More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
R.C. Sproul
Read between
February 11 - February 22, 2025
No doctrine in the Christian faith engenders more debate than the doctrine of predestination.
No other doctrine more clearly demonstrates our utter dependence on divine grace and mercy than the doctrine of predestination. No other doctrine is more comforting to the personal struggle of faith than the doctrine of election.
Much is at stake in how we understand predestination, and we must be extraordinarily sensitive and careful in how we handle this doctrine.
Every church and every Christian has some doctrine of predestination because the Bible has a doctrine of predestination.
Predestination does not refer to the course of the stars, God’s general divine superintendence, His providence over the universe, or His governance over natural laws. Rather, Paul is talking about salvation—a predestined salvation in which, from the foundation of the world, believers were chosen by God to be saved.
God knows all things in advance, and He knows them perfectly.
Though all churches and Christians don’t agree about the nature of predestination, one point can be agreed on: God, in His sovereignty, in some way predestines who gets to heaven and who does not. That’s the simplest definition of predestination.
The Augustinian view maintains that from the foundation of the world—before anyone was born or did anything—God decided who would be brought to faith and who would not.
In the first view, the decisive factor regarding a person’s destiny rests with the individual. In the second view, the decisive factor rests with God.
We can never spend too much time studying the character of God.
It is much better to understand this passage as denoting universal categories in this golden chain: all who are foreknown (in whatever sense one understands foreknowledge here) are predestined, and all who are predestined are called, and all who are called are justified, and all who are justified are glorified.
The external call is the basic proclamation of the gospel message to all people.
The internal call, however, has to do with the secret operation of the Holy Spirit.
To summarize, the Apostle Paul teaches in Romans 8 that all of the elect are foreknown by God. There is no election apart from foreknowledge. Predestination means that people are predestined to be called, justified, and glorified.
In Romans 9, Paul labors the point that our election is not based on what we do—not on our doing, our willing, our goodness, or our badness. Instead, before we were born—and without any respect to what we would do or not do—God elected some and not others, that His purposes in election might stand.
One individual was chosen, and another was not. Neither was chosen or not chosen because of anything he did or would ever do.
Paul’s anticipation of such an objection would not have been necessary if the text were teaching the prescient view.
You may very well be numbered among the elect but have not yet realized your election.
When we receive grace from God, we receive a blessing, favor, or benefit from His hand that we have not deserved, earned, or merited. It comes to us simply from the wideness of His mercy.
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion”
So, the first thing we must understand about God’s grace is that His grace is sovereign. Grace is something that God is never obligated to give—God doesn’t owe anyone grace.
If God owed us grace, it would no longer be grace. It would...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But when the topic of the sovereignty of grace comes up, people don’t want to believe that God has the authority or the right to grant His mercy and grace as He wills.
When our sins were transferred to Jesus, before the bar of God’s justice, Jesus was no longer innocent. He was innocent in and of Himself, but by imputation, as our representative, He was regarded as sin (see 2 Cor. 5:21).
If we think that God owes us grace, we’ve stopped thinking about grace and have started thinking about justice.
The worst thing that could happen to us is for us to ask God for justice. The only way we can draw a breath in this world, and the only way we can hope of going to heaven, is by His sovereign grace alone.
Clearly, God sovereignly elects some to salvation and does not elect others; He chooses some people as objects of His saving grace and tremendous benefits but does not give that same blessing and favor to others.
The fact that there is no reason in us does not mean there is no reason at all behind God’s actions.
God never wills apart from His own counsel.
We should be properly amazed by the grace of God, but tragically, we tend to take His grace for granted.
What God chooses, He does so according to His good pleasure. This word makes all the difference in the world.
But there is no evil will in God.
The only thing that has ever pleased God is goodness, the only pleasure that He’s ever had is a good pleasure, and the only purpose that He’s ever had is a good purpose.
Our problem is usually that we don’t always like God’s decisions. We don’t always agree with His counsel. We are often tempted to say or think, “If I were God, I would do this,” or, “If I were God, I certainly wouldn’t do that.” It is at this point we must stop and repent of our arrogance. As bad as the world may sometimes seem to our finite human minds, we can say with absolute certainty that the world would be a true disaster if we were in the place of God.
The idea that Augustine taught was this: the sinner has no inclination in his heart for the things of God unless God first changes his soul.
The whole point of God’s work of regeneration is that God not only designs the ends of salvation, but He also ordains the means to bring about those ends in people’s lives.
God Himself supplies the condition necessary for the sinner to respond.
One of the most controversial texts on this topic appears in John 6:44. Jesus says: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
The metaphor of Scripture is that the man has already drowned. He is at the bottom of the ocean. The New Testament teaches that God the Holy Spirit is like a rescuer who dives to the bottom of the sea, pulls the dead man out, and breathes life into him. Likewise, the dying man in the hospital who has to open his mouth to receive the medicine is not really desperately and critically ill. He is already dead. Taking life-saving medicine to the coroner’s office or the morgue and offering it to a corpse is an exercise in futility. A corpse cannot open its mouth to receive healing medicine. The
...more
If God looked at people who were dead in sin, even if He looked for a long time, how many would He find responding positively to the gospel? He would have no one to elect, no one to predestine, because He would see all of them perishing in their unbelief.
But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” (John 6:61–63, 65)
Jesus says the flesh is no help at all; it profits nothing. It does not contribute even 1 percent; it contributes 0 percent. One hundred percent of our salvation is from God.
It is the false belief that we’re not really dead in sin and trespasses, but that we’re only sick in sin and trespasses, still possessing the ability to revive ourselves once we hear the gospel.
Part of the problem is that some people have a distorted understanding of predestination and election. They think of it as if God drags people kicking and screaming against their wills into the kingdom of God, and at the same time He prevents other people from coming to the kingdom who do want to be there.
Does that mean that God drags us kicking and screaming into the kingdom? No, and the reason is that we have been regenerated. For us to be saved, God must first regenerate us. Regeneration is the raising to new spiritual life; it is a change in the disposition of hearts.
The second aspect of the distorted idea of predestination is that God keeps people out of the kingdom who desperately want to be there. But, as we have seen, no one in his natural state wants to be there. We are fugitives from God.
Unless everyone is elect, we have two categories—the elect and the nonelect. And because two categories exist, there must be some kind of double predestination.
By contrast, the Augustinian view of double predestination is asymmetrical. It is called a positive-negative view of predestination. This view holds that God does a positive work in the lives of the elect whereby He intervenes to rescue them from spiritual death by making them alive and creating faith in their souls. With respect to the reprobate, God does not do a positive work by creating fresh evil in their hearts and forcing them to reject Christ. Rather, He does a negative work by merely passing over them. He performs what is often described in the New Testament as a type of divine
...more
He doesn’t prevent the others from coming to Christ—He doesn’t have to prevent them from coming to Christ. They prevent themselves because they don’t want to come to Christ.
Double predestination is simply this: the elect receive mercy and the reprobate receive justice, but no one receives injustice.
