a non-Christian shall not see life, and that's never going to change. Do you see how this is used asymmetrically? Because what they would say is, well, no, actually, but if they switch and become a believer, well, then this no longer applies. Do you see that? It's a really subtle point, but it's an important point.

People are very one-sided in their application here. We would all say, " He does not believe the Son. " Even a Calvinist would say, " That's true insofar as they don't not believe in the Son, then they won't see life. " And they won't literally hold that to be true, to kind of throw their words back at them, because they would understand that there's actually an implied condition here. And in the same way, that first part has an implied condition as well. So Perseverance of the Saints.

Brother Clark is going to send out an email later today from a person who actually they're from DTS who they even try to believe in perseverance of the saints in eternal security, but they concede the point that there are 85 passages I actually added one 85 passages and verses that they came up with that imply that someone can forsake his or her salvation. And it's an amazing list. So you'll get that in your email and check them out.

So you'll see that there's just dozens and dozens of verses in almost every book of the Bible. There's so many examples. You can go through it on your own time. I like to point out things like the parable of the sower. Parable sower, it's pretty clear. The sower is like putting seed in all these places and there's genuine life there, right? But for example, in one case, the deceitfulness of wealth, the cares of this world, and the desire for other things, they choke it out and they kill it.

And so there was life there, but did it go on and make it? No, it didn't. Parable to unforgiving debtor. Wow. How do you read that parable and not see that Jesus is saying like, there's a person who genuinely was forgiven. They owed like whatever it was, a million dollars to this king.

They're forgiven and they go out and they find somebody who owes them, I'll make it up, a dollar, and they start strangling the person, give me back when you and then the king hears about it and he says, " Actually, I'm going to put you back in jail, and you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail and suffer weeping and gnashing of teeth, " which is obviously a picture of the final judgment. So how do you read that parable and not see that there is a conditionality on that?

Even in the Lord's Prayer, there's forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. And he ends the Lord's Prayer by saying, " So if you do not forgive others your debts, your father will not forgive you your transgressions either. " Parable the vine and the branches. People are genuinely in the vine, but if they don't bear fruit, what does it say? They're cut off. They're cut off. Paul, so those are all Jesus. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10, he says, gives this whole story of Israel.

He says, " They were all baptized into Moses. They all ate the same food. They all drank the same spiritual drink. " But their bodies were scattered in the desert. And he says that they all were baptized. They saw the miracles. But he says, they didn't make it. Only two adults, Caleb and Joshua made it into the Promised Land. And he says, this is a picture for the Christian life as well. This is also Paul, Colossians 1:22 to 23.

" He is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him. " If indeed, and by the way, this is from the ESV, " If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. " Pretty clear, right? Like he's saying, there's a condition. And it would be deceptive. And nobody would talk like this if there's not the possibility of you losing your faith.

There's a bunch of passages in Hebrews, so you can look at those later.