A THEOLOGICAL AND PASTORAL STUDY

Election Fraud

How Calvinistic Soteriology Reconstructs
the Gospel It Means to Defend

James J. Burke

Fireproof Commentaries

Election Fraud
How Calvinistic Soteriology Reconstructs the Gospel It Means to Defend

Copyright © 2026 by James J. Burke
All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version unless otherwise indicated.

First digital edition, 2026
Published by Fireproof Commentaries
fireproofcommentaries.org

This digital edition may be downloaded and shared without charge in its complete and unaltered form. It may not be sold or republished for commercial use without written permission.

Preface — Why This Book Is Necessary

I have seen it happen too many times, and I have spoken with fellow pastors who carry similar heartbreaking stories. The churches and names differ, and the details are never exactly the same, but the pattern has become painfully familiar.

An established and healthy church loses its pastor, perhaps suddenly or perhaps through retirement or death, sometimes before he could help the congregation prepare to discern a successor. In other cases, he had years in which he should have prepared them and did not. Whatever the circumstances, the church now finds itself searching for a man who will love its people while faithfully preaching and preserving the Word it has received.

The congregation asks for recommendations, and a pulpit committee begins reviewing names and listening to sermons until, eventually, the church meets a bright and engaging young man whose personality wins them over. He speaks warmly of Scripture's authority and God's sovereignty, of salvation by grace and the necessity of faith. He says the right things and affirms the church's doctrinal statement, winning the confidence and affection of the people who call him to be their pastor.

For a time, all seems well.

Then something begins to change. Perhaps the pastor already held convictions he did not fully disclose, or perhaps his theology changed after he accepted the call. A pastor is not dishonest merely because further study changes his mind, for every minister must remain teachable beneath the Word of God; the ethical crisis begins when he recognizes that his convictions have departed materially from the doctrine of the church but does not tell the church plainly.

A year passes, or perhaps three, while the pastor continues using familiar words that gradually acquire unfamiliar meanings. In sermons and Bible classes, sovereignty, grace, election, foreknowledge, calling, and regeneration are presented as possessing deeper meanings that the congregation has never understood. Yet the people are not told that their pastor has adopted a theological system at odds with their historic convictions; instead, they are led to believe that he is simply bringing greater precision to what they have always confessed.

But the relationships among the doctrines have changed.

In the new structure, the saving grace that finally distinguishes the believer from the unbeliever is a selective and irresistible work that ensures particular sinners will believe. Election no longer means that God chose His people in His Chosen Son and predestined those in Christ to adoption, holiness, inheritance, and glory, but that God selected particular unbelievers before creation to receive the inward grace that would inevitably bring them to faith. Regeneration is moved before faith, so that life produces believing rather than the believer receiving life in the Son. Christ's death is then redefined according to the hidden selection, and the public invitation of the gospel is divided from the inward call that alone can save.

If some of those terms are unfamiliar, do not be discouraged. Each one will be explained as we go, in the chapters themselves, in sidebar definitions along the way, and in a glossary at the back of this book. No reader needs a seminary education to follow this argument. That is rather the point.

The same words remain on the church's doctrinal statement, but a different theological structure now stands behind them. When members begin asking questions, those questions may be treated as evidence of theological immaturity. When they bring forward Scripture, they may be treated as students who have not yet reached their pastor's level instead of as fellow believers seeking to understand the Word. Their inherited convictions are described as shallow tradition, while the new system is presented as the serious, God-centered reading of Scripture and their objections are made to sound as though they arise from an unwillingness to let God be sovereign.

Because the pastor has earned the trust and affection of the people, some receive the new teaching eagerly, while others recognize that the doctrine of the church is being changed without the church ever knowingly deciding to change it. When they speak up, questions become disagreements, disagreements become factions, and friendships that have endured for years begin to strain. Soon the controversy is no longer confined to a Bible class: families leave, and longstanding members are portrayed as resisting biblical truth or sovereign grace. Those who embrace the pastor's system are treated as the people who have finally understood, and in some cases even the language of election becomes a means of distinguishing the enlightened remnant from those who departed.

Before long, a church that called a pastor to preserve and proclaim its faith has been divided in the name of a theology it never knowingly chose.

This book is for those churches.

It is written especially for traditional General Baptist, Independent Baptist, and other non-Calvinist congregations, many of which possess a provisionist theology in substance even if they have never used that label. They believe that Christ died for the world, that the gospel may be offered sincerely to every sinner, that the Father draws and the Spirit convicts, that a sinner is responsible to repent and believe, that faith contributes nothing to Christ's work, and that the Spirit gives life to the believer in union with the Son.

They received those convictions because they believed that this is how Scripture presents the saving work of God. Protecting human autonomy from divine sovereignty was never their purpose. They have not always been taught, however, how those convictions fit together or how to defend them when familiar biblical words are placed into a different theological system, and that vulnerability has not gone unnoticed.

There exists a published literature of church reformation, and it is not all of one kind. Some of it offers honorable pastoral counsel. When a Reformed writer advises a pastor to teach patiently over decades because he loves the people he serves, he is describing what any faithful pastor of any conviction ought to do. Patient teaching is not deception, and expository preaching is not manipulation; a pastor who believes that a church is wrong should seek to persuade its people from Scripture rather than coerce them. Some Reformed writers explicitly affirm that such change must respect congregational authority and constitutional procedure and must be pursued honestly, in love.¹

Other material in this literature goes further, counseling the long-term doctrinal reformation of existing non-Calvinist congregations while deliberately avoiding labels such as Calvinism or doctrines of grace, on the reasoning that those labels may confuse or inflame hearers before the teaching has prepared them. Some of it recommends working the desired changes through the pulpit, carefully selected men, distributed literature, and patient incremental steps. Published case studies likewise describe churches moving from non-Reformed convictions to Reformed theology over a period of years, sometimes after the pastor's own theology changed while he was already serving.²

These accounts demonstrate that such transitions are real, although they do not by themselves establish dishonesty in every case. The notes at the end of this preface identify the sources, and wherever this book characterizes them, it will do so from their own words. I have no interest in attributing to any author a strategy he did not commend.

This book will not accuse every Calvinist pastor of duplicity, nor will it treat every attempt at church reform as an institutional conspiracy. This book turns upon the distinction between disclosed persuasion and undisclosed redirection. Whether the method was patient or forceful matters less than whether the congregation gave informed consent to the direction.

An openly Calvinistic pastor serving an openly Reformed church is not the target of this book, nor is a Calvinistic candidate who explains his convictions fully to a non-Calvinist church that knowingly chooses to call him. The parties may be accepting a serious risk, but the pastor has not obtained the office through concealment.

The harder case is the pastor whose theology changes while he serves. The change itself creates an obligation rather than proving duplicity: if he no longer believes what the congregation understood him to affirm, he must say so, explaining the extent of the change before employing the authority of the pulpit, the accumulated trust of pastoral relationships, or the appointment of new leaders to make the change irreversible.

A pastor is free to reconsider his theology, but he is not free to reconsider the congregation's theology on its behalf.

The church called him on the basis of a shared doctrinal commitment, and if his convictions depart materially from that commitment, honesty requires disclosure so that the congregation may determine what follows. It may choose to reconsider its doctrine, conclude that the disagreement can be borne, or decide that the pastor can no longer represent its faith. Whatever the decision, it belongs to the church after the truth has been stated plainly.

This is no less important because the disagreement concerns soteriology. A pastor who became convinced that women should occupy the pastoral office could not honestly treat the change as a private refinement while continuing to serve a complementarian church as though nothing fundamental had happened. In the same way, a pastor who abandoned cessationism could not quietly introduce a charismatic practice and tell the congregation that he was merely helping it understand its existing doctrine more deeply. Although these questions occupy different theological categories, each may help constitute a church's identity, and a material departure therefore requires candor.

The same is true when a pastor moves from the church's historic belief in universal provision, a genuine saving invitation, faith before regeneration, resistible drawing, and election in Christ to definite atonement, effectual calling, regeneration before faith, and an unconditional selection of particular unbelievers to salvation. That is a different account of how the doctrines relate, what the gospel offers, and what occurs when a sinner believes. Calling it a minor adjustment within the old position conceals the actual change.

Pastors and churches should study Calvinism carefully, and congregations need not fear theological vocabulary, distrust every young minister, or turn pastoral examinations into inquisitions. Calvinists are not thereby presumed unsaved, and Calvinistic churches have every right to confess and teach their convictions openly.

Its purpose is to give non-Calvinist congregations what too many have lacked: a clear understanding of their own biblical convictions, a fair understanding of the system that challenges them, and the ability to ask questions that reach beneath familiar words to the relationships those words have been made to serve.

A church must go beyond asking whether a candidate believes in sovereignty, election, grace, atonement, calling, regeneration, and faith. It must ask what he believes those words mean. It must ask whom Christ intended to save by His death, whether God gives saving life before faith, whether every hearer receives a genuine invitation, what election chooses and where it is located, and whether the candidate intends to preserve the church's historic doctrine after receiving its trust.

Those questions are not hostile; they are acts of stewardship. Because they are easier to commend than to compose, this book ends with an appendix that supplies them: a set of plain-language questions for pulpit committees and congregations, with the reasons each question matters and the follow-up questions that reach beneath a practiced answer. If readers carry away nothing else from this book, I hope they will carry that appendix into their committee meetings and use it.

Proof texts alone cannot settle the dispute, because the theological construction as a whole must be examined. Scripture must be heard on grace, inability, calling, faith, regeneration, union with Christ, election, foreknowledge, predestination, atonement, hardening, and assurance, with its explicit statements distinguished from the inferences supplied by a system. From those texts emerges a positive account of salvation in which grace comes first and remains grace, faith is real without becoming meritorious, and every saving blessing is found in Christ.

The burden is theological because the danger is pastoral, and congregations cannot recognize the reconstruction of their doctrine if they do not understand the doctrine being reconstructed.

This book is an effort to help them understand—and, having understood, to stand.

Notes

Mark Dever, “How to Change Your Church,” Capitol Hill Baptist Church, March 1, 2010, https://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/sermon/how-to-change-your-church; Mark Dever, By Whose Authority? Elders in Baptist Life (Washington, DC: 9Marks, 2006), especially 31–41, https://www.9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/By-Whose-Authority-Book-PDF.pdf; Phil A. Newton, “Moving from a Deacon-Led to an Elder-Led Church,” 9Marks Journal (May–June 2010): 19–21, https://www.9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9Marks_Journal_2010_May-Jun_Deacons.pdf. Newton expressly advises following the method prescribed in the church’s governing documents.

Ernest C. Reisinger and D. Matthew Allen, “Walking Without Slipping: Instructions for Local Church Reformation,” in A Quiet Revolution: A Chronicle of Beginnings of Reformation in the Southern Baptist Convention (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2000), https://founders.org/library/walking-without-slipping/. The practical counsel explicitly recommends avoiding labels such as Calvinism, Reformed, and doctrines of grace while teaching the doctrines, cultivating selected men, distributing literature, and taking incremental steps. For published transition accounts, see Scott Lee, “Reformed by the Word: One Church’s Journey,” Founders Ministries, https://founders.org/articles/reformed-by-the-word-one-churchs-journey/; Tom Ascol, “Reforming Churches,” Founders Ministries, https://founders.org/articles/reforming-churches/; and Chris Lewis, “Reviving a Dying Church,” Acts 29, December 4, 2017, https://www.acts29.com/reviving-a-dying-church/. Lewis describes a congregation that was “solidly Arminian” when he became pastor in 2006 and “solidly reformed” ten years later; he also commends advance notice and gradual outward movement from a small group of key people.

Introduction — What the Charge Means

The preface has explained why this book is necessary, but a congregation cannot recognize the redirection of its doctrine merely by listening for unfamiliar words. The words will usually remain familiar, and nearly all of them will be biblical: sovereignty, grace, election, atonement, calling, regeneration, and faith. What changes is the relationship among them, the order in which they are placed, and the account they are made to give of what happens when a sinner hears the gospel and believes.

There is much in Calvinistic preaching that every Christian ought to affirm. God is sovereign, man is sinful, salvation is entirely by grace, and Christ is the only Saviour. No sinner can boast that he discovered God by superior wisdom, made himself worthy of mercy, or contributed anything to the finished work of Christ; if we are saved, God must receive all the glory.

Those truths are not the problem.

The problem is the theological construction erected around them. Calvinism defines the doctrines of salvation in a particular way and then places them into a governing causal order. Its distinctiveness therefore reaches beyond speaking more often or more forcefully about sovereignty and grace. Each part reinforces the others until the construction appears to be the only possible defense of grace, and any objection to the construction can then be made to sound like an objection to grace itself.

The System Behind the Words

The classical Reformed confessions state the construction plainly. Before the foundation of the world, God chose a definite number of particular persons unto salvation, not because He foresaw faith or anything else in them, and determined to pass by the rest. Christ came to redeem those chosen persons, and the Holy Spirit applies that redemption to each of them through effectual calling and regeneration. God enlightens the mind, changes the heart, renews the will, and makes the unwilling willing; the person who has been inwardly renewed then repents and believes, and everyone given this saving grace will certainly come to Christ.¹

Fairness requires an accurate representation of that account. The Westminster Confession, the Second London Baptist Confession, and the Canons of Dort do not teach that God drags an unwilling sinner into salvation through external force. They say that grace changes the sinner inwardly so that he comes willingly, and Dort expressly rejects the idea that God treats human beings as blocks and stones or coerces a reluctant will. The renewed person truly believes, truly repents, and truly comes to Christ; he is not a spectator while God believes in his place.²

The question, therefore, is not whether Calvinists affirm faith or whether the regenerated person acts voluntarily. The question is what their construction has already determined faith must be. If regeneration is the effectual act that renews the will and certainly produces faith, the sinner's believing is voluntary, but it is no longer resistible; he believes because the prior saving work has made his believing certain. Everyone who receives that work will come, while no one from whom it is withheld can come.

Together these convictions form a single causal order. Unconditional individual election identifies those who will be saved; definite atonement identifies those whom Christ intended savingly to redeem; effectual calling brings those people inwardly to Christ; regeneration supplies the life and willingness from which faith follows; perseverance carries every true recipient of that grace to final glory. If one asks why one sinner believes while another remains in unbelief, the decisive answer is found before either hears the gospel: God chose to give one the effectual grace that certainly produces faith and did not choose to give that grace to the other.

Calvinists sincerely preach Christ and call every hearer to repent and believe. Many do so clearly, warmly, and with an evident love for souls; some preach more freely than their theological construction can easily explain. Criticism becomes unjust when it ignores their sincerity, refuses their careful distinctions, or portrays effectual calling as crude external compulsion.

Nevertheless, the construction raises a question that sincerity alone cannot answer. What does the public call of the gospel mean if only those who receive a separate, inward, and irresistible call can answer it? The preacher addresses everyone, but the system says that the decisive saving work is given only to those already selected; the same words reach every ear, while only some hearers receive the inward renewal without which faith is impossible.

That changes more than the relative placement of regeneration and faith. It changes what may be said about God's saving intention toward every hearer, what the atonement provides for those who may never believe, why unbelief is condemnable, where election is located, how assurance is grounded, and whether the open summons of Christ discloses the whole saving disposition of God toward the person being summoned.

What the Title Charges

The title Election Fraud is deliberately pointed, but it is not an accusation that Calvinists are personally dishonest. Many Calvinists love Christ, preach the gospel plainly, and display the grace of God in their lives; the charge concerns what the theological construction does to the biblical doctrine of election, not the personal character of everyone who has received that construction.

Scripture places God's saving purpose in His Son. Christ is the Chosen One, the faithful Son, the promised Seed, the Last Adam, and the Head of a new humanity. God chose His people in Christ before the foundation of the world and appointed their identity, holiness, adoption, inheritance, and final conformity to His Son; those who belong to Christ share the chosen standing and destiny of the One to whom they have been joined.

Reformed confessions also use the words in Christ, and it would be careless to pretend otherwise. The dispute cannot be settled merely by pointing to the phrase, because both accounts can pronounce it; the question is what the phrase is allowed to govern. Does God's choice stand first in His Chosen Son, with people sharing that election through union with Him, or does an unconditional selection of particular unbelievers determine who will later be effectually brought into Christ? In the latter construction, Christ is indispensable, but the selection that distinguishes the saved from the lost logically governs who will be joined to Him.

That relocation is the fraud named in the title. Election is presented as though its controlling biblical meaning were God's hidden selection of which unbelievers will receive the grace that causes faith, and that premise is then carried into passage after passage concerning foreknowledge, predestination, calling, and divine purpose. The result is a tightly connected structure in which the atonement is fitted to the selected people, calling is divided into a universal summons and an inward summons, regeneration is placed before faith, faith becomes the certain effect of life already given, and perseverance becomes evidence that the hidden decree has reached the person in time.

The system is coherent, and its coherence deserves to be taken seriously, but coherence is not the same as truth. A theological construction may fit tightly together because its controlling premise has been carried consistently into every room; the question is whether Scripture supplied that premise and whether Scripture itself builds the rooms in that order.

I do not object because Calvinism makes God too sovereign, for nothing could make God too sovereign. I object because it identifies sovereignty with the determinative causation of the saving response, grace with the inward work that makes faith inevitable, and election with a pretemporal selection that decides which individuals will be brought into Christ. In trying to protect salvation from every hint of human boasting, the construction places the decisive saving distinction behind the gospel and then asks the public summons to speak in front of it.

Divine Initiative Without Divine Substitution

The biblical alternative is neither autonomous human choice nor divine coercion concealed beneath the word grace. Scripture begins with the God who creates, speaks, promises, sends, accomplishes, reveals, draws, convicts, and saves. The sinner's response arises within that divine initiative, never as an independent search for God.

God created a world which reveals His power and Godhead. He gave His Word, made the promise of the Seed, and in the fulness of time sent His Son. Christ obeyed unto death for sinners and rose to become the source of a new humanity. The gospel reaches hearers who did not invent it and could never discover its saving message by unaided reason; the Father draws while the Spirit enlightens and convicts through the Word, pressing the truth of Christ upon the whole person. Grace comes first and surrounds the saving encounter from beginning to end.

But divine initiative is not divine substitution.

The Father draws; He does not believe for the sinner. The Spirit convicts; He does not repent in the sinner's place. The Word reveals Christ; it does not eliminate the need for an answer to Christ. God is capable of bringing truth to bear upon a human person without becoming that person, and He is capable of enabling a real response without making surrender inevitable. Scripture must establish that claim, but the false choice should be refused from the outset: faith need not be either autonomously manufactured by man or irresistibly caused by God.

When the sinner entrusts himself to Christ, he does something real, but he creates nothing. He does not provide the sacrifice, satisfy God's wrath, remove his guilt, produce righteousness, generate eternal life, or join himself to Christ by spiritual power. Faith is not a contribution added to the work of Christ, a payment offered to the Saviour, or a virtue by which the sinner makes himself worthy; it is the abandonment of every competing ground of confidence and every claim to self-rule as the sinner entrusts himself to the Christ whom grace has revealed.

In that converting faith, the Spirit joins the believer to the risen Son and gives him life. The human and divine actions are distinct, but they do not constitute two independent saving events: faith does not regenerate, and the Spirit does not believe. The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

The saving encounter may therefore be stated plainly:

The Father draws. The Word reveals Christ. The Spirit convicts and enlightens. The sinner genuinely entrusts himself to Christ. In that converting faith, the Spirit joins him to the risen Son and gives him life.

This account gives no sinner a reason to boast. God takes the initiative and supplies both the revelation and the entire saving provision. Righteousness and life are Christ's, while the power that gives life belongs to the Spirit. Faith contributes none of these things; it simply receives the Christ in whom every saving blessing is found.

What May Be Said to Every Hearer

The pastoral question is not whether a Calvinistic preacher can sincerely invite everyone to Christ. Many do, and Reformed theologians have offered differing accounts of the free or well-meant offer, the sufficiency of Christ's death, and the relationship between God's revealed commands and His eternal decree. Those differences must be heard rather than flattened into a single careless accusation.

The deeper question is whether the system permits the preacher to tell every hearer that the Christ proclaimed is genuinely available to him and that God's saving summons discloses no contrary intention hidden behind it. If the only grace that can produce faith is effectual grace, and if that grace is intended only for the elect, then the general call may be universal in address while the decisive saving provision remains selective in purpose and application. The book must examine whether Scripture itself requires that division.

Calvinists rightly insist that sinners are condemned for their sin and unbelief, not for failing to possess election or for lacking grace as though grace were a debt God owed them. The criticism must therefore be stated more carefully: how should we understand culpable unbelief when the system also says that faith is impossible without an inward grace God chose to bestow only upon particular people? Scripture unquestionably holds sinners responsible; the question is whether the Calvinistic explanation of their inability and God's selective remedy is the explanation Scripture gives.

The same care is necessary when discussing the atonement. It is not enough to say that Calvinists deny the value of Christ's death or cannot preach the cross, because they confess its infinite worth and proclaim the crucified Christ. The issue is whether Christ's death was given with a saving provision and intention toward every person summoned to believe, or whether its saving design was restricted to those already selected. That question belongs to the later chapters, where the relevant texts can receive more than introductory treatment.

Yet the pastoral consequence can already be seen. The gospel either brings Christ into the open as God's genuine saving provision for the hearer, or it announces Him publicly while the decisive answer to Is He savingly intended for me? remains hidden in an eternal selection and an inward call. This book contends that Scripture places the saving certainty where the gospel places it: everyone who comes to the Son will be received, and everyone in the Son possesses every saving blessing.

The Road Ahead

The argument will proceed in five movements. First, we will state the Calvinistic construction from its own confessions and examine the definitions of grace, inability, and spiritual death upon which it depends. Second, we will follow the gospel as it comes to the sinner through the drawing Father, the proclaimed Word, and the convicting Spirit, asking what faith is and what happens when the sinner believes. Third, we will recover election in the Chosen One by examining Ephesians 1, Romans 8, and Romans 9–11 within their larger arguments. Fourth, we will consider the scope of Christ's saving work and the shadow doctrine of reprobation. Finally, we will face the texts and labels often treated as conversation-ending before returning the doctrine to the places where it matters most: the pulpit, the counseling room, the troubled conscience, the pulpit committee, and the sinner hearing Christ call.

Throughout these chapters, I occasionally refer readers to my earlier books and studies. Those references identify places where a passage or doctrine has received fuller treatment and help preserve continuity across this work; they are not offered as authorities alongside Scripture or as independent proof of any conclusion argued here.

The aim is to let the gospel address man in the way Scripture presents it while preserving salvation as the work of God. God remains sovereign when He addresses a responsible creature and receives all the glory when the sinner receives what only grace could reveal and only Christ could provide. The open call requires neither a secret regeneration beforehand nor a hidden restriction behind the words of His Son.

Christ says, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

This book asks whether the invitation means what it says.

Notes

See Westminster Confession of Faith 3.3–7, 8.8, 9.3–4, 10.1–2, and 17.1, https://www.opc.org/wcf.html; Second London Baptist Confession (1689) 3.3–7, 8.8, 9.3–4, 10.1–2, and 17.1–3, https://founders.org/library-book/1689-confession/; and Canons of Dort, First Main Point, Article 7; Second Main Point, Article 8; and Third and Fourth Main Points, Articles 10–14, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort. These sources differ in wording but share the causal construction summarized here.

Westminster Confession of Faith 10.1–2 and Second London Baptist Confession 10.1–2 describe effectual calling as renewing and determining the will while the sinner comes “most freely.” Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Main Points, Articles 11–12 and 16, says regeneration makes the unwilling will willing while expressly denying that grace treats people as “blocks and stones” or coerces them against their will. See the editions cited in note 1.

Part One

The System Behind the Sermon

Chapter 1 — More Than Five Points

Imagine a church searching for a pastor. The pulpit committee asks a candidate whether he believes the Bible is the inspired Word of God, whether man is sinful and unable to save himself, whether salvation is entirely by grace, whether Christ died for our sins, whether the Holy Spirit must work in the sinner's heart, whether a sinner must repent and believe, whether God elects, and whether every true believer is secure in Christ. The candidate answers every question sincerely, signs the church's doctrinal statement without reservation, and preaches a clear sermon about the necessity of the new birth. Nothing in the interview sounds foreign to the congregation, and every important box appears to have been checked.

Some time later, however, the church begins to discover that its agreement with the pastor did not extend as far as either side assumed. When the church spoke of election, it meant God's eternal purpose established in Christ and shared by those who are united to Him through faith; the pastor meant God's unconditional selection of particular unbelievers who would certainly be brought to faith. When the church spoke of the Spirit's gracious work, it meant the drawing, revelation, conviction, and enlightenment by which God makes a genuine response to the gospel possible; the pastor meant an inward renewal given only to the elect which certainly produces the faith that follows. When the church said Christ died for our sins, it meant that Christ made saving provision for every sinner, although only believers possess that salvation in Him; the pastor meant that Christ savingly bore the sins of those people, and only those people, whom the Father had chosen.

Both sides said that salvation is by grace through faith. Both believed what they said. The difficulty arose because the same vocabulary had been placed inside two different doctrinal grammars, even when no one had necessarily lied.

Ambiguity is not deception. Sincere agreement with an underspecified sentence is possible, especially when a church has long shared a common understanding which it never thought necessary to spell out. Deception begins when a person recognizes the material difference, relies upon the ambiguity to obtain or retain trust, and then uses that trust to redirect the church without its informed consent. That pastoral and ethical question will return near the end of the book. Before a congregation can recognize when its confession is being changed, however, it must learn to hear more than theological nouns.

Doctrine Has Grammar

A vocabulary list tells us which words are available, but grammar tells us what those words are doing together. Two sentences may contain precisely the same nouns while assigning them different subjects and objects, arranging their actions in a different order, or reversing the direction of cause and result. Knowing that two people use the words grace, faith, election, atonement, and regeneration therefore tells us much less than we may imagine. We must also ask what each doctrine concerns, what it does, whom it includes, and how it relates to the doctrines around it.

Consider the sentence, “God saves sinners by grace through faith.” Nearly every evangelical Calvinist and non-Calvinist Baptist can affirm it without hesitation, but the sentence does not tell us whether saving grace is extended to every sinner or effectually given only to selected sinners; whether grace enables a person to believe or inwardly renews him so that his faith becomes certain; whether regeneration is the life given in converting union with Christ or the prior cause which produces faith; whether Christ provided salvation for the world or savingly redeemed only the elect; or whether election is God's purpose in His Chosen One, shared by believers, or His selection of particular unbelievers who will be made believers.

Nor does the sentence tell us whether the gospel call expresses God's saving intention toward every hearer in the same sense. One preacher may tell every sinner that God has provided a Saviour for him, is drawing him through the truth he now hears, and will give him life in the Son if he believes. Another may call every sinner to Christ just as earnestly, while believing that God has neither intended the atonement savingly for every hearer nor given every hearer the grace without which no one can come. The public words may sound nearly identical while the account beneath them is materially different.

Whenever a familiar doctrinal term carries important weight, therefore, four questions help us hear its grammar. What is its object: what or whom does it concern? What is its operation: what does it actually do? What is its scope: to whom is it given, directed, or intended? What is its relationship to the rest of salvation: what precedes, causes, conditions, or results from what? These are not traps designed to make a Calvinist use an unwanted label. They are the ordinary questions by which we understand any theological claim.

Let us apply the questions carefully to the sentence already before us: “Salvation is wholly by grace through faith.” First, what are the objects of its principal terms? Grace is God's favor and saving action toward guilty people who cannot rescue themselves, while saving faith looks away from the sinner's worth, resolve, prayer, or moral improvement and rests upon Christ. The sentence therefore excludes both self-salvation and faith in faith, but it has not yet explained how God's gracious action reaches the sinner. Second, what is grace's operation? Does it provide the Saviour, bring the Word, reveal Christ, convict of sin, and enable a response which remains resistible, or does it inwardly regenerate selected sinners so that faith certainly results? Both accounts make grace necessary; they differ over what grace does.

Third, what is its scope? Does the gracious provision and enablement expressed in the gospel genuinely extend to every sinner who hears, or does saving grace in this sentence name an effectual work bestowed only upon the elect, while other hearers receive the outward call alone? Finally, what is the relationship between grace and faith? Is faith the nonmeritorious condition in which the sinner is united to Christ and receives the life found in Him, or is faith the certain effect of regenerating life already given? The familiar sentence does not answer these questions merely by containing the correct words. Once its object, operation, scope, and relationships have been stated, however, we can begin to see the actual doctrine being confessed. Throughout this book, we will ask the text itself to tell us what biblical words are doing. Labels may assist that inquiry, but they cannot replace it.

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SIDEBAR: Doctrinal Grammar Doctrine has grammar because theological words act in relationship to one another. Two Christians may both say that salvation is by grace through faith while giving very different accounts of what grace does and how faith arises. To understand the actual doctrine, ask four questions. What is the term's object: what or whom does it concern? What is its operation: what does it do? What is its scope: to whom is it directed or given? What is its relationship to the surrounding doctrines: what causes, conditions, precedes, or results from what? These questions do not replace careful exegesis or prove one system correct. They bring the system into view so that its claims can be tested from Scripture. Shared vocabulary is important, but agreement becomes clear only when the relationships behind the words are also understood. See the Glossary: Calling; Election; Grace; Regeneration.

The Flower Is Not the Root

Calvinism is often introduced through the five points remembered by the English acronym TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. The device is memorable, and it can be useful, but it can also make the system appear to be a row of independent propositions from which a person might select two, four, or five according to his reading of particular passages.

The Canons of Dort were not written as five English words beneath a flower. They were a careful ecclesiastical response to five articles presented by the Remonstrants, and their third and fourth heads were joined because the subjects belonged together. More importantly, the Reformed confessions discuss much more than five disputed conclusions. They give an account of God's decree and providence, man's fall and will, Christ's mediation, the calling of the sinner, regeneration, faith, justification, sanctification, perseverance, assurance, the church, and final glory. TULIP may name five recognizable blossoms, but it does not show the root from which they grow or the stem through which they draw life.

The doctrines become a system because they answer one another causally. God unconditionally chooses particular people unto salvation. Christ secures redemption for those chosen people. At the appointed time, the Spirit effectually calls and inwardly renews them, producing the willing faith by which they receive Christ. God then justifies, sanctifies, and preserves everyone to whom that saving grace is given until final glory.

That is not a hostile reconstruction imposed upon Calvinism by its opponents. Its internal consistency is one of the system's great attractions. The same electing purpose governs the people for whom redemption is accomplished, the people to whom it is savingly applied, the response that application produces, and the glory in which the purpose is completed. If one begins with the unconditional election of particular sinners and insists that God's decree cannot fail, definite redemption, effectual calling, regeneration as the cause of faith, and certain perseverance fit together with considerable force.

The structure is coherent once its premises have been granted; its authority, however, depends upon whether Scripture itself constructs salvation through that causal chain.

The Confessional Structure

The Westminster Confession states the structure with admirable clarity. God chose particular people unto everlasting life before the foundation of the world, not because He foresaw their faith, good works, or perseverance. Those elected people, and no others, are redeemed by Christ, effectually called unto faith, justified, adopted, sanctified, kept, and saved. Fallen man has lost all ability to convert himself or prepare himself for conversion. In effectual calling, God enlightens the mind, removes the heart of stone, renews the will, and effectually draws the sinner to Christ; the person comes freely because grace has made him willing.¹

This last point must not be passed over, because careless criticism often turns effectual calling into external compulsion. Westminster does not teach that God drags a sinner to Christ while the sinner continues to hate Him, nor that God believes in place of the sinner. It teaches that God first changes the sinner inwardly and thereby produces a new willingness from which the person freely comes. The sinner's faith is voluntary and real; it is also the certain result of a renewal selectively given to those already predestined to life. The dispute concerns why the elect person becomes willing while another sinner does not. Both sides agree that he willingly believes.

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SIDEBAR: Effectual Calling Reformed theology distinguishes the outward gospel call from effectual calling. The outward call summons everyone who hears to repent and believe, but it does not by itself give every hearer the ability to respond. Effectual calling is the selective inward work given to those God has chosen. Through the Word and Spirit, God enlightens the mind, renews the will, and brings the sinner freely and certainly to Christ. The response is not externally forced: the renewed person truly desires Christ and personally believes. It is nevertheless inevitable, because the inward renewal makes continued refusal impossible. The disagreement examined in this book is therefore not whether the elect sinner comes willingly. It is whether Scripture divides calling into an outward summons which may reach many and a saving inward call which renews only selected sinners and unfailingly produces their faith. See the Glossary: Calling; Calvinism; Regeneration.

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 closely follows this soteriological architecture. It differs from Westminster on baptism, church order, covenant administration, and other matters important to Baptist identity, but it likewise teaches particular and unconditional election, redemption and effectual calling belonging to the elect, the sinner's inability to prepare himself for conversion, and an inward calling which renews the will and effectually draws the person to Christ. A Baptist therefore need not become Presbyterian in church government or baptism in order to embrace the causal structure of Reformed salvation.²

This is especially important for independent and traditionally non-Calvinist Baptist congregations. A candidate may sound thoroughly Baptist, hold Baptist convictions about the local church and baptism, and preach with the style and vocabulary familiar to the congregation while understanding salvation through essentially the same causal relationships expressed at Westminster. The word Reformed may describe a broad historical tradition in one conversation and a more limited soteriology in another. The label alone will not tell a church what the candidate believes.

The Canons of Dort make the decisive relationship particularly plain. Dort insists that the gospel be proclaimed to all people without distinction, that everyone called through the gospel is called seriously, and that God genuinely promises rest and life to those who come. It refuses to blame God or the gospel when sinners reject that call. At the same time, Dort teaches that faith is a gift bestowed according to God's eternal decree, that He softens the elect while leaving the nonchosen in their hardness, and that election is not based upon foreseen faith because faith itself flows from election as its fruit and effect. When one person believes and another does not, the decisive difference must not be credited to free will but to God, who effectually works in the elect, renews the will, makes the unwilling willing, and produces both the will to believe and belief itself.³

We should allow all of those affirmations to stand together. Confessional Calvinism can preach to everyone, call everyone seriously, hold the unbeliever responsible, deny external coercion, and insist that the believer comes willingly. It nevertheless locates the ultimate explanation of the different outcomes in a selective grace grounded in unconditional election—a grace which effectually produces faith instead of making it genuinely possible for every hearer.

Real Differences Among Calvinists

No fair examination can speak as though every Calvinist holds every point in precisely the same form. Some people identify themselves as four-point Calvinists because they reject limited or definite atonement while retaining unconditional election, effectual grace, and perseverance. That is a material difference, for it changes what they believe may be said about Christ's death for the nonelect. Yet if they continue to teach that God grants selected sinners an inward grace which infallibly brings them to faith, their answer to the causal question at the center of this book remains substantially Reformed.

Reformed theologians also differ over whether God's decrees should be ordered logically before or after His decree to permit the fall. Supralapsarian and infralapsarian accounts are not interchangeable, and their differences deserve more care than a brief chapter can give them, but both retain God's unconditional identification of those who will receive saving grace. We need not settle the order of the decrees in order to ask whether Scripture teaches that God selected which sinners would be caused to believe.

There are differences in the language of predestination and reprobation as well. Some Calvinists speak readily of a double predestination, while others emphasize an important asymmetry: God actively saves the elect but passes over the rest, condemning them for their own unbelief and sins rather than producing evil in them as He produces faith in the elect. That distinction should be honored. To say that God does not cause faith and unbelief in the same manner is not meaningless, even though a later chapter will ask what follows when God withholds from the nonelect the only grace by which anyone can believe.

Calvinists also differ in how they speak of God's desire for the salvation of every hearer. Many vigorously defend the free offer of the gospel and affirm that God in His revealed will calls all people sincerely to repentance and faith. Others qualify such language more carefully. Hyper-Calvinism may restrict indiscriminate gospel invitations or deny that God in any sense desires the salvation of all, but it would be irresponsible to make that denial representative of ordinary confessional Calvinism. The challenge in this book is not to defeat the weakest or harshest presentation; it is to ask whether the strongest account of a sincere general call can stand beside a decree and saving operation which distinguish the hearers.

Even the familiar phrase regeneration before faith requires care. Some Calvinists teach a temporal priority, while others say that regeneration and faith occur together in time but that regeneration is logically or causally prior. We should not manufacture an interval in which a person walks about as a regenerate unbeliever if the theologian has not taught one. The relevant claim is causal: God gives the inward renewal which produces faith, and faith certainly follows because the renewed will now freely embraces Christ.

Finally, contemporary Calvinism is not confined to those who subscribe to Westminster, Dort, or the 1689 Confession in full. Some pastors accept only several of the five points; some soften older formulations; some borrow Reformed accounts of election and calling while rejecting Reformed covenant theology or church government; and some prefer phrases such as the doctrines of grace without adopting a detailed confession at all. These differences are real. Our concern is the account of salvation a person actually teaches. The correctness of his historical label is secondary.

The Common Causal Center

Once those variations are acknowledged, enough remains in classical confessional Calvinism to identify the issue this book must examine. The common center is not a high view of God, a serious doctrine of sin, a devotion to biblical authority, or the conviction that salvation is entirely gracious. Non-Calvinists may affirm every one of those truths. The more precise center is the claim that the ultimate difference between the believer and the unbeliever is explained by God's unconditional decision to give particular sinners the effective inward grace which certainly produces their faith.

The extent of the atonement may be disputed, the logical order of the decrees may be arranged differently, the language of reprobation may be stronger or more restrained, and regeneration may be said to precede faith temporally or only causally. If faith remains the inevitable result of selective grace grounded in unconditional individual election, however, the central causal account remains intact.

Again, the word inevitable must not be made to mean physically forced. According to the responsible Reformed account, grace changes what the sinner perceives, loves, and wills, so that he comes to Christ voluntarily. The disagreement is therefore not between a forced response and a voluntary response. It is between a voluntarily inevitable response caused by prior renewal and a genuinely resistible response made possible by God's prior gracious work. Everything turns on whether grace must produce an inevitable response in order to remain fully grace.

Familiar Words, Different Accounts

Traditional Baptist statements of faith are often brief because they arose within churches where the important relationships were assumed. Concision is not a fault, and no church can fit an entire systematic theology into the document by which it summarizes its doctrine. Nevertheless, a true sentence can be too brief to establish pastoral compatibility.

“Salvation is wholly by grace through faith” does not tell us whether grace draws, reveals, convicts, and enables the sinner who then believes, or whether selective regeneration causes the faith which follows.

“Christ died for our sins” does not tell us whether Christ made saving provision for the sins of the whole world, with believers now speaking as those who possess that provision in Him, or whether He savingly bore only the sins of those eternally selected.

“The Holy Spirit convicts and regenerates sinners” does not tell us whether the Spirit convicts the world and regenerates the believer in union with Christ, or regenerates selected sinners so that they will believe.

“Election is according to the foreknowledge of God” does not tell us whether election is located in Christ and shared by the covenant people whom God foreknows, whether God chose individuals on the basis of foreseen faith, or whether foreknowledge means His prior loving choice of particular individuals without regard to their faith.

“Whosoever will may come” can be affirmed by someone who believes that God graciously enables every hearer to respond and by someone who believes that everyone made willing through effectual grace will certainly come. The words establish that no willing sinner will be refused, but by themselves they do not tell us why some become willing while others remain unwilling.

Even “all true believers will persevere” may function differently within two systems. Both may ground security in God's faithfulness, but one may describe God's preservation of everyone who is in Christ, while another may also treat final perseverance as the necessary evidence that selective effectual grace was present from the beginning. The sentences overlap substantially, but the account of assurance in which they operate may not be identical.

None of these examples proves dishonesty. They prove only that doctrinal agreement cannot always be measured by matching familiar sentences. A candidate may sign such a statement sincerely while a congregation receives his signature as agreement with relationships the statement never actually names. If neither side recognizes the ambiguity, the resulting conflict may be tragic without having begun in bad faith. Once the difference is recognized, however, continued reliance upon the ambiguity becomes a moral question as well as a theological one.

Statements of Faith and Informed Agreement

The answer is not to turn every church confession into an encyclopedia or every pastoral interview into a hostile examination. A statement of faith must summarize, and Christian fellowship would become impossible if every sentence required exhaustive qualification before believers could serve together. Nor should a pulpit committee try to surprise a candidate with obscure terminology which the committee itself cannot explain.

The answer is informed interpretation. A congregation should understand the historic meaning it attaches to its own confession, and a candidate should disclose a materially different construction even when he can affirm every sentence in isolation. The most helpful questions will therefore reach beyond nouns to verbs and relationships. What does election choose? What does grace do? Whom did Christ intend savingly to redeem? To whom is the Spirit's enabling work given? Does the Spirit give life in order that a sinner will believe, or does He give life in converting union when the sinner believes? What may the preacher say to every hearer about God's saving intention and Christ's death without a qualification he keeps hidden?

These questions are not accusations. An openly Calvinistic candidate who explains his convictions plainly has not deceived a non-Calvinist congregation. If the church knowingly calls him, it owns that decision and must not later pretend that his candor was concealment. Likewise, a candidate whose position is still developing should be permitted to say so without being forced into an artificial certainty. Clarity protects the candidate as well as the church because it prevents an honest theological difference from being recast later as personal betrayal.

What clarity cannot permit is agreement reduced to a password test. “Do you believe in sovereignty?” “Is salvation by grace?” “Do you preach whosoever will?” A prepared candidate from either system can answer each question correctly and sincerely. The church has learned almost nothing until it asks what sovereignty governs, how grace acts, who the whosoever can be, and why one hearer believes while another does not.

Neither Suspicion nor Naivety

Congregations should not hear the words sovereignty, election, elder, Reformed, or doctrines of grace and imagine that a covert campaign must be underway. Calvinists are not a monolith, and many Reformed pastors state their convictions openly, love their churches patiently, and would consider doctrinal concealment a betrayal of their office. Suspicion can divide a congregation before the disputed doctrine has even been understood.

Naivety is not charity, however. A church entrusted with the gospel has a duty to understand the doctrine it confesses and the teaching it authorizes. Members do not rebel against pastoral leadership by asking what familiar words mean, and a pulpit committee does not insult a candidate by asking him how the doctrines he affirms relate to one another. A man who answers plainly should welcome the clarity, even when his answer reveals that he and the church should not enter pastoral ministry together.

Vocabulary can expose the disputed causal chain, but only Scripture can establish or overturn it. The relevant passages must be followed in context to determine whether selective regeneration is actually made the cause of faith and unconditional individual election the cause of selective regeneration. The same texts must also be allowed to supply their positive account: grace which truly comes before every saving response, faith which surrenders without earning, life received in union with Christ, election centered in God's Chosen One, and a saving provision and invitation which may be proclaimed honestly to every sinner.

The five points are not five isolated flowers which may be plucked and examined one at a time. They grow from a root, draw life through a connected stem, and bear a particular account of why one sinner believes while another does not.

We will not decide the question by counting petals. We will follow the roots into Scripture.

Notes

Westminster Confession of Faith 3.3–7; 8.5, 8; 9.3–4; 10.1–2; 17.1. The text used here is the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's online edition, “Confession of Faith,” https://www.opc.org/wcf.html.

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chapters 3, 8, 9, 10, and 17. The chapter descriptions and quotations have been checked against “The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English,” Founders Ministries, https://founders.org/library-book/1689-confession/.

Canons of Dort, First Head, Articles 5–8, 15; Second Head, Article 5; Third and Fourth Heads, Articles 8–14 and relevant Rejections of Errors. The text used here is the Christian Reformed Church's online edition, “Canons of Dort,” https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort.

Chapter 2 — When Grace Becomes Inevitability

There is a moment which arrives in nearly every discussion of grace and human response. A believer says that God sought him before he sought God. God brought him the gospel, opened his understanding, convicted him of sin, and made Christ known. The believer denies any desert or contribution of his own, especially any power to create spiritual life within himself. He gives God all the glory for everything he possesses in Christ.

Then he says, “I believed.”

At once the discussion changes. If he truly could have refused, did his faith supply the decisive difference between himself and the person who remained in unbelief? The objection assumes that, unless grace made his surrender inevitable, it merely placed salvation within reach and left him to complete what God began; on that account, he may now boast that grace came to both men, but he used it more wisely.

The concern is serious because the truths it seeks to protect are serious. No sinner discovers Christ through unaided insight, rises above his corruption through natural strength, makes himself worthy of mercy, or supplies what the work of Christ lacks. Salvation is of the Lord, and every attempt to defend a genuine human response must preserve that confession without qualification.

Yet the questions contain an assumption which must be brought into the light. They assume that God cannot sufficiently enable a personal response without causally determining which response will occur. Grace must either leave the sinner alone or make his faith inevitable; if the sinner truly responds, grace must somehow have stopped short of doing all that salvation requires.

Why must those be the only possibilities? The sovereign God can act upon a person without acting instead of him, unless Scripture teaches otherwise.

Grace Comes First

We should begin with what cannot be surrendered. Grace is not God's reward for spiritual interest, an assistance supplied after the sinner begins moving toward Him, or a favorable response to faith produced independently of His action. God originates the entire saving encounter.

Before the sinner believes, there is a God to be believed, a Son who has been given, a cross upon which redemption has been accomplished, and a resurrection through which life has been established in Christ. There is a Word which reveals the truth, a messenger whom providence has brought, and the Spirit who makes the claims of Christ intelligible and personally urgent. The sinner did not create any of these things. He did not climb toward heaven until God noticed his effort and came down to meet him.

John begins the gospel with God coming into our darkness. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, “full of grace and truth,” and of His fullness believers have received “grace for grace” (John 1:14, 16). John begins with the true Light entering a world which did not know Him and with the Son declaring the Father whom no man had seen. Humanity has not found its own way to God. Even before we settle every question raised by the statement that Christ “lighteth every man,” the direction of the passage is unmistakable: revelation moves from God toward people who could never have produced it.

Paul speaks in the same direction when he asks whether sinners despise “the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering,” not knowing that “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance” (Romans 2:4). God's goodness is not the result of repentance. It precedes repentance and moves the sinner toward it. The sinner may despise that goodness, but he cannot claim that he first approached God without it.

Most fully, God loved and gave His Son before the world believed. Christ did not come because worthy people had made themselves ready to receive Him. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Grace begins in the heart of God, appears in the person of Christ, accomplishes what sinners could never accomplish, and comes near through the Word and Spirit.

Faith does not initiate grace. Faith arises within a gracious encounter which God has already created.

What Effectual Grace Protects

The strongest Reformed account begins with fallen sinners who are not morally neutral people waiting for sufficient information. They are corrupt, hostile, and unwilling to come to God while left in their natural condition. The outward gospel may reach many ears, and the Spirit may perform what Reformed theology calls common operations, but no one will savingly respond unless God inwardly changes him.

Effectual calling therefore does more than present Christ or make faith possible. According to the Westminster Confession, God enlightens the mind, removes the heart of stone, renews the will, and effectually draws the sinner to Christ; the person comes freely because grace has made him willing. The Canons of Dort similarly insist that regeneration renews the will so effectually that the sinner actually and certainly believes.¹ People are therefore neither treated as blocks and stones nor coerced against a reluctant will.

The account is intended to protect several truths which this book also protects. God must act first. Grace must reach more deeply than bare information. The sinner cannot prepare himself for life. The believer cannot attribute faith to a morally superior nature or an untouched power standing outside God's gracious dealings. Christ must accomplish the whole saving work, and boasting must be excluded.

The disagreement begins when these truths are made to require a further conclusion: if grace leaves refusal possible, grace has not done enough. If two sinners hear the gospel and only one believes, the believer must have supplied what grace lacked. If faith distinguishes him from the unbeliever, he must possess something of which he may boast. Only a grace which determines his response, therefore, can preserve salvation as the work of God.

The conclusion adds something to the word grace, for it rests upon a causal premise: a divinely enabled response cannot be sufficiently explained unless another divine act makes that response unavoidable. Scripture may be offered in defense of the premise, but the premise cannot simply be included in the definition and then used to prove itself.

Grace Is Not a Mechanism

Part of the difficulty arises when grace is imagined as an impersonal spiritual force. We speak as though God places a quantity of grace into one person, observes whether it is strong enough to overcome him, and then receives more or less glory according to how completely it determines the result. Resistible grace consequently sounds like weak grace, while irresistible grace sounds like strong grace.

Scripture speaks much more richly. Grace is God's undeserved favor expressed in His gracious action, supremely in Jesus Christ. Grace gives, appears, reigns, teaches, strengthens, justifies, and saves. Its power resides in the gracious God acting through His Son to accomplish what sinners could never accomplish, rather than in an abstract capacity to overwhelm resistance.

Romans 5 locates grace in Christ rather than in an invisible mechanism working behind Him:

“For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many” (Romans 5:15).

Grace reigns “through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (verse 21). Adam's transgression brought sin and death into the world; Christ's righteous work establishes the gift of righteousness and life. Whatever questions remain about how that gift is received, the power and sufficiency of grace are first located in what God has accomplished in His Son. Grace is not made successful by the sinner, because the sinner did not become the Second Adam, obey unto death, bear sin, rise from the grave, or establish eternal life.

Titus likewise speaks of grace as God's action coming visibly into history:

“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:11–12).

The passage does not reduce grace to instruction, for the Christ in whom grace has appeared “gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity” (verse 14). Yet Paul is willing to say that grace teaches. Divine teaching is purposeful and powerful, but teaching does not cease to be real merely because the person addressed may refuse to learn. The form of action matters. God may teach through truth, draw through revelation, command through the gospel, and convict through the Spirit without every action becoming another name for the inward regeneration which makes faith certain.

Paul gives us an even more concentrated grammar of grace and human action when he looks back upon his apostolic labor. He first declares, “by the grace of God I am what I am,” then says that the grace bestowed upon him “was not in vain,” because he “laboured more abundantly than they all.” He will not allow that statement to become self-congratulation, however, and immediately adds, “yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Paul really labored, and grace was so completely responsible for what his labor became that he could deny himself the glory without denying himself as the acting servant.

This verse is not directly describing the sinner's first act of faith, and it should not be made to prove the resistibility of saving grace by itself. It does, however, give us a positive Pauline pattern which the doctrine of conversion must respect. Grace and responsible human action are not competing percentages which must add up to one hundred. Grace can be with the person, enabling and sustaining an action which remains truly his, while God receives the glory for everything accomplished through it. Paul did not have to say that grace labored instead of him in order to say that his labor existed entirely by grace.

Grace is not less than power. Its power is the power of God accomplishing His purposes through the actions He has chosen: giving, revealing, calling, warning, teaching, drawing, convicting, receiving, uniting, and giving life. We cannot decide in advance that every one of those verbs must describe the same causal operation.

Necessary Is Not Necessitating

The distinction at the center of this chapter can now be stated carefully. If a sinner cannot believe without revelation, then revelation is necessary for faith. It does not follow that revelation makes faith inevitable. If no one can come unless the Father draws, drawing is necessary. It does not follow from the word draw alone that every person drawn must come. If the Spirit must convict, conviction is necessary. It does not follow that conviction cannot be resisted.

The movement from necessary to necessitating requires additional evidence. It is one thing to say, “Without God's action, this response cannot occur.” It is another to say, “Whenever God performs this action, no other response can occur.” Those propositions are not identical.

This book therefore affirms necessary grace without hesitation. Left to ourselves, we do not discover Christ, create the gospel, overcome our darkness, or generate saving faith from an untouched moral power. It also affirms enabling grace: God brings the Word and Spirit to bear upon the sinner so that the response commanded becomes genuinely possible. His command therefore reaches beyond announcing a duty to people left entirely incapable of answering.

Classical Reformed theology uses effectual grace in a stronger and more selective sense. God grants the elect an inward work which certainly produces faith, while the nonelect receive the outward call without the inward ability necessary to answer. The book disputes the identification of decisive gracious action with the act that makes faith inevitable, because Scripture must establish that identification before it can be required by the word grace.

The word sufficient must consequently be handled with care. A Calvinist may say that the general call is sufficient to reveal the sinner's duty and establish his responsibility, while also saying that only the elect receive the effective ability to believe. When this book speaks of sufficient gracious enablement, it means something more: wherever God summons a sinner to Christ through the gospel, His gracious action gives that hearer a genuine possibility of responding. The call genuinely summons and enables a responsible answer. On this account, it reaches farther than informing a helpless person what he would do if God had chosen to make obedience possible.

This makes no claim that sinners have identical experiences, receive equal information, or share a uniform providential history. Grace cannot be divided like a substance into measured portions, and God does not deal with interchangeable subjects arranged in a laboratory. He knows actual persons, including their relationships and circumstances, and addresses them through warnings, mercies, witnesses, and encounters with His Word. The claim concerns the genuineness of God's saving address: His command to believe does not conceal the absence of every possibility of obedience.

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SIDEBAR: Necessary Grace and Necessitating Grace To say that grace is necessary means that no sinner can believe without God's prior action. God must give the Son, reveal the gospel, draw the hearer, enlighten understanding, and convict of sin and truth. Faith does not arise from an untouched natural power. To say that grace is necessitating makes a further claim: when God performs the decisive inward work, no contrary response remains possible, and faith must result. The difference may be stated simply. The claim “Without God's action, this response cannot occur” leaves open whether another response remains possible when God acts. Scripture must therefore tell us both that grace is indispensable and what form each gracious action takes. This book affirms necessary and sufficient grace while asking whether drawing, enlightenment, and conviction must be redefined as an irresistible regeneration which produces faith. See the Glossary: Grace; Drawing; Enlightenment; Conviction.

Divine Initiative Is Not Divine Substitution

Scripture's language is personal from beginning to end. God reveals and calls; He commands, warns, and teaches; He draws the sinner through pleading and promise. Human beings hear and either suppress or receive what they hear. They resist, refuse, yield, and believe. These verbs do not place the creature outside God's sovereignty. They tell us the kind of relationship the sovereign God has chosen to establish with persons made in His image.

Divine initiative is not divine substitution.

The Father draws; He does not believe for the sinner. The Spirit convicts; He does not repent in the sinner's place. The Word reveals Christ; it does not entrust the hearer to Christ. God supplies the truth, the summons, the reasons, the opportunity, and the ability to respond, while the sinner remains the responsible subject who trusts or refuses.

The same differentiated agency appears in Paul's account of the founding of the Corinthian church. Paul and Apollos were “ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man.” Paul planted, Apollos watered, “but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:5–6). The ministers did not create life, the Corinthians did not produce the gospel, and God alone gave the increase; nevertheless, Paul does not erase the ministers' planting and watering or the Corinthians' believing in order to protect God's work. The laborers are servants, Christ is the only foundation, and the church is God's building. The actions are neither equal nor competitive, but each is allowed to retain its proper subject.

First Corinthians 3 does not tell us by itself everything the Spirit did inwardly when the Corinthians believed. It does show how naturally Paul can distinguish the proclaimed means from the hearers' faith and God's life-giving result without collapsing them. Grace employs genuine human instruments and addresses genuine human hearers while accomplishing a result only God can give; humanity has received no divided share in the accomplishment of salvation.

God's power to determine an outcome remains beyond question. Scripture records occasions when He restrains evil or overrules human intention. He hardens judicially, redirects rulers, and accomplishes His purpose despite opposition. Sovereignty, however, does not require every divine-human relation to take that form. God is sovereign enough to address responsible persons under meaningful conditions, permit resistance within His rule, and judge the response without losing control of His creation.

We need not solve every philosophical question about freedom and providence before reading a gospel command as a command. When Scripture calls sinners to believe, blames unbelief, describes resistance, and promises life to the believer, we should allow that personal grammar to stand unless the text itself requires us to translate it into a causal mechanism operating behind the encounter.

Grace May Be Resisted without Being Weak

Scripture repeatedly describes genuine divine action toward people who refuse the good placed before them. Jesus laments over Jerusalem, “how often would I have gathered thy children together,” and then names the barrier: “and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37). Luke distinguishes those who received John's baptism from “the Pharisees and lawyers” who “rejected the counsel of God against themselves” (Luke 7:30). Stephen tells Israel's leaders, “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:51).

None of those statements, taken alone, proves that every operation of the Spirit is resistible. Matthew 23 raises questions about Jerusalem and her children; Luke's “counsel of God” concerns God's revealed summons through John rather than requiring the conclusion that His eternal decree was frustrated; Stephen speaks of the Spirit resisted through prophetic and gospel witness. Those distinctions should be honored.

They nevertheless establish the category required here. Christ may genuinely will to gather those who refuse. People may reject God's revealed counsel against themselves. Hearers may resist the Holy Ghost acting through the truth. Divine action does not become unreal merely because it is resisted, and resistance does not prove that grace never came near.

The passages arise from different settings, but their cumulative grammar is remarkably consistent. Christ wills a gracious gathering; Jerusalem refuses. God sends His counsel through John; the Pharisees reject it against themselves. The Holy Ghost speaks through the prophets and Stephen; the hearers resist. In each case a divine action is directed toward people for their good, a contrary human response occurs, and Scripture locates the refusal in those addressed rather than explaining it by saying that God never truly acted toward them. Reformed theology may classify these actions as an outward call or common operations rather than effectual grace, but that classification does not erase the textual pattern. The pattern positively favors a category of purposeful, personal, gracious divine action which can be resisted.

Paul can even warn the Corinthians “that ye receive not the grace of God in vain,” then place the urgency of the gospel before them: “behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:1–2). His warning addresses a church within the larger appeal of his ministry and should not be turned into a solitary proof text for universal saving enablement. It does, however, demonstrate that receiving grace in vain is a meaningful biblical category. Grace may truly address, teach, warn, and summon without automatically producing its intended fruit in every person it reaches.

Grace has not failed because it did not perform the response it called forth. Its purpose in the encounter includes making Christ known, bringing a genuine opportunity to believe, exposing the heart, and establishing the righteousness of God's judgment when light is refused. Saving life is possessed in the Son; it is not deposited mechanically in everyone whom grace addresses.

John 3 holds these truths together. God gave His Son so that “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). The unbeliever is condemned “because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (verse 18), and Jesus explains that condemnation through the coming of light and the sinner's relation to it: “light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (verse 19). Refusal does not reveal that no Son was given, no light appeared, or no gracious divine approach occurred. It reveals what the sinner did in relation to the Son and light which came.

Sovereignty Does Not Prove Voluntary Inevitability

The strongest Reformed response does not equate effectual grace with mechanical coercion. It is compatibilist: regeneration changes the sinner's governing disposition so that he willingly comes to Christ, while the renewed disposition makes any contrary response impossible. The faith is voluntary because the sinner acts according to what he now understands, desires, and wills; it is inevitable because God's prior renewal certainly determines what that willingness will be.

That is the position under examination. When this book speaks of determinism in conversion, it is not accusing Calvinists of teaching that God externally forces a resisting person through the door. It is identifying the causal claim that prior regeneration so determines the person's voluntary response that refusal is no longer possible. The disagreement is not forced faith versus willing faith. It is whether Scripture teaches that saving faith must be made voluntarily inevitable by an inward renewal given only to those already selected.

Sovereignty and causal inevitability nevertheless answer different questions. Sovereignty concerns God's rightful and effective rule over His creation. Compatibilist effectual calling concerns the particular means by which God is said to determine the sinner's response. The second does not follow merely from the definition of the first.

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SIDEBAR: Compatibilism Compatibilism teaches that a choice may be both voluntary and certainly determined. A person acts freely when he acts according to what he understands, desires, and wills, even if a prior cause has made that willing response inevitable. Applied to Reformed conversion, regeneration changes the sinner's governing disposition so that he sees Christ as desirable and willingly believes. God does not drag a person toward a Christ he still hates; He renews the person so thoroughly that coming becomes both free and certain, while continued refusal is no longer possible. This is a more careful position than mechanical coercion, and it should be represented accordingly. The regenerated person acts voluntarily; that point is agreed. The disputed question is whether Scripture teaches that saving faith must be made voluntarily inevitable through an inward renewal given only to those already selected. See the Glossary: Compatibilism; Sovereignty; Calvinism.

God remains sovereign when He establishes a promise to be received by faith, commands sinners to believe, permits them to resist, judges their refusal, and unfailingly gives the promised life to everyone who is in His Son. Christ has died and risen. The gospel is true. Everyone who comes will be received. Everyone united to the Son possesses His life, and nothing can prevent God from completing the destiny He has appointed for His people in Christ.

The Calvinist may answer that God's decree encompasses the human responses just described, and the later chapters on election will address that construction directly. The point here is narrower. The biblical affirmation that God is sovereign does not by itself prove that He unconditionally selected which unbelievers would believe and then irresistibly caused their faith. That account requires its own exegetical demonstration.

Nor should we defend responsible response by making God a risk-taker who waits helplessly to discover what sinners will do or allows human freedom to limit His rule. God knowingly created the world and gave His Son. He established the saving promise, ordained faith as the means of receiving Christ, and governs history toward His appointed end. Human response exists within God's sovereign order, not outside it.

God does not surrender sovereignty when He holds the creature responsible for the response He has graciously enabled.

Does the Believer Complete Grace?

If the sinner must believe, has he completed a salvation which grace left unfinished? Only if faith accomplishes some part of the saving work.

Faith does not provide the Son, accomplish the atonement, establish the promise, illuminate its own understanding, justify the ungodly, join itself to Christ by spiritual power, or generate resurrection life. The sinner brings none of these things to God. He receives the Saviour in whom God has already placed them all.

The distinction between reception and contribution is not wordplay. A person may perform the act of receiving while possessing no claim to the gift and adding nothing to its value. More importantly, Paul himself places believing opposite working and wages in Romans 4. Chapter 6 will follow his grammar carefully and show why faith is surrender rather than payment. For now, it is enough to see that the presence of a real human response does not divide the accomplishment of salvation between Christ and the sinner.

The harder question remains: if one sinner yields and another resists, what explains the difference? We should not conceal the immediate answer. One yields and the other resists. Yet the believer's response did not arise outside grace, reveal a better nature worthy of salvation, complete an insufficient cross, or create the life he receives. Chapters 5, 6, and 15 will address that objection in full, distinguishing the responsible subject of faith from the source, ground, accomplishment, and power of salvation.

Removing the person from the encounter cannot make grace more gracious, and converting commanded faith into the inevitable symptom of an act already completed adds nothing to God's glory. The glory of grace is that God comes to enemies who did not seek Him, brings near a Saviour they could never provide, makes known a truth they could never discover, enables a surrender they could never make unaided, and gives those who believe a life they could never create.

Grace comes first. Grace is necessary. Grace is powerful, personal, sufficient, and sovereign. Grace remains entirely grace even when the sinner must truly believe.

The objection will now move from the definition of grace to the condition of the sinner. Even if grace need not mean inevitability in the abstract, can a person who is dead in sins hear, understand, or respond before he has been made alive?

Everything depends upon what Scripture means when it calls the sinner dead.

Notes

Westminster Confession of Faith 9.3–4 and 10.1–2, in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's online edition, “Confession of Faith,” https://www.opc.org/wcf.html; Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Heads, Articles 11–16, in the Christian Reformed Church's online edition, “Canons of Dort,” https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort.

Chapter 3 — What Does It Mean to Be Dead?

The illustration is familiar because its force appears undeniable. Imagine standing beside a casket and asking the person lying within it to listen, reconsider his condition, and choose life. He cannot hear the request, understand it, desire what is offered, or move toward it. He must first be made alive. In the same way, we are told, a sinner who is dead in trespasses and sins cannot hear the gospel spiritually, understand Christ, repent, or believe until God regenerates him. Life must precede every action of the living.

The illustration protects an essential truth. A corpse cannot restore its own life, and a sinner cannot create the life of Christ, reverse judgment, repair his alienation, justify himself, or raise himself into God's new creation. Life must come from God.

The difficulty begins when the illustration is permitted to define spiritual death before Scripture does. A physical corpse cannot walk in sin, follow the world, obey a prince, fulfill desires, resist the Holy Ghost, receive the Word with joy, or love darkness. The people Scripture calls spiritually dead do all of those things.

Spiritual death is real, and sinners cannot make themselves alive; the issue is what kind of death Scripture describes and which features of bodily death we are authorized to carry into the spiritual condition. An illustration may illuminate a biblical term, but it may not supply attributes which the text itself denies.

Death Is More Than Cessation

We ordinarily use death for the end of bodily life, and Scripture certainly uses it that way. The body returns to the dust, the integrated life of the embodied person is broken, and the person no longer lives through that body in the present world. Yet Scripture also speaks of death as a condition, a dominion, an enemy, a sentence, an alienated relationship, and a power which reigns. Those meanings are related to bodily death, but they are not exhausted by what a corpse can or cannot do.

Jesus said of the prodigal son, “this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24). The son had remained biologically alive while he left his father and wasted his inheritance, eventually joining himself to a stranger in a far country. His death was relational and moral, expressed through the alienation and ruin produced by rebellion. When he returned to the father, he did not rise from physical decomposition; the relationship was restored.

Paul describes a widow who “liveth in pleasure” as “dead while she liveth” (1 Timothy 5:6). Christ tells the church at Sardis, “thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead,” and then commands the dead church to watch, strengthen what remains, remember, hold fast, and repent (Revelation 3:1–3). Believers are told that they are dead to sin, although sin may still tempt them and must not be permitted to reign in their mortal bodies. In each case, death names a governing condition or broken relationship rather than the end of personhood and every capacity for response.

None of these passages, considered alone, proves everything an unregenerate sinner may do when the gospel comes. They establish the semantic boundary which our doctrine must respect. When Scripture uses death relationally and spiritually, we cannot transfer every incapacity of a physical corpse into the word and then treat the resulting definition as though Paul supplied it.

Death is the condition and dominion of human life alienated from God, the source and fullness of life. It is expressed in corruption and mortality, leading at last to bodily dissolution and judgment. Separation is part of that condition, but sinners are not separated from God's omnipresence or sustaining power. They remain creatures upheld by Him and answerable to Him. They are alienated from fellowship with God and from the life of His proper rule, existing within a hostile order they cannot escape or transform.

This order reaches back to humanity's rebellion. Adam and Eve sought autonomy and severed trust, after which they were barred from the Tree of Life. Their choice did not make mortal creatures capable of death for the first time; it placed mortal humanity under corruption and made death inevitable. Their descendants are born into no neutral garden. They inherit a human world whose relationships, desires, powers, and destiny are already structured by rebellion.

Spiritual death is therefore neither nonexistence nor unconsciousness. It is human life attempting to exist apart from communion with the God from whom all life must continually be received.

Dead People Who Walk

Ephesians 2 is the principal text, and it deserves to be read before it is illustrated:

“And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Ephesians 2:1–3).

The phrase “hath he quickened” in verse 1 is supplied by the KJV translators to complete the English sentence. In the underlying sentence, Paul begins, “And you, being dead in trespasses and sins,” describes that former condition through verse 3, turns to God's mercy in verse 4, and reaches the controlling action in verse 5: God “hath quickened us together with Christ.” This does not make the supplied wording inaccurate. It helps us follow Paul's actual movement from the condition of death to God's life-giving action.

The people Paul describes are dead, but they are not inactive. They walked in trespasses and sins. They followed the age and pattern of the world. They lived under the influence of the prince of the power of the air and belonged to an order identified by disobedience. They conducted themselves in the desires of the flesh and fulfilled the purposes of flesh and mind.

Their death consists in active rebellion and corrupt desire under alienation and condemnation. They remain thinking, desiring, choosing persons, but their activity proceeds within the wrong realm and cannot produce the life for which humanity was created. Their agency is real, while the condition governing that agency is pervasively disordered.

This evidence does more than render a corpse reading unnecessary. Paul's own predicates positively define the condition. Spiritual death cannot mean the absence of every personal, moral, or responsive action, because Paul explains death by describing the actions of the dead. They are living persons whose entire walk belongs to death's dominion, though their bodies remain active.

We should not respond by imagining an untouched island of moral purity within them. The world shapes their understanding, the flesh governs their desires, the evil one exercises influence, disobedience identifies their allegiance, and wrath names their deserved end. They cannot educate themselves into resurrection life, improve their way back into fellowship, or free themselves from the powers which rule the age.

Yet inability to create life is not identical to inability to be addressed by the Life-giver. Paul has shown us dead persons who are morally active. He has not yet said that God cannot bring revelation, conviction, and enabling grace to them until after He has secretly made them alive.

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SIDEBAR: Spiritual Death Spiritual death is humanity's corrupt, alienated, and condemned existence under self-rule and apart from communion with God. The spiritually dead cannot create the life they lack, produce acceptable righteousness from their rebellion, reconcile themselves to God, or free themselves from sin's dominion. Yet Scripture does not describe them as nonexistent or personally inactive. The dead in Ephesians 2 walk, desire, choose, obey, and rebel; their activity belongs to the realm of death and cannot generate resurrection. The picture of a physical corpse can therefore become misleading if it is made to deny every capacity to hear an address, experience conviction, or respond when God graciously brings His Word and Spirit to bear. Inability to give oneself life is not the same as inability to be addressed by the Life-giver. See the Glossary: Death, Spiritual; Depravity / Total Depravity; Regeneration.

By Nature the Children of Wrath

The phrase “by nature the children of wrath” must retain its weight. Paul includes Jews as well as Gentiles, writing “among whom also we all,” so no ancestry, culture, or covenant history places one group outside the human condition. We do not begin as neutral persons standing beyond Adam's world and deciding without influence which humanity we will join.

Natural birth places us within the mortal, corrupt, and alienated humanity established through Adam's rebellion. We enter a world already governed by disordered desire, false worship, domination, suffering, and death. Even before our own history can be told, we receive a body subject to corruption, relationships formed within sin's damage, and a human inheritance cut off from the Tree of Life.

Paul's immediate argument nevertheless connects spiritual death and wrath with personally enacted rebellion. The Ephesians were dead in their trespasses and sins, “wherein” they walked. They fulfilled the desires of flesh and mind and belonged to the children of disobedience. Later Paul warns that God's wrath comes upon the children of disobedience “because of these things,” namely, fornication, uncleanness, covetousness, and idolatry (Ephesians 5:5–6).

By natural birth, then, people belong to the mortal and rebellious humanity established through Adam; by personally walking in that order's disobedience, morally responsible people make its rebellion and guilt their own. This is more than the later influence of a bad society upon otherwise contextless individuals. Adam's rebellion altered humanity's actual condition, inheritance, access to life, and destiny. It is also more precise than saying Ephesians 2 directly declares every infant personally guilty of Adam's act.

Paul is describing formerly disobedient adults rather than answering every question about infancy, inherited guilt, or the precise transmission of corruption. Those questions require the controlling argument of Romans 5 and a larger doctrine of original sin. Here we should say what Ephesians says: the people addressed belonged natively to a wrath-bound humanity and had personally enacted its disobedience.

But God

If we stopped at verse 3, we would have a complete description of ruin but no gospel. Paul does not turn toward a remaining human capacity which death left undamaged. He turns toward God:

“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4–6).

God is the decisive subject. He is rich in mercy. He acts because of His great love. He makes alive, raises, seats, displays grace, and creates a new workmanship. Salvation cannot be credited to the dead, because the dead do not create their life and the creature does not create God's workmanship.

The life-giving action is repeatedly joined to Christ. In Ephesians 1, God raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand. In chapter 2, He makes believers alive together with Christ, raises them together, seats them “in Christ Jesus,” and creates them “in Christ Jesus” unto good works. Salvation is not a package of life sent from a distant Christ. It is participation in the life, standing, and destiny of the risen Son.

This matters for the disputed order. The text does not describe an independent spiritual substance placed within selected sinners so that they can subsequently enter Christ by faith. It locates quickening together with Christ and then says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith” (verse 8). Grace is the source and character of the rescue; faith is its nonmeritorious reception; life and new creation are found in Christ.

Interpreters dispute whether “that” in “and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” refers narrowly to faith or gathers the whole preceding salvation by grace through faith. Because faith is grammatically feminine and that is neuter, the broader saving reality is the more natural referent, though grammar alone cannot make every narrower reading impossible. The central truth is not in dispute: salvation is God's gift, not a work, and no one may boast.

Ephesians 2's union language does not by itself settle every question about the logical relations within conversion. It does positively locate the life with Christ and salvation through faith. Nothing in the paragraph says that particular sinners are first made alive apart from faith and then believe as the inevitable evidence of life already given. That order is inferred from what a dead body cannot do rather than stated by Paul's description of the spiritually dead.

The Carnal Mind Cannot Submit

Romans 8 appears to close the remaining door:

“The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7–8).

The word cannot must retain its full force. The mind of the flesh is not a basically friendly mind waiting for more information. It is enmity. It refuses God's authority and cannot become pleasing to Him while remaining governed by self-rule. The flesh cannot submit because it claims the throne for itself, and its death is a present alienation from God rather than merely a future penalty.

An unbeliever may still perform outwardly right or socially beneficial actions. He may tell the truth, provide faithfully for his children, show compassion to a neighbor, or render a judgment which corresponds to God's law. The problem lies deeper than whether every individual conclusion differs from God's conclusion. The carnal mind claims the authority to establish the measure by which good and evil will be judged. Even where its measure happens to parallel God's, it has not submitted to God's right to rule.

A usurper may decide a case justly, but the justice of that decision does not legitimize the throne from which he issued it. He continues to exercise an authority which belongs to the rightful king. In the same way, an outwardly right act may genuinely benefit another person without reconciling the actor to God or establishing righteousness before Him. The act remains situated within a life which claims moral authority for itself.

Isaiah's confession that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” belongs to the lament of an unclean and rebellious people (Isaiah 64:6). It should not be flattened into the claim that every act performed by an unbeliever is equally cruel or socially worthless. Its force is that the righteousness offered from within uncleanness cannot cleanse the people, repair their rebellion, or establish a claim upon God. Right actions performed beneath usurped authority cannot make the usurper righteous before the King.

But we must also follow Paul's subjects. Romans 8:1 begins with those who are “in Christ Jesus.” Verses 5–8 contrast people whose identity and orientation are after the flesh with those who are after the Spirit. Paul then tells believers, “ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you” (verse 9). If Christ is in them, the Spirit is life because of righteousness, and the Spirit who raised Jesus will finally give life to their mortal bodies (verses 10–11).

Paul is contrasting realms and the identities and outcomes those realms govern. Those in the flesh cannot please God as people governed by the flesh. Their hostility must end. The claim to moral self-rule must be surrendered as they come under the life and rule of the Spirit. Conversion therefore requires more than improving the conduct of the usurper. It requires relinquishing the usurped throne. The passage establishes the necessity of transformation; it does not explain in verses 5–8 how the person passes from one realm to the other.

Saving faith is consequently not one more righteous work performed by the carnal mind beneath its own authority. It is the surrender of that claimed authority to the rightful King. The sinner does not independently measure Christ and congratulate himself for reaching the correct verdict; under the grace of the Word and Spirit, he abandons his right to rule himself and entrusts himself to Christ.

Nothing here says that the Spirit cannot convict and enable someone still identified with the flesh, or that regeneration must make surrender inevitable before faith occurs. We should not answer that the sinner “can believe if he wants,” because Paul has told us that his wants and mind are disordered. God must confront the governing rebellion, reveal the rightful King, expose the false claim to authority, and enable surrender through the Word and Spirit. The sinner cannot make self-rule pleasing to God. He must relinquish it. The question is whether that graciously enabled surrender must already be the inevitable effect of regeneration. Romans 8 does not say that it is.

The Natural Man Receives Not

Paul's words to Corinth are equally severe:

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

The context begins before chapter 2. The word of the cross is foolishness to those who perish. Jews demand signs, Greeks seek wisdom, and God saves through what the world calls the foolishness of preaching. Paul refuses to make faith stand in the wisdom or eloquence of men, preaching Christ crucified “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).

The natural man's problem reaches deeper than a failure to parse religious sentences. Paul says that he does not receive the things of the Spirit because they are foolishness to him, and that he cannot know them because they are spiritually discerned. His standards, loves, ambitions, and vision of power belong to the natural order. The crucified Messiah contradicts the wisdom through which he judges reality, so he neither welcomes the truth nor recognizes its spiritual worth. The inability is real, and its remedy must be spiritual.

Miracles and human wisdom cannot compel faith. Faith comes through hearing the gospel, and the Spirit brings the truth of the cross home to the hearts of hearers. Paul's answer to natural wisdom is not cleverer natural wisdom. It is the Spirit revealing the deep things of God, the apostles speaking them in words taught by the Spirit, and the cross being proclaimed in the Spirit's power.

A Reformed reader may answer that this is precisely the point: the natural man cannot discern spiritual truth until regeneration makes him spiritual. The verse is consistent with that conclusion, but it does not state it. Paul does not use the language of regeneration here, identify spiritual discernment with the new birth, or place regeneration before faith. He establishes the natural man's inability and the necessity of the Spirit; he does not, in this sentence, settle the disputed order in which the Spirit overcomes that inability.

The surrounding argument tells us how God's wisdom comes: the Spirit reveals the deep things of God, the apostles receive and speak them in words taught by the Spirit, and Christ crucified is proclaimed in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. No one savingly confesses Jesus as Lord apart from the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 12:3). Divine revelation and spiritual action are therefore indispensable. What remains to be demonstrated is whether this revealing and enabling work may be brought to bear upon a sinner before regeneration, or whether regeneration must first make believing inevitable. First Corinthians 2:14 does not answer that question merely by saying that the needed discernment is spiritual.

Paul's rebuke of the Corinthians in the next chapter supplies a related caution, although it does not directly explain verse 14. He calls people indisputably in Christ “carnal” and babes because their jealousy and rivalry continue to reflect the world's wisdom (1 Corinthians 3:1–3). Carnal and natural are not interchangeable terms, and the presence of carnality among believers does not prove that an unregenerate person can spiritually discern the gospel. It does show that Paul is concerned with governing orientation and the standards by which truth is evaluated, rather than offering a simple biological chart in which every worldly judgment disappears at the instant of regeneration.

The passage, then, gives no support to unaided human faith. Human wisdom cannot discover or receive God's saving wisdom, and the natural man cannot overcome his own hostility by thinking more cleverly. The Spirit must reveal through the Word and bring the truth of the cross to bear upon the hearer. Chapter 5, “The Grace That Comes Before Life,” will make the positive biblical case that this work of drawing, enlightening, teaching, and conviction may be real and resistible before the sinner receives life in Christ. Here the narrower conclusion is enough: the necessity of the Spirit does not by itself establish regeneration before faith.

Light Came into the World

John 3 brings the sinner's condition, God's initiative, responsible refusal, and judgment into one argument. God loved the world and gave His only begotten Son so that the believer should not perish but possess everlasting life. The unbeliever is condemned “because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18). Jesus then explains that condemnation:

“Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

This is not a neutral person making a detached intellectual calculation. The sinner loves darkness, practices evil, hates exposure, and refuses to come to the light. His inability is personal and moral; his loves and deeds have formed a life opposed to truth.

Yet Jesus does not explain the condemnation by saying that light never truly approached those who lacked prior regeneration. The Light came. People encountered Him and hated what He exposed. The divine initiative was real, the human hostility was real, and condemnation rested upon unbelief in relation to the given Son.

The person who does truth comes to the light “that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (verse 21). Even the coming which distinguishes him from the lover of darkness does not become autonomous moral achievement. His deeds have been wrought in God. Divine action and genuine coming are held together without the text narrating a prior regeneration which made that coming inevitable.

The Word Reaches Four Soils

The parable of the sower provides the clearest narrative test of the corpse analogy. The seed is the Word of God. Life resides in what the sower sends rather than in an independent power belonging to the soil. The sower initiates, the Word comes to every hearer, and the outcomes differ according to reception, resistance, pressure, competing love, depth, and endurance.

Some hear but the devil takes the Word from their hearts lest they believe and be saved. Others receive the Word with joy and “for a while believe,” but have no root and fall away in testing (Luke 8:12–13). Still others allow the cares and pleasures of life, including its riches, to choke what they have heard. The good soil keeps the Word it has received and bears fruit with patience.

Temporary belief is not saving union later lost. The rocky hearers have no root; the Word never becomes the enduring life from which fruit grows. Nevertheless, Jesus calls their response receiving the Word with joy and believing for a while. Unregenerate hearers may experience a real response to spiritual truth without possessing regeneration. That is difficult to reconcile with the claim that an unregenerate person can no more respond to the Word than a corpse can hear a sermon.

The good soil should not become an untouched moral virtue which existed apart from providence and grace. The parable does not narrate everything God did to bring the hearer to that moment, everything the Word made known, or everything the Spirit did to make the truth intelligible and urgent. It teaches that the Word comes bearing what the hearers lack and that their relation to it is personally meaningful.

The evidence is now cumulative. Ephesians describes the dead as morally active within death's dominion. Romans describes the flesh as hostile and unable to please God while remaining flesh. First Corinthians describes natural judgment rejecting a gospel which the Spirit reveals through preaching. John describes sinners hating Light which has actually come. Jesus describes unrooted hearers genuinely receiving and temporarily believing the Word.

Together these texts favor spiritual death as alienated, corrupted, hostile human life which cannot produce resurrection life, yet can be graciously addressed before regeneration. That is more than an alternative the words barely permit. It is the pattern created by the predicates, contrasts, and movements of the passages themselves.

What the Dead Cannot Do

Rejecting the corpse analogy does not leave us with a weak doctrine of sin. The spiritually dead cannot discover the gospel through unaided wisdom, make Christ savingly present to themselves, cleanse their guilt, escape judgment, restore communion with God, free themselves from the world and flesh, create union with Christ, generate resurrection life, or transform themselves into God's new creation.

God must give the Son, preserve and send the Word, reveal Christ, draw, enlighten, convict, enable, receive the believer, forgive, justify, join him to Christ, and give life. The sinner supplies none of those works.

What the spiritually dead may do when God graciously addresses them is hear, misunderstand, suppress, resist, receive temporarily, become convicted, refuse exposure, or yield in trusting surrender. These are not independent saving powers which the sinner possesses outside grace. They are personal responses made possible within an encounter God creates and sustains.

A dead sinner cannot raise himself. That is precisely why the gospel does not command him to raise himself. It commands him to come to the living Christ.

Faith is not an act of self-resurrection. It is the surrender of the dead and condemned self to the Son in whom God has established life. When the sinner believes, the Spirit joins him to the One who has passed through death and risen into incorruptible human life.

The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

A command addressed to the spiritually dead must therefore be more than bare sound. Either God graciously enables the hearer to answer the public summons, or that summons waits upon another call given only to those already chosen.

Part Two

When the Gospel Comes

Chapter 4 — Is the Gospel an Actual Call?

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace” (Isaiah 52:7).

The gospel comes through a herald.

Isaiah's messenger does not climb the mountain to offer religious advice or advertise one spiritual possibility among many. He announces what God has done: peace, salvation, the return of the LORD to Zion, and the reign of God. “Thy God reigneth,” he declares. The hearers are confronted with news they did not create and authority they do not confer.

Jesus begins His public ministry in the same manner. He proclaims the gospel of the kingdom of God, announces that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom has drawn near, and then commands, “repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14–15). The announcement and summons belong together. God has acted; therefore the hearer must respond.

The gospel is God's authoritative good news concerning His Son, Jesus Christ: Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose again, and saves all who trust in Him. It is the announcement of what God has done, not advice about what humanity must achieve. Yet because the gospel announces the risen Lord, it cannot be placed before the hearer as information requiring no allegiance. The King who is proclaimed calls the sinner to leave self-rule and entrust himself to Christ.

Calling is God's authoritative summons to enter, embrace, and live out the life and purpose He has revealed. The relationship can be stated simply: the gospel announces Christ; the call summons the hearer to receive Him.

Everything turns on whether that summons is actual. Does God genuinely call every hearer toward a saving relation which grace has made possible, or does the public message command most hearers toward a salvation which God has not savingly provided or enabled for them?

Two Kinds of Call

Reformed theology answers by distinguishing the general call from the effectual call.

The general call goes outward through the preaching of the gospel. It announces Christ, commands repentance and faith, and promises salvation to everyone who believes. It may be heard, understood in some measure, and rejected. Some who receive only this public call may also experience what Reformed confessions call the common operations of the Spirit, but they are not savingly changed.

The effectual call is different. The Westminster Confession and the Second London Baptist Confession say that God effectually calls those whom He has predestined to life. Through the Word and Spirit He enlightens their minds, removes the heart of stone, renews their wills, and draws them to Christ. They come freely because grace has made them willing.¹

The Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes effectual calling as the Spirit's work of convincing the sinner of sin, enlightening his mind in the knowledge of Christ, renewing his will, and persuading and enabling him to embrace Christ.² This inward call does not externally drag an unwilling person into salvation. It changes him so that his coming becomes both willing and certain.

The Canons of Dort state the distinction with particular pastoral care. They insist that everyone called through the gospel is called sincerely. God seriously declares that it pleases Him for those called to come, and He promises rest and eternal life to everyone who comes and believes. If a hearer refuses, the fault lies neither in Christ, the gospel, nor God, but in the person called. If another person obeys and is converted, however, Dort locates the decisive difference in God's election and effectual work within him.³

That is the strongest Reformed formulation. It does not teach that the public call is a divine joke, that God lies when He commands faith, or that the conditional promise is false. The public summons reveals the sinner's duty and promises salvation to every believer. The inward call gives the elect what alone can make their willing response certain.

The difficulty appears in the words Dort uses to defend the public summons. What does it mean for every hearer to be called sincerely, seriously, and truly when God has chosen not to give most hearers the only grace which, within the system, could make obedience possible?

Command, Promise, and Summons

We must first distinguish several truths which are often gathered beneath the single word call.

God commands repentance and faith. His authority does not depend upon the sinner's willingness, and human rebellion cannot erase creaturely duty. If a person has corrupted his own desires, his unwillingness does not place God under obligation to lower the standard of righteousness.

God also promises salvation to everyone who believes. The statement “everyone who believes will be saved” remains logically true within Calvinism. No believer will come to Christ and discover that the promise excluded him.

Yet the gospel call is more than a statement of duty followed by a true conditional proposition. God brings the crucified and risen Christ before the hearer and summons that person to leave his present allegiance and come. The authority of the command and the accuracy of the promise do not exhaust the issue. It is whether God is genuinely bringing salvation near to this hearer or announcing a condition while withholding the only grace which could permit him to meet it.

This chapter need not settle every question concerning the different senses in which Scripture speaks of God's will. Chapter 13 will later consider His commands, permissions, patience, judgment, and expressed desire that sinners turn and live. Our question here is narrower: How does Scripture portray the gospel call itself?

It portrays an actual divine-human encounter.

Jesus Loved Him and Called Him

The man commonly called the Rich Young Ruler gives that encounter a human face. The familiar name gathers the details of the three Synoptic accounts: Matthew identifies him as young, Luke calls him a ruler, and all three describe the possessions that governed his response (Matthew 19:16–26; Mark 10:17–27; Luke 18:18–27). He came running, knelt before Jesus, and asked, “Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?”

Jesus brought the commandments before him, and the ruler answered that he had observed them from his youth. Then Mark records a detail which must govern the way we hear everything that follows: “Then Jesus beholding him loved him.” The searching demand did not arise from coldness, contempt, or a desire to drive away a man for whom Christ possessed no saving concern. Jesus looked upon this particular man in love and said:

“One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me” (Mark 10:21).

Every element of an actual summons is present. Jesus addresses the man before Him, exposes the allegiance which keeps him from surrender, promises treasure in heaven, and personally commands him to come and follow. This is far more than a distant religious possibility or an explanation of what a saved person would hypothetically do. The living Lord stands before him and calls him out of his present life into fellowship and discipleship with Himself.

Selling everything is not a universal price by which sinners purchase eternal life. Jesus places His finger upon the rival lord governing this man. The ruler wants eternal life, but he also intends to retain the wealth from which he derives security, standing, and control. For him, surrender must become concrete at exactly that point. The command to give his possessions to the poor exposes the throne, while “come, take up the cross, and follow me” names the new allegiance to which Christ calls him.

The encounter certainly exposes the ruler's self-righteousness and inability to save himself. Some readings therefore treat Christ's words chiefly as law intended to reveal that impossibility. Yet the scene extends beyond exposure. The same words which uncover the man's bondage also invite him to leave it. Jesus does more than demonstrate that the ruler has failed; He promises treasure and calls the man to follow. The law-like exposure and the gracious summons meet in one loving address.

The ruler refuses. “And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions” (verse 22). He understands enough of the demand to feel its force, and his grief shows that he does not dismiss it lightly. Yet sorrow never becomes surrender. When Christ and possessions can no longer occupy the throne together, he chooses the possessions and walks away from the Christ who loved and called him.

Jesus then tells His astonished disciples how difficult it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God. When they ask, “Who then can be saved?” He answers, “With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible” (verses 26–27). The story therefore gives no support to an autonomous human ability which can produce salvation without grace. Christ initiates the encounter, speaks the truth, exposes the heart, issues the summons, and identifies God as the only source of saving possibility. The man remains responsible for the refusal through which his ruling love is revealed.

The passage leaves some questions about inward ability and effectual calling to the wider witness of Scripture, but it establishes the point required here. A call may be loving, personal, searching, gracious, and genuinely directed toward eternal life even when the person addressed walks away. The ruler's refusal leaves Christ's love and the sincerity of His command intact. It shows what happened when an actual call confronted a competing allegiance.

Many Are Called

Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a king who prepared a wedding feast for his son and sent servants to summon those who had been invited. “Come unto the marriage,” the servants announced; the dinner was prepared and everything was ready (Matthew 22:1–4).

The invited people refused. Some made light of the summons and returned to their farms and businesses. Others abused and killed the messengers. The king judged them and sent his servants into the highways to gather others until the wedding was furnished with guests.

Jesus concludes, “For many are called, but few are chosen” (verse 14).

That sentence must not be detached from the story and made to prove an entire system by itself. The call is broad and resistible. It is not a casual mention of a hypothetical banquet. The king has prepared the feast, sends his servants, names what is ready, commands the invited to come, and holds them responsible when competing loves and hostility govern their response.

“Few are chosen” establishes a distinction within the multitude called, but the parable does not explain that distinction by an inward regeneration selectively causing attendance. The story explains absence through refusal, indifference, competing allegiance, and violence toward the servants.

The guest without a proper wedding garment also warns us not to equate attendance with saving reception. A person may enter the visible gathering without possessing the relationship appropriate to the feast. The gospel may be heard, welcomed outwardly, and answered temporarily without the hearer entrusting himself to Christ. That does not make the call unreal for either the openly resistant or the falsely responsive.

The parable in Luke 14 follows the same moral pattern. A great supper is prepared, and the servant announces, “Come; for all things are now ready.” The invited people excuse themselves because land, possessions, work, and domestic concerns matter more to them. The master then sends the servant outward until the house is filled. The initiative belongs to the host, the supper is ready before anyone arrives, the summons is broad, and those absent exclude themselves through the loves revealed in their refusal.

Righteousness Near at Hand

Romans 10 brings the theological relationships together. It joins righteousness, submission, nearness, faith, confession, calling upon the Lord, preaching, hearing, disobedience, and God's patient outstretched hands.

We must keep the chapter where Paul placed it, within Romans 9–11. Paul is answering the apparent crisis created by Israel's widespread rejection of Christ. If God made promises to Israel and Israel has stumbled, has God's Word failed? Paul's answer is no. Israel's stumble is real, Gentile inclusion is real, and God remains faithful. Romans 10 explains why Israel stumbled, how salvation comes, and why preaching is necessary.

Paul begins with desire and prayer: “Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved” (Romans 10:1). He does not speak of resistant people with cold satisfaction. Before identifying their error, he demonstrates the grief, longing, and intercession which should accompany a Christian explanation of unbelief.

Israel has zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Its error is more than missing information. “Going about to establish their own righteousness,” the people “have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (verse 3). Religious self-righteousness is a refusal. It prefers a standing which may be achieved, possessed, compared, and defended to a righteousness received wholly in another.

“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (verse 4). The law is not worthless, and God did not err in giving it. The law revealed righteousness, exposed sin, and moved toward its goal in Christ. The justified standing the law could never produce for sinners is now located in the Son and received through faith.

The gospel therefore does not call sinners to manufacture a righteousness which remains distant. It summons them to submit to the righteousness God has brought near.

Paul gives this righteousness a voice: “But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise.” It does not command the sinner to ascend into heaven and bring Christ down or descend into the deep and raise Him from the dead. Christ has already come. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Salvation does not wait for a spiritual hero to accomplish what only the Son could accomplish.

“But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach” (verse 8).

Here is one of God's great mercies: He puts saving truth near. It is near as the Word concerning Christ, carrying far greater substance than a vague religious sentiment, private intuition, or mystical feeling. Drawing upon Deuteronomy 30, Paul shows that God Himself has overcome the distance. The saving Word is near because God has brought it near through His Son and through preaching.

That nearness is central to an actual call. God brings His saving Word to sinners personally. He sends the herald, brings the Word to the mouth and heart, and presents the Christ whom faith receives. An abstract condition left for sinners to discover from their own resources could never possess this personal nearness.

The Mouth and the Heart

Paul states the promise with unforgettable directness:

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9).

We must not shrink these words into a formula, as though salvation were produced by recitation. Confession with the mouth and belief in the heart are the outward and inward expression of genuine faith. The object is the risen Lord, not the correctness of the sinner's words or the intensity of a religious moment.

Believing unto righteousness describes the reception of Christ, not a spiritual power within faith which joins the sinner to Him. The sinner believes and confesses; the Spirit joins the believer to the risen Son and gives life. Paul is describing the direction and saving relation of faith, not assigning life-giving efficiency to the human act.

Nor is confession an additional work placed beside faith. To confess Jesus as Lord is openly to acknowledge His rightful authority. Calling upon His name is a cry of dependence and surrender, not a request for assistance while the sinner preserves his own throne. Faith receives the Saviour as Lord. It dethrones self.

Paul then gives the scope of the promise:

“For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:12–13).

This whosoever is not weak. It is the open door of God's mercy. The promise is not qualified by ethnicity, religious pedigree, moral history, or an undisclosed decree which the hearer must discover before coming. There is one Lord over all, and He is rich toward all who call upon Him.

Faith Comes by Hearing

Paul now traces the necessary means by which that open promise reaches actual people:

“How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?” (Romans 10:14–15).

No calling upon a Christ who has not been believed. No believing in a Christ who has not been heard. No hearing without a herald. No herald without divine sending.

Preaching is not a hobby or a religious performance. God sends messengers with good news of peace. They announce the crucified and risen Christ, and the gospel supplies the person, truth, promise, and reasons toward which faith responds.

Yet “they have not all obeyed the gospel” (verse 16). Hearing does not mechanically produce surrender. The gospel is God's personal address through revealed truth. It transcends bare information without becoming an impersonal instrument which regenerates every person reached by its sound. It is an authoritative summons. Some obey; some refuse.

“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (verse 17).

There is no faith without revelation. God creates the saving encounter by bringing the Word and Christ near, sending the messenger, drawing, illuminating, and convicting through the truth. In that sense, we may say that God creates faith through the gospel announcement: faith would neither exist nor possess an object apart from what God has done and revealed.

We must not make that sentence say that proclamation irresistibly regenerates, that God performs the hearer's believing, or that every person who hears the words necessarily believes. Paul has just said that not all obeyed. The Word supplies faith's revealed object, truth, reasons, promise, and gracious occasion. The Spirit makes that truth intelligible and presses it upon the will. The sinner himself believes or refuses; when he believes, the Spirit joins him to Christ and gives life.

They Heard and Disobeyed

Paul anticipates the excuse that Israel may not have heard. “Yes verily,” he answers. He then asks whether Israel failed to know, and again appeals to Moses and Isaiah. Israel possessed the Scriptures, prophets, promises, Christ's public ministry, and apostolic witness. Paul refuses to explain the nation's unbelief through the absence of light, though he does not claim that every Israelite experienced an identical degree of exposure.

The chapter closes with one of Scripture's most searching pictures of the call:

“All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people” (Romans 10:21).

These are not the hands of a reluctant God. He calls, brings the Word near, sends messengers, reveals righteousness in Christ, promises salvation without ethnic distinction, and stretches out His hands while a stubborn people contradict Him.

Israel's refusal is not evidence that no actual call occurred. Their disobedience is their response to a Word genuinely heard and a righteousness genuinely brought near. As Chapter 11 will later demonstrate, the outstretched hands are not a hidden refusal dressed as an invitation.

The call is not made real by the sinner's acceptance. His refusal is culpable because God had already brought the Word near and stretched out His hands.

Receiving and Resisting the Word

Acts shows both responses.

At Pentecost Peter proclaims the crucified and risen Christ. His hearers are pricked in their heart and ask, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter commands repentance and baptism, continues testifying, and exhorts, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation.” Those who gladly receive his word are baptized and added to the church (Acts 2:22–41).

“Save yourselves” does not mean that the hearers become their own saviors. Christ has accomplished the saving work, God has sent the messenger, and the Spirit has pressed the truth upon their hearts. Peter nevertheless commands them to respond, separating themselves from the resistant generation by receiving the Christ proclaimed to them.

Stephen later tells Israel's leaders, “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:51). That statement does not prove that every possible operation of the Spirit may be resisted. It establishes the point required here: people can resist the Spirit acting through prophetic and gospel witness. Their resistance does not prove that the divine address lacked authority, power, or personal application.

The public call does not exhaust the gracious action surrounding the gospel. The Father draws, and the Spirit enlightens and convicts; yet those works should not be compressed into a single word and then identified with regeneration. The call is not bare sound, and the grace which brings it near is not bare information.

From Call to Calling

Scripture also addresses believers as “the called” and commands them to walk worthy of their calling. Reformed theology understands these successful uses as evidence of effectual calling: everyone called in this sense actually belongs to Christ.

We should affirm the saving result without importing an unstated mechanism. A call is an authoritative summons. A calling is the identity, purpose, and vocation contained within the summons.

When sinners receive the gospel in repentant faith and the Spirit joins them to Christ, they become the called—saints summoned into fellowship with Christ, one body and one hope, holiness, peace, freedom, service, faithful suffering, inheritance, and glory. Their calling is the identity and purpose they now possess in the Son, not simply the remembered moment when they heard a sermon.

Romans 8:30 may therefore describe the call as savingly realized in the people under discussion. That is stronger than the rejected public summons considered merely from the side of resistant hearers. Yet successful in outcome does not automatically mean irresistible in causation. Chapter 10 will examine that distinction within Paul's full argument.

The same family of words can name God's summons as issued, the summons as received and realized, and the identity and vocation which continue after conversion. Context determines which aspect is prominent. A realized calling does not make the rejected summons insincere, and a rejected summons does not make the believer's calling uncertain.

The Actual Call

An actual gospel call depends entirely upon revelation and grace; it grants fallen sinners no autonomous faith. Neither does every hearer receive an identical providential history or the same intensity of conviction. It does not make God's sovereign purpose dependent upon human permission, make the gospel an impersonal regenerating mechanism, or turn a temporary public response into saving faith.

It means that through the gospel God genuinely addresses sinners. He brings the crucified and risen Christ before them, commands repentance and faith, promises salvation to everyone who comes, and establishes culpability when light is refused. The call may be resisted without becoming unreal, and it may reach its saving end without becoming a synonym for regeneration before faith.

The preacher therefore does not offer religious advice and wait to see whether autonomous wills can improve themselves. He announces what God has done. The Father sent the Son. Christ died and rose. God brought the Word near. The King now commands the hearer to turn and trust.

The call carries authority because God speaks, grace because Christ is brought near, promise because everyone believing will be saved, and urgency because resistance is culpable and hardening is real.

The gospel call is not an empty sound sent toward a closed door God has determined never to open. It is the voice of the King bringing His Son before the sinner and commanding him to come.

The sinner may refuse. Many do. But his refusal does not prove that God never called him.

It proves that the call was real enough to be resisted.

Notes

Westminster Confession of Faith 10.1–4, https://www.opc.org/wcf.html; Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 10.1–4, https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-10.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Questions 30–31, https://www.opc.org/sc.html.

Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Main Points of Doctrine, Articles 8–12, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort.

Chapter 5 — The Grace That Comes Before Life

When a Christian tells the story of his conversion, he may say, “I found Christ.” We understand what he means. There was a time when he was not seeking the Lord, or thought he was seeking while looking everywhere but toward the truth, and then the gospel came into view. He heard. He understood. He became convinced that Christ was who the gospel declared Him to be, and at last he entrusted himself to the Saviour.

Yet as he looks backward, he begins to see that grace preceded every step. He did not create the witness of creation or the accusation of conscience. He neither preserved the Scriptures nor sent the preacher, and he did not arrange the conversation or cause the Word to reach him when it did. He did not make Christ intelligible to his darkened understanding. Grace exposed his self-rule and awakened the desire to be reconciled to God. Long before he could describe what was happening, the Father was drawing through the revealing Word as the Spirit enlightened and convicted.

Grace was already there.

This recognition does not require him to deny that he believed. Nor must he imagine that God secretly regenerated him before he trusted Christ, so that the person listening to the gospel was already alive without yet being united to the Son in whom life is found. Scripture gives us another category: God may act graciously, supernaturally, personally, and powerfully upon a sinner before giving him life.

Grace before life is not life before faith.

Must Regeneration Come First?

Reformed theology commonly argues that it must. Fallen people are hostile toward God, unable to receive spiritual truth while remaining as they are, and unwilling to come to Christ. Their condition reaches far deeper than ignorance. The public preaching of the gospel may reach many people, and some may experience what the Reformed confessions call the common operations of the Spirit, but only the elect receive the effectual inward work which changes the governing disposition of the heart. God enlightens their minds, renews their wills, and draws them to Christ so that their coming becomes both willing and certain.¹

The Reformed argument protects truths we must also protect: no sinner discovers Christ by unaided insight, no morally superior person supplies what grace lacks, and no autonomous will stands outside God's action and decides whether to permit Him to save. If the fallen sinner is genuinely corrupt, the Reformed reader asks, what could anything short of regeneration accomplish? If grace leaves the person capable of refusing, has the decisive saving difference not finally been relocated inside the human will?

We should not answer by imagining grace as a small assistance distributed to otherwise neutral people. Human beings are not neutral, and God's work is not a standardized quantity placed before identical wills. People bring different histories and loves to the gospel, together with their fears, wounds, habits, degrees of light, and patterns of resistance. God orders circumstances personally and sends messengers providentially, pressing truth upon actual people rather than abstract examples in a theological diagram.

Neither does Scripture disclose some hidden virtue inside the believer which deserves congratulation. Everything that made faith possible came from God: the witness, the Word, the Son, the cross, the resurrection, the messenger, the understanding, the conviction, the drawing, the promise, and the ability to come. Faith does not become meritorious because the hearer must exercise it. Chapter 6 will address that objection directly.

A more basic issue remains. Must every gracious work which makes faith possible be identified with regeneration? Does Scripture teach that the Spirit cannot address, enlighten, convince, or draw an unregenerate person unless He first gives that person resurrection life?

We should also say what would favor the Reformed answer. If Scripture consistently reserved divine teaching and enlightenment for people already made alive, treated every participation in the Spirit's work as saving union, and described drawing and conviction as invariably producing faith, then the case for collapsing these works into effectual calling would be strong. John 6:44–45, 1 Corinthians 2:14, and 2 Corinthians 4:6 are read together in precisely this way: the natural person cannot receive spiritual things, God must command light to shine in the heart, and everyone taught and drawn by the Father comes to Christ.

Those texts establish the necessity of divine action, but they do not stand alone. We must also account for passages in which Christ draws beyond a secretly identified regenerate class, the Spirit reproves the world, hearers resist the Holy Ghost, people receive the Word temporarily without root, and profoundly enlightened participants in the Spirit's work are distinguished from things accompanying salvation. Scripture places a rich field of divine action before life, and that positive pattern—not merely the possibility of alternative definitions—requires us to preserve preparatory grace as a real category.

Distinguishable Works of Grace

We must distinguish these works without turning conversion into a machine. They may overlap in experience, and the person being drawn may not know where one description ends and another begins. The distinctions are theological, not necessarily chronological measurements.

God bears witness to Himself through creation and conscience, and His providence may bring a person toward fuller light. The gospel then reveals and proclaims the crucified and risen Christ. Through that gospel, God authoritatively calls the hearer to repent and believe. The Father draws the person toward the Son. The Spirit enlightens his understanding so that the gospel comes into intelligible and personally significant view. The Spirit convicts his will, exposing unbelief and false judgment and pressing upon him the necessity of yielding or resisting. The sinner then entrusts himself to Christ or refuses Him. When the sinner believes, the Spirit joins him to the risen Son and gives him life.

The gospel reveals Christ; calling summons the hearer to receive Him. Drawing brings the hearer toward Christ. Enlightenment enables him to understand the Christ revealed. Conviction presses the truth of Christ upon his will. Faith is his surrender to Christ. Regeneration is the Spirit's gift of Christ's life in union with Him.

God acts throughout. Yet God does not perform the sinner's faith, and the sinner does not perform the Spirit's regeneration.

<!-- SIDEBAR START: drawing-enlightenment-conviction -->

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SIDEBAR: Drawing, Enlightenment, and Conviction These works of grace belong together, but they are not interchangeable. Drawing is the Father's gracious action bringing the sinner toward the Son through truth, testimony, providence, and the gospel. Enlightenment is the Spirit's work making the revealed truth concerning Christ intelligible and personally significant, so that the hearer is not left to unaided darkness. Conviction exposes unbelief, false righteousness, and judgment, pressing the truth upon the conscience and will. These actions may overlap so completely in experience that the hearer cannot separate their moments, but each describes a different relationship. Drawing is not the sinner's coming, enlightenment is not his believing, and conviction is not his repentance. Neither should any of them automatically be renamed regeneration. Grace brings Christ truly near and makes a responsible response possible; the hearer must still yield or resist. See the Glossary: Drawing; Enlightenment; Conviction; Regeneration.

The Father Draws

Jesus states the necessity of divine initiative plainly:

“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44).

No person comes to Christ from an untouched capacity of his own. The saving movement does not originate in a will standing independently of God. The Father must act first.

Jesus then explains this drawing through divine teaching:

“It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me” (John 6:45).

The Father teaches. The hearer hears and learns. The hearer comes to Christ. Jesus does not explain the movement by introducing a hidden impartation of resurrection life between the Father's teaching and the sinner's coming. The Father reveals the Son, and the person who receives that teaching comes to the One revealed.

Hearing and learning are not bare exposure to sound. The murmuring crowd heard Jesus speak while refusing the Father's testimony in His words. Learning describes a receptive relation to divine teaching. Yet that does not make teaching another word for regeneration or make coming merely the inevitable motion of a person already alive. Drawing acts upon the hearer's understanding, desire, and will through what the Father reveals concerning His Son.

The Reformed reader will immediately observe that Jesus continues, “and I will raise him up at the last day.” If the one drawn is the one raised, does the verse not teach that drawing always succeeds? Chapter 14 will examine that construction fully. For now, we need only preserve the movement of Jesus' statement. No one comes unless the Father draws, and the person who comes through the Father's drawing will be raised. The promise of resurrection belongs securely to the comer. The verse does not require us to redefine drawing as regeneration before the coming occurs.

John 12 guards the meaning from the opposite direction. As Greeks arrive desiring to see Jesus and the hour of the cross approaches, He declares:

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32).

John tells us that Jesus spoke of the manner of His death. The Father draws through the revelation of the crucified Christ and toward Christ Himself. Through the cross, the Son is placed before the world, and the drawing extends beyond Israel toward the nations now beginning to seek Him.

If drawing itself means irresistible regeneration, the words “all men” must be restricted before the verb can carry that meaning. At minimum, the two passages require us to see drawing in relation to revelation: the Father teaches concerning the Son, and the Son is lifted up before the world. God draws through providence, testimony, truth, promise, warning, and the beauty and sufficiency of the crucified Son. The drawing remains inseparable from the person and work of Jesus.

Drawing is more than permission. God truly acts upon the person and brings him toward Christ. Yet action upon a will is not substitution for a will. Love may draw, testimony may draw, truth may draw, and the Father may draw through all of them without believing in the sinner's place.

The Light Shines

John introduces Christ as both life and light:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:4–5).

The true Light comes into the world He made. The world does not know Him. He comes to His own, and His own do not receive Him. Yet as many as receive Him and believe on His name are given the right to become the sons of God (John 1:9–13).

John 1:9, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” has been interpreted in several ways. Some understand a universal inward illumination; others understand the objective shining of the incarnate Light upon humanity; still others take the phrase to describe Christ as the One who enlightens every person who is enlightened. We need not make the doctrine of preparatory grace depend upon resolving that clause more precisely than the context allows.

John's larger pattern is clear. The Light truly shines. People may remain in darkness, fail to know the One who made them, or refuse the One who comes to them. Others receive Him and believe on His name. Revelation, understanding, reception, and life belong together, but they are not interchangeable.

Enlightenment is the Spirit's work by which the gospel comes into intelligible and personally significant view, enabling the hearer to understand and recognize the truth concerning Christ. It makes assent possible but is not identical to assent, and assent itself may stop short of saving trust. Enlightenment brings the hearer into the light of the gospel; it does not itself give him life.

Paul's commission illustrates how divine revelation, human witness, and response may belong to one encounter without being collapsed into one action. Christ sends him to the nations “to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18). Paul does not become the source of spiritual sight, nor does every person hearing him become regenerate. He is the appointed witness through whom the gospel enters human understanding and summons people to turn. The messenger opens the Scriptures; the Spirit opens understanding; the hearer is called to leave darkness and come into the light.

Enlightened, Yet Not Necessarily Regenerate

Here the argument reaches its exegetical center. Hebrews gives positive reason to distinguish enlightenment from regeneration. It describes people who have experienced the very operations commonly gathered into effectual calling and then distinguishes their condition from salvation. The people described in Hebrews 6 were:

“once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come” (Hebrews 6:4–5).

These words describe more than hearing Christian vocabulary from a distance. The people entered the illuminated sphere of the gospel and the covenant community. They understood the message, sampled the heavenly gift, participated in the Spirit's activity among God's people, and encountered realities belonging to the coming kingdom.

We must not reduce “partakers of the Holy Ghost” to conviction alone. The phrase describes real participation. They experienced the Spirit's illuminating, convicting, persuasive, communal, and kingdom-signifying work. Yet the passage does not say that the Spirit had joined them to Christ, sealed them in Him, or made the life of the Son their life.

The agricultural image explains the distinction. Rain falls upon the ground. One field receives it and bears useful herbs; another receives the same rain and produces thorns and briars. The difference is not whether heaven truly acted upon the ground. The question is what the ground brought forth under that gracious visitation. The writer then says, “But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation” (verse 9). His language does more than leave room for a distinction between profound gospel experience and salvation; it makes that distinction within the text. Enlightenment, tasting, and participation in the Spirit's activity are real, but the writer can still speak of better things which accompany salvation.

The people addressed throughout Hebrews form a mixed assembly: believers, assenters, and rejectors. The assurances strengthen those who have entered by faith, the invitations draw those who stand near without surrendering, and the warnings shake those hardening themselves against the truth. Hebrews 6 addresses people who have sampled grace without surrender. They have experienced the Spirit's deep activity among them and therefore stand far beyond casual observation. Even so, the passage gives us no warrant to call them regenerate.

Hebrews 10 preserves the same pastoral distinctions. The person who sins willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth is not a weak believer who has stumbled, nor an assenter still struggling toward decision. He is a deliberate rejector who knowingly tramples the only sacrifice, counts the covenant blood an unholy thing, and does despite unto the Spirit of grace. There is no other sacrifice to which he may turn because there is no other Christ.

The writer then turns from warning to encouragement:

“But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions” (Hebrews 10:32).

He reminds these sufferers that they endured reproach, identified with afflicted believers, showed compassion to prisoners, and joyfully accepted the spoiling of their goods because they knew they possessed an enduring inheritance. Their former perseverance is evidence of present grace. They are urged not to cast away their confidence but to continue believing “to the saving of the soul” (verse 39).

We should therefore avoid turning enlightened into a technical synonym for either regenerate or unregenerate. Hebrews 6 describes profound enlightenment without the things accompanying salvation, while Hebrews 10 uses illumination within an exhortation to suffering believers. Enlightenment names light received. The person's final relation to Christ must be established by the larger context.

The conclusion is therefore positive rather than merely defensive: Scripture itself describes profound enlightenment and participation in the Spirit's work without identifying those experiences as salvation. The Spirit may act genuinely upon an unregenerate person without that action itself being regeneration.

The Spirit Convicts the World

Jesus tells His disciples that the coming Spirit will bear witness concerning Him, working alongside their witness (John 15:26–27). He then explains what the Spirit will do through that gospel testimony:

“And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8).

Conviction is often reduced to an intense feeling of guilt. A person may be frightened or ashamed, perhaps emotionally burdened by the memory of wrongdoing, and we say that he is under conviction. Such feelings may accompany conviction, and God may use them, but they are not its essence.

Jesus interprets each category. The Spirit reproves concerning sin, “because they believe not on me”; concerning righteousness, “because I go to my Father”; and concerning judgment, “because the prince of this world is judged” (verses 9–11).

The world rendered a false verdict upon Christ. It treated the Righteous One as a blasphemer and deceiver, a criminal threat to be removed. The Father overturned that verdict by raising His Son, receiving and exalting Him. The cross, which appeared to be the world's judgment upon Jesus, became God's judgment upon the ruler of this world and the rebellious order aligned with him.

Conviction is the Holy Spirit's application of the gospel to the human will. Through the truth concerning Christ, the Spirit exposes the hearer's unbelief and false judgment, confronts him with God's verdict concerning Christ's righteousness and the judgment of evil, and presses upon him the necessity of either repentant faith or resistance.

The gospel is no longer remote information. The hearer sees that his wrong actions flow from a life under self-rule, refused the One in whom life is found, and remained aligned with an order already judged. He must now yield, evade, suppress, or harden himself against the truth disclosed.

Acts shows both directions.

Peter proclaims the crucified and risen Christ at Pentecost, and the hearers are “pricked in their heart.” They ask, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter commands them to repent, continues testifying, and exhorts them to separate themselves from the resistant generation. Those who gladly receive the Word are baptized (Acts 2:22–41).

Stephen proclaims the same covenant history moving toward the Righteous One and tells Israel's leaders, “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:51). They too are “cut to the heart,” but instead of asking what they must do, they gnash upon him with their teeth, cast him out of the city, and stone him.

We need not claim that every hearer in Acts 2 and Acts 7 experienced an identical intensity or mode of the Spirit's work. The contrast establishes the point. Spirit-empowered testimony may pierce the heart and be received in repentance, or it may pierce the heart and be answered with intensified resistance. Conviction is not proved saving merely because it is deep, and resistance does not prove that the Spirit never acted personally or powerfully.

The Seed and the Soils

Jesus brings these truths together in the parable of the sower. The seed is the Word of God, and the life is in the seed, not the soil. The hearers do not manufacture revelation, create the kingdom, or place saving power within the message. The sower goes forth, and the Word comes to them.

Yet the same Word encounters different receptions. Beside the way, the Word is heard but taken away before it is believed. Upon the rock, it is received immediately with joy. These hearers “for a while believe,” but in time of testing fall away because they have no root (Luke 8:13). Among thorns, the Word is choked by cares, riches, pleasures, and the deceitfulness of competing desire. In good ground, the Word is received, kept, and brought forth with patience.

The shallow and thorny hearers are people to whom something real happened. One receives the Word joyfully and temporarily believes. Another allows the Word to begin its work but refuses to relinquish rival loves. Their responses may involve understanding and assent, even emotion, reformation, public identification, and genuine experience within the Christian community. What is absent is rooted, persevering surrender to Christ.

Nor should the “honest and good heart” be treated as an untouched moral capacity which existed independently of grace. The parable describes how the Word is received; it does not narrate everything God did providentially to bring the hearer to that moment, everything the Word revealed, or everything the Spirit did in making its truth understood and personally urgent. The good soil contributes no life to the seed and earns no harvest. It receives and keeps what was graciously given.

The parable does not tell us that life was secretly placed in selected soil before the seed arrived. Neither does it tell us that soil created life through its receptivity. It tells us that the Word comes bearing what the hearer does not possess, and that the hearer's response to the Word is real.

The cumulative pattern now comes into view. John 12 places the lifted-up Christ before the nations as the One who draws. John 16 says that the Spirit reproves the world. Acts 7 names resistance to the Holy Ghost. Hebrews 6 distinguishes deep participation in the Spirit's gracious activity from the things accompanying salvation. The soils distinguish reception, temporary belief, and rooted fruit. Together these passages positively distinguish works of grace from regeneration. Together they favor the distinction Scripture has been developing: God may draw, enlighten, and convict an unregenerate person, and that person may still yield or resist.

Resistible Grace Is Still Sufficient Grace

Chapter 2 established the biblical category of gracious divine action which may be resisted. This chapter has now traced how the Father draws, the Light shines, the Spirit convicts, and the Word reaches different hearers. The sharper Reformed objection therefore returns: if grace can be resisted, was it truly sufficient to save? If God enlightens and convicts one sinner who believes while another refuses, has the believer not supplied the decisive element which made salvation possible?

The objection assumes that divine action can be powerful only if it replaces human agency or makes one response causally unavoidable. Scripture does not require that assumption. God may reveal Christ truly, make the gospel intelligible, expose sin and false judgment, draw the sinner toward the Son, and establish a genuine opportunity to believe without performing the hearer's surrender.

Grace has not failed merely because it did not perform the response it called forth. The Word may be suppressed, conviction resisted, light hated, and Christ refused. In each case Scripture attributes the refusal to the sinner rather than treating it as proof that God never approached him. Indeed, resistance is meaningful only because there was something real to resist.

Why, then, does one sinner yield while another continues to resist? We should not evade the immediate answer: one yields to grace, and the other resists it. Scripture locates that response in the hearer. One receives the Word while another rejects it; one comes to the light while another loves darkness; one believes on the Son while another refuses to come that he might have life.

That response does not arise from a better nature or untouched moral power, much less from a virtue worthy of salvation. The believer did not provide the light or improve the gospel, nor did he add power to the cross or persuade the Spirit to give life. His response had abundant gracious causes and sufficient reasons. Christ had been revealed, the Father had drawn, the Spirit had enlightened and convicted, and the promise of life had been brought near.

But a response may be enabled and made reasonable under powerful influence without being causally necessitated. If we demand some additional factor which infallibly determines that the sinner must yield, we have not discovered what the word grace requires. We have assumed the determinism under dispute. The person himself remains the responsible subject who resists or yields, while neither the saving provision nor its power, merit, or life originates in him. Chapter 15 will return to this question and answer it within the book's larger account of grace-enabled faith and election in Christ.

God does not give every person an identical providential history, the same amount of information, or an equal measurable intensity of spiritual influence. Scripture does not portray grace as an impersonal substance divided into uniform portions. God knows every hearer completely and deals with persons in actual times, places, relationships, and histories. Yet wherever He commands faith, He does not mock the hearer with a salvation placed forever beyond the reach of the grace He gives.

Resistible grace is not permission for an autonomous sinner to save himself. It is God acting upon a responsible person without acting instead of him.

Brought to the Son

Preparatory grace does not improve sinners until they become worthy of Christ. Drawing, enlightenment, and conviction do not accumulate merit, repair Adamic corruption, or produce an intermediate kind of spiritual life. They bring guilty and helpless people toward the sufficient Son.

Neither should the experiences produced by this grace become objects of assurance. A person may mistake religious interest, emotional conviction, biblical understanding, temporary joy, costly association with believers, or even remarkable experience of the Spirit's activity for life in Christ. The question is not whether the gospel has affected him deeply. The question is whether he has entrusted himself to the Christ whom the gospel reveals.

The relationship may now be stated in order. God bears witness and draws; the gospel reveals Christ; the call summons the hearer to receive Him; the Spirit enlightens the understanding and convicts the will; the sinner yields in repentant faith or resists; and when the sinner believes, the Spirit joins him to Christ and gives him life. The actions may overlap within one saving encounter, but their subjects and meanings must remain distinct.

Yet none of these gracious actions is the sinner's faith, and none should be renamed the life which the Spirit gives in union with Christ. The sinner must still come.

What, then, is that coming? It is not payment offered to God, merit added to Christ, or the last independent contribution of an autonomous will. It is surrender, and surrender must be understood as receiving salvation without purchasing it.

Notes

Westminster Confession of Faith 10.1–4, https://www.opc.org/wcf.html; Westminster Shorter Catechism, Questions 30–31, https://www.opc.org/sc.html; Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 10.1–4, https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-10; Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Main Points of Doctrine, Articles 8–16, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort. These sources distinguish the public gospel call and common operations of the Spirit from the effectual work which renews the elect sinner's will and brings him certainly to faith.

Chapter 6 — Faith Is Surrender, Not Payment

“Where is boasting then? It is excluded” (Romans 3:27).

Paul does not say boasting has been restrained or redirected toward a more spiritual achievement. It has been shut out. The gospel leaves no opening through which the sinner may carry his résumé into the presence of God and point to morality or religious heritage, to knowledge, sacrifice, sincerity, suffering, reform, or even the wisdom of having made a better spiritual choice than someone else.

The gospel excludes boasting because salvation is established by God's righteous work: redemption is in Christ, propitiation is through His blood, justification is God's verdict, and life is in the risen Son. Nothing the sinner brings can satisfy God's righteousness, remove guilt, conquer death, or add strength to the promise.

Faith does not add one final credential to the résumé. It abandons the résumé.

The law of works says: do, and receive. The law of faith says: receive, because Another has done.

The question, then, is not whether faith is something the sinner truly does. Scripture repeatedly says that people believe, receive, come, call, entrust themselves, and refuse. The question is what kind of action believing is. Does faith give something to God for which He owes salvation, or does faith give the sinner to the Christ who has already accomplished salvation?

Has the Believer Supplied the Difference?

The Reformed objection must be stated plainly. If two sinners hear the same gospel and only one chooses to believe, has the believer supplied the decisive difference? Unless his faith was irresistibly produced by a regeneration that occurred before he believed, it appears that he may say, “Grace came to both of us, but I used it properly,” and preserve the very boast Paul excludes.

Texts such as Ephesians 2:8–9, Philippians 1:29, 2 Timothy 2:25, and 1 Corinthians 4:7 are commonly brought into this argument. The concern beneath their use is sound: everything the believer possesses has been received. He did not discover the gospel through unaided reason, draw himself to Christ, illuminate his own understanding, overcome his corruption through an untouched moral power, or create the ability to respond. God acted first and throughout.

We should not defend faith by placing it outside grace. Chapter 5 has already shown that the Father draws, the Word reveals, and the Spirit enlightens and convicts before the sinner believes. Chapter 14 considers the particular texts used to argue that belief and repentance are selectively and irresistibly granted. Our narrower question here is how Scripture itself distinguishes faith from works and grace from wages.

Does Paul exclude boasting by denying that the sinner believes, or by telling us what believing means?

Romans 3–4 answers directly.

“To Him That Worketh Not, but Believeth”

After declaring that boasting is excluded, Paul asks, “By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith” (Romans 3:27). He then concludes that a person is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

Paul is not replacing a long list of works with one small work called faith. He is contrasting two governing principles. Works seek a standing on the basis of what the person has done. Faith receives a standing established by Another. Works present achievement; faith confesses need. Works calculate wages; faith trusts promise. Works move toward self-righteousness; faith abandons self-righteousness and relies upon God.

Abraham becomes Paul's decisive witness:

“For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Romans 4:3).

The believing is genuinely Abraham's. Paul does not say that God believed in Abraham's place or that Abraham discovered he had already been justified and then displayed the inevitable evidence. Abraham heard God's promise and believed God.

Yet Abraham did not present God with righteousness. Righteousness was counted to him. The promise originated in God, its fulfillment depended upon God, and the standing attached to it was reckoned by God. Faith did not create the promise or supply the power by which it would be fulfilled. It took God at His word.

Paul sharpens the contrast:

“Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5).

The worker earns wages. What he receives is owed. The believer is ungodly and cannot place God in his debt. He does not work for the verdict; he trusts the God who justifies.

Paul's grammar is difficult to reconcile with the claim that every chosen human response must be a meritorious work. He calls the person a believer and simultaneously calls him one who “worketh not.” Believing is not the one acceptable payment substituted for all the unacceptable payments. Paul places it on the opposite side of the contrast.

Faith is therefore a condition of reception without becoming the cause, merit, or price of salvation. The word condition must be used carefully. Faith accomplishes none of the saving work for God to complete. It means that Scripture identifies the believer, rather than the unbeliever, as the person who receives Christ and the blessings found in Him.

Christ's death and resurrection are the accomplishment, His righteousness is the ground, God's grace is the source, and the Spirit's power establishes union and gives life. Faith neither performs nor supplements any of those works. It explains this person's reception of Christ rather than his continued refusal; Christ alone explains the sufficiency of the salvation he receives.

The question of differential outcome still remains. Faith is decisive as the condition distinguishing the believer from the unbeliever, yet its explanatory role has clear limits. Christ and His work explain why His death can save, why righteousness may be counted, why God receives the believer, and how the Spirit gives life. Faith explains the sinner's relation to what Christ has accomplished.

If we then demand a further cause which makes one person's faith inevitable, we have returned to the assumption examined in Chapter 5: that a responsible response remains unintelligible until it has been reduced to the necessary effect of a prior determining act. Scripture does not make that assumption. It attributes faith and unbelief to the hearer while attributing every saving provision, power, and blessing to God.

The believer may truthfully say, “I believed.” He may not say, “My believing made Christ sufficient, created my righteousness, or gave me life.” Faith distinguishes reception from refusal without becoming the achievement upon which salvation rests. Paul himself distinguishes faith from works; this is no verbal escape constructed for the argument when he describes the person who “worketh not, but believeth.”

“That It Might Be by Grace”

Paul presents faith as entirely fitting to grace, rather than as a threat that can be admitted only after the proper qualifications. He says:

“Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed” (Romans 4:16).

The promise is received by faith so that it may rest upon grace. Law makes inheritance depend upon performance, and performance turns blessing into wages. Since sinners do not keep the law, that path produces transgression, wrath, and uncertainty. Promise has another foundation. It depends upon the faithfulness of the One who speaks.

Faith is fitting to grace because it looks away from the recipient's capacity and toward God's word and power. Abraham faced a body as good as dead and the deadness of Sarah's womb, yet he was fully persuaded that what God had promised He was able to perform. He did not treat his confidence as the power which would produce Isaac. He trusted the God who gives life to the dead and calls things which are not as though they were.

The familiar image of an empty hand can be helpful. A hand receiving a gift does not purchase the gift. Yet Paul's account is richer than the image. Faith is the personal surrender of the sinner to its Object, expressed as confidence in Another's word, righteousness, power, and completed action. The gospel supplies its object, God's promise supplies its warrant, the Father draws the sinner toward the Son, and the Spirit brings the truth to bear upon his understanding and will.

Faith excludes boasting because it abandons every claim that God saves the believer for something found or performed in him. The believer remains present in his believing, but his confession is, “I had no righteousness, power, or life of my own, and I entrusted myself to the One who possessed everything I lacked.”

Faith Has an Object

Faith is not optimism, sincerity, religious intensity, confidence in confidence, or the expectation that circumstances will improve. It has an object.

Abraham was “fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:21). The strength of his faith rested in the faithfulness and power of the God who had spoken, rather than in the intensity of his feelings. Paul then brings the object into the fullness of the gospel: righteousness will be counted to those who “believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (verses 24–25).

Saving faith is trusting God and giving yourself to Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the gospel. It is more than knowing the gospel is true; it is choosing to rely upon Christ rather than yourself.

Not long ago I was watching my twenty-month-old grandson, and we began a game in which he climbed onto a box and jumped into my arms. He repeated it for at least twenty minutes and returned to it several times through the day. What struck me was the look of real terror that crossed his face just before every jump. From the first leap to the twentieth, the fear returned; yet every time, he jumped.

His faith did not consist in confidence that his balance and courage would enable him to land safely. It rested in me. He did not have to stop being afraid before he trusted me, and the presence of fear did not make his trust unreal. He looked beyond his own weakness to the person he believed would receive him.

The jump was truly his act. I did not jump for him. Yet nothing about his leap made my arms strong enough to catch him. It did not earn those arms, strengthen them, or create their willingness to receive him; it simply committed him to the one he trusted. Saving faith likewise contributes nothing to the strength of the Saviour. It entrusts the sinner to the Christ whose sufficiency, faithfulness, and welcome already stand complete.

Knowledge and assent are necessary. No one can entrust himself to a Christ he has never heard of or to a promise he believes is false. Faith comes by hearing because the gospel reveals the crucified and risen Son, tells us what He has done, declares His authority and sufficiency, and promises life to everyone who comes.

But assent can stop before surrender. James says that demons believe there is one God and tremble. The shallow soil receives the Word with joy and believes for a time. A person may understand Christian doctrine, defend its truth, feel its moral force, admire Jesus, participate in the church, and still withhold himself from Christ.

Saving faith says, “Because this is true, I give myself to Christ.” The right to remain under self-rule has been surrendered, and the sinner receives Christ Himself with all the benefits found in Him.

Is Believing “the Work of God”?

Jesus uses language in John 6 which may appear to unsettle the distinction between faith and works. After He feeds the multitude, the people ask, “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” Jesus answers:

“This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent” (John 6:29).

Some Reformed interpreters understand “the work of God” to mean the work God Himself performs within the believer: God produces faith, and therefore believing cannot be credited in any sense to the sinner. Others understand it as the work God requires, the one response which displaces the crowd's desire for a collection of religious achievements. The expression work of God can, by itself, describe either work performed by God or work belonging to His requirement. The dialogue and grammar must therefore carry the argument.

The crowd asks, “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” Jesus answers their question with the same human subject: “that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” God appears in the phrase modifying work; He is not the grammatical subject of believe. Jesus does not say, “This is the work God will perform, causing you to believe.” He tells the people before Him to believe on the One God sent.

The surrounding movement reinforces that reading. Before the question is asked, Jesus tells the crowd not to labor for perishing meat but for the enduring meat “which the Son of man shall give unto you,” because the Father has sealed Him (verses 27–28). The gift, the Giver, and the Father's authorization precede the required response. The people then turn the gift back into a question about works. Jesus answers their plural with a singular and redirects them from accumulated religious performance to personal reliance upon the sent Son.

The rest of the discourse preserves both divine initiative and responsible faith. The Father gives the true bread, grants people to the Son, teaches, and draws. Jesus gives life and promises to receive everyone who comes. Yet He also says to these hearers, “ye also have seen me, and believe not” (verse 36). Their unbelief is attributed to them even within the discourse which most strongly declares the Father's necessary action.

The flow therefore favors understanding verse 29 as the one God-appointed response rather than a statement that God performs the believing. The verse does not make faith wages earned by human performance; it overturns the crowd's works premise. Nor does it deny grace's prior action. God sends, seals, gives, teaches, and draws; the hearer is called to believe.

John 6 therefore belongs with Romans 3–4. Faith is not another item added to the works ledger. It is the abandonment of the ledger in order to come to Christ.

One Turn in Two Directions

Jesus enters Galilee “preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,” and saying, “repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14–15). Paul later summarizes his ministry as testifying “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21).

Repentance and faith are not two religious payments, nor should they be turned into separate stages on a spiritual assembly line. They are one decisive turning seen from two directions.

Repentance is the turning from sin and self-rule to God that is inseparable from trusting surrender to Jesus Christ. Faith is the turning toward Christ in trusting reliance. Repentance describes what the sinner leaves; faith describes the One to whom he comes. Surrender names the giving of the self which makes both personal and real.

The Thessalonians provide a living picture. They “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). Their turning was not a movement into religious emptiness. They turned from idols because they turned to God; they left one allegiance because they entered another.

Paul describes the same movement from the inside in Philippians 3. The ancestry, zeal, legal standing, and religious achievement he once counted as gain became loss for Christ. His surrender reached deeper than revising several opinions. He abandoned every ground of confidence by which he had sought to establish himself so that he might gain Christ and “be found in him” (Philippians 3:9).

Repentance therefore reaches beyond regret. Godly sorrow may lead to repentance, but sorrow itself may remain fixed upon consequences, injured pride, or lost comfort. Judas experienced remorse without returning to entrust himself to Christ. Peter wept bitterly and returned. Direction, rather than volume, distinguished their sorrow.

Nor does repentance mean that the sinner reforms his life until he has become acceptable. He cannot. He turns from self-rule precisely because he has abandoned the effort to save, justify, and govern himself apart from Christ.

Surrender Is Not Another Work

The word surrender is useful because it gathers the Bible's language of believing and receiving, of coming, confessing, following, obeying, and yielding, into an ordinary pastoral description. A sinner understands what it means to stop claiming the right to rule himself and give his guilt and future, indeed his allegiance and life, to Jesus Christ.

Saving surrender may be expressed simply:

Saving faith says, “I give myself to Jesus Christ. I will no longer trust myself to save or rule me. I place my guilt, my future, and my whole life in His hands.”

This must not become a new demand for wages. Surrender brings neither a claim of perfect obedience nor a promise that the new believer will never falter; it offers no list of moral reforms in exchange for forgiveness. It is not a second decision reserved for unusually serious Christians after they have already received Jesus in some lesser capacity. Nor is it an emotional performance measured by tears or intensity or by the dramatic language of a prayer.

The sinner does not make Jesus Lord. He is Lord. Faith receives the saving Christ as He truly is rather than dividing Him into a Saviour whose benefits may be accepted and a Lord whose authority may be considered later.

Mature discipleship grows from receiving Christ as Lord; it need not be completed before conversion. The thief beside Jesus possessed little time, incomplete knowledge, and no opportunity to establish a record of Christian service, but he abandoned the verdict of the other thief, confessed his own guilt, recognized the kingdom and authority of the crucified Christ, and entrusted his future to Him: “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42).

Surrender decisively redirects allegiance; sanctification then teaches the believer to live consistently within that allegiance. A new Christian will stumble, discover sins he did not yet understand, and grow in obedience. His failures do not prove that he purchased salvation with an insincere promise. They prove that the life he received must mature.

This distinction also protects the trembling believer. Saving faith is not measured by the emotional force, verbal eloquence, or psychological certainty with which a person surrenders. The desperate father who cried, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” brought a faith mixed with confessed weakness to the right Person (Mark 9:24). The strength of faith lies finally in its object, not in the believer's ability to examine his own confidence and find it flawless.

Surrender means that the self has been entrusted to Christ, not that every fear has vanished or every implication has been understood. A weak hand may receive a strong Saviour. Indeed, the person who knows the weakness of his faith has all the more reason to look away from himself. Assurance rests upon the sufficiency and continuing welcome of the Christ to whom one came, rather than upon remembering how completely one surrendered in a former moment.

The new allegiance is real, and therefore it will bear fruit. Yet the fruit matures because the believer has received life, not because his first act of faith contained a complete record of the obedience he would later perform.

Is Faith Itself “the Gift”?

Paul writes:

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

This passage is often treated as grammatical proof that saving faith is a gift selectively and irresistibly implanted in the elect. The wording does not settle that question so simply. The Greek noun for faith is feminine, while the demonstrative translated that is neuter. Many interpreters therefore understand that to refer to the entire saving reality—salvation by grace through faith—rather than narrowly to the noun faith. Others argue that faith remains included within the gift even if it is not the demonstrative's grammatical antecedent.

The chapter's argument does not require faith to be excluded from everything Scripture may call God's gift. Faith could never exist without what God has given. The Son, gospel, promise, drawing, enlightenment, conviction, opportunity, reasons, and ability to respond all come from grace. Paul unquestionably attributes the whole salvation to God and excludes works and boasting.

What Paul does not say is that regeneration occurred before faith or that the gift character of salvation requires belief to be irresistibly caused. His construction agrees with Romans: salvation is by grace, received through faith, not produced by works. A gift remains a gift when it is received. The receiver does not turn it into wages merely because he could have refused it.

Faith without Works Is Dead

James prevents us from turning faith's non-meritorious character into a lifeless profession.

“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?” (James 2:14).

The issue is a claim: a man says he has faith while his life supplies no evidence of living trust. He offers religious words to a brother or sister lacking food and clothing but withholds the mercy his profession should produce. James compares such faith to a body without the spirit. It is not merely weak; it is dead.

Paul and James are not correcting one another because they are asking different questions. Paul asks whether works can establish a guilty sinner's standing before God. They cannot. James asks whether a claimed faith which never acts is living faith. It is not.

Abraham demonstrates both truths. Genesis 15 says he believed God and righteousness was counted to him. Years later, Genesis 22 displays that faith in the offering of Isaac. James says the faith worked with Abraham's works and was made perfect, or brought to mature expression, through them. The later obedience did not travel backward in time to turn the earlier faith into wages. It fulfilled and demonstrated the living reliance already present.

Works are the fruit and vindication of living faith, not the payment for justification or the cause of regeneration. A faith which never gives the self to Christ is bare assent. A faith which gives the self to Christ will bear fruit because the Spirit gives life.

The fruit does not purchase the root.

The End of Boasting

Paul's question returns with full force. A believer can sinfully boast about anything, including his theological precision, his humility, or the supposed superiority of his conversion. But the structure of faith gives him no ground for boasting.

He did not devise the gospel, provide the Son, bear judgment, rise from death, draw himself, enlighten himself, count himself righteous, join himself to Christ, or give himself life. He did not contribute an achievement which made the promise gracious. He abandoned every such claim and trusted the God who justifies the ungodly.

Faith is the sinner's act, but salvation is not the sinner's accomplishment. Repentance turns from sin and self-rule; faith turns to Christ; surrender gives the self to Him. None pays God, earns righteousness, completes the cross, or creates life.

Faith receives the Son. The Spirit joins the believer to Him.

The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

Chapter 7 — The Sinner Believes; the Spirit Gives Life

Some years ago a man sat across from me in my study. He had been reading Reformed authors for months, and the reading had not comforted him. It had paralyzed him. “I want to come to Christ,” he told me. “But everything I read says I can't unless God regenerates me first. So I keep looking inside myself, trying to find evidence that He has. How do I know if the life is there yet?”

The gospel summons to come had been converted in his mind into a diagnostic question: have I been enabled to come? He was no longer looking at Christ. He was looking at himself, searching for the footprints of a secret work. And the harder he looked, the less he found, because the human heart under self-examination is a hall of mirrors.

I did not answer him that day with a lecture on the order of salvation. I answered him with a sentence I will spend this chapter defending:

The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

You are not asked to detect regeneration. You are asked to trust Christ. The life-giving work belongs to the Spirit, and He does not require you to certify His work before you may obey the gospel.

Pastoral reassurance must rest upon Scripture, and the man's question deserves the careful answer Scripture gives.

What the Question Really Asks

The debate over whether faith precedes regeneration is usually presented as a question of order. Which comes first? Does a sinner believe and then receive life, or must God first give him life so that he can believe?

The question seems simple, but it may also be misleading, because it encourages us to imagine salvation as a line of separate transactions. If regeneration is placed first, new life becomes the cause of faith; if faith is placed first, faith may appear to become the cause of new life. The debate then becomes a contest over which item receives the first position in the sequence.

Let me be fair to the other side at the outset. The best Reformed theologians do not claim that a man walks around regenerate for a week before he believes. Many of them insist that no clock time separates the two. Regeneration and faith occur in the same moment, while the priority they defend is logical and causal, not chronological.¹ Regeneration is prior, they say, the way the root is prior to the fruit, even if both appear together.

I take that refinement seriously, and this chapter argues against the refined position, not against a caricature. The refinement does not dissolve the question; it sharpens it. Even with no interval of time, the construction still requires the Spirit's life-giving renewal to be logically complete apart from the act of faith it produces. Life comes first and produces trust—not in clock time, but in causal explanation.

Scripture, I will argue, does not.

Faith does not generate life, and the Spirit does not generate faith by first placing an unbelieving sinner into a regenerate state. Faith and regeneration are not rival causes competing for priority; they are distinct actions belonging to one converting encounter. Faith is the sinner's chosen, trusting surrender to the Christ revealed in the gospel. Regeneration is the Spirit's act of joining that believing sinner to the risen Christ so that Christ's life becomes his life. Faith contributes no power to the new birth. Regeneration performs no faith in the sinner's place. In conversion, the person entrusts himself to Christ and the Spirit makes him alive in Christ.

What the Reformed Account Actually Says

Before I disagree with the Reformed account, I owe it an accurate statement. The issue is easily obscured by careless criticism, and I have no interest in defeating a position no Calvinist holds.

Classical Reformed theology does not ordinarily teach that God drags an unwilling sinner into salvation by external force. It does not describe the elect as blocks or stones. It does not deny that the regenerated person himself believes and repents.

The Westminster Confession says that God effectually calls everyone He has predestined to life. Through the Word and Spirit, God enlightens the mind, removes the heart of stone, gives a heart of flesh, renews the will, and determines the person toward good. The sinner then comes to Christ “most freely,” because grace has made him willing. But the order is also explicit: the person is “altogether passive” until he is quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit. Only then is he enabled to answer the call and embrace the grace offered in it.²

The Canons of Dort describe the same construction with even greater detail. In regeneration, God opens the heart and infuses new qualities into the will. He makes “the dead will alive,” the evil will good, and the unwilling will willing. Those in whom God works this way are certainly and unfailingly reborn and “do actually believe.” The renewed will then becomes active, so that the people themselves are rightly said to believe and repent.³

Fairness therefore requires us to reject the claim that Calvinists believe God believes instead of the sinner. They affirm that the sinner believes willingly. Their claim is that God first regenerates and renews the will and thereby certainly produces both the willingness to believe and the act of believing. Dort rejects the idea that God gives only the possibility of faith and awaits the sinner's assent. It says that God produces “both the will to believe and the belief itself.”⁴

The Calvinistic order can therefore be stated without caricature:

God unconditionally chose particular individuals for salvation.

The gospel is outwardly proclaimed.

The Spirit effectually calls the elect individual.

In that call, the Spirit regenerates and renews his will.

The renewed person willingly and certainly believes.

Faith is personally exercised, but its exercise is the unfailing effect of a prior selective work of regeneration. The sinner does not believe against his will. His will has first been inwardly remade so that his faith is certain.

This account is coherent. It intends to preserve total dependence upon grace, and it refuses to treat the sinner as the creator of his own new life. Those are proper concerns. I share them. The question is whether Scripture protects them by placing an unbelieving sinner into a regenerate state, however brief or merely logical that state may be, before he entrusts himself to Christ.

The principal texts do not present that state. They present life in the Son, received in a converting union where the sinner believes and God gives life.

Life Is Not a Preliminary Gift Detached from Christ

The deepest problem with regeneration-before-faith reaches beyond the order of two events. It is that life is treated as though it could be given to a person apart from his actual relation to Christ.

The New Testament does not present eternal life as an independent capacity deposited into an elect individual so that he may subsequently come to the Son. Life is in the Son.

“In him was life,” John says (John 1:4). The Father has given the Son to have life in Himself, and the Son gives life to whom He will (John 5:21, 26). Jesus gives Himself as the Life, never a detached spiritual commodity. He says, “I am the resurrection, and the life” (John 11:25). John later gives the relationship its simplest form: “God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:11–12).

The dividing line is not between unregenerate people and regenerate people who may not yet believe. It is between those who have the Son and those who do not. To possess life is to possess the Son. To lack the Son is to lack life.

Faith neither creates the union nor generates the life. The sinner cannot join himself to Christ by an act of spiritual power. The Holy Spirit effects the union. The Spirit gives the life. But He gives life by joining the believer to the living Son—not by creating a detached regenerate condition that stands causally behind faith.

Union with Christ names the relationship established. Regeneration names the Spirit's life-giving act within that union. New birth names the person's new origin and existence. Conversion names the decisive passage in which the sinner turns to Christ and the Spirit brings him out of the old humanity into the new. These truths may be distinguished, but they must not be divided into separate saving states.

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SIDEBAR: Regeneration and Union with Christ Union with Christ is the living relationship established when the Holy Spirit joins the believer to the risen Son. Regeneration, or new birth, is the Spirit's life-giving action within that union, through which Christ's risen life becomes the believer's life. The terms describe distinguishable truths without dividing salvation into separate saving states. Union identifies the relationship; regeneration identifies the gift of life received there. Faith does not create the union, generate the life, or exercise power over the Spirit. It is the sinner's surrendering reception of Christ, while the Spirit alone joins him to the Son and gives life. Nor does the Spirit believe in the sinner's place. In conversion, these different actions meet: the sinner believes, the Spirit unites him to Christ, and the Spirit gives him life in the Son. See the Glossary: Regeneration / New Birth; Union with Christ; Conversion.

The center is not a sequence. The center is Christ.

Raised with Christ Through Faith

Colossians 2:12–13 holds the relationship together with unusual clarity:

“Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses.”

The Colossians had been dead in sins and in the uncircumcision of their flesh. Paul does not weaken their former condition, and nothing in them could create the life they needed.

God acted. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead made them alive. The power belongs wholly to Him. Faith is not described as an inner force capable of raising the dead; its confidence rests in “the operation of God.” The believer depends upon the action of Another from beginning to end.

Yet God's action is not described as an isolated regeneration that precedes faith. The believers are buried with Christ, raised with Christ, and made alive together with Christ. Their new life is participation in His death and resurrection. Union controls every saving verb.

And Paul says that they were raised with Christ “through faith.” Faith does not perform the resurrection; it relies upon the operation of the God who raised Christ. But neither does Paul say that God made the Colossians alive so that, as people already regenerated, they could afterward exercise faith. Their resurrection with Christ is through faith in God's working, and their quickening is together with Christ.

The passage joins what the Reformed order separates. It gives us neither faith as an autonomous cause followed by regeneration nor regeneration as a completed state followed by faith, but a dead sinner, God's powerful action, faith in that action, union with Christ, life with Christ, and forgiveness within one saving reality.

The faith is the sinner's, the operation is God's, the life is Christ's, the union is effected by the Spirit, and the glory belongs to God alone.

Receiving Christ and Being Born of God

John opens his Gospel with another passage in which the human response and divine birth are placed side by side:

“But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

Receiving Christ and believing on His name describe what the hearers do; being born of God describes what God does. John neither confuses the actions nor places a hidden birth before the reception. The people identified as God's children are those who receive Christ and believe on His name, while their birth is attributed entirely to God.

The sequence of clauses should not be pressed into a frame-by-frame chronology, as though the word become proves that several minutes or days separate faith from birth. John's concern is more profound. Those who receive the Son truly become God's children, but the origin of that new existence is not bloodline, fleshly capacity, or human determination. It is God.

That protects both sides of the saving encounter. The sinner really receives Christ, and God alone gives the birth. The human response does not become the efficient cause merely because John names it, nor does the divine action make the response inevitable by occurring in a secret regenerate state John never mentions. These people receive Christ Himself and become God's children through a birth which gives them a new origin, identity, family, inheritance, and life. John describes no intermediate gift of ability through which they then proceed toward Him.

The new birth is not a better condition of the old man. It is life in the Son.

“Ye Must Be Born Again”

Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus is often treated as though it settles the order. Unless a man is born again, he cannot see or enter the kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5). Therefore, it is argued, birth must stand causally before faith, because an unregenerate person cannot even perceive the kingdom in order to believe.

Jesus certainly teaches the absolute necessity of divine birth. Nothing born of the flesh can transform itself into what is born of the Spirit, and Nicodemus's learning, ancestry, office, and moral seriousness cannot produce life. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). New birth is God's work, not man's technique.

But the discourse does not stop at verse 8. Jesus proceeds from the necessity and mystery of birth by the Spirit to the necessity of faith in the lifted-up Son. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the Son of man must be lifted up, “that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:15). The same conversation that denies flesh the power to produce spiritual birth summons the hearer to believe in the Son and places eternal life in that believing relation.

Think of what the serpent picture demands. The bitten Israelite was not told to search himself for signs of returning strength before he looked. He was dying, and he was told to look. The looking healed nothing; the God who appointed the remedy healed. But the healing and the looking were not separated into stages, with life quietly restored first so that the healed man could then manage a glance. He looked, and he lived.

Jesus is not outlining two entrances into life. He is describing the divine and human sides of one entrance. From above, the person must be born of the Spirit. From the standpoint of the gospel's summons, the person must look to and believe in the lifted-up Son. The birth originates in God; the faith rests in Christ.

Nothing in the chapter says that Nicodemus must discover whether the wind has secretly regenerated him before he may look to the Son. Birth emphasizes divine origin, radical newness, and dependence; it is not a complete chronology of conversion. The same Jesus who says, “Ye must be born again,” says that everyone believing in Him has eternal life. Both statements must remain fully true.

Grace Before Faith Is Not Life Before Faith

An honest reader may object that no account of conversion can begin with the sinner's faith, because Jesus said:

“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44).

I affirm every word. No sinner comes to Christ out of his own resources. If God did not act first, no one would believe. Grace precedes faith; that point is agreed. The disputed question is whether the drawing Jesus names must be identified with regeneration. The text does not make that identification, and Jesus immediately relates the Father's drawing to teaching, hearing, and learning:

“It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me” (John 6:45).

The Father teaches the sinner personally. He teaches and draws, while the Spirit reveals, enlightens, and convicts through the Word. This prior work is supernatural and indispensable, but necessary grace before faith is not necessarily life before faith. Chapter 3 established that the natural man's inability requires the Spirit without making 1 Corinthians 2:14 say that regeneration precedes believing, and Chapter 5 traced the drawing and enlightening grace which brings the sinner toward Christ.

Chapter 14 examines John 6 and the other passages commonly treated as decisive, including Acts 13:48. Its conclusion is not that divine initiative can be explained away. The Father's giving and drawing are real, and Acts 13:48 may be read as a real divine appointment of particular Gentile hearers toward eternal life. Yet those passages do not identify drawing or appointment with regeneration, state that life was imparted before faith, or overturn the repeated location of life in the Son.

Grace comes first. God draws, teaches, reveals, and convicts. The sinner comes to the Christ whom grace has made known, and the Spirit gives him life in the Son.

Children of God by Faith in Christ

Paul speaks just as directly in Galatians:

“For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:26–27).

The wider argument concerns promise, law, faith, sonship, identity, and inheritance. Those who belong to Christ are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29). Their new identity is neither an isolated inward improvement nor a reward for meritorious belief. They have been brought into Christ. They wear His identity. They belong to the promised Seed, and therefore His sonship and inheritance become theirs.

Paul says that they are God's children “by faith in Christ Jesus.” Again, faith does not manufacture sonship. Christ is the Son. Faith does not create the inheritance. It belongs to Christ. Faith does not baptize the believer into Christ. God acts through His appointed means and by His Spirit. But faith is the stated relation through which these people are identified as children in Christ.

The verse does not describe a person first made alive while standing outside Christ and subsequently enabled to believe. It gives us persons who, by faith, are children of God in Christ Jesus.

This is why faith must be understood as more than assent to a proposition. It is the giving of oneself to the Son, the abandonment of every rival identity and ground of confidence in order to be found in Him. Faith receives Christ because it entrusts the person to Christ. In that believing surrender, the Spirit establishes the union that faith itself has no power to create.

Made Alive Together with Christ

Ephesians 2 is another principal Reformed text, and rightly so. It exposes every attempt to make salvation a human achievement.

The people Paul describes were dead in trespasses and sins. They walked according to the course of this world, lived under the prince of the power of the air, fulfilled the desires of flesh and mind, and were children of wrath (Ephesians 2:1–3). Their death was active rebellion, corrupt desire, alienation, and condemnation. They did not discover a remaining island of moral purity and climb from it toward God.

The turn in the passage begins with God: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us” (Ephesians 2:4). God makes alive. God raises. God seats believers in heavenly places. Salvation is by grace. Boasting is excluded. The saved person is God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.

But notice again how God makes alive: “quickened us together with Christ.” The life is not described as a preliminary capacity given apart from union. It is life together with Christ, resurrection together with Christ, and a new creation in Christ.

The same paragraph says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Interpreters dispute whether “that” points narrowly to faith or more broadly to the entire saving reality. The argument here does not depend upon settling that grammatical debate. Either way, salvation is God's gift, accomplished by His mercy and power, received through faith, and realized in Christ. Nothing in the text says that selected individuals are first made alive apart from faith and then believe as the necessary evidence of that prior life.

Paul's controlling language is union rather than assembly-line sequence: alive together, raised together, seated together, created in Christ. To read a causal interval between regeneration and faith into the passage is to supply what Paul does not state.

The passage answers the question of boasting without making faith an irresistibly produced effect. Why can no believer boast? Because the mercy, love, Christ, resurrection, life, salvation, new creation, and works appointed for him all come from God. Faith receives this gift; it does not compose or purchase it.

Does First John Put Birth Before Belief?

First John 5:1 is often offered as grammatical proof of regeneration before faith: “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” Because “is born” reflects a completed action with an existing result, some conclude that the birth must have occurred before the believing and must be its cause.

The grammar does identify the believer as someone who has been born of God. It does not, by itself, establish the temporal or causal sequence by which his first act of saving faith occurred.

John uses the same pattern elsewhere: “Every one that doeth righteousness is born of him” (1 John 2:29), and “Every one that loveth is born of God” (1 John 4:7). New birth is certainly the source of Christian righteousness and love, yet the construction also functions evidentially: these qualities identify those whose origin is in God. The form by itself does not map the precise moment at which birth and first faith enter a causal chain.

John's purpose throughout the letter is to identify the marks of God's children and give believers assurance of the life they possess in the Son. His statement in 5:1 is entirely consistent with the claim made here: the person who believes in Christ has been born of God. The text contains no prior state in which the person was born of God while still unbelieving.

The Greek grammar permits only a modest conclusion here: no doctrine this important should rest upon what one grammatical form is asked to imply beyond its immediate use. Chapter 14 examines that form more fully alongside the other passages commonly treated as decisive.

Faith Does Not Cause the New Birth

The account immediately faces an important objection. If the Spirit gives life when the sinner trusts Christ, has faith become the cause or condition that activates regeneration? Does God merely stand ready while the human will supplies the decisive power?

No.

Faith is not an efficient cause. It produces no life. It changes no divine disposition. It completes no deficiency in Christ's work. It supplies no righteousness. It exerts no power over the Spirit. God does not owe regeneration to faith as wages paid for a human performance.

Faith is receptive because its entire movement is away from self and toward Christ. It is chosen without being meritorious, just as refusal is chosen without becoming autonomous sovereignty. The sinner relies upon a gospel he did not invent, a Christ he did not provide, a cross on which he did not suffer, a resurrection he did not accomplish, and a Spirit whose life-giving power he does not control.

The difference between faith and unbelief is real, but it is not a difference in moral achievement. Faith is the surrender of every claim to achieve salvation. The believer has no ground to say, “I supplied what Christ lacked.” His confession is the opposite: “I had nothing. I abandoned myself to the One who had everything.”

“Who Maketh Thee to Differ?”

But the Reformed objector has a sharper arrow in his quiver, and I want to feel its point before I answer it. The objection is not that faith earns salvation. It is that faith, on my account, explains it. If two sinners sit under the same gospel, drawn by the same grace, and one believes while the other refuses, then the decisive difference between them appears to lie in the sinner and not in God. Paul asks, “For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Does the believer not answer, in the end, “I made myself to differ—I believed”?

That sharper objection deserves a careful answer, not a quick one.

First, observe what the believer actually has. Everything he possesses, he received. His life is Christ's life. His righteousness is Christ's righteousness. His sonship is Christ's sonship. His inheritance is Christ's inheritance. Even the gospel that summoned him, the drawing that brought him, and the conviction that broke him were God's works, not his. When Paul asks him, “what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” the believer's honest answer is: nothing. Faith is not one more saving possession added to the inventory. It is the empty-handed act of receiving Christ, and no man boasts of the emptiness of his hands.

Second, observe how Scripture itself assigns responsibility. When men perish, Scripture repeatedly locates their guilt in their refusal: “ye will not come” (John 5:40); “ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy” (Acts 13:46); “how often would I have gathered … and ye would not” (Matthew 23:37). Scripture also speaks of God judicially hardening and giving sinners over, and those passages must receive their full weight. But divine judgment does not turn unbelief into an innocent absence of grace. When men are saved, Scripture locates every saving cause in God: His love, His mercy, His Son, His Spirit, His Word, His drawing, and His gift of life. Salvation is wholly God's gift; unbelief remains the sinner's culpable rejection. That is not a tidy symmetrical system. It is the asymmetry Scripture repeatedly presents, and I would rather preserve it than resolve it into a scheme.

Third, let us be honest about where the mysteries lie, because every position has one. I cannot fully explain why one drawn sinner surrenders and another resists. The Calvinist, however, cannot fully explain how the God who could regenerate every sinner regenerates only some while sincerely offering Christ to all. He appeals to the hidden counsel of God. I acknowledge the mystery of created freedom under grace. The difference is not that one account has mystery and the other has none. The difference is where each account places what has not been revealed. Scripture's public summons places the guilt of refusal in the sinner, who “would not,” while revealing God as One who truly calls sinners to repentance and declares His saving desire (1 Timothy 2:4). I am content to leave unexplained what Scripture leaves unexplained without placing a contrary saving intention behind the gospel's open call.

The believer, then, cannot explain his faith by pointing to something admirable in himself, and he will never try. Ask him why he believes, and he will not describe his own act at all. He will describe Christ.

One Saving Encounter Seen from Several Sides

The beginning of a life offers a better analogy than links in a chain.

At conception, several distinguishable realities arise together. A new life begins. A new personal history begins. A new bodily existence begins. New family relationships, identity, inheritance, and destiny come into view. These truths can be distinguished, but they are not assembled through a series of independent acts stretched across separate states.

The analogy must not be pressed too far. It cannot explain the psychology of faith, and it must never replace the biblical language of new birth. But it helps expose the weakness of treating salvation like a conveyor belt.

At conversion, one saving encounter may be viewed from several sides:

From the human side, the sinner turns from self-rule and entrusts himself to Christ. This is repentance and faith.

From the standpoint of passage, he leaves the old allegiance and enters a new existence. This is conversion.

From the standpoint of relationship, the Spirit joins him to the risen Son. This is union with Christ.

From the standpoint of life, the Spirit makes him alive together with Christ. This is regeneration or new birth.

From the standpoint of standing, God places him in the Righteous One and declares him righteous there. This is justification.

From the standpoint of family, the person joined to the Son receives the standing and inheritance of a son. This is adoption.

From the standpoint of estrangement, hostility gives way to peace with God. This is reconciliation.

These are not different names for exactly the same thing. Each identifies a real dimension of salvation. But they belong together because Christ is not divided. The believer does not receive a portion of Christ called regeneration, then another portion called justification, and later a relationship called union. He receives Christ, and every saving blessing is his in Him.

Salvation is not less precise when it is centered in a Person rather than an order. It becomes more precise, because every doctrine is allowed to name what is true of the person who has been joined to Christ without pretending that the blessing can exist independently of Him.

The Gospel Can Speak Directly

The man in my study was not wrestling with an abstraction. This is where the doctrine either helps him or harms him.

If regeneration must occur before faith, the preacher addresses hearers while knowing that the decisive saving event may need to occur behind the words he speaks. He may sincerely command everyone to believe, but the system tells him that only those whom God first renews can answer. And the seeking sinner learns the system faster than we think. He is turned inward, exactly as my visitor was: Has God regenerated me? Is my conviction evidence of effectual calling? Is my desire to come proof that life has already been given, or is it merely a common operation of the Spirit that will pass and leave me where I was?

I have watched that introspection do its work, and its work is cruel. The tender conscience, the very person most likely to be under the Spirit's conviction, is the one most tormented by it, while the presumptuous man reassures himself easily. When regeneration before faith is turned into a diagnostic gate through which a seeker must pass before coming to Christ, something has gotten backwards.

The New Testament speaks more directly.

It does not tell the sinner to determine whether he has already been born again. It tells him to look to Christ, receive Christ, come to Christ, believe on Christ, call upon the Lord, repent, and be reconciled to God. Not one apostolic sermon in Acts instructs a hearer to examine himself for signs of prior regeneration. The Word is always outward and forward: Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ offered—repent and believe. The promise is not that everyone who detects regeneration may come. The promise is that everyone who comes will be received: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

So the preacher can look every hearer in the eye and say:

You cannot create the life you need. You cannot erase your guilt, free yourself from sin, or raise yourself from death. But Christ has been given for sinners. The Father draws through the truth now brought before you. The Spirit works through that Word to expose sin and press Christ upon the conscience. Do not turn conviction into another object of self-examination, and do not harden your heart. Abandon your rule, entrust yourself to the crucified and risen Son, and live.

That summons does not place the sinner in control of salvation. It places him under the authority of God and before the sufficiency of Christ. It leaves the life-giving work exactly where Scripture leaves it—with the Spirit.

That is, in substance, what I said to the man across from me. Stop asking whether the wind has blown. Look at the Son who was lifted up for you. The serpent-bitten Israelite was not commanded to feel for his pulse; he was commanded to look. And when the sinner does look in faith, he need not wonder afterward whether his faith produced the miracle. It did not. He has been joined to the living Christ. The Spirit has given what faith could never manufacture. He was dead, and now he lives—not because belief possesses resurrection power, but because the Son to whom he entrusted himself has life beyond the dominion of death.

The sinner believes. The Spirit gives life.

Faith does not regenerate, and the Spirit does not believe. In conversion, these distinct actions meet. The believer receives no ground for boasting, and the gospel retains no hidden qualification.

Life is in the Son.

Notes

Careful Reformed treatments deny any temporal interval between regeneration and faith while maintaining regeneration's causal priority. See, e.g., John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), on effectual calling and regeneration; Anthony A. Hoekema, Saved by Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), on regeneration as logically but not chronologically prior to conversion. The argument of this chapter is aimed at that refined position.

Westminster Confession of Faith 10.1–2. The confession says that those predestined to life, “and those only,” are effectually called; the sinner is passive until quickened and renewed, and then freely embraces the offered grace. For the current official Orthodox Presbyterian Church text, see https://opc.org/wcf.html.

Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Main Points of Doctrine, Articles 11–12 and 16. Article 16 expressly denies that grace treats people as “blocks and stones” or coerces a reluctant will by force. The objection in this chapter therefore concerns the causal construction, not coercion as Calvinists define it.

Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Main Points of Doctrine, Article 14. The current Christian Reformed Church text is available at https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort?language=en.

Part Three

Chosen in the Chosen One

Chapter 8 — Before the Foundation of the World

For many Christians, the word election immediately opens a door into eternity past. Before the world existed, God is imagined selecting particular individuals from the mass of fallen humanity. Their names are written on one list. The rest are passed over or entered upon another. Everything that happens in time, including the coming of Christ, the preaching of the gospel, the sinner's faith, and the gift of the Spirit, carries that earlier division into effect.

On that account, election answers one controlling question: Which individuals did God decide to save?

Scripture certainly speaks of God's purpose before the foundation of the world. It does not present salvation as an emergency response improvised after Adam's fall. God is never surprised, never forced to revise His purpose, and never dependent upon human worthiness. Grace originates in Him.

But it does not follow that the central content of God's eternal purpose is a hidden division of individuals into those who will and will not be irresistibly brought to faith.

When Paul blesses God for election, he does not begin with an unseen list. He begins with a Person: God “hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ,” and “hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:3–4). The words before the foundation of the world matter. So do the words in Him.

Election is eternal, gracious, and certain. It is also Christ-centered. God's saving purpose stands in Christ Himself instead of being settled somewhere behind Him and merely carried out through Him. It is established in Christ, revealed in Christ, entered in Christ, and brought to completion in Christ.

God unquestionably chooses. The dispute concerns what He chose, whom He calls chosen, and where His chosen people receive that identity.

The Reformed Answer

Before constructing a positive account, we should understand the doctrine being challenged.

The Westminster Confession says that before the foundation of the world God chose particular persons “in Christ, unto everlasting glory.” Their number is so certain that it can neither increase nor diminish. God did not choose them because He foresaw faith, works, perseverance, or anything else in them. He also ordained every means necessary to bring those selected persons to salvation. The rest of mankind He determined to pass by.¹

The Canons of Dort are equally direct. Election is God's unchangeable purpose by which He chose “a definite number of particular people” out of the fallen race. Christ was appointed as their Mediator and Head. God determined to give those individuals to Christ, effectually call and draw them into His fellowship, grant them faith, preserve them, and glorify them. Faith is not the means by which a sinner enters an elect people; it is one of the effects produced in those who were already individually elected to salvation.²

This is more than the claim that God eternally knew who would believe. It is more than the claim that salvation is God's plan. It is the assertion that God selected which particular unbelievers would certainly be made believers, and that this selection explains why one person receives Christ while another refuses Him.

Reformed theology can therefore say that believers were chosen “in Christ” while making the selection of particular individuals logically prior to their actual relation to Christ. Christ becomes the appointed Mediator and Head of the persons selected. The Spirit later brings each of them into the fellowship for which he was chosen.

That observation closes off a shortcut, and we should pause to notice it. It will not do simply to quote the words in him and declare the debate finished. The confessions use the same words. Westminster says the elect were chosen “in Christ.” Dort says the choice was made in Him. Both readings can pronounce the phrase. The dispute is over what the phrase is allowed to govern: whether in Christ names the place where election itself stands, or only the means by which a selection settled behind Christ is carried into effect. Vocabulary cannot decide that question. Only the texts can, and chapter 9 will put Ephesians 1 to exactly that test.

The position argued in this book is different. God's election is His eternal purpose established in His Chosen Son and appointed for the people united to Him. It neither waits for human beings to give an abstract plan its members nor responds to foreseen virtue. Christ is the chosen and representative Head in whom the people themselves are chosen, not an agent who merely saves a set selected behind Him.

To see the difference, we must begin earlier than Ephesians, within the biblical pattern of God's choosing rather than earlier in time.

Choosing Is Larger Than Selecting Who Will Be Saved

The Bible uses the language of choosing for more than eternal salvation.

God chooses places where His name will dwell. He chooses priests and kings for office. He chooses servants for tasks. Jesus chooses the Twelve, though one of them is a devil (John 6:70). The risen Christ identifies Paul as “a chosen vessel” appointed to bear His name before Gentiles, kings, and Israel (Acts 9:15). None of those choices can simply be substituted for the doctrine of personal salvation.

This variety teaches us to ask what a particular choosing is for. Election may establish identity, office, service, representation, privilege, responsibility, destiny, or some combination of them. The word chosen does not carry a complete theological system inside itself.

That is especially important when Scripture speaks of chosen persons who stand for a people. A king may be chosen to rule, a purpose extending far beyond his private benefit. A priest is chosen to serve and represent. A servant is chosen to accomplish his master's purpose. The choice falls upon a person, but its reach extends through that person to others.

Biblical election is therefore often representative and vocational. God chooses someone to be something and to accomplish something within His purpose.

Election remains entirely personal. God does not choose an idea instead of a person. He chooses real servants, gives them real names, and appoints them to real ends. But the first question cannot always be, “Was this individual selected for heaven?” The text may be answering a larger question about God's purpose in history and the people represented by the chosen one.

Israel: A Chosen People with a Purpose

Israel provides the clearest Old Testament example.

Moses tells the nation, “The LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6). That choice did not arise from Israel's size, strength, or superiority. They were few. God set His love upon them, redeemed them from Egypt, kept the oath sworn to their fathers, and made them His covenant people.

Israel's election was gracious and historical. It gave the nation an identity, covenant, law, worship, land, inheritance, and vocation among the nations. Through Israel the promises were carried, the Scriptures given, and the Messiah brought into the world. Israel was called to be holy because it belonged to the holy God.

Yet Israel's election did not mean that every Israelite possessed eternal life. The generation redeemed from Egypt could still harden its heart and fall in the wilderness. Priests could despise God's name. Kings could abandon the covenant. Prophets could address the chosen people as rebellious children. Paul can say that God did not cast away “his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:2) while also grieving over Israelites who remained in unbelief.

That fact alone should prevent us from treating every biblical reference to election as a synonym for the unconditional salvation of selected individuals. Israel was genuinely chosen, and individual Israelites could genuinely refuse the God who chose the nation.

Nor was Israel chosen merely for itself. God promised Abraham that all families of the earth would be blessed in him. Israel received a priestly and witness-bearing vocation among the nations. Its election served a purpose reaching toward the Messiah and, through Him, toward the world.

Israel's historical election is real and enduring. The church does not erase it or become Israel under another name. Yet Israel's chosen identity also prepares the biblical grammar by which one person may represent a people and one people may possess an identity, calling, and future in its chosen head.

The Chosen Servant

The line of God's purpose narrows toward Christ.

Isaiah introduces the Servant with the language of election: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 42:1). Matthew applies the passage to Jesus: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles” (Matthew 12:18).

Christ is chosen for a saving and representative mission. He will faithfully accomplish the work Israel and its rulers failed to accomplish. He will bring God's judgment and saving order to the nations. He will not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. The nations will trust in His name.

Isaiah's Servant is even addressed as “Israel” and then commissioned to bring Jacob back to God (Isaiah 49:3, 5–6). The Servant bears the people's name while standing over against the people's failure. He embodies Israel's vocation, restores Israel, and carries God's salvation to the ends of the earth.

This is representative identity. The Servant does not cease to be an individual because He represents a people. Nor does the people disappear into an abstraction. The chosen One fulfills their calling, secures their future, and gathers them into the purpose established in Him.

The New Testament continues the pattern. At the cross, the rulers mock Jesus as “Christ, the chosen of God” (Luke 23:35). Their mockery speaks more truth than they understand. Peter calls Christ “chosen of God, and precious,” the living stone rejected by men but established by God as the foundation of a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:4–6).

Then Peter applies the same chosen language to those built upon Him: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9). Christ is the chosen cornerstone. Those who come to Him become living stones in the house built upon Him. His chosen standing is not a private distinction locked within Himself. It establishes the identity and vocation of a chosen people who show forth God's praises.

Questions remain about how individuals enter that people, but the center has been established. The chosen community is not assembled around an impersonal decree. It is built upon and derives its identity from God's Chosen One.

The Promised Seed and Those Who Belong to Him

Paul makes the representative pattern explicit through the promise to Abraham.

The promises were spoken to Abraham and his seed. Paul draws attention to the singular form and says, “And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). Christ is the promised Seed in whom the Abrahamic purpose reaches its appointed fulfillment.

But Paul does not leave the promise with one isolated individual. At the end of the same chapter he tells believers, “And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).

Christ is the Seed. Those who belong to Christ are the seed.

They do not become a second promised seed alongside Him. They share His identity and inheritance because they belong to Him. What is singular in the representative Head becomes corporate in the people united to Him.

The intervening verses explain how that belonging is received: “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26). Faith does not create the promise or move God to establish Christ as the Seed. The purpose existed before any believer entered it. Faith entrusts the person to Christ; the Spirit joins him to the One in whom the promised identity and inheritance already stand.

This is the relationship corporate election must preserve. The corporate does not replace the personal. A person must actually belong to Christ. Nor does the personal stand independently of the corporate. No believer possesses a private election detached from the Seed, the body, the household, and the people whose identity is in Him.

The Last Adam and the New Humanity

The Adam–Christ contrast carries the same structure to the whole human race.

Adam is both the first sinner and the representative head of the old humanity. Natural birth places a person in the human order proceeding from him, a world of self-rule, alienation, corruption, and death. Every morally responsible person confirms Adam's rebellion personally, but no one invents Adamic humanity for himself.

Christ enters that world as the faithful Son and rises as the last Adam. Paul calls Him “a quickening spirit,” the life-giving head of the humanity that will bear the image of the heavenly man (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). He does not repair Adam's humanity and return it to probation. He brings incorruptible resurrection life into creation and establishes a new humanity in Himself.

The representative relationship is again personal and corporate at once. Christ is one man. The new humanity is many persons. They do not receive His life by natural descent or impersonal decree. The Spirit joins believing sinners to the risen Son. In that union His life becomes their life, His standing their standing, His Father their Father, His inheritance their inheritance, and His future their future.

This is why election cannot be reduced to the question of which isolated individuals will go to heaven. God's purpose is to form a humanity in the obedient Son, restore human vocation under His headship, display His grace through that people, and bring the inheritance of the renewed creation beneath Christ.

Election has a Head because salvation creates a people.

Chosen in Him

We are now ready to hear Paul's opening blessing in Ephesians without importing an individual-selection mechanism before the sentence begins.

God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. He predestined this people to adoption through Jesus Christ. He accepted them in the Beloved, redeemed them in Christ's blood, revealed His purpose to gather all things under Christ's headship, gave them an inheritance in Him, and sealed those who heard and believed the gospel with the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 9 will examine that passage closely. For now, the controlling relationship should be plain: every blessing has one address, and election is not the exception. The people are chosen where they are blessed, adopted, accepted, redeemed, inherited, and sealed—in Christ.

Paul does not say that Christ was an afterthought added to a selection made elsewhere. Nor does he tell believers to search behind Christ for a decree containing their individual names. He directs their praise toward the God who established every saving blessing in His Son before the world began.

The content of that election is also stated. The chosen people are appointed to be holy and without blame before God in love. They are predestined to adoption. They receive an inheritance ordered toward the praise of God's glory. Election gives them identity, vocation, and destiny.

Identity: They are the people in the Beloved Son.

Vocation: They are to be holy, blameless, and expressive of God's grace.

Destiny: They are appointed to adoption, inheritance, conformity to Christ, and the completed gathering of all things under Him.

Election therefore answers more than who. It answers in whom, for what, and toward what end.

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SIDEBAR: Election in Christ Election in Christ begins with God's Chosen Son rather than with an abstract list of unbelievers considered apart from Him. Before the foundation of the world, God established His saving purpose in Christ and appointed what the people in His Son would become: holy and without blame, adopted as children, formed for service, made heirs, conformed to Christ's image, and brought to glory. Those whom the Spirit personally joins to Christ through faith fully share that chosen identity and destiny because they belong to the Chosen One. This corporate election is not faceless or impersonal; union with Christ is a real relationship entered by actual people. The difference concerns the location and object of election. God does not first choose certain unbelievers to be caused to believe and then bring them to Christ. He elects His people in the Son. See the Glossary: Election; In Christ; Union with Christ.

Not a Faceless Collective

A predictable objection follows. Has the doctrine chosen a class while leaving its membership uncertain? The corporate account may appear to make the church an empty container into which people later climb, allowing real persons to disappear inside an abstraction.

No.

God's purpose is not impersonal, uncertain, or ignorant of the people who will belong to His Son. God knows every person perfectly. No believer surprises Him by appearing in Christ, and no name enters His knowledge only when the sinner believes. The Father knows His people, the Son knows His sheep, and the Spirit deals with actual persons through the gospel.

But perfect knowledge is not the same as a causal selection that determines which sinners must believe. God may eternally know a real human response without that knowledge manufacturing the response or making the response meritorious. Nor does God's certainty require us to place an individual decree of regeneration behind every act of faith.

Here we must distinguish two certainties without separating them. The certainty of God's purpose rests on Christ. Before creation, God established in His Son the identity, standing, vocation, and destiny of the people who would belong to Him. Nothing in heaven or earth can overturn that purpose, because it stands in the One who died, rose, and reigns. At the same time, God was never ignorant of the actual persons who would believe. He knows them exhaustively and eternally. Our knowledge is observational and after the fact; we learn what happens by watching it happen. God's knowledge is neither late nor learned. He inhabits eternity and knows the end from the beginning. Christ therefore secures the appointed standing and future of His people, while God's omniscience means that their membership was never unknown or uncertain to Him. The purpose was never an empty possibility, yet neither its certainty nor God's knowledge requires a hidden selection that causes particular sinners to believe.

Scripture joins settled divine purpose and genuine human responsibility without embarrassment. Peter can say in a single sentence that Christ was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” and that “ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain” Him (Acts 2:23). The cross unfolded according to God's settled counsel, yet those who crucified Christ acted wickedly and remained answerable for what they did. That verse does not by itself define the precise relationship between foreknowledge, decree, and human action; chapter 10 will take up that larger question. Its modest importance here is that divine certainty does not erase meaningful human response or responsibility.

Corporate election is personal because union with Christ is personal. The sinner does not enter a statistical category. He entrusts himself to a Person, and the Spirit actually joins him to that Person. Once in Christ, he is not vaguely associated with a chosen group. He fully shares the group's standing, calling, promises, and future because they belong to the Head to whom he has been joined.

The people are not chosen instead of persons. Persons are chosen as the people they truly are in Christ.

Not Election Based on Foreseen Merit

Another objection says that if individuals share election through faith, then God must have looked down the corridor of time, identified those wise enough to believe, and elected them because of their foreseen decision.

That does not follow.

God did not foresee faith and decide that faith was sufficiently virtuous to deserve salvation. Faith does not establish the saving purpose, choose Christ, accomplish redemption, create the new humanity, or determine its destiny. The purpose originated wholly in God before creation. Christ's standing does not depend upon the believer's response, and the elect people's future is not negotiated with its members. The believer does not become the ground of election any more than he becomes the ground of justification. He receives both in Christ.

The difference from foreseen-faith election is therefore substantial. God did not choose an individual because belief made that individual preferable. He chose Christ and the people in Him according to His own grace and purpose. The believing sinner shares that election because he now belongs to the Chosen One.

Grace loses nothing. Boasting gains nothing. Christ remains everything.

What God Settled Before Creation

What, then, did God settle before the foundation of the world?

He appointed His Son as the Redeemer and representative Head of a people. Peter says Christ was “foreordained before the foundation of the world” and manifested in these last times for us (1 Peter 1:20). The word is literally foreknown. The same apostle opens his letter by addressing believers as “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:2). The correspondence is suggestive. The Son was foreknown before the world; the people are elect according to the Father's foreknowledge, through the Spirit's work, unto the obedience and cleansing found in the Son. Those verses do not by themselves define the precise relationship between Christ's foreknowledge and the election of His people. They do, however, place both within one Christ-centered movement of the Father's purpose rather than directing the reader toward a saving purpose detached from the Son.

The Father determined the saving work His Son would accomplish, the people who would exist in Him, the holy identity they would bear, the family into which they would be adopted, the inheritance they would receive, and the Christlike destiny toward which they would be brought.

This purpose is not provisional. God will have a people in His Son. Everyone truly joined to Christ shares the whole standing and future appointed in Him. No power can invalidate that purpose, no accusation can overturn Christ's standing, and no enemy can finally prevent His people from bearing His image.

The certainty is located in Christ rather than in a hidden selection behind Him.

That gives election its proper pastoral force. The believer does not ask, “Can I discover whether God selected me before I look to Christ?” He looks to Christ because the gospel openly presents Him. When he entrusts himself to the Son, he need not search for another election elsewhere. He is in the Chosen One. The purpose established before the world began now names him, not because he found his name on a secret list, but because he belongs to the Son in whom every saving name and blessing is secure.

Election directs faith outward.

It says that God did not improvise the believer's salvation. The Son who receives him has always been the center of God's purpose. The holiness to which he is called, the family into which he is brought, and the future he will inherit were appointed before he existed. His faith adds nothing to that purpose. It simply abandons every rival confidence and receives the Christ in whom the purpose is fulfilled.

The gospel does not invite the sinner to become the architect of his destiny. It invites him into the destiny God established in His Son before the foundation of the world.

The Chosen One and the Chosen People

The biblical pattern can now be stated plainly.

God chose Israel as a covenant people with an identity and vocation in His historical purpose. From Israel He brought the Chosen Servant who embodies faithful Israel, restores Jacob, and carries salvation to the nations. That Servant is the promised Seed in whom Abraham's family and inheritance are fulfilled. He is the last Adam who rises as Head of a new humanity. He is the chosen cornerstone upon whom living stones are built into a chosen people.

God chose believers in Him.

They are not elect because they possess a quality God admired in advance. They are not elect because faith earns placement in the purpose. They are elect because, when they entrusted themselves to Christ, the Spirit joined them to the Elect One, and what God appointed for His Son's people is now fully theirs.

Election is therefore not smaller than the Calvinistic doctrine. It is larger. It supplies the identity and destiny of God's people within God's eternal purpose to bring a holy people into the life, standing, vocation, inheritance, and future of His Son and, under Christ's headship, to carry creation to its appointed end.

Paul gathers these truths into one sustained blessing in Ephesians 1. Its repeated phrase in Christ must be allowed to govern what God chose before the foundation of the world and where His chosen people possess that identity.

Nor will the argument avoid the passages most often quoted against it. Readers have been holding certain texts in reserve throughout this chapter: Romans 9, with Jacob and Esau and the vessels of mercy; Acts 13:48, where “as many as were ordained to eternal life believed”; John 6, where all that the Father gives the Son come to Him; and the unbroken chain of Romans 8:29–30. Those passages deserve careful chapters, not passing footnotes, and later chapters will give them that attention. Nothing argued here asks the reader to look away from them. It asks only that they be read in the same light in which Paul blesses God—with Christ at the center of the purpose, not behind it.

Notes

Westminster Confession of Faith 3.3–7. The confession says that particular persons are unchangeably designated, chosen in Christ without foresight of faith, and effectually called to faith; the rest are passed by. Current official Orthodox Presbyterian Church text: https://opc.org/wcf.html.

Canons of Dort, First Main Point of Doctrine, Articles 6–9. Article 7 defines election as God's choice in Christ of “a definite number of particular people” and His decree to grant them faith and draw them effectively into Christ's fellowship. Current Christian Reformed Church text: https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort?language=en.

Chapter 9 — Every Spiritual Blessing in Christ

Paul does not introduce election as a problem to be solved. He introduces it as a reason to worship.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he begins, “who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). From there the sentence rises through election, adoption, grace, redemption, forgiveness, revelation, inheritance, faith, and the sealing of the Spirit until it reaches the praise of God's glory for the third time.

In Greek, Ephesians 1:3–14 is one extended sentence. English punctuation makes it easier to read, but it can also hide the accumulating force of Paul's praise. He is not placing separate doctrines into isolated compartments. He is following one saving purpose from before the foundation of the world, through the blood of Christ and the preaching of the gospel, toward the completed inheritance guaranteed by the Spirit.

And every part of that purpose has one center.

God blesses us in Christ. He chooses us in Him. He bestows grace in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption. God's purpose is established and displayed in Christ. All things will be gathered under His headship. In Him we receive an inheritance. In Him the hearers believe and are sealed.

The phrase changes form as the sentence moves, and its precise shade of meaning is not identical in every clause. Sometimes Christ is the sphere in which a blessing is possessed. Sometimes He is the representative in whom a people stand. Sometimes He is the agent through whom the purpose is accomplished. But He is never incidental. Paul does not allow the reader to leave Christ in order to find the real saving purpose somewhere behind Him.

That is why the words “chosen us in him” must be read inside the whole blessing.

One Long Blessing

The sentence begins with God and ends with God's glory.

That matters because theological controversy can make election sound like a detached mechanism. One side asks how God can remain sovereign if He does not select which individuals will believe. Another asks how human responsibility can remain meaningful if that selection determines every response. Paul begins elsewhere. He looks at the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and blesses Him for what He has done for His people in His Son.

The sentence moves in three broad stages.

First, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world and predestined us to adoption through Jesus Christ (verses 4–6). Second, in the Beloved we possess redemption and forgiveness, and God has revealed His purpose to gather all things under Christ's headship (verses 7–12). Third, people who heard the gospel and believed were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who guarantees the inheritance until its completed redemption (verses 13–14).

Eternity past, the cross, the proclaimed gospel, the believer's response, the Spirit's sealing, and the future inheritance all belong to one doxology.

This form should discipline our conclusions. Paul is not writing a philosophical treatise about the relation between decree and freedom. He is not yet explaining foreknowledge as he will force us to consider it in Romans 8. He is not addressing Israel's hardening and mercy as he does in Romans 9–11. He is telling believers why God deserves their praise.

We should therefore affirm everything he says, distinguish it from what we infer, and refuse to make the passage answer questions it does not directly address.

Every Blessing Has One Address

Verse 3 gives the controlling statement: God “hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.”

Election follows with the words “according as,” or “just as,” God chose us in Him. The choice is not a disconnected divine act placed beside the blessings in Christ. It begins Paul's explanation of the comprehensive blessing already named.

The location matters. Redemption is accomplished and possessed in Christ Himself, rather than merely planned by God and later delivered through Him. “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (verse 7). Grace is not an impersonal substance transferred to isolated recipients. It is grace “wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (verse 6). The inheritance is not stored apart from the Son and distributed to those whose names appear on another list. “In whom also we have obtained an inheritance” (verse 11).

The King James expression “made us accepted in the beloved” is pastorally beautiful. The underlying verb emphasizes God's gracious favor bestowed upon us. The point remains the same: favor does not reach the believer apart from the Beloved Son. What belongs to Christ becomes the believer's possession in relation to Him.

Election must be read with the same grammar. Paul does not say merely that God chose people and then decided Christ would save them. He says God chose “us in him.” Whatever else the phrase means, it does not permit Christ to become an afterthought or a delivery system for a selection whose defining identity lies elsewhere.

Chosen Us in Him

The central clause is brief: God “hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world” (verse 4).

Several truths are explicit.

God is the One who chooses. The choice originates in His will rather than human worth. The objects of the choice are “us,” real people rather than an empty idea. The choice occurred before the foundation of the world. It is therefore not an improvised response to history. The people are chosen “in Him.” And the stated purpose is “that we should be holy and without blame before him.”

Corporate election must not evade the direct object. Paul does not say only that God chose Christ. He says God chose us. The doctrine defended in this book is not that God elected an abstract container called the church while remaining unaware of the persons who would belong to His Son. God knows persons perfectly, and persons fully share the chosen standing of the people when the Spirit joins them to Christ.

But the individual-selection reading must not evade the prepositional phrase. Paul does not say only that God chose us. He says He chose us in Him.

What work is that phrase doing?

One answer is that it means God selected certain individuals and appointed Christ as the agent through whom their salvation would later be accomplished. On that reading, “in Christ” functions much like “through Christ.” The individuals are the objects of a logically prior choice; Christ is the appointed Mediator who brings that choice to completion.

There is truth in calling Christ the Mediator. Paul explicitly says in the next verse that adoption is “by,” or through, Jesus Christ. In verse 7 he says redemption is through Christ's blood. When Paul wishes to emphasize means or agency, he has language available to do so.

Yet in verse 4 he says “in Him.” The expression can carry several related senses, but here it naturally identifies the position or relation of the people chosen. Even some defenders of individual election acknowledge that the phrase qualifies “us” and describes union with Christ rather than simply substituting for “through Christ.”¹

That acknowledgment brings the actual dispute into view. The Calvinistic reading says that God chose particular persons while viewing them as unbelievers, and that their later union with Christ realizes a selection already made of them outside their actual relation to Him. The corporate reading says Paul names the people as they stand in the Chosen One. God chose us, the real people of Christ, in Him.

The corporate reading immediately faces a fair question: How can God choose people in Christ before the foundation of the world when no one was yet united to Christ? Union with Christ happens in history, when the Spirit joins a believing sinner to the risen Son, so the objection is that the corporate reading requires God to regard people in a relation they did not yet have.

It does. But notice that the objection cuts both ways.

Every doctrine of eternal election has God regarding people under a description that was not yet historically true. The Calvinistic reading has God choosing particular persons viewed as fallen unbelievers before any of them existed, sinned, or heard a promise. The corporate reading has God appointing a people viewed in the Son before any of them believed. Neither reading escapes anticipation. An eternal purpose concerning creatures of time cannot escape it. The question is not whether God's choice anticipates history. It is which anticipation the text names. And Paul does not describe the chosen as those God viewed outside of Christ awaiting placement into Him. He describes them, from the first clause of the blessing onward, in Him.

The grammar alone does not settle every theological question. It does settle where Paul places the chosen people. He does not direct us to look behind Christ for our defining electoral identity.

Holy and Without Blame

Paul also tells us what the choice is for: “that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.”

The phrase “in love” may complete the description of the people's holiness or introduce God's act of predestining them. The placement permits discussion, and the chapter need not force a conclusion. Either way, love belongs inside the saving purpose, whether as the atmosphere of the holiness to which the people are appointed or as the divine motivation from which their adoption proceeds.²

The stated end is clearer. God chose the people in Christ to be holy and blameless before Him.

Holiness here includes consecration to God and moral conformity to His character. “Without blame” was used of an acceptable sacrifice without defect and came to describe a person or people fit to stand before God. Later in Ephesians, Christ presents the church to Himself “a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing,” but “holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:27). The language of election reaches toward that completed presentation.

This purpose cannot be reduced to private admission into heaven. God appointed a people to bear a holy identity before Him. Their election has moral shape. Grace brings them beyond exemption from condemnation and toward the likeness appropriate to the Son in whom they stand.

The individual-election argument sometimes reasons that because only fallen sinners need to be made holy, God must be viewing the objects of election as particular unbelievers selected to receive salvation. The first part is true: the people Christ saves are sinners and possess no native holiness that could commend them to God. But the conclusion does not follow from the purpose clause. Paul tells us the destiny of the chosen people. He does not explain here why one unbeliever will believe while another will not, nor does he say that the choice produces faith.

The text says what God chose the people to become. We should not silently replace that object with a different one.

Predestinated unto Adoption

Paul continues: “Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will” (verse 5).

Predestination means determination beforehand. But the word does not define its own object. To say that God predestines is not yet to say what He predestines people to experience. Paul supplies the answer.

He predestined us unto adoption.

Adoption gives the people the standing of sons and the full right of inheritance. It is not a lesser substitute for new birth. New birth concerns the impartation of life; adoption concerns family standing, filial privilege, and inheritance. Men and women alike receive the standing Paul describes. The Son is Son by nature. Those joined to Him are brought through Him into the Father's family and share the inheritance appointed in Him.

The participle translated “having predestinated” further explains God's choosing. Grammarians debate whether it carries a causal, instrumental, or modal force. We need not imagine a sequence in eternity in which God first predestined and then chose, or first chose and then predestined. Paul's burden is that the eternal choice included an appointed destiny.

Again, the text names that destiny. It does not say God predestined selected unbelievers to faith or predestined them to regeneration so that they must believe. It says He predestined us to adoption through Jesus Christ.

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SIDEBAR: Predestination Predestination means appointing or determining something beforehand, but the word does not explain its own object or destination. Those must be learned from the passage. In Ephesians 1, believers in Christ are predestined unto adoption and inheritance; in Romans 8, those foreknown in Christ are predestined to be conformed to the image of God's Son. The emphasis therefore falls upon what God settled beforehand for His people: their standing, family, holiness, service, conformity, inheritance, and glory in Christ. Predestination should not automatically be made another word for deciding which unbelievers will receive the grace that causes faith. It describes the certain destiny appointed for the people who belong to the Son, and God will faithfully complete that purpose in everyone who is in Him. See the Glossary: Predestination; Election; In Christ.

This was “according to the good pleasure of his will.” The purpose originates in God. No believer designed adoption, chose the Son, supplied redemption, or negotiated the inheritance. Faith did not persuade God to form this purpose. Before creation, God freely established what the people in His Son would become.

That is why receptive faith creates no merit. The sinner does not invent the family by entering it. He does not become the ground of adoption by receiving the Son. He abandons every claim to independent standing and entrusts himself to Christ. The Spirit joins him to the Son in whom the Father's gracious purpose already stands.

Accepted in the Beloved

The first movement ends “to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (verse 6).

Paul does not invite believers to praise the perceptiveness of their faith. He directs praise to the glory of God's grace.

The Beloved is Christ. The title recalls the Father's delight in His Son. Jesus is not one recipient of grace among others. He is the beloved Son in whom grace is bestowed upon His people. Their acceptance is therefore not an independent verdict secured by a quality in them. It is derived from their relation to Him.

This is personal without becoming individualistic. God does not accept a faceless collective while ignoring its members. Each believer is genuinely received. But no believer is accepted as a detached religious individual. He is accepted in the Beloved, as one joined to the Son and belonging to His people.

Election, adoption, grace, and acceptance form one movement. The people chosen in Christ are appointed to the Father's family through Christ and graciously favored in Christ. The sentence has still given no hint of a selection standing behind the Son.

Redemption and the Mystery of His Will

Paul now moves from what God established before creation to what believers possess through the historical work of Christ: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (verse 7).

Election cannot be detached from the cross. The eternal purpose does not save by its bare existence. Redemption comes through blood, the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness addresses real trespasses. Grace is rich because the cost is borne by the Beloved and the guilty receive what they could never purchase.

God also abounds toward His people “in all wisdom and prudence,” having made known “the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself” (verses 8–9).

The final phrase may refer to a purpose God set forth in Himself, as the King James Version reads, or to the purpose He set forth in Christ. The nearest masculine antecedent permits the latter, and the historical movement of the sentence favors Christ as the public center in whom the purpose is displayed. The larger point is not dependent upon deciding the pronoun. Verse 10 states the content openly.

God's disclosed purpose is “that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him.”

The mystery of God's will is not revealed as a list of particular persons selected to receive irresistible faith. It is the great purpose to sum up or head up all things in Christ.

The verb translated “gather together in one” can convey summing up or bringing beneath one head. Both senses suit the larger letter. Christ gives coherence to God's purpose, and in verses 20–23 God exalts Him above every power and gives Him as Head over all things to the church, which is His body.

Election belongs within that purpose. God is forming a holy family in the Son and directing the inheritance of creation toward Christ's headship. The question of who goes to heaven matters greatly, yet remains too small to contain Paul's praise.

In Whom We Have an Inheritance

Verse 11 continues, “In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.”

The expression translated “we have obtained an inheritance” can also be understood to mean that believers were appointed as God's own portion or possession. Israel could be described as the LORD's portion. On either reading, the people and their future stand in Christ. They receive the appointed inheritance in Him, or in Him they become the people claimed as God's possession.³

The verse contains one of the passage's strongest declarations of divine sovereignty. God works all things according to the counsel of His will. The corporate reading has no interest in weakening those words. The inheritance is not uncertain, the purpose is not provisional, and history will not force God to surrender the end He established.

But the strength of the declaration does not authorize us to change the object of predestination. In this clause it is joined to the inheritance or appointed portion and to the purpose that the people should exist for God's praise. The text does not say, “having been predestined to believe,” or, “having been predestined to be irresistibly placed into Christ.”

The system may argue that such a decree is necessary to secure the result. That is a theological argument and deserves an answer. It is not the grammatical content of the verse.

“We” and “Ye Also”

Paul says the purpose was “that we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ” (verse 12). Then the pronoun changes: “In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation” (verse 13).

Before asking who the two groups are, we should notice the verb. The word the King James renders “first trusted” is literally “hoped beforehand.” Paul describes an earlier company who set their hope on Christ in advance, and this chapter will call them the earlier hopers for that reason.

Who, then, are the “we” who first hoped in Christ, and who are the “ye also”?

The most natural broad reading distinguishes earlier Jewish believers from the Gentile recipients who later heard the gospel. That movement would anticipate the argument of Ephesians 2, where Gentiles once alienated from Israel's covenants are brought near by Christ's blood and Jews and Gentiles are created into “one new man” in Him. Other possibilities remain. “We” may emphasize Paul and the apostolic circle, or earlier believers generally, before turning directly to the recipients.

The distinction has limits. The “us” of verses 3–11 often reads naturally as the whole confessing community, not exclusively Jewish Christians. Verse 12 narrows the description with the phrase “who first trusted.” The transition is real, but its precise boundaries are debated.

What is unmistakable is the movement from an earlier group to “ye also.” The Gentile or later hearers were not an afterthought. They enter the same Christ-centered blessing, and verse 14 returns to “our inheritance.” The pronouns distinguish historical reception and then reunite the believers in a common possession.

The church does not erase Israel or become Israel renamed. Yet the gospel creates a real shared people in Christ. Those who first hoped and those who later heard stand in the same Beloved, receive the same Spirit, and await the same inheritance.

Hearing, Believing, and Sealing

Verse 13 gives the sentence's clearest description of personal reception: “In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise.”

The King James translators printed “trusted” in italics because the Greek supplies no verb at that point. The clause runs: in whom ye also, having heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, ye were sealed. The translators' supplement is a reasonable bridge, but the structure of the original strengthens the observation that follows. The Greek supplies two participles, “having heard” and “having believed,” leading to the one finite verb, “ye were sealed.” English translations differ over whether to say “after” or “when,” but the historical movement is plain. The Word of truth came to actual hearers. The message was the gospel of their salvation. They believed in Christ. They were sealed with the promised Spirit.

Paul does not say the Spirit's sealing caused them to hear. He does not say the sealing caused them to believe. Nor does he mention an unstated prior regeneration that explains their faith. A Calvinist may supply that sequence from a larger theological construction, but it is not stated here.

Ephesians itself supplies the nearest support for that construction, and we should not pretend otherwise. Paul tells these same readers that they were “dead in trespasses and sins,” and that God, rich in mercy, “even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:1, 4–5). The Calvinist reads death as total inability and the quickening as a regeneration that precedes and produces faith. That reading deserves recognition, but its full answer belongs to the earlier treatment of inability and regeneration. Two limits suffice here. First, Paul locates the quickening in union: God made us alive together with Christ, raised us up together, and seated us together in heavenly places in Him. That is participation in the risen Son, though union language alone does not decide the disputed order of regeneration and faith. Second, when Paul says “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (2:8), the pronoun “that” is neuter while “faith” is feminine. That difference makes the preceding concept, salvation by grace through faith, the most natural referent, though it does not make a narrower reference to faith grammatically impossible.⁴ The verse therefore magnifies the divine gift of salvation without by itself specifying whether regeneration precedes and produces faith.

At the same time, faith does not seal the believer or create union by its own power. The sinner believes; the Spirit acts. The hearer entrusts himself to the Christ proclaimed in the gospel, and the Spirit personally marks him as belonging to the Son and joins him to the life and future of Christ's people.

This keeps both sides of the saving encounter intact. The response is real. The divine action is real. Faith is not a work that manufactures the blessing; it is reliance upon the Person in whom every blessing stands. The Spirit is not a reward earned by faith; He is God's promised gift who makes the believer's participation personal and living.

The Spirit is “the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession” (verse 14). An earnest is a first installment and guarantee. The believer possesses the Spirit now, and that possession pledges the completed inheritance still to come.

The sentence that began before the foundation of the world ends in the future redemption of God's possession. The whole movement is certain because it stands in Christ and is sealed by the Spirit.

What Paul Says—and What the System Supplies

The strongest individual-election reading deserves to be stated fairly.

God chose “us,” real people in His Son. His choice therefore reaches beyond an abstract plan. He chose before creation, before anyone had believed. The passage emphasizes His will, grace, good pleasure, purpose, and counsel. Holiness is the goal rather than the cause of election. Plural pronouns do not prove corporate election. Faith appears only later in the historical application of salvation. Therefore, the argument concludes, God selected particular fallen individuals, appointed Christ to redeem them, and determined to give them the faith by which they would enter His fellowship.

Several elements of that account are plainly present in Ephesians 1. God truly chooses people. His purpose precedes creation. Grace originates wholly in Him. Human merit contributes nothing. Christ accomplishes redemption. God's purpose and the inheritance of His people are certain.

But the final causal sequence is supplied rather than stated.

Paul does not say God chose particular unbelievers to become believers. He says God chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless. He does not say predestination determines who will exercise faith. He says the people are predestined unto adoption and connected with an appointed inheritance. He does not say faith is an effect irresistibly produced by election. He says the Ephesian hearers heard the gospel, believed in Christ, and were sealed by the Spirit.

Nor does the corporate reading rest upon the mere fact that Paul says “us.” A plural can certainly describe numerous individuals chosen separately. The corporate conclusion rests upon the identity of the people in Him, the representative pattern established in Christ as the Chosen One, and the way Ephesians itself unfolds Christ's headship over His body and the creation of Jews and Gentiles into one new humanity.

The passage itself and the larger theological synthesis must also remain distinct.

Ephesians 1 explicitly establishes that the election is eternal, gracious, personal, and in Christ. It explicitly identifies holiness, adoption, inheritance, and praise as appointed ends. It explicitly places redemption in Christ and describes hearers believing and being sealed.

The passage strongly supports the conclusion that “in Him” identifies the position and representative sphere of the chosen people rather than naming Christ as a mere instrument. It gives no textual definition of predestination as a mechanism causing faith.

The fuller claim, that believers share the election of God's Chosen One when the Spirit joins them to Him through the saving encounter of faith, draws upon the broader biblical pattern and the theology of union with Christ. It is a theological synthesis, not the lexical meaning of a single preposition.

And Ephesians 1 alone does not disprove every possible doctrine of individual election. It shows that the Calvinistic mechanism is not stated in the passage most often treated as its foundation. The remaining texts must still be heard.

That is not evasion. It is reading with boundaries.

To the Praise of His Glory

Paul returns three times to praise.

Election is “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (verse 6). The earlier hopers exist “to the praise of his glory” (verse 12). The Spirit guarantees the inheritance “unto the praise of his glory” (verse 14).

That refrain is not decoration. It is the passage's own verdict on what election is for. Paul wrote these verses so that believers would bless God, not speculate beyond the revealed Christ about the contents of a hidden decree.

The Reformed confessions themselves say that election should produce praise, assurance, and consolation, and they warn against inquisitive searching into God's hidden counsel.⁵ The concern is not their stated pastoral aim. It is the pressure that can arise when election is presented primarily as a hidden selection of individuals. The believer's eye may turn inward and backward: Am I among the chosen? Was my name on the list? Paul's doxology turns the eye outward and upward. Every clause gives the worshipper another reason to look at the Father and the Beloved Son: chosen in Him, adopted through Him, accepted in Him, redeemed in Him, sealed in Him, made heirs in Him. The sentence never pauses to let the believer examine his own credentials, because the sentence never locates the blessing in him to begin with.

Nor does election send the troubled sinner behind Christ to ask whether a hidden decree contains his name. The blessing directs him to the Beloved. The gospel tells him where redemption, forgiveness, adoption, and inheritance are found. When he entrusts himself to the Son, the Spirit joins him to Christ and thereby to the people whose purpose was established before the foundation of the world.

Every spiritual blessing has one address.

The believer is chosen where he is redeemed, accepted, adopted, sealed, and given an inheritance—in Christ.

Notes

Leslie James Crawford argues for unconditional individual election but concludes that “in Him” in Ephesians 1:4 qualifies “us,” describes their position, and is better understood in terms of union than as a simple equivalent of “through Christ.” He then argues that God viewed those persons as unbelievers prior to the historical realization of that union. See “Ephesians 1:3–4 and the Nature of Election,” The Master's Seminary Journal 11/1 (2000): 75–91, especially 83–86, https://tms.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/tmsj11e.pdf. For representative interaction between individual and corporate readings, see Thomas R. Schreiner, “Does Romans 9 Teach Individual Election unto Salvation?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 36/1 (1993): 25–40, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/files_JETS-PDFs_36_36-1_JETS_36-1_025-040_Schreiner.pdf; and Brian J. Abasciano, “Corporate Election in Romans 9: A Reply to Thomas Schreiner,” JETS 49/2 (2006): 351–71, especially 366–68, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/files_JETS-PDFs_49_49-2_JETS_49-2_351-371_Abasciano.pdf.

The Greek phrase en agapē may modify the holiness and blamelessness of verse 4 or the predestining action beginning verse 5. Its distance from “chose” makes a direct connection to that verb less likely. See the NET Bible notes on Ephesians 1:4–5: https://classic.net.bible.org/passage.php/o/w/passage.php?passage=eph+1%3A3-14.

The passive eklērōthēmen may be understood as receiving an allotted inheritance or being appointed as God's portion. The latter reading recalls Israel as the LORD's portion in Deuteronomy 32:8–9. Neither alternative changes the controlling “in whom.” See the NET Bible note on Ephesians 1:11, https://classic.net.bible.org/passage.php/o/w/passage.php?passage=eph+1%3A3-14.

On the possible antecedents of touto in Ephesians 2:8 and the preference for the preceding concept of salvation by grace through faith, see Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 334–35; and Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 342–44. The gender difference weighs against isolating pistis as the antecedent but does not make such a reference grammatically impossible.

Westminster Confession of Faith 3.8 says the doctrine should produce praise, reverence, humility, diligence, and consolation: https://www.opc.org/wcf.html. The Canons of Dort, First Main Point, Articles 12–13, reject inquisitive searching into hidden things and describe assurance of election as producing humility, adoration, and love: https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort?language=en.

Chapter 10 — Foreknown, Predestined, Called

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

“Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Romans 8:28–30).

These verses are often opened as though Paul had paused his letter to provide a complete chronology of salvation. God foreknows particular individuals, predestines them to salvation, effectually calls them, regenerates them so that they believe, justifies them, and finally glorifies them. The sequence is commonly called the golden chain, and every link is understood to secure the next.

Paul's words certainly describe an unbroken purpose. The same people appear throughout the sequence, and no hostile power can prevent their appointed glory. We should not weaken that assurance.

But Paul has already identified those people before he reaches verse 28. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The subjects of the chapter are not selected unbelievers waiting to be placed in Christ. They are people already in Christ, and Paul is writing to assure them of the future God has appointed for them there.

They are suffering, groaning, waiting, and sometimes unable even to form the prayers their weakness requires. Paul's question is not whether God's hidden decree caused their faith. It is whether pain, opposition, and death can prevent those in Christ from becoming what He has appointed them to be.

The answer is no.

The Groaning Around the Chain

Romans 8 begins with people “in Christ Jesus” and ends with the love of God “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Between those declarations, the same people possess the Spirit of life, receive the Spirit of adoption, cry “Abba, Father,” and live as children and joint-heirs with Christ. The chapter's opening and closing locate the whole promise in the Son.

Yet they suffer.

Paul does not treat that suffering as an embarrassing exception to the victorious Christian life. He places it within the life of sonship: “if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together” (Romans 8:17). Present suffering cannot be compared with the glory that will be revealed in God's children, but the suffering is real while it lasts.

Creation groans beneath corruption, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. Believers groan within themselves while awaiting “the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” Even possessing the firstfruits of the Spirit does not remove the ache of an unfinished salvation. The Spirit Himself helps their infirmities and intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered.

It is within that threefold groaning of creation, believers, and the interceding Spirit that Paul says all things work together for good.

He does not mean that every event is pleasant, that every loss will be reversed in this life, or that tragedy becomes good merely because it occurs beneath God's providence. The “good” is defined by the sentence that follows. God is carrying His people toward conformity to His Son. Even suffering cannot escape that purpose.

That is the burden of Romans 8:28–30. Paul is not looking backward from faith to discover an invisible mechanism that produced it. He is looking forward from suffering to the Christlike glory God has promised.

What Paul's Grammar Is Doing

The flow of the sentence confirms that purpose.

Verse 28 describes the same people in two ways: they are “them that love God” and “them who are the called according to his purpose.” Grammatically, the two descriptions stand together. Paul is not narrating how the second group was turned into the first. He is identifying one believing people whose lives now stand within God's call and purpose.

Verse 29 begins by explaining why all things can serve their good: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.” Paul then supplies both the content and purpose of that predestination. The content is conformity to the image of the Son, and the purpose is that Christ might be the Firstborn among many brethren. The sentence moves positively toward destination, family, and the preeminence of Christ. It does not name faith or entrance into Christ as the object predestined.

Verse 30 repeatedly says, in effect, “whom ... these also.” That construction emphatically carries the same people across the sweep, but the links are joined by repetition rather than by words meaning because, by means of, or therefore. The grammar asserts correspondence and continuity. It does not, merely by placing the verbs beside one another, explain the inward cause by which the call was received or the means by which justification came.

Verse 31 then gives Paul's own conclusion: “What shall we then say to these things?” He does not explain a hidden conversion mechanism. He proclaims that God is for His people, that no accusation can overturn His verdict, and that nothing can separate them from His love in Christ.

This is more than an alternative reading the words happen to permit. It follows the people Paul identifies, the reason verse 29 supplies, the object of predestination, the repeated continuity of verse 30, and the application Paul draws in verses 31–39.

What the Golden Chain Is Said to Prove

The phrase golden chain comes from later theology and identifies a serious Reformed argument rather than a slogan that may be dismissed.

Calvin says God's foreknowledge in Romans 8:29 is not bare prescience but the adopting distinction by which He eternally knows His children apart from the reprobate. Those foreknown are predestined to life, called according to election, justified, and brought certainly to glory.¹

The contemporary Reformed reading usually presses the verb called with particular force. Many people hear the outward gospel call and refuse it. But everyone called in Romans 8:30 is justified. Therefore, the argument says, Paul cannot mean the public call considered simply as an invitation heard by believers and unbelievers alike. He must mean an inward, effectual summons included within predestination, a call that accomplishes the faith it commands.²

The repeated structure strengthens the case. Whom God foreknew, He predestined; whom He predestined, He called; whom He called, He justified; whom He justified, He glorified. No group appears to shrink as the sentence proceeds. The foreknown do not divide into called and uncalled people, nor do the called divide into justified and unjustified people. The same people arrive at glory.

We should concede that continuity without hesitation. Romans 8:29–30 is not describing a collection of unreal categories or an empty corporate plan waiting to see whether anyone will enter it. Paul speaks about actual people. God knows them, appoints their destiny, summons them, justifies them, and secures their glory.

Continuity of persons does not by itself establish the entire causal system being read into the sequence.

It does not necessarily follow that each verb names the mechanism causing the reality represented by the next. Paul does not say the call regenerates, that regeneration produces faith, or that justification follows without faith. Indeed, regeneration and faith are not mentioned in the sequence at all. Before deciding what their omission means, we must allow each word Paul does use to bear the meaning supplied by Romans and by the sentence itself.

What About Romans 9?

A Reformed reader will reasonably answer that Romans 8 does not stand alone. Romans 9 follows immediately, speaks of God's purpose according to election, places Jacob before Esau, declares God's freedom in mercy and hardening, and describes vessels of mercy prepared beforehand for glory. If Romans 9 supplies an unconditional, individual, and causal framework, that framework will naturally be brought back into Romans 8.

But it must first be demonstrated from Romans 9–11 rather than assumed and then used to interpret Romans 8 as independent proof of itself. The two passages address connected but distinguishable questions. Romans 8 asks whether suffering can defeat God's purpose for those in Christ. Romans 9–11 asks whether Israel's widespread unbelief means that God's Word and covenant purpose have failed.

Romans 9–11 must therefore be heard as one sustained argument: Jacob and Esau concern the promise-bearing line and peoples, Pharaoh's hardening is judicial, the vessels belong within a Jew-and-Gentile argument, and Romans 10 and 11 explicitly place faith, unbelief, remnant, partial hardening, and offered mercy within the answer. Chapter 11 develops that reading in full. Readers may finally judge the argument differently, but Romans 9 should not be imported backward as a settled premise before its own question and Old Testament citations have been heard.

A doctrine gathered from other passages may properly inform Romans 8. It should not be presented as something Romans 8 itself states. Romans 8 does not say that these people are in Christ because God selected them beforehand for irresistible faith. It identifies them as already in Christ and assures them of the destiny appointed for them there.

Those Who Love God

Paul identifies his subjects before he calls them foreknown. They are “them that love God” and “them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

These are not spiritually neutral people standing outside Christ. They possess the Spirit, belong to God's family, suffer with His Son, and await the redemption of their bodies. Paul gives two descriptions of one believing people. They love God, and they are the called according to His purpose.

Calling in Scripture is larger than an invisible event that causes conversion. A call is God's authoritative summons. Through the gospel He calls sinners to turn from self-rule and entrust themselves to Jesus Christ. That summons may be resisted; its authority does not depend upon the hearer's compliance. When it is received through repentant faith, however, the call becomes the believer's identity, hope, purpose, and vocation in Christ.

Paul regularly addresses Christians in this received identity. They are “called to be saints” and “the called of Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:6–7). God calls them into the fellowship of His Son (1 Corinthians 1:9), into one hope (Ephesians 4:4), unto holiness (1 Thessalonians 4:7), and unto His kingdom and glory (1 Thessalonians 2:12). Their calling is the identity and vocation they now possess, far more than something that happened before they believed. It names the life and purpose they have received and are now summoned to embody.

Romans 8:28 uses calling in this purposeful sense. These believers are the called according to God's purpose because they now belong to the family He is conforming to Christ. Their suffering occurs within that calling rather than outside it.

That retrospective identity does not, by itself, settle the nature of the calling event. A Reformed reader may readily agree that only believers bear the saving identity “the called” and still argue that an inward effectual call caused them to believe. Calling believers the called proves that God's summons has reached its saving end among them; it does not, by itself, prove or disprove that the summons irresistibly caused their response.

Verse 30 likewise says God called the people He predestined, and everyone called in that sentence is justified. The call is therefore not being considered from the side of people who heard and refused it. It is the call as savingly realized among those who received Christ. That conclusion identifies the people and outcome in view. It does not explain the inward mechanics of the event.

Paul does not say that calling secretly regenerated them before faith or believed in their place. He has already spent the letter explaining how the gospel reaches its saving end: the righteousness of God is “unto all and upon all them that believe”; a person is “justified by faith”; and “being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 3:22, 28; 5:1). The positive doctrine of the gospel call requires the whole biblical witness and will receive fuller treatment earlier in this book. The more limited claim here is that Romans 8:30 does not define calling as the irresistible cause of faith.

Romans 8 does not overturn that account by omitting its details from one compressed sentence.

Whom He Did Foreknow

A careful definition is essential: Foreknowledge is God's perfect knowledge of all things, including His relational knowledge and purpose concerning those who are in Christ. God's foreknowledge is more than passive observation of future human actions. It is personal and covenantal.

That definition protects us from two opposite mistakes.

The first mistake is to say that God looked down the corridors of time, noticed which people would produce faith from their own resources, and rewarded their better decision by choosing them. That is not this book's position. Faith does not arise independently of God's Son, Word, drawing, illumination, and conviction. Nor does faith persuade God to establish an election He had not already established in Christ.

Paul also says God foreknew people, “whom,” rather than merely foreseeing information about them. God's knowledge is neither late nor impersonal. He eternally and perfectly knows the actual people who will belong to His Son. Corporate election concerns real people eternally known to God, never an empty category whose eventual membership surprised Him.

The opposite mistake is to make foreknow a lexical synonym for choose certain unbelievers unconditionally to receive irresistible faith. Biblical foreknowledge is richer than bare foresight, but the word itself does not contain that entire doctrine.

Three passages help us hear its range.

Peter says Christ “was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (1 Peter 1:20). The word translated foreordained is the same verb translated foreknow in Romans 8:29. Peter means more than that the Father possessed advance information about the Son, nor did He select Christ from a field of sinful candidates. The Son was personally foreknown within the Father's settled redemptive purpose and then manifested in history.

Peter opens the same epistle by addressing believers as “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:2). The people, the Spirit's sanctifying work, and the cleansing of Christ belong to one relational purpose.

Paul later asks, “Hath God cast away his people?” and answers, “God forbid.” After identifying himself as an Israelite, he continues, “God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:1–2). The people under discussion are Israel. Paul immediately acknowledges widespread Israelite unbelief and identifies a believing remnant, yet he still denies that God has cast away the foreknown people. Foreknowledge can therefore describe God's prior covenantal knowledge of a people without asserting that every historical member was individually regenerated or eternally saved.

Calvin answers that Romans 11 uses foreknow for God's gratuitous election of the remnant. Because Paul soon speaks of a remnant according to the election of grace, Calvin understands the foreknown people as the sons God chose by His good pleasure rather than Israel considered in its unbelieving breadth.³ That reading connects Romans 11 directly to his interpretation of Romans 8 and deserves to be stated rather than left implicit.

Yet Paul's question concerns whether God has cast away His people, the same Israel whose widespread unbelief created the crisis of Romans 9–11. Paul points to himself and the remnant as evidence that the people have not been abandoned; he does not begin by redefining the people as the remnant. He then distinguishes the hardened “rest,” says the hardening of Israel is only “in part,” anticipates mercy toward Israel, and calls those who remain enemies concerning the gospel “beloved for the fathers' sakes.” If “His people” already meant only the individuals certain to be saved, the denial would say little more than that God has not rejected those He has not rejected. The larger argument is that God's covenantal knowledge and purpose concerning Israel survive the present unbelief of many Israelites.

Romans 11 does not determine the meaning of Romans 8 by itself. It does prevent us from assuming that whenever God foreknows people, the word must mean an invisible selection of individuals all sharing the same eternal destiny.

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SIDEBAR: Foreknowledge God has always known every person, event, and future response perfectly. Biblical foreknowledge, however, often says more than that God possessed information in advance. To know a person or people may describe relationship, recognition, and covenantal regard. Paul says that God foreknew Israel even though many Israelites remained in unbelief, and Peter says that Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world. The word therefore should not be silently expanded to mean “chose beforehand to regenerate and cause to believe.” Neither should it be reduced everywhere to God's advance awareness of who would exercise faith. The context must identify whom God recognizes and the purpose in which they are being considered. In Romans 8, the foreknown people are those already under discussion: those in Christ, who love God and belong to His purpose. See the Glossary: Foreknowledge; Election; Predestination.

Acts 2:23 joins Christ's delivery to “the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” while holding the people who crucified Him responsible for their wicked hands. The relationship between counsel, knowledge, providence, and human action is not reduced to a lexical formula.

Romans 8:29 should be read within that biblical pattern. God perfectly and relationally knows the actual people embraced within His purpose in Christ. He is not discovering their names as history unfolds. Yet Paul does not say foreknowledge causes their faith, nor does he define the foreknown as isolated unbelievers selected to receive a response withheld from everyone else. He moves from the people God knows to the destiny God has appointed for them.

Predestined to What?

“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate”—to what?

Paul answers: “to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

Predestination means determination beforehand, but the verb does not define its own object. Ephesians 1 says believers are predestined to adoption and an appointed inheritance in Christ. Romans 8 says they are predestined to conformity to the image of the Son.

The difference matters. Paul does not say God predestined selected unbelievers to become believers. He does not say they were predestined to regeneration so that faith would necessarily follow. He says what the people God foreknows are appointed to become.

That conformity begins in the present. The Spirit forms the character of Christ in His people as they put to death the deeds of the body, walk as sons, suffer faithfully, and learn dependence in weakness. It will be completed when their bodies are redeemed and fashioned like the risen body of Christ. Predestination includes character, vocation, endurance, resurrection, and glory.

Its purpose is also corporate and Christ-centered. God is forming “many brethren” around the Firstborn, a family which bears His likeness while He holds the preeminent place. The certainty of predestination rests in the Father's purpose to display the Son through this redeemed people joined to Him.

This strengthens rather than weakens assurance. The believer is not promised merely that he will arrive somewhere called heaven. God has appointed him to share the life, likeness, family, and glory of Christ.

What This Reading Does Not Say

Before returning to Paul's sequence, several misunderstandings should be removed.

This reading does not say that every person who hears the public gospel call is justified. Paul is not speaking about the call as rejected by an unbelieving hearer. He is describing people among whom God's call has reached its saving end through faith. They are now “the called,” and the summons has become their shared identity and purpose.

It does not say God elected an impersonal plan while remaining ignorant of the people who would enter it. God knows the persons perfectly and eternally. The corporate character of the family explains the sphere and shape of their election; it does not erase personal knowledge, personal union, or personal salvation.

It does not make faith the cause of God's purpose. God chose Christ, established salvation in Him, appointed the standing and future of His people, sent the Son, gave the Word, and draws, enlightens, and convicts the sinner. Faith supplies none of those things. It is the sinner's surrender to what grace has brought near, and the Spirit joins the believer to the Son in whom the purpose already stands.

Nor does this reading break Paul's sequence or make glory uncertain. Every person justified in verse 30 will be glorified. The disagreement concerns how the people came to be among the called and justified, not whether God will complete the future He has appointed for those in Christ.

Romans 8:29–30 does not answer every causal question left by that distinction. It does not need to. A passage may give absolute assurance concerning the people in view without supplying an exhaustive explanation of why one hearer received the call while another refused it. We should preserve the full strength of Paul's answer while refusing to make his silence answer something else.

Called, Justified, Glorified

Paul now gathers the purpose into one sweeping sentence:

“Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Romans 8:30).

The repetition establishes the continuity of the people. It does not attempt to name every saving reality or explain every causal relationship.

The call has already been proclaimed through the gospel, pressed by the Spirit, and received by the believers Paul addresses. Justification has already been explained through faith in Christ. Paul can therefore say that those God called He justified without repeating the gospel, the cross, faith, or union with Christ in the sentence. Their absence no more creates a faithless justification than it creates a crossless one.

Justification is God's act of bringing the sinner into right standing by placing him in the standing of Christ Himself. The declaration is true because the believer has been joined to the righteous Son. Faith contributes no righteousness and completes no unfinished work. It is the sinner's reliance upon Christ, and in that saving encounter the Spirit joins him to the One in whom righteousness and life already stand complete.

Paul then says those God justified He also glorified.

The wording is startling because believers are still waiting for glory. Earlier in the chapter Paul said they suffer so that they may “be also glorified together” and await the redemption of their bodies. Their glorification has not been completed in history.

All five principal verbs in verses 29–30 present their actions as wholes, and Paul speaks of glory in the same sweeping form as foreknowledge, predestination, calling, and justification. The future is treated as settled within God's purpose. This is often called a proleptic or anticipatory use: the promised completion is spoken of as accomplished because nothing can prevent it.

That final verb reveals the scale of Paul's sentence. The sequence reaches from God's prior knowledge and purpose, through calling and justification experienced in history, to a bodily glory that the same chapter says believers are still awaiting. Paul has gathered eternity past, the believer's present standing, and the future resurrection into one completed rhetorical sweep.

The point leaves room for causal relationships among the realities named, while showing that the succession of aorist verbs is not a simple ledger of adjacent events occurring one after another. Since “glorified” anticipates a bodily glory not yet historically completed, the verbal sequence alone cannot tell us that every preceding term names a temporally or logically adjacent mechanism producing the next. The context, Paul's prior argument, and the stated object of each action must supply those relationships.

The verb tense should not be made to carry the entire doctrine by itself. Paul's context supplies the assurance. The God who knew His people and appointed them to Christ's image will not surrender that purpose when they suffer. He will complete the life already begun in the Son by raising and transforming their bodies. Glorification is God's final work of making believers fully like the risen Jesus Christ.

An Unbroken People, Not an Exhaustive Chronology

The traditional chain contains five named links, but Romans itself describes many other realities essential to salvation: the gospel, Christ's death and resurrection, faith, repentance, union with Christ, the Spirit's indwelling life, adoption, sanctification, and perseverance.

Paul has not forgotten them. Many appear within the same chapter.

Romans 8:29–30 is therefore a sequence, but it is not a complete conversion chronology. Paul selects realities that sweep from God's prior knowledge and purpose to the final glory threatened in the believer's imagination by present suffering.

The repeated “whom” and “them” establishes identity across that sweep. Everyone justified in the sentence belongs among the called, and everyone justified will be glorified. But identity is not the same thing as causation. Paul does not say calling justifies apart from faith, any more than he says predestination justifies apart from Christ. He does not say predestination causes the call to be believed through regeneration, because neither regeneration nor the sinner's response is under discussion in the sentence.

A wider theological system may propose those causal relationships. Romans 8:29–30 should not be cited as though the succession of verbs states them.

The passage gives us something better suited to its purpose. God knows His people. He has appointed them to the image of His Son. His call has become their received identity and vocation. He has brought them into Christ's righteous standing. He will complete their transformation in glory. Suffering can wound them, exhaust them, and leave them without words, but it cannot make God's purpose fail.

What Shall We Say to These Things?

Paul does not leave us to invent the application of his sequence. He supplies it.

“What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

Opposition is real, but it cannot overturn the purpose. God did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for His people; He will therefore freely give them everything necessary with Him. No charge can reverse God's justification. Christ died, rose, reigns, and intercedes.

Then Paul names the sufferings that might appear to sever believers from their future: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword. These are not philosophical possibilities. They are the pressures under which Christians might wonder whether God's purpose still holds.

“Nay,” Paul answers, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Romans 8:37).

The victory is not the absence of suffering. It is the failure of suffering to separate God's children from Christ or prevent their conformity to Him. The love that secures them is not an abstraction hidden behind the gospel. It is “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (verse 39).

That is where foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification lead. They do not direct believers behind Christ to search for their names in a secret decree. They direct suffering believers to the Christ in whom God knows them, calls them, justifies them, forms them, and will raise them in glory.

God has not promised that the road will be gentle. He has promised where it ends.

Nothing can separate His people from His love in Christ.

Notes

John Calvin, Commentary on Romans, comments on Romans 8:28–30, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom38.xii.ix.html.

See the Reformation Study Bible note on Romans 8:30, https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/reformation-study-bible/Rom.8.30, and R. C. Sproul, “The Golden Chain,” https://learn.ligonier.org/sermons/golden-chain.

Calvin, Commentary on Romans, comments on Romans 11:1–6, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom38.xv.i.html.

Chapter 11 — Has the Word of God Taken None Effect?

Romans 9 is often opened as though Paul were answering a timeless philosophical question: Why does God save one individual and not another?

Important as that philosophical question may be, Paul begins in grief.

“I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart,” he writes. He could wish himself accursed for his “kinsmen according to the flesh” (Romans 9:2–3). These are Israelites. To them belong the adoption, glory, covenants, law, worship, promises, and fathers. From them, according to the flesh, Christ came.

Yet many Israelites have rejected their Messiah.

That creates the crisis controlling all three chapters. If Israel received God's promises, but much of Israel remains outside Christ while Gentiles enter in great numbers, has God's Word failed? The question carries with it the faithfulness of God to the people He chose and the integrity of the promises He gave them.

Paul states the governing thesis in Romans 9:6: “Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect.” He repeats the governing denial in Romans 11:1: “Hath God cast away his people? God forbid.” Between those statements he traces promise, election, mercy, hardening, faith, unbelief, remnant, Gentile inclusion, and Israel's future.

Romans 9 cannot be read faithfully as though Romans 10 and 11 were explanatory footnotes added after the real doctrine had already been settled. The three chapters are one argument. Romans 9 establishes God's freedom to define and advance the promise. Romans 10 identifies Israel's failure and proclaims the nearness of the saving Word. Romans 11 denies Israel's final rejection and looks toward mercy.

Paul's sovereignty is not in question; what matters is what His sovereignty is doing in the argument.

The Word Has Not Failed

Paul's first answer is that physical descent never meant automatic participation in every blessing of the promise.

“They are not all Israel, which are of Israel: neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children” (Romans 9:6–7). Ishmael descended physically from Abraham, but God said, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.” Abraham's effort could not determine the promise-bearing line. God brought Isaac through Sarah according to His own promise.

Ethnic Israel remains Israel within this distinction. Paul has just called his unbelieving kinsmen Israelites and listed their continuing privileges. Later he will again call the hardened people Israel and deny that God has cast them away. “Not all Israel is Israel” therefore distinguishes identities within Israel; it does not rename the Gentile church as Israel and make the historical people disappear.

Nor does Isaac's election prove that God selected Isaac for eternal life and Ishmael for eternal damnation. Genesis is speaking about the child through whom the covenant promise and appointed seed would proceed. Isaac is a real person, and his historical role bears saving significance for the world. But the text does not give us Ishmael's eternal destiny.

Paul's point is that God, not flesh, custom, or human arrangement, determines the line of promise.

The Elder Shall Serve the Younger

Paul sharpens the example with Rebekah's twins.

They shared the same father and mother. Before they were born or had done good or evil, God said, “The elder shall serve the younger.” This occurred “that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth” (Romans 9:11–12).

No reading should weaken those words. God's choice preceded the twins' works. The promise did not advance because Jacob behaved better than Esau. God possessed the authority to choose the younger for the covenant role and make His purpose stand.

But Paul quotes an Old Testament sentence with an Old Testament context.

The oracle given to Rebekah says, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels” (Genesis 25:23). The elder serving the younger describes the peoples represented by the twins. Indeed, Genesis never narrates Esau personally serving Jacob in the simple way the quotation might suggest. The nations become the visible fulfillment.

Paul then joins that oracle to Malachi: “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (Romans 9:13). Malachi was written long after the brothers died and explicitly addresses Israel and Edom. God's covenant love rested upon Jacob's people, while Edom stood beneath judgment.

The individuals and the peoples cannot be torn apart. Jacob and Esau are real men whose chosen roles shape the histories of the nations within them. The corporate dimension does not make the individuals imaginary. But neither may the individual names be detached from the representative and national meanings supplied by Genesis and Malachi.¹

Romans 9 concerns salvation. Paul's anguish, the remnant, the righteousness of faith, and the climactic promise that all Israel will be saved make that plain. Yet a passage may concern salvation without every election in it being an unconditional selection of individuals for heaven or hell.

The choice of Jacob establishes the promise-bearing people and line through which the Saviour comes. It does not explicitly declare Jacob eternally saved and Esau eternally damned before either was born.

I Will Have Mercy

An objection follows: “What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God?”

Paul answers with the strongest possible denial: “God forbid.” Then he quotes God's words to Moses after Israel's golden-calf rebellion: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Romans 9:14–15; Exodus 33:19).

Mercy belongs to God.

It cannot be earned by works, summoned by human desire, or produced by exertion. “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy” (Romans 9:16). The believer's faith does not create mercy, improve Christ, or place God under obligation. Salvation begins in God's compassion and depends upon His gracious action.

The disagreement is not over whether mercy is sovereign and undeserved. It is whether sovereign mercy must mean that God unconditionally selected which particular unbelievers He would cause to believe.

Paul now turns from Moses to Pharaoh.

“Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up,” God tells Pharaoh, “that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth” (Romans 9:17; Exodus 9:16). Pharaoh is an individual ruler whose actions affect a people. He is also a rebel already resisting command, revelation, and judgment.

Exodus describes his hardening in several ways. Pharaoh hardens his own heart. His heart becomes hard. God hardens him. Scripture neither excuses Pharaoh nor confines the event to unaided self-hardening. God judicially confirms and employs the ruler's resistance, preserving him through the plagues so that the exodus will display divine power and proclaim the LORD's name.

“Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Romans 9:18).

That is real divine hardening. It must not be explained away. But the cited history is not an account of God creating Pharaoh for the purpose of withholding every possibility of repentance. It is the judicial use of a resistant ruler within God's redemptive purpose.

Why Doth He Yet Find Fault?

The objector presses harder: “Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?”

Paul does not apologize for God. “Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?” The creature may not summon the Creator before its court. “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” (Romans 9:19–20).

The potter has authority over the clay, making one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor.

This imagery echoes more than one prophet. Isaiah rebukes clay that reverses the Creator-creature relationship and questions its Maker (Isaiah 29:16; 45:9). Jeremiah watches a potter rework a marred vessel, and God applies the image to His authority over nations. Yet He also says that announced judgment may be withheld if a nation turns and announced blessing withdrawn if it does evil (Jeremiah 18:1–10).

Paul's rebuke carries Isaiah's full force. God has sovereign authority over the historical use, judgment, and mercy of His creatures. Jeremiah's conditional application prevents us from turning the image itself into proof that the clay has no morally meaningful response.

Paul then speaks of “vessels of wrath fitted to destruction” whom God endures “with much longsuffering,” and “vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory” (Romans 9:22–23).

Wrath and destruction are real. So are mercy and glory. Yet Paul's wording contains an important restraint. He explicitly says God prepared the vessels of mercy beforehand for glory. With the vessels of wrath, the form translated “fitted” does not explicitly name God as the one who fitted them. That grammatical difference gives no proof that they prepared themselves, yet it also prevents the interpreter from silently turning the two descriptions into a perfectly symmetrical double decree.²

God also endures the vessels of wrath with much longsuffering. The sentence is not a picture of impatient destruction. It is a picture of divine authority, patient endurance, righteous judgment, and mercy displayed toward a people called “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles” (Romans 9:24).

The vessels are real persons. They also belong to corporate histories—Israel, Gentiles, rulers, remnant, hardened branches, and vessels of mercy gathered from both peoples. Paul does not force us to choose between persons and peoples.

He does require us to stop before adding a causal decree of unbelief that he has not stated.

A People Who Were Not a People

Paul now gathers Hosea and Isaiah into the argument.

Hosea promised that people disowned beneath judgment would again be called God's people and children of the living God. In Hosea's original setting, those words concern the restoration of Israel. Paul applies the pattern to God's call of a people including Gentiles: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” (Romans 9:25).

Isaiah supplies the other side. Though Israel be as numerous as the sand, “a remnant shall be saved” (Romans 9:27). Without God's preserving mercy, Israel would have become like Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Word has not failed. God has always possessed freedom to maintain the promise through a remnant and to call outsiders into mercy. Yet the remnant is not proof that Israel has been discarded. A remnant is the preserved part of the people, evidence that judgment has not erased the promise.

Then Paul asks, “What shall we say then?”

His own answer should govern everything that precedes it.

They Sought It Not by Faith

Gentiles who were not pursuing righteousness attained “the righteousness which is of faith.” Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not attain it.

Why?

“Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law” (Romans 9:32).

Paul does not say Israel failed because its members were absent from an eternal list of persons selected for faith. He says they stumbled at Christ. Combining Isaiah's stone passages, he presents the Messiah as both stumbling stone and secure foundation: whoever believes upon Him will not be ashamed.

Faith therefore remains entirely nonmeritorious. The Gentiles did not devise God's righteousness; Christ accomplished it, the gospel revealed it, and faith receives it. Israel failed by refusing to submit to the righteousness God gives in His Son. Insufficient achievement was never the issue.

Romans 10 continues without changing the subject: “Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved.” They possess zeal, but not according to knowledge. “For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:1–3).

Israel's unbelief is neither innocent nor unexplained. They seek to establish rather than submit. The contrast is not between meritorious faith and divine grace. It is between self-established righteousness and receptive reliance upon Christ.

The Word Is Nigh Thee

Paul reads Deuteronomy 30 through Christ.

The saving Word is not inaccessible in heaven or beyond the sea. No sinner must ascend to bring Christ down or descend to bring Him from the dead. “The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart” (Romans 10:8).

This is “the word of faith, which we preach.”

If a person confesses Jesus as Lord and believes in his heart that God raised Him from the dead, he will be saved. “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10).

The promise is open: “Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.” There is no difference in access between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is rich “unto all that call upon him.” Joel's promise becomes Paul's proclamation: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).

The “whosoever” is not a boast about autonomous ability. Calling is possible because God has acted, Christ has risen, the Word has come near, preachers have been sent, and the gospel is heard. The sinner contributes no saving provision. He calls upon the Lord who is rich in mercy.

Paul then traces the public movement: calling requires belief, belief requires hearing, hearing comes by the Word of God, and preaching requires a sent messenger.

That order matters. Faith does not arise from ignorance, spiritual darkness, or unaided human reflection. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” God sends the messenger, brings the Word near, reveals Christ, illuminates the sinner’s need, and convicts him of the truth; there is no faith without revelation.

Yet hearing is not itself believing, nor does revelation irresistibly produce faith, for Paul immediately asks whether Israel heard and answers, “Yes verily.” They heard the Word and remained responsible for refusing it. God creates the entire gracious encounter in which faith arises, but He does not believe for the sinner. The Word reveals Christ and calls for faith; the sinner either entrusts himself to Christ or refuses the truth he has heard.

Did Israel fail because it never heard?

“Yes verily,” Paul answers. They did hear. Isaiah had already asked, “Lord, who hath believed our report?” Moses had warned that God would provoke Israel by a people once considered foolish. Isaiah pictured God found by those who had not sought Him.

But concerning Israel God says, “All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people” (Romans 10:21; Isaiah 65:2).

The outstretched hands are not a hidden refusal dressed as invitation. God truly addresses a resistant people. Israel heard, contradicted, and refused. The same chapter that magnifies God's initiative assigns moral weight to the hearer's response.

Hath God Cast Away His People?

Romans 11 opens with the question the entire argument has been approaching: “Hath God cast away his people?”

“God forbid.”

Paul himself is an Israelite, of Abraham's seed and Benjamin's tribe. “God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:2).

Some read “foreknew” as referring only to individually selected Israelites. The immediate grammar more naturally reaches back to “his people,” meaning Israel, the people whose apparent rejection created Paul's anguish. God has not rejected the historically known people, even though many within that people remain hardened.³

Elijah once thought he alone remained faithful. God told him He had reserved seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal. “Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace” (Romans 11:5).

The remnant is personal and corporate. It contains actual believing Israelites, including Paul. It is also the preserved remnant of the people. Grace excludes works: “if by grace, then is it no more of works.”

Paul does not soften the other side. “The election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded” (Romans 11:7). Israel's history includes judicial hardening. Paul combines Moses, Isaiah, and the Psalms to describe eyes that do not see and a table becoming a snare.

Yet the hardening is not the final word.

Because of Unbelief They Were Broken Off

“Have they stumbled that they should fall?” Paul asks.

Again: “God forbid.”

Through Israel's fall salvation comes to the Gentiles, “for to provoke them to jealousy” (Romans 11:11). Even the judgment serves a restorative movement. If Israel's fall brings riches to the world, “how much more their fulness?” If their casting away brings reconciliation to the world, what will their receiving be “but life from the dead?”

Paul pictures one cultivated olive tree.

The patriarchal root is holy. Some natural branches are broken off. Wild Gentile branches are grafted among the remaining branches and share the richness of the root. Gentiles have not replaced the root and have no ground to boast over Israel.

The explanation is explicit: “Because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith” (Romans 11:20).

The warning is also explicit. Do not be high-minded. Fear. God did not spare unbelieving natural branches and will not indulge Gentile presumption. Continue in His goodness. Otherwise you may be cut off.

Paul's image is corporate. Israel, considered in its unbelieving national majority, was broken off from its place of covenant privilege and testimony, yet Israel was not rejected absolutely, for Paul himself and thousands of other believing Jews remained as natural branches in their own tree. In the same way, Gentile Christianity has been grafted into the covenant testimony by faith, but no church, denomination, or Christian institution may therefore presume that its place is permanent regardless of its faithfulness. Christ's warning in Revelation supplies the parallel: a church that abandons its first love may have its candlestick removed (Revelation 2:5). The church Christ builds cannot finally perish, and those whom the Spirit has joined to Christ cannot lose His life, but an unfaithful church can lose its place of witness. Paul is warning the church corporately against the same unbelief and presumption by which Israel stumbled.

The corporate reading does not drain the warning of personal force, for churches become proud, presumptuous, and unbelieving through the persons within them. Every hearer must therefore abandon boasting and continue in God's goodness, but the threatened cutting off concerns the church's place of covenant testimony rather than the loss of Christ's risen life by one whom the Spirit has joined to Him.

And the hope is explicit: “They also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again” (Romans 11:23). Israel's corporate restoration will occur through the faith of actual Israelites, just as its national stumbling occurred amid the unbelief of actual Israelites. Paul neither dissolves persons into a nation nor reduces the olive tree to a collection of individuals chosen without reference to faith.

Natural branches were broken through unbelief. Gentile Christianity stands in the place of covenant testimony by faith. Israel can be restored if it does not continue in unbelief.

Those sentences are not qualifications of Romans 9. They are its continuation.

And So All Israel Shall Be Saved

Paul reveals a mystery to prevent Gentile conceit: “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Romans 11:25).

Israel's hardening is partial. Paul and the remnant prove it is not total. It is also presented with an “until.” The sentence looks beyond the present condition.

“And so all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:26).

Interpreters have understood “all Israel” as the church composed of Jews and Gentiles, the total number of elect Jews across history, or a future widespread salvation of ethnic Israel. The immediate contrast between Israel and Gentiles, the warning against Gentile arrogance, the natural branches awaiting regrafting, and Israel's continuing relation to the fathers make the third reading strongest.⁴

This promise never guarantees salvation to every Israelite regardless of faith. The olive-tree argument has just identified unbelief as the cause of breaking and the abandonment of unbelief as the path of restoration. “All Israel” describes Israel corporately in the same way Paul can speak corporately of Israel stumbling without meaning every Israelite rejected Christ.

Nor does this future erase the church or create two ways of salvation. The Deliverer comes from Zion and turns ungodliness from Jacob. Sins are taken away under the covenant. Israel is saved by the same Christ proclaimed in Romans 10 and received through faith.

Concerning the gospel, unbelieving Israelites are enemies for the Gentiles' sake. “But as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:28–29).

Israel's election has not been transferred away. God's historical calling remains. Their present unbelief is serious, but it does not annul His purpose for the people.

The movement ends in reciprocal mercy. Gentiles were once disobedient and received mercy through Israel's disobedience. Israel is now disobedient and will receive mercy. “For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32).

Paul does not say all deserve mercy. He says all stand in disobedience and depend upon mercy.

What Romans 9–11 Proves

The strongest Calvinistic reading deserves a direct hearing.

Romans 9 concerns salvation and names individuals. Jacob is chosen before works; mercy does not depend upon willing or running; God hardens whom He wills; and the objector asks how God can find fault if no one resists His will. Vessels of mercy are prepared beforehand for glory, while the elect remnant obtains salvation and the rest are hardened.

Every one of those statements belongs in the doctrine.

The individual-election argument presses them further. A corporate people cannot exist without persons. If God chose a definite remnant, He necessarily chose the individuals composing it. Paul's repeated singular language concerning one upon whom God has mercy, one whom He hardens, and one vessel made to honor cannot be dismissed as though only nations mattered. The “calling” of Romans 9:24 is normally saving in Paul, and the contrast between destruction and glory reaches beyond temporary historical service. Romans 10 does not displace election with human choice; on the Calvinistic reading, proclamation and faith are the ordained means by which the eternally selected are brought to salvation. Human responsibility and determinative sovereignty stand together even if their relation exceeds our understanding.⁵

That is a considerably stronger argument than saying Romans 9 is only about which nation performs which earthly task. Paul is concerned with Israel's salvation. Individuals genuinely receive mercy or remain beneath wrath. The chapter should concede that without hesitation.

But a corporate reading does not deny any of those facts. It asks where the primary orientation of election rests and how individuals participate in the elected people. A remnant necessarily contains persons, but that truism does not tell us whether each person was unconditionally selected to become a believer. A ruler can represent a hardened kingdom without ceasing to be personally guilty. A named patriarch can carry a chosen people and promise without his vocation becoming a declaration of his rival's eternal damnation. A singular vessel can stand within a corporate image without losing personal accountability.

The presence of individuals therefore does not settle the disputed causal question. The question remains whether Paul says God chose those individuals as unbelievers in order to produce their faith, or whether He sovereignly defines the promise in Christ and counts believing Jews and Gentiles as His people.

The objection of Romans 9:19 also must not be made to prove too much. “Who hath resisted his will?” certainly shows that Paul's teaching has asserted formidable divine sovereignty. But the objector has just heard that God overturned natural privilege, chose the younger nation, displayed mercy after Israel's rebellion, and judicially used Pharaoh's resistance to proclaim His name. Those claims are sufficient to provoke a creature's accusation without requiring an unstated decree of every act of unbelief. An objection may reveal the force of Paul's teaching; it cannot add a mechanism Paul has not named.

But their combination still does not produce the entire Calvinistic mechanism.

The individual examples are representative persons within the history of peoples and promise. The Old Testament quotations concerning Jacob and Esau explicitly concern nations and covenant roles. Pharaoh is judicially hardened within the exodus after persistent resistance. The potter governs nations and vessels with sovereign authority. The vessels of wrath are endured with longsuffering, while God's active prior preparation is explicitly stated of vessels of mercy.

Most importantly, Paul supplies his own explanation of Israel's failure: they did not pursue righteousness by faith, would not submit to God's righteousness, and heard only to contradict. Natural branches were broken off because of unbelief, Gentiles stand by faith, and Israel can be grafted in again if it does not continue in unbelief.

A Calvinist answers that faith and unbelief are the ordained means by which the decree appears in history. That is a coherent systematic reply. It is not a sequence Paul states in Romans 9–11. The chapters never say God eternally selected which Israelites would be caused to believe and withheld that faith from the rest.

Nor is “means” an empty answer. God does save through the proclaimed Word, and a theology of sovereignty may legitimately affirm that He ordains means as well as ends. The narrower exegetical point is that Paul's treatment of those means gives them explanatory and moral weight. Israel seeks, stumbles, refuses to submit, hears, gainsays, and remains in unbelief. Gentiles hear, believe, call, stand by faith, and are warned not to boast. Paul does not pause to reinterpret those responses as the inevitable effects of two prior selections. Any system that does so must acknowledge that it is synthesizing beyond the stated argument.

Romans 9–11 proves God's sovereign freedom to carry the promise through chosen representatives, show undeserved mercy, judge and harden persistent rebellion, include believing Gentiles, preserve a remnant, and remain faithful to Israel.

It proves that salvation is by grace and received by faith.

It proves that unbelief is culpable and hardening is real.

It proves that Israel's stumbling has neither defeated God's Word nor canceled His calling.

It does not reduce the mystery to a mechanism selecting which unbelievers must become believers.

O the Depth

Paul ends where a doctrine of election should end.

“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”

The wisdom is visible across the entire argument. Israel's stumbling opens a door of mercy to the nations. Mercy to the nations is meant to provoke Israel. The remnant proves God has not abandoned His people. The natural branches can be grafted in again. Every group is shut up beneath disobedience so that no group may boast and mercy may be seen as mercy.

No one has first given to God. No one has placed Him in debt. “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things” (Romans 11:36).

The Word has not failed.

The promise has reached the nations, the remnant remains, Israel is still beloved, and the Deliverer will have the final word.

“To whom be glory for ever. Amen.”

Notes

Genesis 25:23 identifies the twins as two nations, and Malachi 1:2–5 explicitly contrasts Israel and Edom. Thomas R. Schreiner acknowledges these corporate dimensions while arguing that Paul's saving concern and use of singular persons also support individual election; Brian J. Abasciano argues that the persons function as corporate representatives and that their election does not specify individual eternal destinies. See Schreiner, “Does Romans 9 Teach Individual Election unto Salvation?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 36/1 (1993): 25–40, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/files_JETS-PDFs_36_36-1_JETS_36-1_025-040_Schreiner.pdf; Abasciano, “Corporate Election in Romans 9: A Reply to Thomas Schreiner,” JETS 49/2 (2006): 351–71, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/files_JETS-PDFs_49_49-2_JETS_49-2_351-371_Abasciano.pdf; and Schreiner, “Corporate and Individual Election in Romans 9: A Response to Brian Abasciano,” JETS 49/2 (2006): 373–86, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/files_JETS-PDFs_49_49-2_JETS_49-2_373-386_Schreiner.pdf.

The participle katērtismena (“fitted/prepared”) in Romans 9:22 may be passive or middle and does not express an agent; verse 23 uses the active proētoimasen with God as subject for the vessels of mercy. The asymmetry is real, though it does not by grammar alone establish how the vessels of wrath became fitted for destruction.

The referent of Romans 11:2 is disputed. The corporate reading takes “his people which he foreknew” as Israel, while individual-election readings often understand the phrase as the elect remnant. The continuing Israel-language through verses 1–2 and the chapter's denial of Israel's final rejection favor the corporate referent, without denying the remnant distinction introduced immediately afterward.

“All Israel” remains disputed. This chapter adopts a future corporate restoration of ethnic Israel because “Israel” remains distinct from the Gentiles in Romans 11:25, natural branches remain capable of regrafting, and verses 28–29 relate Israel's election to the fathers. Corporate salvation does not imply the salvation of every individual without faith.

Schreiner makes this cumulative case in the two articles cited in note 1. He argues that Romans 9–11 concerns salvation, that corporate and individual election are inseparable, that Paul's singular examples must retain individual reference, and that Romans 10 describes responsible faith without displacing unconditional election.

Part Four

A Saviour Given for the World

Chapter 12 — For Whom Did Christ Die?

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

“He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

“For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

“But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3:16–21).

Those words belong together.

John 3:16 is often lifted from its setting and made to carry an argument by itself. The Calvinist may answer that world need not mean every individual, while the non-Calvinist may answer that whosoever must mean anyone at all. The two sides then debate the possible range of two words while the movement of the passage waits to be heard.

John tells us more than the saving result of belief. He tells us whom God loved, what God gave, why the Son was sent, who escapes condemnation, why the unbeliever remains condemned, and what moral response the coming of the Light exposes.

The world is already perishing. The Son entered no morally neutral creation populated by innocent people waiting to be divided into the condemned and the delivered. Sin had already brought humanity beneath judgment. Yet God loved this fallen world and gave His only begotten Son so that the world through Him might be saved.

The division appears in the presence of the given Son. Whoever believes in Him does not perish but has everlasting life. Whoever refuses Him remains beneath the condemnation already resting upon the world, and John states the reason plainly: “because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”

Nor is unbelief presented as an innocent inability for which the unbeliever bears no meaningful responsibility. Light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. They did not fail to embrace a Saviour who was never given for them. They refused the Light that came to them.

Although John 3 leaves further questions about substitution, sacrifice, redemption, and the application of salvation, it establishes the saving disposition in which those questions must be answered. God loved the world. God gave the Son. The Son came so that the world through Him might be saved. Life is possessed by believing in Him, and condemnation remains upon the one who refuses Him.

That is where our doctrine of the atonement must begin.

What Definite Atonement Actually Claims

The Calvinistic doctrine is commonly called limited atonement, but careful Reformed theologians usually prefer definite atonement or particular redemption. Those names express the doctrine more accurately. Calvinists do not ordinarily mean that Christ's death is limited in value, deficient in power, or incapable of saving any sinner who comes to Him. They mean that the Father sent the Son to redeem a definite people and that Christ died with the saving intention of securing every blessing necessary to bring those people infallibly to glory.

The Canons of Dort state that the death of God's Son is the complete satisfaction for sins and is “of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world.” They also require the gospel promise, that whoever believes in Christ shall not perish, to be proclaimed without distinction. Those who remain in unbelief perish through their own fault, not because Christ's sacrifice is deficient.¹

If the doctrine stopped there, much of the controversy would disappear. But Dort goes further. It says that God's saving intention in Christ's death extends to “all those and only those” chosen from eternity, and that Christ purchased for them the faith by which they certainly receive salvation.² The Second London Baptist Confession makes the same relationship explicit. Christ procured reconciliation and an everlasting inheritance for those whom the Father gave Him, and He certainly applies that redemption to every person for whom He obtained it, uniting them to Himself by the Spirit and persuading them to believe.³

This is more than the familiar statement that Christ's death is sufficient for all but efficient only for the elect. It is a claim about divine intention, personal substitution, and the cause of faith. Christ's death has infinite value, the gospel may be preached to everyone, and every hearer is commanded to believe; nevertheless, according to the confession, Christ did not obtain saving redemption for everyone addressed by that gospel. He obtained both redemption and the faith that receives it for the elect alone.

That is a coherent system. It also exposes the real question. Did God give His Son to the world with a genuine saving provision for every person, or does the public language of gift, invitation, and promise conceal a saving intention restricted to people who alone will be caused to believe?

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SIDEBAR: Definite Atonement and Universal Provision The disagreement is not whether Christ's death possesses infinite worth. Definite atonement, also called particular redemption or limited atonement, teaches that Christ died with the saving intention of actually securing redemption for the elect alone. His death is sufficient in value for every person, but its saving design and accomplishment concern those the Father chose and the Spirit will certainly bring to faith. Universal provision teaches that God genuinely gave His Son for every sinner and that Christ's accomplished work is sufficient and savingly intended for the world, while its benefits are possessed through faith and union with Him. This is not universalism: those who finally refuse the Son remain under condemnation and do not possess the life found in Him. The question is therefore one of saving scope and intention, not the value of Christ's sacrifice or whether salvation can exist outside Him. See the Glossary: Atonement; Universal Provision; Expiation; Propitiation.

The answer must preserve everything Christ accomplished.

A Work Accomplished

Christ did not come merely to make salvation possible in the sense that He placed God and man into a neutral position and waited to see whether the sinner would complete the work. He obeyed where Adam rebelled. He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. He suffered, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. He entered death, broke its dominion, arose in incorruptible life, and ascended as the living Head of a new humanity.

The atonement is accomplished.

By atonement I mean the whole uniting work of Christ by which He deals with sin, guilt, wrath, death, and alienation and establishes peace with God in Himself. His substitution is real and penal. The Just One stood representatively for the unjust and bore the judgment our rebellion deserved. His sacrifice is propitiatory: God's righteous wrath against sin is answered and satisfied in the obedient self-offering of the Son. His blood is the price of redemption, liberating sinners from the old dominion and claiming them as His own. God establishes reconciliation through Christ, overcoming the hostility sin created and opening the way into peace.

None of this is accomplished by faith.

Faith absorbs no portion of wrath, adds no merit to Christ's obedience, gives no value to His blood, and supplies no life to His resurrection. Its role is connection to the Source rather than the source of salvation. The sinner receives Christ, and in receiving Him receives the saving reality already complete in Him.

The atonement is accomplished in Christ, and its blessings are savingly possessed through union with Christ. Provision is not possession. The unbeliever does not presently possess justification, reconciliation, forgiveness, or life while remaining outside the Son. The believer does not complete those blessings by believing; the Spirit joins him to the Christ in whom they are already complete.

The Sins of the Whole World

John's Gospel is not alone in using universal language for the saving work of Christ. In his first epistle John writes to believers who have an Advocate with the Father, “Jesus Christ the righteous.” Then he adds: “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1–2).

The sentence deliberately moves beyond “our sins.” A definite-atonement reading may understand “our” to mean Jewish believers and “the whole world” to mean Gentile believers also, or it may take the phrase as referring to the elect scattered throughout the world. That interpretation preserves a universal horizon, but it does so by supplying a restricted group not named in the sentence.

John does not say that Christ is the propitiation for our sins and potentially for everyone else's. Neither does he say for our sins and for those of the elect throughout the world. He says, “not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” The natural force of the contrast enlarges the object rather than secretly redefining it.

Yet John does not therefore teach that every person is already forgiven. In the same letter, life is possessed in the Son: “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:12). The propitiatory sacrifice is wholly sufficient for the world's sin and genuinely given for the world, but saving possession remains in the Son.

Hebrews uses language just as broad. Jesus was made a little lower than the angels “that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9). The context soon speaks more particularly of bringing many sons to glory, of those who are sanctified, of the children God gave Him, and of Abraham's seed. Those expressions identify the people who come to share His glory; they do not require us to rewrite “every man” as “every one of the elect.” The movement is from the Son's solidarity with humanity through death to the actual family gathered around the risen Captain of salvation.

Paul likewise commands prayer “for all men,” specifically including kings and others in authority, because God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” He grounds that desire in the one God, the one mediator between God and men, and the one Christ “who gave himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:1–6).

The strongest Calvinistic answer says that “all” means all kinds of people: rulers as well as subjects, Gentiles as well as Jews, and people from every social class rather than every person without exception. The context certainly opposes a narrow gospel restricted by nation, rank, or social position. But Paul's reasoning reaches deeper than a list of human classes. There is one God over humanity, one Mediator between God and men, and one ransom given for all. The universality of prayer rests upon the universality of the saving mediation we proclaim.

Universal ransom and universal salvation are distinct claims. Paul never says that all possess redemption regardless of faith. He says that the one Mediator gave Himself for all and that God's people should therefore pray without erecting boundaries where God has not erected them.

John 12 joins this universal saving provision to the cross itself. As Jesus approaches His death, He declares, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” John immediately explains, “This he said, signifying what death he should die” (John 12:32–33). The drawing is cruciform and worldwide. The Greeks who have come seeking Jesus signal the widening horizon, but the presence of Gentiles does not require “all men” to mean only some people from all nations. The lifted-up Son becomes the revealed object toward whom humanity is drawn and before whom the world's response is exposed.

One Died for All

Second Corinthians 5 brings accomplishment, representation, proclamation, and response into one passage.

“The love of Christ constraineth us,” Paul writes, “because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead.” Christ's death has a representative reach. He died and rose so that those who live should no longer live unto themselves but unto Him. Paul then announces that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,” and that God has committed to the apostles the word of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:14–19).

A definite-atonement reading may understand “all died” to mean all who died in union with Christ, so that the “all” for whom He died are the same people who now live unto Him. That reading recognizes the passage's representative and participatory language, but it also assumes the very extent it is being used to prove. Paul moves from the one who “died for all” to “they which live,” and that movement naturally permits a distinction between the reach of Christ's representative death and those who presently participate in His risen life.

The reconciling action begins with God. It is established in Christ before the apostle makes his appeal. Paul does not travel through the world persuading God to become reconciled to sinners. He announces what God has done in Christ.

Yet Paul immediately pleads, “We pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God” (verse 20).

That appeal would be unnecessary if objective reconciliation meant that every individual already possessed peace with God apart from Christ. It would be insincere if God had established no saving reconciliation in Christ for most of those who heard it. The two sides belong together. God has acted in Christ to reconcile the world, and therefore His ambassadors sincerely summon every hearer to enter the peace He has established.

Paul concludes, “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (verse 21). The saving exchange reaches its destination in a Person: “in him.” Christ entered our condemned condition without becoming sinful, bore judgment in our place, and established righteous standing in Himself. The believer becomes the righteousness of God in union with the righteous Son.

The Sheep and the Church

The universal texts must not be used to mute the particular ones.

Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). The angel declares that Jesus “shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Paul tells the Ephesian elders that God purchased the church with His own blood (Acts 20:28), and he tells husbands that “Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). Christ gave Himself to redeem and purify “a peculiar people, zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14). Isaiah's Servant bears the iniquities of many and sees the people made righteous through His saving work.

We should affirm all of it without qualification. Christ loves His sheep particularly. He gave Himself for His church intentionally. His death does not leave the existence of His redeemed people uncertain. He arose to gather, sanctify, preserve, and glorify a people who belong to Him.

The naming of a particular object cannot by itself establish exclusivity. When Paul says Christ loved him and gave Himself for him (Galatians 2:20), no one concludes that Christ therefore gave Himself for Paul alone. When Ephesians says Christ loved the church, it magnifies the Bridegroom's purposeful devotion to His bride without adding the word only.

John 10 does contain a severe contrast between sheep who hear Christ's voice and opponents who do not believe because they are not of His sheep. That passage requires fuller treatment alongside John's themes of hearing, teaching, drawing, and believing. Even there, however, “I lay down my life for the sheep” identifies those who belong to the Shepherd and receive His life; it does not require us to make the Shepherd's saving provision unavailable to the world God loved and to which He sent Him.

The universal passages tell us how broadly Christ was given. The particular passages tell us what He certainly creates in those who receive Him: a redeemed people, a gathered flock, a sanctified bride, and a living body joined to its Head.

His Sacrifice and His Intercession

Two further passages strengthen the definite-atonement argument by joining Christ's death to the blessings that follow it.

Paul asks, “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” He then moves from the delivered Son to justification, freedom from every charge, resurrection, and intercession: “It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:32–34). Owen argues that the people for whom Christ was delivered must therefore receive every saving blessing. If the Son were delivered for someone who finally perishes, the promised gift of “all things” would fail.⁴

We should accept Paul's assurance without weakening it. Everyone for whom Paul speaks in this passage receives everything necessary for final salvation. Yet the identity of the “us” is supplied by the chapter itself. Paul began with “them which are in Christ Jesus,” described those who walk after the Spirit, addressed the children and heirs of God, and spoke of those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Romans 8:32–34 establishes the absolute security of those in Christ; it does not state that Christ bears no saving relation to anyone outside that company. Nor does it turn every biblical use of for into a technical formula meaning “for this group and no other.” The promise is that God will freely give believers all things “with him.” Far from making union unnecessary, the passage locates every saving blessing in the Son with whom it is given.

Owen joins this argument to Christ's priestly intercession. In John 17 Jesus says of His disciples, “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me” (verse 9). Since Christ's sacrifice and intercession are the two acts of one priestly office, Owen reasons that they must have the same personal object. If Christ does not intercede for the world, He did not offer Himself for the world.⁵

Again, the particularity is real. Jesus is making definite petitions for the men whom the Father gave Him, and in verse 20 He extends those petitions to people who will believe through their word. But a particular prayer for His disciples does not become a declaration that no saving provision exists for anyone else. The prayer itself looks toward a saving effect in the world: Jesus asks for His people to be one “that the world may believe that thou hast sent me,” and again “that the world may know that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21, 23).

Most importantly, John himself places advocacy and propitiation side by side without making their stated objects identical. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,” he writes, before adding, “and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1–2). Christ's intercession effectually secures and applies the blessings of His work to His people; His propitiatory sacrifice is the sufficient and genuine provision for the whole world. The particularity of application does not prove an exclusivity in the sacrifice that John explicitly extends beyond “ours.”

Even Denying the Lord That Bought Them

One difficult sentence deserves attention because it crosses the boundaries that definite atonement is intended to protect.

Peter warns that false teachers will secretly bring in destructive heresies, “even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter 2:1). These people are refusers, not simply confused believers. The chapter describes them as corrupt, presumptuous, deceptive, and destined for judgment. Yet Peter says the Lord bought them.

Some interpreters understand this as the language of covenant purchase drawn from Israel's exodus. The false teachers belong outwardly to a community the Lord purchased, just as rebellious Israelites belonged to a nation God redeemed from Egypt. Others understand Lord as the Father rather than Christ, or argue that Peter speaks according to the teachers' profession rather than their actual redemption.

The covenant background is possible and should keep us from forcing the verse to carry the entire doctrine of atonement. Even so, its most direct wording remains striking. Peter does not say they claimed to have been bought; he says the Lord bought them. Nor does he appear troubled by saying both that they were bought and that they bring destruction upon themselves.

At minimum, the verse warns us against building an atonement system that cannot permit Scripture to use purchase language for anyone who finally perishes. Read alongside the clearer world-and-all passages, it fits naturally within a saving provision genuinely made in Christ but rejected by those who deny the Lord who bought them.

The Error of the Individualized Ledger

John Owen gave the most famous argument against that conclusion. He reasoned that if Christ paid the full debt of all the sins of every person, justice requires every person's discharge. If God punishes an unbeliever for sins already punished in Christ, He exacts a second payment for the same debt. Unbelief cannot solve the problem, Owen argued, because unbelief is itself a sin. If Christ died for it, it cannot prevent salvation; if He did not, then Christ did not die for all sins.⁶

That argument rightly protects the completeness of Christ's work. God does not collect an unpaid balance from believers. Faith supplies no missing satisfaction. Everyone united to Christ possesses a perfect righteousness, a completed reconciliation, and a justification against which no charge can stand.

But Owen's conclusion depends upon more than penal substitution. It depends upon an individualized commercial model in which every sin is treated as a separately measured debt, every portion of punishment is assigned to a particular account, and payment automatically produces the discharge of that individual before and apart from union with Christ.

Scripture's language of debt, price, purchase, and ransom must retain its full meaning. Christ paid a real and immeasurable cost. He bore real judgment. He satisfied divine justice. Alongside that language, Scripture presents sacrifice, covenant, representation, reconciliation, victory, participation, and union. No single commercial illustration is large enough to govern them all.

Christ's satisfaction is complete, but its completeness is located in the crucified and risen Christ, not in a ledger of detached credits assigned to individuals before they are joined to Him. Humanity stands under one of two representative heads. Outside Christ, the sinner remains in Adam, under condemnation and accountable for refusing the Light genuinely given to him. In Christ, the believer shares the Son's righteous standing, receives the reconciliation He accomplished, and can never be charged again for the guilt his Head has borne.

Faith receives Christ without completing His payment, supplementing His obedience, or persuading God to become gracious. The Spirit joins the believer to the One in whom satisfaction, righteousness, and life are already complete.

The penalty of sin is not a collection of identical units that can be counted, transferred, and charged twice. It is divine judgment upon guilty humanity. The incarnate Son entered that humanity, bore its curse as the representative Man, and arose as the Head of a new creation. His sacrifice is not divided into portions. It is the one sufficient and completed sacrifice of the Son of God, genuinely given for the world and savingly possessed by everyone united to Him.

Owen's double-payment conclusion therefore follows only if his ledger is accepted as the controlling definition of atonement. It does not follow from the representative and union-with-Christ account Scripture gives us.

Was His Blood Wasted?

The objection can now be stated in its most personal form. If Christ died for people who finally reject Him and perish, was His blood wasted upon them? Did He fail to accomplish what He intended, leaving part of His suffering fruitless because the sinner's unbelief proved stronger than His saving purpose?

No drop of Christ's blood was wasted, because His death accomplished exactly what the Father sent Him to accomplish. He bore sin's judgment, satisfied divine justice, defeated death, established reconciliation and life in Himself, and became the sufficient Saviour genuinely given for the world. The atonement was never intended to cause every person irresistibly to believe. It established in Christ the saving reality into which every believer enters, secured the people who live in Him, and provides the righteous foundation upon which God summons every sinner to be reconciled.

The refusal of some leaves that accomplishment intact. John 3 presents unbelief as the culpable response of people who love darkness when the Light comes to them, rather than as a defect in the Son's work. The Son was sent to save the world; condemnation arises from the sinner's response to that saving gift. When he refuses the genuinely given Son, his refusal exposes his love of darkness and leaves him beneath the condemnation from which Christ would have delivered him. The blood remains effectual in the Christ outside whom the unbeliever has chosen to remain.

What We May Say to Every Hearer

The question “For whom did Christ die?” is not asked only in theological classrooms. It reaches the pulpit, the hospital room, the jail, the deathbed, and the quiet conversation with a sinner who wonders whether the gospel is truly addressed to him.

May we tell that person merely that Christ died for sinners and that perhaps he will discover himself to have been included if irresistible grace eventually causes him to believe? Must we direct him away from the saving intention of the cross and toward a bare command whose hidden purpose may be to expose rather than deliver him?

The apostles spoke more openly.

The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. Jesus tasted death for every man. He gave Himself a ransom for all. One died for all. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. Christ is the propitiation not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

We may therefore tell every person, without examining a hidden decree, “Christ died for you.” We may say more: “God loved the world of which you are a part and gave His Son so that you might not perish. Christ has borne sin's judgment, conquered death, and established reconciliation in Himself. Come to the Light. Be reconciled to God. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

That promise contains no hidden qualification. Whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. Whoever comes receives the crucified and risen Son in whom salvation already stands complete, rather than a possibility waiting to be completed.

And whoever refuses Him remains condemned. John does not say he is condemned because no Saviour was given for him, no atonement was made for him, or no saving mercy was ever intended toward him. He is condemned already “because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Light came into the world, and he loved darkness rather than Light.

The cross is sufficient for every sinner, intended as God's saving gift to the world, and effective in everyone who believes. Its accomplishment is complete. Its provision is universal. Its benefits are possessed in Christ. Its application is the work of the Spirit.

The sinner contributes nothing but his need and entrusts himself wholly to the Saviour. The Spirit joins him to Christ, and in Christ he receives righteousness, reconciliation, redemption, and life.

God gave His Son for the world.

The invitation means what it says.

Notes

Canons of Dort, Second Main Point of Doctrine, Articles 3, 5, and 6, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort?language=en.

Canons of Dort, Second Main Point of Doctrine, Article 8, at the link in note 1.

Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 8.5 and 8.8, https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-8.

John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, Book II, chapter 7, especially his appeal to Romans 8:32–34, https://ccel.org/ccel/owen/deathofdeath/deathofdeath.i.vii.vii.html.

Owen, Death of Death, Book II, chapter 7.

Owen, Death of Death, Book III, chapter 7, https://ccel.org/ccel/owen/deathofdeath/deathofdeath.i.ix.vii.html.

Chapter 13 — The Shadow Doctrine of Reprobation

“Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel; Thus ye speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?

“Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:10–11).

Israel was already beneath judgment. The people were not innocent, confused observers wondering why tragedy had overtaken them. Their transgressions and sins were upon them, and they knew they were wasting away beneath the consequences. Yet God did not answer their despair by telling them that destruction had always been His highest purpose for them. He swore by His own life that He had no pleasure in the death of the wicked, called them to turn from their evil ways, and asked, “Why will ye die?”

Those words disclose more than the abstract proposition that repentance is morally preferable to wickedness. They reveal God's disposition toward the people He addresses. He does not delight in their death. He desires their turning. He commands them to turn, and He places life before them as the end toward which the warning calls.

Ezekiel 18 says the same thing at greater length. The wicked man who turns from his wickedness shall live. The righteous man who turns to iniquity shall die. God asks, “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” He concludes, “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye” (Ezekiel 18:23, 32).

The immediate setting concerns covenant judgment and physical death, but that setting does not make God's declared disposition unreal. Temporal judgment remains divine judgment. The God who speaks is not presenting a false countenance to Israel while secretly desiring the opposite of what He swears. His words reveal His character: God righteously judges rebellion, but He desires the wicked to turn and live.

That declaration creates a serious difficulty for the doctrine standing in the shadow of unconditional individual election.

The Shadow Cast by Election

Reprobation does not receive the attention in popular Calvinistic preaching that election receives. Election is presented as the comforting truth that God chose particular sinners before they were born, gave Christ specifically to redeem them, and will irresistibly bring them to faith and glory. Reprobation is more likely to remain in the theological classroom, mentioned cautiously when someone asks what that choice means for everyone else.

Yet if God unconditionally selected only certain individuals to receive the faith that infallibly saves, then He also decided not to give that faith to the rest. On this account, the non-elect are people whose refusal God determined to leave certain, going beyond the mere foresight of that refusal. Within the system, their exclusion from effectual grace belongs to the same eternal decree by which the elect are included.

R. C. Sproul candidly acknowledged the connection. If all salvation rests upon eternal election and not everyone is elect, then, by what he called the “resistless logic” of the position, there are people whom God eternally chose not to elect. That non-election is reprobation.¹

The logic should be conceded. We cannot affirm unconditional individual election to saving faith and then pretend that the unelected majority simply disappeared from the decree. Reprobation is the shadow cast by that doctrine of election.

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SIDEBAR: Reprobation Reprobation names God's eternal purpose concerning those who are not elect. Reformed formulations differ in emphasis. Some speak more actively of people ordained to condemnation; others stress that God passes them over, leaves them in their chosen sin, and condemns them justly for that sin rather than producing their unbelief in the same manner that He produces faith in the elect. That asymmetry is real and should be honored. The difficulty examined here remains: if no sinner can believe without irresistible regeneration, and God eternally determines to give that sole saving remedy only to selected people, His nonselection of everyone else makes their continued unbelief certain. Reprobation is therefore not an unrelated addition to unconditional individual election. It is the consequence cast by a saving choice which identifies beforehand those who alone will receive the grace that makes faith possible. See the Glossary: Reprobation; Election; Supralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism.

The answer of this book is not to retain the premise while hiding its consequence. Scripture reveals God's election of a people in Christ and His predestination of those in the Chosen One to adoption, holiness, service, conformity, inheritance, and glory. It does not reveal an earlier selection of which unbelievers will be caused to believe and which will be denied every possibility of doing so.

The shadow is pastoral as well as logical. A congregation may hear for months about the wonder of being personally chosen while hearing little about what the doctrine implies for the neighbor, child, or visitor who is not chosen. But the gospel is preached to both, and both are commanded to repent. According to the system, however, God has eternally determined to grant one the only grace that can produce faith and to withhold it from the other.

That is the teaching we must examine.

What Reformed Theology Actually Teaches

Fairness requires precision. Reformed theology does not ordinarily teach that God creates fresh wickedness in the non-elect in exactly the way He creates spiritual life in the elect. It rejects what is called equal ultimacy.

Calvin nevertheless defines predestination as God's eternal determination concerning every person and says that some are preordained to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. He later writes, “Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates,” because God is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance appointed to His children.²

The Westminster Confession says that God chose some people to life and passed by “the rest of mankind,” extending or withholding mercy according to His will and ordaining them to dishonor and wrath “for their sin.”³ The Canons of Dort speak even more exactly. God decreed to leave the non-elect in the misery into which they had fallen by their own fault, “not to grant them saving faith and the grace of conversion,” and finally to condemn them for their unbelief and their other sins. Dort immediately denies that this makes God the author of sin and calls Him its righteous Judge.⁴

The Second London Baptist Confession uses softer language, saying that some are predestined to eternal life while others are “left to act in their sin to their just condemnation.” It also says that the elect alone are redeemed by Christ and effectually called by the Spirit.⁵

These statements join two claims that must both be heard. The reprobate are real sinners who act willingly and are condemned justly. They are not innocent people dragged into hell despite their love for God. Yet God also determined not to grant them the saving faith and conversion that He grants irresistibly to the elect.

The asymmetry concerns the manner of God's action. He acts positively to regenerate the elect, giving them a new heart and producing faith. He passes over the non-elect, leaving them to follow the corrupt desires they already possess. Their condemnation arises from their sin, not from an innocent failure to possess a gift God owed them.

God is not morally responsible for evil in the same way as the creature who loves and commits it. Judicial hardening presupposes genuine guilt, and no sinner can stand before God and claim a right to grace.

But the passive expression passing over does not make the eternal decision passive. If every fallen person is unable to believe without irresistible regeneration, and if God eternally decided to regenerate only some, then the unbelief of the rest goes beyond permission in the ordinary sense that God allows responsible creatures to resist His grace. Their continuation in unbelief is made certain by His decision to withhold the only grace that could ever bring it to an end.

God owes grace to no one. The disputed issue is whether Scripture teaches this account of His relationship to the people He commands to believe.

Two Wills Without Double Talk

Answering that question requires preserving legitimate distinctions within the will of God.

The cross prevents such an easy answer. God forbade murder, false witness, betrayal, and judicial injustice. Yet Jesus was delivered by “the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” and Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel did what His hand and counsel determined beforehand to be done (Acts 2:23; 4:27–28). God purposed the saving death of His Son without morally approving the wicked intentions of the people who killed Him.

God may command what righteousness requires while permitting a creature to disobey. He may take no pleasure in evil considered in itself while permitting it within a purpose that remains righteous. He may delay judgment patiently while certainly appointing it. He may harden an established rebel without becoming the author of the rebellion He judges.

Neither side in this debate believes that everything God morally desires must be irresistibly produced. The disagreement is not whether God can desire one thing and permit another. It concerns what He does in relation to His stated desire that sinners turn and live.

The position defended in this book is not that God stands at a helpless distance while autonomous human wills determine whether He may save. God creates the saving encounter. He gives the Son, reveals the truth, brings the Word near, draws the sinner, enlightens his understanding, and convicts him of sin and of the truth of Christ. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). There is no saving faith without revelation and no saving possibility apart from grace.

Yet grace does not need to believe in the sinner's place in order to remain grace. God may address a responsible person, enable a genuine response, and permit that person to resist without surrendering His throne. The sinner supplies no Saviour, righteousness, merit, life, or spiritual power. He either entrusts himself to the Christ whom God has brought near or refuses Him.

The Calvinistic account says something more. God could give the effectual grace that infallibly produces faith in every sinner, but He has eternally chosen not to do so. He nevertheless commands all to believe and, according to many Calvinists, sincerely desires their salvation in another sense.

That construction is not a formal contradiction once different senses of willing are carefully defined. It is internally coherent after its premises are granted. The issue is whether Scripture gives us those premises and locates God's higher purpose where the system places it.

“I Would ... Ye Would Not”

Jesus' lament over Jerusalem carries the same moral reality as Ezekiel's appeal:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37).

The strongest restricted Reformed interpretation observes that Jesus says He would have gathered Jerusalem's “children,” while the “ye” who would not may refer particularly to the city's leaders. The scribes and Pharisees had shut the kingdom of heaven against men, neither entering themselves nor allowing those who were entering to go in (Matthew 23:13). John Gill also understood the gathering as the outward ministry of Christ and the temporal preservation Jerusalem refused rather than an inward desire to regenerate every inhabitant.⁶

Those observations should not be brushed aside. The grammar does distinguish the children from the resisting “ye,” and Jerusalem's coming desolation controls the immediate setting. But neither point empties the lament of resisted compassion. Christ speaks as Jerusalem's rejected King. He gathers the city's long history of killing God's messengers, His repeated desire to shelter, the leaders' opposition, and the judgment now approaching into one brokenhearted sentence.

Even if the leaders hindered the gathering of others, their own resistance remains real. Even if the shelter included preservation from temporal ruin, Christ genuinely desired what their refusal prevented them from receiving. “Ye would not” is not theatrical language spoken over people whose contrary response alone fulfilled the saving intention Christ held toward them.

The pattern appears throughout Scripture. God tells Israel, “Oh that my people had hearkened unto me,” and names the good He would have done had they listened (Psalm 81:13–16). Through Isaiah He asks what more could have been done for His vineyard and laments the wild grapes produced where He looked for righteousness (Isaiah 5:1–7). He says, “In returning and rest shall ye be saved,” and then adds, “and ye would not” (Isaiah 30:15). Jesus tells His opponents that He speaks “that ye might be saved,” but they “will not come to me” that they might have life (John 5:34, 40). Paul describes God stretching out His hands all day to a disobedient and contradicting people (Romans 10:21).

None of these passages makes human freedom independent of God. Together they establish something more biblical and pastoral: God truly calls, truly extends mercy, and truly grieves over culpable refusal.

Not Willing That Any Should Perish

Paul commands that prayers be made for all people, including kings and all in authority, because God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” There is one God and one Mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus, “who gave himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:1–6).

The strongest restricted reading takes “all men” to mean all kinds of people. The explicit reference to rulers supports the conclusion that no social rank lies outside the church's prayers or the gospel's reach. Yet Paul's reasoning does not stop with a catalog of classes. One God stands over humanity, one Mediator stands between God and humanity, and the ransom He gave grounds a saving summons that crosses every boundary. The passage naturally declares the breadth of God's saving desire without teaching that every person will finally be saved.

Peter says that the Lord is “longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). A Calvinistic reading may restrict “any” and “all” to the elect or to the beloved community addressed by the letter. The pronoun us-ward deserves acknowledgment, and this verse need not carry the entire doctrine. Nevertheless, Peter addresses a professing community that still receives warnings, and he interprets the apparent delay of judgment as saving patience. The following verse says the day of the Lord will come. Patience does not cancel judgment; it creates space for repentance before judgment arrives.

At Athens Paul adds the universal command. God “now commandeth all men every where to repent” because He has appointed a day of judgment and given assurance by raising Christ from the dead (Acts 17:30–31). A command by itself establishes duty rather than everything about the commander's disposition. Read beside Ezekiel's oath, Christ's lament, God's outstretched hands, His patience, and the universal provision of the preceding chapter, however, this command is not a hollow summons. God desires every sinner to repent and be saved. He has given His Son for the world and commands every person to receive the mercy brought near in Him.

When God Hardens

Scripture also says that God hardens, blinds, gives people over, and sends delusion. Those actions must not be reduced to bare foreknowledge.

But the biblical order matters. Pharaoh repeatedly encounters God's command and power, resists them, and hardens his heart. God then judicially confirms and employs that resistance. Romans 1 describes people who suppress the truth, exchange God's glory, and refuse to retain Him in their knowledge; “wherefore” God gives them over. Second Thessalonians 2 speaks of people who “received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved”; “for this cause” God sends them strong delusion. Romans 11 describes branches broken off because of unbelief and says they may be grafted in again if they do not remain in unbelief.

The sons of Eli provide a severe example. They refused their father's rebuke “because the LORD would slay them” (1 Samuel 2:25). God does more here than observe their decision. Judgment has reached the point at which He does not restrain them from the sin through which their destruction comes. But the chapter has already described their greed, sacrilege, sexual sin, and contempt for the offering of the LORD. God's judicial purpose does not create innocent unbelief; it brings entrenched rebellion to judgment.

Deuteronomy 28:63 says that, as the LORD rejoiced to do Israel good, He would rejoice to destroy an unrepentant covenant people. That statement must stand beside Ezekiel rather than being used to erase it. God takes no pleasure in death considered as the ruin of His creature, yet He is neither defeated nor morally reluctant in the execution of righteous judgment. He delights in justice without revealing that He created the rebel so that rebellion could supply an occasion for destruction.

The pattern is revelation, resistance, warning, patience, and judgment. Hardening is God's righteous act, but it is judicial. We should not turn a judgment upon resisted truth into an eternal explanation for why the sinner could never have received the truth in the first place.

Which Purpose Displays His Glory?

John Piper offers one of the strongest modern defenses of the Calvinistic distinction between God's revealed saving desire and His sovereign decree. He offers a systematic explanation for every universal text rather than casually dismissing them. He affirms that God has compassion upon all people, does not delight in the perishing of the impenitent, and in a real sense desires the salvation of all.

He then asks why that desire does not result in universal salvation. His answer is that God values something more highly than saving every person: “the manifestation of the full range of God's glory in wrath and mercy” and the humbling of human pride through unconditional election. God's compassion for the non-elect is real, but a higher purpose prevents that compassion from becoming a decision to regenerate them.⁷

That is a serious argument. It recognizes the biblical complexity of God's willing, refuses to make His compassion hypocritical, and rightly insists that God remains glorious in judgment. It also exposes the precise point of disagreement.

The choice is not between God's glory and human glory, as though any grace-enabled response transfers the credit for salvation from Christ to the believer. Nor is it between sovereign grace and an autonomous will that generates faith from its own resources. The sinner believes only because God has created the gracious encounter through His Son, Word, drawing, illumination, and conviction. The sinner who believes has nothing of which to boast. He has received the truth God brought near and entrusted himself to the Saviour who alone gives life.

The actual question is whether Scripture teaches that the full display of God's glory required Him to withhold from most people every saving possibility and then judge them for the unbelief that inevitably continued. Piper's answer can be made internally coherent, but coherence does not establish the premises. We must ask what Scripture says humanity was created for, what hell was prepared for, and whether wrath is presented as an original purpose for a human class or as God's righteous response to rebellion.

What Was Humanity Created For?

The Bible does not begin with two groups of human beings assigned to two eternal destinies. It begins with a good world given by a generous God.

God makes humanity in His image and gives the man and woman a shared vocation within creation. They are made to know Him, receive life from Him, bear His likeness, and exercise dominion beneath His rule. Eden is not a trap arranged to divide humanity into the saved and the damned. It is abundant gift. The command concerning the forbidden tree is real, and death is truly threatened, but life precedes the threat. Communion precedes exile. Blessing precedes curse.

God did not create from loneliness or need, for He lacks nothing. He freely chose to create humanity for image-bearing communion with Himself and faithful participation in His righteous rule. The biblical story ends with that purpose fulfilled: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people” (Revelation 21:3).

Rebellion enters that good world through humanity's desire for autonomy. Evil is not a defect God placed within creation so that judgment would have an object. Humanity mistrusts God's goodness, grasps the authority to define good and evil apart from Him, and fractures the communion for which it was made.

God's grief in Genesis 6 confirms the moral order. When the thoughts of the human heart become continually evil, “it grieved him at his heart” (Genesis 6:6). That grief does not mean God was surprised, had miscalculated, or had lost control. It is His faithful response to a creation that has become corrupt. A God who secretly approved wickedness as wickedness would not grieve over it. Divine grief tells us that human rebellion is genuinely contrary to what pleases Him, even while His sovereignty remains capable of judging it and directing history toward redemption.

Romans 8 carries the same creation story forward. Creation was subjected to futility, “not willingly,” but “in hope,” and now groans while waiting for deliverance (Romans 8:20–23). The world is not abandoned to meaninglessness. Its frustration restrains the lie that autonomy can provide eternal life, and its groaning anticipates liberation through the redeemed humanity Christ is bringing to glory.

Creation begins as gift, suffers beneath humanity's rebellion, is preserved through judgment and mercy, and waits for renewal through the Second Adam. Christ redeems a people within the renewal of creation itself and restores humanity's place within God's purpose. The first Adam grasped autonomy; the Second Adam obeyed the Father, bore the curse, defeated death, and arose as the Head of a new humanity. The story proceeds toward a renewed world in which the servants of God see His face, bear His name, and reign with Him (Revelation 22:3–5).

Jesus' description of final judgment contains a revealing asymmetry. To those at His right hand the King says, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34). To those at His left He says, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (verse 41).

The kingdom is prepared for human heirs. The fire is prepared for the devil and his angels.

Final condemnation nevertheless remains deliberate, everlasting, and just. Jesus plainly says that rebellious people enter everlasting punishment. But He does not describe hell as prepared for a class of human beings whom God created for that destination. Humans enter the judgment prepared for the devil and his angels when they persist in the devil's rebellion and refuse the King for whose fellowship and service humanity was made.

Romans 9 observes a similar restraint. Paul explicitly says that God prepared the vessels of mercy beforehand for glory. When he speaks of vessels of wrath “fitted to destruction,” he does not explicitly name God as the one who fitted them. Although that difference cannot settle the doctrine of reprobation by itself, it agrees with the larger scriptural pattern. God positively prepares a people for glory in Christ. He endures rebels with much longsuffering and judges them righteously when they persist in unbelief.

God is glorified in that judgment. No condemned sinner will prove Him unjust, weak, or defeated. But judgment and redemption do not therefore become two equal reasons for which God created humanity. Communion is the positive purpose. Wrath answers the rebellion that violates it. Judgment removes what will not be reconciled to God's righteous order; it does not reveal that God created human rebellion in order to have something to punish.

No Contrary Intention Behind the Call

God desires every sinner to repent and be saved. That statement does not mean He has decreed universal salvation, that He will suspend righteous judgment forever, or that His sovereignty waits helplessly upon unaided human will. It means that the words He has revealed may be received without a hidden reversal.

“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God,” Moses said, “but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29). That distinction should teach us humility about what God has left unrevealed and confidence in what He has made known. A theological system may distinguish aspects of God's will where Scripture requires such a distinction, as the cross itself requires us to do, but it may not use an inferred secret decree to reverse the disclosed character of God's call.

The church therefore does not need to look behind the gospel for God's true disposition toward the hearer. God has not withheld Christ from the people He commands to receive Christ. As the preceding chapter established, the Son was given for the world, tasted death for every man, and became the propitiation for the sins of the whole world. Nor has God left the sinner without gracious initiative. The Father draws. The Word reveals Christ. The Spirit convicts and enlightens. God brings the sinner into a real encounter with the truth and calls him to entrust himself to the Son.

If the sinner believes, he has not created salvation, completed Christ's work, or contributed merit. The Spirit joins him to the risen Son, and every saving blessing is received in Christ. If he refuses, his condemnation does not fulfill a secret intention contrary to the gospel addressed to him. Light came, mercy was brought near, and he would not come that he might have life.

Reprobation is the shadow of unconditional individual election because, once the saving choice is placed in a secret selection of which unbelievers will be caused to believe, a secret non-selection of everyone else necessarily follows. The revealed call must then be interpreted beneath a higher contrary decision not to grant most hearers the faith being commanded. Scripture requires no such shadow behind the gospel.

God created humanity for life with Him and prepared His kingdom for human heirs from the foundation of the world. Everlasting fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. Those who finally enter it do so as rebels who refused the God who called them to turn and live, not as human beings fulfilling the hidden purpose for which they were created.

The judgment is real. The warning is urgent. The invitation is sincere.

“Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?”

Notes

R. C. Sproul, “Is Double Predestination Biblical?” Ligonier Ministries, https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/double-predestination-biblical.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.21.5 and III.23.1, Henry Beveridge translation, https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes/institutes.v.xxii.html and https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes/institutes.v.xxiv.html.

Westminster Confession of Faith 3.7, https://www.opc.org/wcf.html.

Canons of Dort, First Main Point of Doctrine, Article 15, https://www.rca.org/about/theology/creeds-and-confessions/canons-of-dort/.

Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 3.3 and 3.6, https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-3.

John Gill, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, comments on Matthew 23:37, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/gill/matthew/23.htm.

John Piper, “Are There Two Wills in God?” Desiring God, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/are-there-two-wills-in-god.

Part Five

The Texts, the Labels, and the Pulpit

Chapter 14 — The Texts That Seem to Settle the Question

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

There are verses that seem to end a theological argument as soon as they are quoted. Their language is so direct, their divine action so prominent, and their saving result so certain that any further discussion can appear evasive. John 6:37 is one of those verses. The Father gives people to the Son, all whom He gives come, and every person who comes is received. A few verses later Jesus says that no one can come unless the Father draws him, and then promises to raise that person at the last day. Near the end of the discourse He says that the Spirit gives life, that the flesh profits nothing, and that no one can come unless coming has been granted by the Father.

Read together, those statements form the strongest case we have yet considered for the Calvinistic order. They make claims extending beyond salvation's divine origin to its accomplishment and application. They appear to describe why one person believes while another does not. The believer comes because of the Father's gift, drawing, and grant; the unbeliever departs because none of those saving actions occurred for him. If the Spirit alone gives life and the flesh profits nothing, it seems natural to conclude that the Spirit must first make the chosen sinner alive so that he will certainly come.

Other texts appear to confirm the same order. “As many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). The Philippians were graciously given “to believe” (Philippians 1:29). God must grant repentance to those who oppose the truth (2 Timothy 2:25). Everyone presently believing that Jesus is the Christ “is born of God” (1 John 5:1). Taken together, the verses seem to form a wall around the doctrine: appointed to life, granted belief, given repentance, birth made the cause of believing, and drawing made so certain that resurrection follows.

We should feel the weight of that argument before answering it. If our theology survives only by weakening give into permit, draw into mention, ordain into dispose oneself, or born of God into a religious title bestowed by human decision, then it does not deserve to survive. God acts first. His action is necessary. The people described actually come, believe, repent, and receive life. No serious reading of these passages may evade those truths.

But three claims must not be collapsed into one another. The first is divine priority: God acts before and upon the sinner. The second is saving realization: the people under discussion actually come, believe, repent, or stand as people born of God. The third is irresistible causation: God selected particular unbelievers, regenerated them while they were unbelieving, and thereby determined their faith.

The first two claims may be explicit where the third remains an inference. That distinction does not weaken grace. It asks only that the causal mechanism be demonstrated from the text before the text is made to carry it.

Bread in the Wilderness

John 6 does not begin with an abstract discussion of election. It begins at Passover, in the wilderness, with a hungry multitude and a sign.

Jesus feeds five thousand men with five barley loaves and two small fishes. The people recognize that something extraordinary has happened and identify Jesus as the promised Prophet, but they misunderstand the sign so completely that they attempt to seize Him and make Him king. Jesus withdraws, crosses the sea, and is found the next day by a crowd still searching for Him.

Their search might look like coming to Christ, but Jesus exposes it: “Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled” (John 6:26). They saw the event without receiving it as a sign. They wanted the bread while refusing what the bread revealed.

When they ask what they must do to work the works of God, Jesus directs them to belief in the One God has sent. Their immediate answer is astonishing: “What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee?” (verse 30). They have crossed the sea to find the Man who fed them miraculously, and now they demand a sign so that they may believe. They invoke Moses and the manna, as though the bread in their own hands had told them nothing.

This is the setting in which Jesus says that no one can come unless the Father draws him. The crowd is not devoid of revelation. They have the Scriptures, Moses, the sign, the words of Christ, and Christ Himself standing before them. Their unbelief is not innocent ignorance produced by God's silence. It is a failure to receive what God has shown.

The preceding chapter of John has already described the same crisis. The Father has borne witness through John the Baptist, Christ's works, the Scriptures, and Moses, but Jesus tells His opponents that the Father's Word does not abide in them because they do not believe the One He sent. “Search the scriptures,” He says, “for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life” (John 5:39–40).

John therefore places divine witness, human refusal, and inability within the same moral world. We should not reduce “cannot” to “will not,” as though fallen people retain an untouched natural power they merely happen not to exercise. But neither should we detach their inability from the self-rule, false loves, and resistant hearing through which it appears. They cannot come because they will not receive the Father's testimony in the Son, and they will not come because bread, ancestry, approval, and control remain more desirable to them than Christ as He truly is.

No sinner escapes that bondage by looking deeper into himself. The Father must act.

Coming Is Believing

Jesus defines the coming of which He speaks:

“I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).

Coming is believing reception of Christ. It is not physical nearness, because the crowd is physically near and remains unbelieving. It is not a work added to faith, because Jesus places coming and believing in parallel. Nor is it a discovery that spiritual life has already been received. The person comes to the Bread because life is found in Him.

That parallel continues through the discourse. Jesus tells the crowd, “ye also have seen me, and believe not” (verse 36). He then promises to receive the person who comes (verse 37). He describes the Father's will as the salvation of everyone who sees the Son and believes on Him (verse 40). He says that no one can come without the Father's drawing (verse 44), that everyone who hears and learns from the Father comes (verse 45), and that the believer has everlasting life (verse 47).

The Father does not carry people into Christ's vicinity while leaving faith unexplained. He brings them to believe in the Son. Yet the faith remains the person's response to Christ. The Father does not believe in his place, and the sinner does not create the Christ whom he receives.

All That the Father Gives

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me.” The certainty of that statement should be allowed to stand without qualification. What the Father gives will come.

The first clause presents the gift collectively. John uses the neuter singular expression “all that,” as though the Father were entrusting one whole gift to the Son. The second clause turns to the individual: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” The gift is a people, but that people consists of actual persons, each of whom comes and is received.

The verse is sometimes treated as though the verb give already contains the entire Calvinistic order. Calvin wrote that those whom the Father chose He regenerates and gives to the Son so that they obey the gospel.¹ That is clear theology, but it is more than a translation. Jesus does not use the words choose or regenerate in the passage. The Father's giving may be related to election and regeneration within a larger system, but the relationship must be established rather than hidden inside the ordinary word give.

John Murray, while defending irresistible grace, offered a more careful account. He treated the Father's giving and drawing as two sides of one saving event: drawing describes the Father's action upon people, while giving describes His presentation of them to the Son.² That observation helps us because it moves the discussion from a secret decree in eternity to the Father's actual bringing of people to Christ.

The central question then becomes: How does Jesus describe that bringing?

Before answering it, notice the parallel between verses 39 and 40. Jesus says that the Father's will is that He lose nothing of all the Father has given Him, but raise it at the last day. He then says that the Father's will is that everyone who sees the Son and believes on Him have everlasting life, “and I will raise him up at the last day.”

These are not two groups. The Father's gift and the believing people are the same saving reality viewed from different sides. From the Father's side they are given to the Son. From their side they behold the Son and believe. From Christ's side they are received, preserved, and raised.

The emphasis is wonderfully pastoral. Christ does not explain the Father's gift so that a trembling sinner will wonder whether he belongs to a hidden class. He says, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” The Father's sovereignty does not narrow the welcome. It secures it. The person who comes will not discover that he misunderstood the invitation, arrived without a warrant, or desired a Saviour who had not desired him. Christ will receive him.

No One Can Come

The murmuring begins when Jesus says that He is the Bread who came down from heaven. The people know His human family and assume that their familiarity qualifies them to judge His origin. Jesus answers:

“Murmur not among yourselves. No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:43–44).

The inability is real. “No man can come” means that no one is able to come. A sinner cannot reason his way to Christ from neutral premises, reform himself into spiritual life, or produce faith by staring harder at the same sign he has already bent to his desires. The Father must draw him.

The drawing is also savingly effective in the person described. The same person whom the Father draws is the one Christ promises to raise. We should not answer Calvinism by pretending that Jesus speaks of a weak appeal that leaves the sinner untouched. The Father personally and successfully brings this person to the Son.

Yet successful does not automatically mean regenerative or irresistible. A word may describe the completed saving relation without explaining every causal movement within it. If I say that a teacher taught a student to read, I describe an effective act that includes the student's actual learning; I have not said that the teacher secretly altered the student's nature so that learning became unavoidable. Jesus does not leave us to invent an analogy, however, because He immediately explains His own meaning.

Drawn by Being Taught

“It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me” (John 6:45).

Jesus quotes Isaiah 54:13. In Isaiah, Zion is pictured as a barren and afflicted woman who will be restored after the suffering of the Servant described in Isaiah 53. Her children will be taught by the LORD, established in righteousness, and given great peace. Jesus places that promised divine teaching in the present crisis and identifies Himself as its destination. The person who has truly heard and learned from the Father comes to the Son.

The word “therefore” is important. Jesus does not mention divine teaching as an unrelated truth placed beside drawing. He has said that the Father must draw, quotes the promise that people will be taught by God, and concludes that everyone who hears and learns from the Father comes. The Father draws by teaching people concerning His Son.³

This teaching is more than exposure to information. The crowd has heard the sounds Jesus made, understood enough to take offense, and remained unbelieving. The person of verse 45 has heard and learned from the Father. Revelation has reached its intended realization in him, and he comes.

But hearing and learning should not be renamed before we have allowed them to speak. Jesus names the Father's action as teaching and the person's response as hearing and learning. God supplies the truth. God sends the Son. God bears witness through Scripture, signs, words, and the Spirit's illumination. God presses that truth upon the conscience, confronting the hearer with the authority and mercy of the Father through the proposition. Yet the hearer truly learns. God does not learn for him.

Successful learning and irresistible regeneration are not synonyms. The verse assures us that everyone who has truly heard and learned from the Father comes, but it does not say that the Father first made an unbeliever alive so that learning became inevitable. That explanation comes from the system; Jesus' explanation is teaching received.

Verse 46 guards us from imagining that this teaching bypasses Christ: “Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.” People do not come to the Son after receiving a private vision of the Father elsewhere. The Son alone has seen the Father and reveals Him. The Father draws people through the witness concentrated in the incarnate Word.

This accords with the principle Paul states in Romans: “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). There is no faith without revelation. The sinner cannot invent the object of faith or create the saving encounter. John 6 deepens the point: saving hearing is the fruit of the Father's personal teaching and drawing.

Draw All Men

The verb translated draw can describe strong physical action. John uses it of drawing a sword and hauling a net; Acts uses it of dragging people before authorities. Those uses show the force of the Father's drawing. Yet a sword cannot hear, a net cannot learn, and a person drawn through revelation is not an inanimate object.

John later uses the same verb when Jesus says, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32). We need not make that verse settle every question about the scope or result of the drawing in John 6. A Calvinist may argue that “all” means all kinds of people rather than every individual, especially because Greeks have just come seeking Jesus. Even so, John 12 prevents us from treating draw as though its lexical meaning were “regenerate irresistibly.” The nature of the drawing must be learned from each context, and in John 6 Jesus describes the person successfully drawn as one who has heard and learned from the Father.

The grace is effective in the believer, but its efficacy is not a mechanism hidden behind the Word. The Father teaches; the person hears and learns; he comes to Christ; and Christ will raise him.

The Spirit Gives Life

The discourse grows harder when Jesus speaks of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. The crowd wanted a supplier of bread, perhaps even a king who would restore the nation, but Jesus offers Himself as the Bread and announces that His flesh will be given “for the life of the world” (John 6:51). They may not take His gifts while refusing His person and death. They must receive life wholly from Him.

Many who had been called disciples recoil. Jesus answers:

“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63).

The Spirit alone gives life. Human resources cannot produce it, and a fleshly appropriation of Christ cannot secure it. Yet Jesus does not place the Spirit's work behind dispensable words. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” His words reveal the Bread, expose false desire, summon faith, and present the Son in whom life is found.

Some hear and refuse. “There are some of you that believe not,” Jesus says, and John tells us that He knew their unbelief from the beginning. Jesus continues, “Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (verses 64–65).

Coming must be genuinely granted. Jesus is not saying that God merely permits people who already possess an independent saving capacity to use it. The Father must give what flesh cannot produce. But the discourse has already told us what the Father does: He gives the Bread, bears witness, teaches, draws, and brings people to the Son. Verse 65 gathers that divine priority into a necessary grant; it does not replace the earlier explanation with an unnamed regeneration.

Nor should we reverse the logic. “No one can come unless it is given” establishes a necessary condition. It does not state that everyone who finally refuses received no true divine address, no gracious drawing, or no opportunity to learn. These departing disciples had heard words that were spirit and life. Their stated failure is unbelief. The further claim that God withheld from them the only grace that could have made any other response possible is not found in the sentence.

John 6 therefore gives us a sequence as gracious as anything Calvinism seeks to protect. The Father sends and seals the Son. He gives the Bread and bears witness, then teaches, draws, and grants. The sinner hears and learns; he comes and believes, eating and drinking. The Spirit gives the life that flesh can never produce. Christ receives the believer and loses none of the Father's gift, but raises him at the last day.

The sinner does not generate the drawing, teach himself the truth, create faith's object, or give himself life. But neither does Jesus say that the Father regenerates him before he believes. The Father draws and teaches. The sinner hears, learns, and believes. The Spirit gives life in the Son.

As Many as Were Ordained

Acts 13:48 seems even more direct because Luke states the result in a single sentence:

“And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.”

Some non-Calvinists have tried to settle the verse by arguing that the participle translated “ordained” must be read in the middle voice and understood as people disposing or positioning themselves toward eternal life. That reading is grammatically possible according to some interpreters, but it is too uncertain to bear the weight often placed upon it. “Ordained” or “appointed” is a natural translation, and the prophetic setting makes God the likely implied agent.⁴

We should therefore grant the stronger reading. God had ordered particular Gentile hearers toward eternal life, and those people believed. The appointment is real and personal. The corporate inclusion of the nations does not make the individuals disappear.

The narrative tells us what that appointment is accomplishing. Paul and Barnabas first preach to the Jews, some of whom contradict and blaspheme. The apostles answer, “seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles” (Acts 13:46). They then quote Isaiah 49, where God appoints His Servant as a light to the nations and salvation to the ends of the earth. The Gentiles hear that the promised salvation includes them, rejoice, glorify the Word, and believe.

Luke places culpable rejection and gracious ordering beside one another. The Jews put the Word from themselves and judge themselves unworthy. The believing Gentiles do not enter eternal life because of ethnic privilege, moral superiority, or an accidental expansion of Paul's ministry. God had ordered the Servant, the mission, the Word, and these hearers toward eternal life.

The verse does not tell us when that personal appointment occurred, define its relation to foreknowledge, or say that God regenerated these Gentiles before they believed. They were appointed to eternal life, not explicitly appointed to believe, and when the saving Word reached them, they believed and received in Christ the life toward which God had directed them.

Acts 13:48 therefore supports divine initiative more strongly than a mere-opportunity reading permits, but it supports the Calvinistic causal order less completely than is often assumed. Appointed is not thereby made a technical synonym for unconditionally elected, regenerated, or irresistibly caused.

Granted to Believe—and to Suffer

Paul tells the Philippians:

“For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29).

The grammar includes both believing and suffering within what has been graciously given. We should not weaken the verse by saying that God granted only information, an opportunity, or a bare capacity to believe. Paul includes the Philippians' believing itself within the gift.

He is also speaking to a particular church in a particular conflict. He calls them to live worthily of the gospel, stand together, strive together for the faith, and remain unafraid before their opponents. They had been graciously granted to believe, and in the opposition they were then enduring, they had also been granted to suffer for Christ. The verse does not promise that every Christian will suffer in the same manner merely because both gifts appear in one sentence.

Acts gives concrete history to the first gift. Paul did not arrive in Philippi because he selected the most promising city on a strategic map. The Spirit closed the routes into Asia and Bithynia, and a man of Macedonia appeared in a night vision pleading, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” Paul and his company concluded that the Lord had called them to preach the gospel there (Acts 16:6–10).

The Macedonian call was unusual even within Paul's Spirit-directed ministry. His first journey began through the Holy Ghost's direct commissioning at Antioch, and the Lord guided him through other visions and providences, but no other journey followed this exact pattern of two closed routes and a nighttime summons into a named region. God personally directed the missionaries and the Word to Philippi.

There Lydia's heart was opened so that she attended to the things Paul spoke. There the jailer heard the Word of the Lord and believed. Their faith came by hearing, and their hearing came because God sent the gospel across the sea to them. Their believing was given without being performed for them. The gift included Christ, the gospel, the missionaries, providential direction, illumination, conviction, and the saving encounter in which they entrusted themselves to the Son.

Philippians 1:29 therefore describes God's particular grace toward this church, not a universal mechanism of conversion. It does not identify prior regeneration as the cause of their faith, any more than the granting of their suffering requires us to say that God irresistibly caused their opponents' hostility. God graciously ordered both realities within their life with Christ, and Paul called them to live faithfully within what they had received.

If God Peradventure Will Give Repentance

Second Timothy 2:25 places God's gift within the quiet work of pastoral correction:

“In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth.”

The Lord's servant must not strive. He must be gentle, patient, able to teach, and willing to correct opponents in meekness. Why continue teaching people who have positioned themselves against the truth? Because God may give them repentance.

Repentance is God's gift. Timothy cannot shame, overpower, or out-argue a person into a genuine turning. Yet Paul does not conclude that teaching is irrelevant until an invisible regeneration occurs. He commands teaching because God grants repentance through truth patiently brought to bear upon a deceived hearer.

The direction of the gift is explicit: repentance leads “to the acknowledging of the truth.” The following verse describes the opponents coming to their senses and escaping the devil's snare. The movement is from error through instruction into recognition, sobriety, and freedom. God supplies the truth, sends the teacher, convicts through the Word, and graciously grants the turning; the deceived person recognizes his error, awakens, and repents.

Paul does not tell Timothy whether these opponents are all unregenerate. The surrounding chapter speaks of doctrinal error within the professing church, including teachers who have strayed from the truth and overthrown the faith of some. The repentance may be conversion, restoration, or both according to the person addressed. That uncertainty alone prevents the verse from serving as a universal chronology of initial regeneration and faith.

The expression “if God peradventure” reflects the servant's limited knowledge and hope. Timothy cannot identify a hidden elect person before teaching him, nor may he decide that an opponent is unreachable because he has not displayed evidence of effectual calling. He corrects everyone with meekness because God may bring truth home and grant repentance.

Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, and repentance is the same turning viewed from the sin and error being abandoned. God creates the encounter; the person turns. Calling repentance a gift does not mean that God repents in the person's place, and describing the person's turning does not mean he generated grace from himself.

The Believer Has Been Born of God

First John 5:1 returns us to the question of new birth:

“Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.”

The present participle identifies the person presently believing and confessing that Jesus is the Christ. The perfect verb translated “is born” presents that believer as one who has been born of God and remains in the resulting life. The new origin is wholly divine. The believer did not beget himself, and John does not describe birth as a title earned by correct doctrine.

The Reformed argument is that the completed birth must logically cause the continuing faith. John uses similar constructions elsewhere: everyone doing righteousness has been born of God, and everyone loving has been born of God. Righteousness and love are fruits of divine birth rather than causes of it; therefore, it is argued, faith must also be the fruit caused by prior birth.⁵

That is a substantial contextual argument, but it asks the sentence to answer two different questions at once. John is identifying present believers, not narrating the first instant of their conversion. His repeated formulas give the marks by which God's children may be recognized: they practice righteousness, love God and His children, confess the true Christ, overcome the world through faith, and do not settle into sin as their governing life.

These marks arise from new life. Once born of God, the Christian's continuing faith, love, obedience, and perseverance are expressions of the life he has received. But the grammatical form does not tell us that God regenerated an unbeliever in order to cause his first believing response. The present participle identifies the believer; the perfect identifies his settled origin and condition. The causal chronology is inferred.

The letter's pastoral purpose confirms the distinction. John writes amid false teaching and departure so that those continuing in the apostolic confession may know that they have eternal life. First John 5:1 answers, “Who bears the marks of God's child?” It does not directly answer, “What invisible act caused the first moment of faith?”

The wider context locates life in Christ:

“God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:11–12).

John does not give us saving life located in an unbeliever outside Christ, waiting to produce the faith by which Christ will later be received. Life is in the Son. The person who has the Son has life; the person who does not have the Son does not.

The positive order is therefore neither that faith efficiently causes regeneration nor that regeneration exists as saving life before the sinner receives Christ. God reveals His Son through the Word, the sinner believes and receives Him, and the Spirit gives life in union with the Son. The believer now stands as one born of God, and his continuing confession bears witness to that divine birth.

What These Texts Settle

These passages settle more than a shallow defense of human choice can bear. No sinner comes to Christ from untouched natural ability. The Father must draw, teach, give, and grant. God ordered particular Gentile hearers toward eternal life. The Philippians' believing belonged to His gracious gift. Repentance comes from God through truth. The believer's new life and origin are from God alone.

The texts also settle more than an abstract doctrine of provision. In each passage grace reaches real people. Those given to the Son come. Those appointed believe. The Philippians receive the gospel and suffer for Christ. Opponents may awaken and repent. The person believing that Jesus is the Christ stands as one born of God. Divine initiative does not remain suspended above history; it becomes personal encounter and saving reality.

What the texts do not state is the complete Calvinistic causal proposition: God selected certain unbelievers apart from faith, regenerated them while they remained unbelieving, and thereby irresistibly caused them to believe. That system may coordinate the passages in that manner, but it must not hide its conclusions inside the meanings of give, draw, appoint, grant, or born.

The alternative is not grace plus an independent human contribution. Revelation comes from God. Christ is given by God, and God sends the gospel. The Father teaches and draws. The Spirit brings conviction and light, then gives life. The sinner could not invent the truth or summon Christ from heaven; neither could he atone for sin or raise himself from death.

Yet when the Father teaches, the sinner must hear and learn. When the Word comes, he must not put it from him. When error is exposed, he must acknowledge the truth and repent. When the Son is presented, he must come and believe. These responses do not create the saving gift. They receive the One in whom the gift is found.

The preacher therefore need not translate these verses into hidden questions for the hearer: Have you already been selected? Has an invisible regeneration occurred? Is your desire to come proof that you were included in a secret gift? Jesus directs the hearer away from himself.

Hear the Father in the words of the Son. Learn what the signs and Scriptures reveal. Do not murmur because Christ refuses to become the Saviour you would prefer. Do not put the Word from you and judge yourself unworthy of everlasting life. Receive the Bread God has given. Repent, believe, and come.

The first half of John 6:37 destroys self-reliance: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me.” The second half destroys despair: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

No sinner can come without the Father.

No sinner who comes will be refused by the Son.

The invitation has no hidden qualification.

Notes

John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, on John 6:34–40, trans. William Pringle, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom34.xii.vi.html.

John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), especially the chapters on regeneration and perseverance. Murray treats giving and drawing in John 6:37, 44, and 65 as inseparable aspects of the Father's efficacious action.

John 6:45 follows Isaiah 54:13 closely while broadening the form from Isaiah's “all thy children” to “they shall be all taught of God.” See Adam W. Day, Jesus, the Isaianic Servant: Quotations and Allusions in the Gospel of John (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018), 104–11.

The participle tetagmenoi is most naturally read as passive in context, with God as the implied agent, though the form is morphologically capable of a middle reading. The argument here does not depend on denying divine appointment. For the traditional Reformed reading, see “Acts 13:48,” Reformation Study Bible, https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/reformation-study-bible/Acts.13.48. For a recent grammatical reexamination proposing that Paul is the unstated agent and that the people were “arranged” for eternal life, see J. Michael McKay Jr., “A Reexamination of tassō in Acts 13:48: ‘Enrolled,’ ‘Appointed,’ or ‘Arranged’?” The Bible Translator 75, no. 1 (2024): 50–64, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20516770241234305. The present reading acknowledges the disputed syntax while declining to make either disputed construction carry more than Luke states.

For a sustained Reformed defense, see Matthew Barrett, “Does Regeneration Precede Faith in 1 John?” Mid-America Journal of Theology 23 (2012): 5–18, https://www.midamerica.edu/uploads/files/pdf/journal/01-barrettjournal2012.pdf. For a detailed challenge to the tense-based causal argument, see Brian J. Abasciano, “Does Regeneration Precede Faith? The Use of 1 John 5:1 as a Proof Text,” Evangelical Quarterly 84.4 (2012): 307–22, https://evangelicalarminians.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Abasciano.-Does-Regeneration-Precede-Faith.-The-Use-of-1-John-5.1-as-a-Proof-Text.pdf.

Chapter 15 — Neither Pelagian nor Merely Arminian

“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17).

Labels can clarify a disagreement, but they can also bring one to a premature end. Once a position has been called Pelagian, many Christians quite reasonably assume that nothing more needs to be heard. Pelagianism is not a harmless difference over the order of salvation. It has long named a corruption of the gospel in which fallen humanity is treated as though it retained the natural moral power to begin its return to God, making grace helpful but not inwardly necessary for a saving response.

That error should be rejected. It should also be defined before the word is applied.

If we say that the sinner believes and the Spirit gives life, the immediate Calvinistic answer is often that we have allowed fallen man to accomplish spiritually what only God can accomplish. If we say that grace may be resisted, we are told that the decisive difference between the believer and the unbeliever must lie in an independent power of free will. If we deny that God selected particular unbelievers and regenerated them so that they would certainly believe, our position may be labeled semi-Pelagian, synergistic, Arminian, or some unstable combination of all three.

Yet none of those labels answers the underlying questions. The dispute concerns whether the sinner discovers Christ without revelation or begins moving toward God before God draws him; whether faith supplies any part of the atonement, produces the new birth, or gives the sinner life; and whether grace must perform the sinner's response in order to remain grace. Above all, election must be identified as God's choice of particular unbelievers who will be caused to believe, His foresight of particular people who will believe, or His eternal purpose established in Christ and shared by those united to Him.

The question concerns what necessary grace does, whether the sinner's response contributes to Christ's work or receives it, and where Scripture locates the elect people and the purpose appointed for them.

The Error of Pelagianism

The historical controversy associated with Pelagius was more complicated than the shorthand descriptions sometimes suggest. Pelagius did not deny that God was gracious, did not reject the forgiveness found in Christ, and did not tell people to boast that they had created themselves. He and the writers associated with him could speak of grace, prayer, Scripture, Christ's teaching, and divine help. Historians continue to debate exactly which propositions belonged to Pelagius himself and which came from the larger movement condemned under his name.¹

The central problem nevertheless remains clear enough for our purpose. Grace could be located principally in the created capacity of the will, the law and instruction God supplied, the example of Christ, and the forgiveness offered when people sinned. Fallen humanity was not understood to require the prior, personal work of God without which no saving response could be made. The sinner might need teaching, encouragement, pardon, and assistance, but he possessed by nature the decisive moral ability to begin obeying God.

That is not the position argued in this book.

Human beings are not born as morally untouched copies of Adam standing in a second Eden. We enter the mortal, corrupt, and disordered human world established through Adam's rebellion. Sin surrounds us, inhabits the structures of our common life, finds an answering desire within us, and becomes our own as we repeat Adam's claim to self-rule. This book has treated original sin as humanity's inherited corruption and alienation within Adam's rebellious order. That account avoids both the mechanical transfer of Adam's personal guilt to people who have not yet acted and the reduction of sin to occasional imitation of a bad example. We inherit a humanity alienated from the life of God, subject to death, and disposed toward autonomy; every morally responsible person confirms that inherited disorder through his own sin.

Nothing within that fallen order discovers the gospel. Nature declares God's power and leaves humanity without excuse, but it does not disclose that the eternal Son took flesh, died for our sins, was buried, rose again, and receives everyone who entrusts himself to Him. No sinner can believe a gospel he has never heard or trust a Christ who has not been revealed. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

Even hearing the outward words is not the whole of God's gracious work. The Father draws the sinner toward the Son. The Spirit enlightens the understanding so that the gospel becomes intelligible and personally significant. He convicts concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment, exposing unbelief and pressing the truth of Christ upon the will. God provides the messenger, the Word, the opportunity, the light, and the gracious encounter in which faith becomes possible.

The sinner does not initiate that encounter. He does not create the object of faith, call himself through the gospel, overcome his own blindness without illumination, or produce spiritual life from his fallen nature. God acts first, not only in eternity and at Calvary, but personally when the gospel comes to the hearer.

Faith is nevertheless the hearer's faith. The Spirit does not trust Christ in the sinner's place. He reveals, draws, enlightens, and convicts; the sinner either continues in resistance or abandons self-rule and entrusts himself to the Son. A sinner who can believe only because God has spoken, drawn, enlightened, and convicted is not the self-starting sinner of Pelagianism. A faith which receives Christ while creating, earning, and completing nothing is not salvation by natural ability.

Who Makes the First Approach?

Semi-Pelagianism is an even less precise historical label. The people now grouped beneath it did not call themselves semi-Pelagians, and they did not constitute one uniform school. The expression came into use much later as a way of describing positions which, while acknowledging inherited corruption and the necessity of grace, placed the beginning of the movement toward God in the human will. The sinner first desired faith, prayed, sought mercy, or turned toward God; grace then met, assisted, and completed the movement he had begun.²

The Second Council of Orange, meeting in AD 529, rejected that priority of unaided human initiative. Its canons insisted that grace does not arrive merely because a person first prayed for it, that even the will to be cleansed comes through the Spirit's work, and that the beginning and desire of faith are gifts of grace rather than natural possessions. It specifically denied that anyone can assent to the preaching of the gospel through natural powers without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.³

We need not adopt everything in Orange to recognize the usefulness of that distinction. The council spoke within a sacramental framework and made claims about Adamic inheritance that are not identical to the account defended here. Its importance for the present question is narrower: it identified the error of treating the first saving approach as the achievement of unaided nature, after which grace comes to help.

This book rejects that order. Before the sinner seeks Christ, the Father has sent the Son. Before he understands the gospel, God has given the Word. Before he recognizes his need, the Spirit has brought the truth to bear upon him. Even when providence leads a person toward a Christian witness, awakens him through circumstances, or makes him conscious that the life he possesses cannot save him, the movement is already surrounded and made possible by grace. God does not wait at the end of a road the sinner constructed by himself.

God's first step makes the sinner's responsible step possible without replacing it. Grace prepares, reveals, summons, and enables; it does not need to become an irresistible act of regeneration that secretly completes the decisive passage before faith occurs. The Spirit brings the sinner to the threshold of surrender, but the sinner must surrender. Divine priority and genuine human response are not opposites unless we first assume that grace can act upon a person only by replacing his agency.

If semi-Pelagianism means that unaided human nature initiates the saving movement and grace arrives to assist it, this book rejects semi-Pelagianism. God comes first, speaks first, draws first, and makes faith possible. The sinner nevertheless must truly believe.

Does Faith Help God Save?

The word synergism is often introduced at this point. It comes from words meaning “work together,” and that simple definition makes the accusation sound conclusive. If God acts and the sinner also acts, have they not cooperated in salvation? If one sinner believes while another resists, has the believer not supplied the part that turned God's provision into an actual salvation?

The problem is that working together can describe several relationships which are not theologically equal. If synergism means that Christ performs most of the saving work and the sinner supplies what remains, this book emphatically rejects it. The sinner does not bear his own judgment, add merit to Christ's obedience, complete an insufficient atonement, pronounce his own justification, place himself into the Son, or breathe spiritual life into his dead humanity. Christ accomplishes the saving work. God justifies. The Spirit joins the believer to the risen Son and gives life.

Faith supplies none of those actions. It does not become the final payment added to the cross, because receiving a gift does not complete its purchase. It does not become the efficient cause of regeneration, because trusting Christ has no power to create Christ's life within the believer. It does not place God under obligation, because the promise received by faith originated in God's grace and rests wholly upon Christ's worthiness.

If synergism means only that God and the sinner both act in the saving encounter, then it names something true but says too little to be useful. The Father draws while the sinner is drawn. The Spirit convicts while the sinner is convicted. The gospel calls while the hearer listens, resists, or believes. These are not equal contributions to a jointly manufactured salvation. They are distinguishable actions within a personal encounter created and sustained by grace.

A giver and a receiver both act, but they do not therefore manufacture the gift together. A physician and patient may both act, but they do not perform the cure in the same sense. Every analogy eventually fails, and salvation should not be forced into a commercial or medical model. Even so, the distinction between accomplishment and reception remains essential.

For that reason, synergism should not control our positive account. It creates the impression that salvation is a shared construction when Scripture gives each action its proper subject. The sinner repents and believes. The Spirit regenerates and gives life. Faith does not regenerate, and the Spirit does not believe. In conversion, these distinct actions meet.

What Classical Arminianism Teaches

Calling this position Arminian would be much less misleading than calling it Pelagian. Classical Arminianism does not teach that saving faith arises from an untouched natural free will. The Five Articles presented by the Remonstrants in 1610 say that fallen man cannot of himself think, will, or do what is truly good, explicitly naming saving faith. They call grace “the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of all good,” affirm the need for prevenient, assisting, awakening, following, and cooperating grace, and then deny that the operation of grace is irresistible.⁴

The same articles teach that Christ died “for all men and for every man,” while the forgiveness obtained in His death is enjoyed only by believers. They describe God's eternal purpose in Jesus Christ to save those who, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, believe and persevere, and to condemn the unbelieving as alienated from Christ. Classical Arminianism is therefore not Pelagianism concealed beneath evangelical vocabulary. It affirms fallen inability, the necessity and priority of grace, universal atonement, responsible faith, and resistible grace.

On all of those questions, the position defended in this book stands much nearer to classical Arminianism than to Calvinism. We should say that plainly. The purpose of rejecting an inaccurate accusation is not to preserve the appearance that no one has ever believed anything similar to us. Nor should “not merely Arminian” become a way of accepting Arminian conclusions while refusing the name because Calvinistic polemics have made it disreputable.

Arminius himself also placed Christ nearer the center of predestination than common summaries sometimes acknowledge. In his Declaration of Sentiments, his first decree is God's appointment of His Son as Mediator, Redeemer, Saviour, Priest, and King. His second is God's purpose to receive those who repent and believe, saving them “in Christ, for his sake and through Him,” and to condemn the impenitent as alienated from Christ. His third concerns God's sufficient and effective administration of the means necessary for repentance and faith.⁵

Only then does Arminius describe a fourth decree concerning particular persons. God, he says, foreknew from eternity which individuals would believe through preventing grace and persevere through subsequent grace, and on the basis of that foreknowledge decreed to save those particular people. That is not a picture of autonomous individuals surprising God with decisions He had not anticipated. Christ comes first, grace prevents and assists, and God's knowledge is eternal.

The account of conversion defended in this book therefore overlaps substantially with classical Arminianism wherever Arminianism teaches a graciously enabled but resistible response to the gospel. We should not manufacture a difference where none needs to exist. The principal distinction lies in the meaning and ground of election: whether God elects particular individuals because He foreknows their grace-enabled faith, or whether God establishes His electing purpose in Christ and those joined to Christ share what God chose and appointed in Him.

Election in the Chosen One

The familiar foreseen-faith account still treats election finally as God's selection of particular individuals considered according to what He foreknows about them. Calvinism says God selected certain unbelievers without regard to their foreseen faith and then ordained the faith by which He would save them. The Arminian account says God selected those particular people because He foreknew that, through grace, they would believe. The systems differ profoundly over the condition and causation of faith, but both may leave the reader imagining an eternal list of separately considered individuals as the primary form of election.

Scripture places Christ before the list.

As Chapters 8 through 11 have argued from Christ's identity and from Ephesians 1 and Romans 8–11, God's purpose before the foundation of the world is established in His Chosen One. Christ is the promised Seed and faithful Son, the obedient Servant and Last Adam, and the appointed Heir in whom God's purpose for humanity is fulfilled. He stands at the center of election as the representative of the people whose sphere and inheritance He is, not simply the distributor of benefits to individuals whose election was settled elsewhere.

Those who are joined to Christ share what God appointed in Him. They become members of His body and children in the Son, Abraham's seed in the promised Seed and heirs according to the promise. Chosen in Him and accepted in the Beloved, they are predestined as those in Christ to adoption and conformity to His image, to service in His purpose, and to the inheritance prepared for His people.

Faith is not the meritorious ground upon which God owes a person election, nor is it an independent fact which God passively discovers in the future and ratifies in eternity. Faith is the gospel-appointed and grace-enabled entrusting of the self to Christ. In that converting faith, the Spirit joins the believer to the Son. The believer shares the Son's life and therefore belongs to the people God purposed in Him before the world began.

Because God knows all things, He has always known the name of every person who will finally belong to Christ. The same names may therefore appear in a hypothetical Arminian list of foreseen believers and in God's exhaustive knowledge of the people who will be united to His Son. That agreement does not make the doctrines identical. In the Arminian account, prescient foreknowledge identifies whom God knows will believe; election then selects those foreseen believers. In the account defended here, God's exhaustive knowledge of future believers does not create a second electing decree behind Christ. God elects the Chosen One and purposes the identity, service, inheritance, and destiny of His people in Him. Those who are united to Christ become actual participants in that already established election. This preserves the distinction developed in Chapter 10: biblical foreknowledge is relational and covenantal recognition, not simply advance awareness of a fact God uses to construct a list.

That is why Christocentric election through grace-enabled faith remains the most useful short description of the position, provided that each part is allowed to retain its biblical relationship. Christocentric means that God's purpose is established in the Chosen Son rather than in an abstract list standing behind Him. Election means that those belonging to Christ share the identity and vocation purposed in Him, together with His inheritance and destiny. Through faith does not mean that faith causes the decree or earns entry; it names the appointed personal reception of Christ in which the Spirit establishes converting union. Grace-enabled means that God supplies the revealing gospel, every work of drawing, enlightenment, and conviction, and the opportunity and ability to respond without believing in the sinner's place.

The phrase should summarize the doctrine after Scripture has shown the relationships. It must never become a new label by which difficult texts are made to say less than they say.

But Why This Sinner?

A Calvinist reader may grant every distinction made so far and still ask the question he considers decisive. If God does not select particular unbelievers and give them an irresistible regeneration which causes faith, why does one sinner believe while another continues to resist? If both hear the gospel, experience conviction, and possess a genuine possibility of responding, must the ultimate difference lie in something better within the believer?

We should not evade the immediate answer. One sinner yields to grace and the other continues to resist it. Faith is the decisive condition distinguishing the person who enters Christ from the person who remains outside Him. Scripture repeatedly locates that response in the hearer: one receives the Word while another rejects it; one comes to the light while another loves darkness; one believes on the Son while another refuses Him. A theology which is unwilling to say that the believer believes has not preserved grace by its reluctance. It has allowed a prior causal theory to silence the grammar of the gospel.

That answer grants the believer no better nature or untouched moral power, much less a worthy contribution to salvation. He did not create himself or the gospel, nor did he arrange the saving encounter. He supplied neither the illumination and conviction nor the reasons and ability to respond. He believes because Christ has been revealed through the Word and the Father has drawn him, while the Spirit has made the truth intelligible and pressed it upon his will. His response has abundant gracious causes and sufficient reasons; it is not an inexplicable movement arising from an independent self.

But a response may be enabled and made reasonable under powerful influence without being causally necessitated. The person himself is the acting subject. He considers and desires, resists or yields, and in believing gives himself to Christ. If we ask for some additional factor which infallibly determines that he must yield, we have no longer asked for an explanation of responsible faith. We have assumed that no personal response is finally intelligible until it has been reduced to the inevitable effect of a prior sufficient cause. That is the determinism under dispute, not a conclusion supplied by the word grace.

Nor does Scripture present two interchangeable sinners in a theological laboratory, both receiving a mathematically identical quantity of grace so that we may isolate a single variable. God's providential dealings with people are personal and varied. One hears after years of exposure to Scripture, another in a moment of crisis, another through the steady witness of a Christian family, and another through a messenger providentially sent across his path. The Father draws wisely through the truth, circumstances, relationships, warnings, mercies, and conviction He brings to bear upon actual persons. This book claims that God's saving provision is genuinely for every sinner and that His gracious address makes a responsible response possible without making it inevitable. The providential experience of that grace differs from person to person.

Does that make the human will the “ultimate determining factor”? It makes the sinner the responsible subject of believing or refusing, which Scripture plainly does. It does not make his will the cause, accomplishment, or ground of salvation. Faith is the decisive condition of receiving Christ, but Christ remains the decisive reason anyone who believes is saved. The believer may truthfully say, “I entrusted myself to Christ.” He may never say, “I supplied what made the cross sufficient; I gave myself life; I earned God's acceptance; or I possessed a virtue for which God owed me election.”

This asymmetry is important. Unbelief is culpably explained by the sinner's resistance to light. Salvation is graciously explained by the Father who draws, the Son who saves, the Word which reveals, and the Spirit who convicts and gives life. Faith does not become meritorious merely because unbelief remains blameworthy. It is the empty-handed surrender by which the sinner ceases to rely upon himself and receives everything in Christ.

The Calvinist answer provides a further determining cause: this sinner believed because God selected and regenerated him, while the other did not because God withheld the only grace that could have produced faith. That answer is certainly more deterministic. It is not therefore more gracious unless Scripture teaches that grace must necessitate the response it commands. The chapters preceding this one have examined the passages offered for that conclusion and found that they establish divine initiative, necessary grace, and saving certainty without establishing regeneration before faith or an unconditional selection of which unbelievers will be caused to believe.

The answer finally remains personal rather than mechanical. Why did this sinner enter Christ? Because God brought Christ near through the gospel, drew and convicted him by grace, and he entrusted himself to the Son. Why did the other remain condemned? Not because no Saviour was provided or no genuine response was possible, but because he resisted the light and would not come to Christ that he might have life.

Why “Provisionist” Is Useful but Incomplete

Many readers of this book will recognize themselves most readily as Provisionists, even if they have never used the word. They believe that God has genuinely provided a Saviour for every sinner, that the gospel may truthfully be preached to every person, that anyone who comes to Christ will be received, and that the unbeliever is condemned because he refused the light given in the Son.

Those affirmations are central to this book. Christ tasted death for every man. He is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world. God commands all people everywhere to repent, and no secret restriction reverses the public promise that everyone believing in the Son has life.

This label receives briefer treatment because most of its central affirmations have already been defended throughout the book rather than because it is unimportant. It names the universal provision that Chapters 12 and 13 established, and it is especially useful in Baptist settings where Christians need a direct alternative to limited atonement and selective saving intention.

Even so, Provisionism cannot be allowed to carry the entire doctrine merely by naming the universality of the provision. We must still ask what God does when the gospel reaches a particular sinner. The answer offered here is not that God placed a Bible in the world and then withdrew to watch unaided wills use the information. The Father personally draws. The Spirit enlightens and convicts. The Word is living truth brought to bear upon the hearer. Provision is public and universal, but grace is also active and personal.

The label can identify an important family resemblance. It cannot replace the biblical account.

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SIDEBAR: Pelagian, Arminian, and Provisionist Pelagianism treats the saving movement as beginning in an unaided human capacity; this book rejects it because the Father must draw, the gospel must reveal, and the Spirit must enlighten and convict before saving faith is possible. Classical Arminianism affirms fallen inability, prior enabling grace, universal provision, responsible faith, and resistible grace. This book shares those convictions, while differing from the common Arminian account in which God individually elects those He foreknows will believe through grace. Provisionism helpfully emphasizes that God has genuinely provided Christ for every sinner and that anyone may be saved through faith. By itself, however, the label does not fully explain drawing, conviction, union, regeneration, or election in Christ. The position defended here is therefore best described as Christocentric election through grace-enabled faith: grace comes first, Christ accomplishes salvation, the sinner genuinely believes, and the Spirit alone gives life in the Son. See the Glossary: Pelagianism; Arminianism; Provisionism; Semi-Pelagianism; Synergism.

What We Affirm and Deny

We affirm that fallen human beings are mortal and corrupt, disposed toward self-rule and possessing no morally neutral power from which they independently discover or initiate salvation. God acts first and throughout. He sends the Son and accomplishes redemption, provides the Word, draws and enlightens, brings conviction, receives and justifies, gives new life, sanctifies, and preserves. There is no saving faith without revelation and no saving response apart from grace.

We affirm that Christ accomplished the whole saving work for the world and that nothing He accomplished is supplied or completed by the sinner. Grace addresses human beings as persons, enabling a real response without making that response involuntary or irresistible. Faith is the sinner's trusting surrender to Christ; it receives the Son but neither merits salvation nor produces life. The Holy Spirit gives life by joining the believing sinner to the risen Christ in conversion. Election is in Christ, and those united to God's Chosen One share the identity and destiny God appointed beforehand for those in Him.

We deny that the sinner possesses an untouched, autonomous capacity by which he begins salvation without grace. We deny that faith earns favor, contributes merit, completes Christ's work, or efficiently causes regeneration. We deny that regeneration must occur before faith so that faith becomes the inevitable expression of life already given, and we deny that the Spirit believes or repents in the sinner's place.

We deny that grace is genuine only when it cannot be resisted. We deny that God elected particular unbelievers outside of Christ and then caused them alone to believe. We also deny that election is merely God's advance ratification of a list of autonomous human decisions. The alternative to unconditional individual election is not an independent will sending information backward into God's decree. It is God's eternal purpose in Christ, His universal provision through Christ, His gracious address through the Word and Spirit, and the sinner's responsible reception of the Son in whom every saving blessing is found.

These affirmations leave no room for boasting. The believer did not conceive the gospel, send the Son, offer the sacrifice, raise Christ from the dead, summon himself, illuminate his own darkness, or give himself life. He has nothing that did not first come from God. Even the possibility of believing exists because God has come near.

Yet it is the believer who believes. God saves human persons by bringing them into surrendered union with His Son, not by replacing their agency with an irresistible response performed upon them. The sinner may resist the light and remain under the condemnation his unbelief deserves, or he may abandon self-rule and entrust himself to Christ. When he believes, he contributes nothing to the cross and creates no life within himself. The Spirit joins him to the Son in whom the saving work is already complete.

God takes the first step. Christ accomplishes the whole work. The Spirit brings the gospel to bear. The sinner genuinely surrenders. God alone gives life.

Notes

For the complexity of reconstructing Pelagius's own teaching and distinguishing it from the broader controversy conducted under his name, see Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (Oxford University Press, 2018). The present chapter uses Pelagianism for the theological error historically condemned under that name, not as a claim that every proposition was expressed identically by Pelagius and all associated writers.

See Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy (Mercer University Press, 1996). The later label groups several fifth- and sixth-century approaches which shared concerns without constituting one uniform confession.

Canons of the Second Council of Orange, A.D. 529, Canons 3–7 and conclusion, trans. F. H. Woods (Oxford: J. Thornton, 1882), https://archive.org/details/canonsofsecondco0000coun.

The Five Articles of the Remonstrants (1610), Articles I–IV, https://pages.uoregon.edu/sshoemak/323/texts/remonstrants.htm.

Jacobus Arminius, A Declaration of the Sentiments of Arminius (1608), section on predestination, especially his four decrees, https://wesley.nnu.edu/arminianism/the-works-of-james-arminius/volume-1/arminius-theological-sentiments/.

Chapter 16 — Preaching with No Hidden Qualification

“Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

There are questions that cannot safely be ignored. What does God require of me? Can my sins be forgiven? What happens when I die? Can I really know God?

The Bible does not answer those questions by giving us a technique for becoming religious or a list of good deeds to perform. It brings us to Jesus Christ. The gospel is God's good news concerning His Son: Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose again, and saves all who trust in Him.

That is the purpose of gospel preaching. The preacher brings the revealed Christ before actual hearers and summons them to come. He announces Christ as God's genuine provision for the people listening. The decisive condition therefore lies openly in receiving the Son, rather than in a hidden act they can neither identify nor seek. He proclaims the Son whom God gave for the world, through whom God now commands all people everywhere to repent, and in whom every believer possesses life.

Yet the same public sentences can carry very different meanings. A preacher may say, “Christ receives everyone who comes,” while believing that most hearers cannot possibly come because God has not chosen to regenerate them. He may say, “God commands you to believe,” while believing that God has withheld from many hearers the only grace that could make faith possible. He may say that Christ's death is sufficient for all while using sufficient to describe the infinite value of a sacrifice God did not savingly intend for all.

Those statements can be made sincerely within a Calvinistic system. The problem is not that every invitation must become a lecture on systematic theology, because every preacher relies upon truths he cannot explain in a single sermon. The problem is that the public summons appears to disclose God's saving disposition toward the hearer while an invisible footnote materially restricts what has actually been provided or intended for him.

The gospel should not require an invisible footnote reversing the natural force of its invitation.

John 6:37 places the Father's sovereignty and the Son's welcome together: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” As Chapter 14 established, no sinner comes without the Father. He sends the Son, provides the Bread, bears witness, teaches, draws, and grants. The sinner has no independent path into Christ. Yet the person who comes does not arrive at the end of that drawing only to wonder whether Christ was savingly intended for him. The Son gives an unqualified promise: the one coming will not be cast out.

The Father's action destroys self-reliance. The Son's welcome destroys despair.

What May Be Said to Every Hearer

Because Christ was given for the world, the pastor may address every sinner before him without first identifying an elect class or detecting evidence of regeneration. He may say that God made the hearer for life with Himself, that sin is a self-ruling refusal of that life expressed through every wrong action, and that every sinner therefore stands guilty, unable to repair himself, and moving toward death.

He may then say that God has not left the sinner in rebellion. The eternal Son became man, lived in the faithful obedience humanity owed, gave Himself for our sins, and rose from the grave. Jesus is the living Saviour to be received, far more than an example to admire or a theological possibility to investigate. He is the Saviour whom God has brought near and the Lord before whom every life must bow.

The preacher may tell every hearer that Christ died for him. He may say that the Father is drawing through the witness He has given and that the Spirit is bringing the truth concerning Christ to bear. He may command every sinner to repent and believe, warn that refusing the light deepens condemnation, and promise without qualification that everyone who entrusts himself to Christ will be received.

This is the posture Paul describes: “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). At Athens he declares that God “now commandeth all men every where to repent” because a day of judgment has been appointed and the risen Christ will judge the world (Acts 17:30–31). At the Bible's end, the Spirit and the bride say, “Come,” and the final summons is, “whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).

These are not techniques for activating a hidden decree. They are truthful addresses to responsible people for whom Christ has been given. The preacher pleads because reconciliation is genuinely offered, warns because condemnation is real, and calls for decision because the hearer must either continue in self-rule or entrust himself to the Son.

A genuine invitation does not require manipulation. The pastor may reason and plead, warn and urge, without creating an atmosphere in which a raised hand or an aisle, a signed card, or repeated words are treated as conversion itself. His confidence rests in the living Word as the Father draws and the Spirit convicts, rather than in his ability to produce a visible result.

A person may express real faith by coming forward, praying with a counselor, requesting baptism, or telling another Christian that he has trusted Christ. Those actions may be honest and important. None of them is the saving object. The church must never make it easier to record a response than to understand the Christ to whom the sinner is being called.

The Christian sharing the gospel should therefore heed a simple rule: do not pressure a person to repeat words he does not mean. Point him to Jesus Christ.

When the Seeker Is Sitting Before You

The theology of salvation becomes especially concrete when a troubled sinner sits across from a pastor and asks, “What must I do?” It is possible to answer with orthodox propositions while still leaving the person looking inward for the decisive evidence.

If regeneration must precede faith, the seeker may be encouraged to look for signs that God has already made him alive. His sorrow, interest, fear, or desire may be examined as possible evidence of effectual calling. A cautious Calvinistic counselor will still direct him to Christ and urge him to believe, but the system leaves an unanswered question behind the counsel: has God performed the inward work without which this person cannot respond?

The pastor need not send the seeker behind the gospel to answer that question. His hearing and understanding, together with the force the truth exerts upon him, mean that God is not absent. The Word has come. The Spirit may be enlightening and convicting. The Father is bringing the claim of the Son before him. Yet enlightenment and conviction, even when accompanied by religious concern or temporary joy, are not identical to converting faith. The seeker must not be encouraged to trust the experience of being drawn instead of the Christ to whom he is being drawn.

The pastor should help him understand the gospel, recognize sin as self-rule and unbelief, and distinguish saving faith from mere assent, temporary emotion, fear of punishment, or a general desire for improvement. He should then direct him to the revealed Son.

Jesus preached, “Repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Repentance and faith are not two religious tasks which earn salvation when successfully completed. They are one turn. Repentance turns from sin and the claim to rule oneself; faith turns to Christ in trusting surrender. The sinner does not bargain with God, promise sufficient improvement, or make himself worthy to receive mercy. He abandons every competing confidence and gives himself to the Saviour whom God has revealed.

This means the counselor must make several distinctions plain. Understanding is not surrender. Emotion is not faith. Repeating words is not coming to Jesus. A person may know the facts, agree that they are true, feel fear or relief, and sincerely desire the benefits of salvation while withholding himself from the Lord who saves.

Saving faith says, “I give myself to Jesus Christ. I will no longer trust myself to save or rule me. I place my guilt, my future, and my life in His hands.”

That surrender is not a work which purchases grace. The sinner contributes no merit, power, righteousness, sacrifice, or life. Faith receives Christ; it does not complete Him. Yet because faith receives Christ Himself, it cannot be reduced to a desire for forgiveness detached from His lordship. There are not two Jesuses, one who rescues a person from judgment and another whose authority may be considered later. The Saviour is Lord.

What, then, should the seeker do? He should come to Christ. He need not first improve himself, achieve a measured depth of sorrow, discover whether he has been secretly regenerated, or find the perfect formula. He must turn from self-rule and entrust himself to the Son.

He may speak to God plainly. He may ask for mercy and say that he is placing his life in the hands of Christ. Scripture gives many prayers of repentance, need, and faith, and no pastor should discourage a sinner from calling upon the Lord. But the words are not a spiritual mechanism. The seeker must not trust the prayer he says; he must trust Christ Himself.

“Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life,” Jesus told those who searched the Scriptures while refusing the One to whom the Scriptures testified (John 5:39–40). Their problem was not a lack of a suitable formula. They would not come. To the person who fears that he may come and be rejected, Jesus gives the other half of the answer: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

You do not need to find the right words or repeat a formula. You need to come honestly to Jesus Christ.

What God Gives When the Sinner Trusts Christ

When the sinner turns from self-rule and entrusts himself to Christ, God does more than change a religious designation or reward a correct decision. The Holy Spirit joins the believer to the risen Son and gives him new life.

The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

That confession has governed this book because it preserves the subjects and actions Scripture gives us. Faith does not regenerate. It possesses no life-creating power. The Spirit does not believe for the sinner. In conversion, the sinner's repentant faith and the Spirit's life-giving union meet without being confused.

Jesus called this being born again. It is not becoming a more disciplined version of the old self, nor is it a life secretly received before the sinner has entrusted himself to Christ. The believer is joined to the risen Son, and Christ's life becomes his life.

Forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, adoption, the indwelling Spirit, a new identity, and an inheritance beyond death do not arrive as unrelated prizes given one by one to a person who performs well enough. They belong together because they are found in Christ. To receive Him is to receive life.

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The pastor may now counsel the believer toward baptism, Scripture, prayer, fellowship, obedience, and service in a faithful local church. Those actions do not earn what Christ has given or preserve what He failed to complete. They are the first expressions of learning to live in the life received from Him.

Assurance Begins Outside the Believer

Calvinism can appear to provide the strongest possible assurance. If God selected the believer unconditionally, Christ died particularly for him, irresistible grace caused his faith, and the decree guarantees his perseverance, what could be more secure?

The difficulty concerns the believer's knowledge that the hidden decree includes him, rather than the certainty of God's saving work itself. The public invitation cannot by itself prove particular election, because the same outward call goes to the nonelect. A past profession cannot settle the question, because Calvinists rightly acknowledge temporary and false faith. The anxious believer may therefore inspect his present faith and fruit for evidence that his response arose from regeneration rather than from an unregenerate religious experience.

Scriptural assurance looks outward before it looks inward. Christ was genuinely given for the believer and for every other sinner. His promise is true for everyone who comes. The person who has entrusted himself to Christ need not discover a secret election behind the Son before believing God's testimony: “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:12).

Assurance therefore rests upon Christ rather than the remembered strength of a human decision. Christ, not the decision, is the object of faith and the ground of assurance. The believer does not argue, “I performed the required act years ago, therefore my present relation to Christ and every subsequent fruit are irrelevant.” He says, “I have entrusted myself to the Son, and God has promised life in Him.”

Assurance then recognizes the living effects of union. Rooted life grows, even when slowly and unevenly. The Spirit continues to convict, correct, teach, and produce love and obedience. These fruits do not create the promise or replace Christ as its foundation. They confirm experientially the life Scripture says is found in the Son.

Pastoral counsel must therefore avoid two opposite errors. Decisionism directs the anxious person to a past response as though repeating words or walking an aisle created an irreversible transaction regardless of whether he ever entrusted himself to Christ. Decree-searching directs him behind Christ to prove that his faith was caused by a secret regeneration. The gospel directs him to the Son and then teaches him to recognize the rooted life which grows from belonging to Him.

Look first to Christ and His promise, then recognize the life that grows from belonging to Him.

A new believer will still have questions. Questions are not evidence that his faith is unreal. New life grows. He may not immediately understand every doctrine or feel uninterrupted joy, and mature fruit will take time. The pastor should direct him repeatedly to Christ and help him obey through baptism and fellowship with the church, patiently teaching him to live in the life he has received.

Christ in the Open

The controversy must finally give way to proclamation.

The preacher does not know every providential road by which the Father brought the people before him. He cannot see the Spirit's conviction, measure the depth of each hearer's resistance, or predict who will yield. He does not need to inspect the secret counsel of God before speaking. He possesses the public gospel.

Christ has been given for the world. The Word has brought Him near. The Spirit exposes unbelief and presses the truth upon the hearer. The sinner is commanded and enabled to repent and believe. The person who comes will not be cast out. The believer receives life in the Son. Everyone in Christ shares the elect identity and appointed destiny of His people.

The invitation therefore contains no hidden class, no unprovided hearer, and no secret divine refusal behind Christ's promise. It may be preached with warning because condemnation is real, with urgency because resistance hardens, with patience because God is longsuffering, and with confidence because the Son receives everyone who comes.

This changes more than the wording of an invitation at the end of a sermon. It changes the preacher's posture throughout the message. He is not searching the congregation for those who may show the marks of an inward decree. He is setting forth Christ before everyone, trusting the Father to draw through the truth and the Spirit to expose the heart. He can be patient without becoming hesitant, urgent without becoming manipulative, and direct without pretending that his own intensity gives life.

It also changes the way the church understands evangelistic faithfulness. Visible responses alone cannot measure success, and the absence of an immediate response does not mean the Word was powerless. The church prays, bears witness, answers questions, and continues bringing Christ near, knowing that grace may work across years of hearing and resistance. Yet it never converts patience into permission for delay. The Christ who calls today must not be put off until the hearer imagines himself more worthy or more able to come.

The pastor may stand before every sinner and speak without crossing his fingers behind the pulpit. He may say that Christ was given for him, that God commands and enables him to believe, that his unbelief is truly his refusal, and that the Son will receive him if he comes. He may counsel the troubled conscience without sending it behind Christ to search for a hidden decree. He may assure the believer that every saving blessing is already found in the Son.

The Father draws. The Word reveals. The Spirit convicts and enlightens. The sinner who hears may resist, or he may entrust himself to Christ. When he believes, the Spirit joins him to the risen Son and gives him life.

“Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

Come to Him.

Chapter 17 — The Pulpit Is an Entrustment, Not a Lever

“Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).

A church calls a pastor because it believes he will preach the Word, love its people, and lead them faithfully in the doctrine they confess together. The congregation may have known him for only a few months. It gives him access which ordinarily takes years to earn: a pulpit from which he may speak into every family, an office from which he will counsel the troubled and teach the young, a voice in choosing leaders, and a place within the most intimate moments of the church's life.

That trust is necessary. A pastor cannot shepherd while every sermon is treated as a hostile proposal and every judgment requires a fresh vote of confidence. The people must be willing to receive instruction, correction, warning, and leadership from a man whose fidelity to Christ they have carefully examined.

The trust is also bounded. The church has not given the pastor ownership of its doctrine or surrendered to him the authority to redefine its faith without its knowledge. It has called him because both parties believe they understand the commitments under which he will serve. If those commitments materially change, the trust relationship changes with them.

The same honesty required in preaching governs the pastor's relation to the church which called him. The gospel should be preached with no hidden qualification reversing the invitation heard by the sinner, and a pastor should serve with no hidden qualification reversing the doctrinal commitment understood by the congregation. In both cases, familiar words may remain while the theological structure behind them changes; faithfulness requires bringing the real meaning into the light.

A pastor may seek to persuade the congregation, but he may not preempt the congregation's judgment by changing its doctrine before it knows that a change is being proposed.

Authority Under Authority

Pastoral authority is neither imaginary nor absolute. Scripture commands pastors to preach the Word, hold fast the faithful Word, rebuke error, watch for souls, and lead the flock. Paul reminded the Ephesian elders that he had kept back nothing profitable and had declared “all the counsel of God” (Acts 20:20, 27). A church cannot faithfully charge a pastor to proclaim Scripture and then require him to suppress every truth which challenges its habits or inherited assumptions.

The pastor therefore does more than repeat a denominational script. He is answerable to Christ, and the congregation should expect his understanding to deepen as he studies. If he discovers that something he has taught is mistaken, he must correct it rather than preserve an error merely because it is familiar. A pastor forbidden to reconsider his interpretation has been placed above Scripture's power to correct him instead of under a confession.

Yet the same Bible which commands leadership also places limits upon it. Paul told the Corinthians that ministers did not have dominion over their faith but were helpers of their joy (2 Corinthians 1:24). Peter told elders to shepherd willingly and eagerly, “neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2–3). Paul described the church as the flock God purchased with His own blood; it did not belong to the elders who watched over it (Acts 20:28).

The pastor consequently exercises authority under the Word, for the good of people who belong to Christ, within an office entrusted by the church. He may teach and persuade with confidence. He may not act as though his superior knowledge transfers ownership of the congregation's confession to him.

Pastoral authority accumulates. Years of faithful preaching, hospital visits, funerals, weddings, counseling, friendship, and ordinary service create trust which extends beyond the logical force of any single sermon. Such confidence is one of the beautiful fruits of a long pastorate. It becomes dangerous when a pastor treats trust earned under one doctrinal commitment as capital he is entitled to spend upon another commitment before the congregation understands what has changed.

The pulpit is an entrustment. It must never become a lever by which the pastor moves the church to a destination it has not knowingly chosen.

Persuasion Is Not Preemption

Published Reformed literature about changing existing churches must be handled accurately. Some of its counsel is plainly honorable. Mark Dever advises pastors seeking change to teach, stay, and love, thinking in decades rather than demanding immediate compliance.¹ Reformed Baptist treatments of eldership may explicitly preserve congregational authority, including the congregation's responsibility to install and remove elders.²

There is nothing inherently deceptive about expository preaching, patient instruction, meaningful membership, biblical discipline, correcting inaccurate membership rolls, developing qualified leaders, following constitutional procedure, or loving people who disagree. Any faithful pastor may employ these practices, and many churches need them. A pastor who believes his congregation is wrong should seek to persuade its people from Scripture rather than coerce them.

Other published material speaks specifically of the long-term theological and structural reformation of churches which were not previously Reformed. Ernest Reisinger and D. Matthew Allen describe the “demolition of misguided theological notions” and the construction of a foundation including unconditional election, particular redemption, effectual calling, and perseverance. They advise against using labels such as Calvinism, Reformed, and doctrines of grace because some people will not understand them and others may become inflamed, while recommending carefully introduced literature and the cultivation of several spiritually minded men who can help carry the reform.³

Published case studies likewise describe pastors whose Calvinistic convictions developed after they were already serving and congregations which moved over a period of years from Arminian or non-Reformed theology to Reformed doctrine. The changes included new confessions and eldership, together with discipline and revised membership practices.⁴ An Acts 29 account of reviving a church that had been “solidly Arminian” describes beginning with a small group and speaking informally with key people, then preparing trusted advocates before moving outward gradually.⁵

These sources present their authors as seeking obedience to Scripture rather than institutional capture. Some commend advance warning and constitutional procedure, including congregational votes conducted with patience and love. They establish that intentional doctrinal transitions occur and that pastors are advised to use preaching and classes, literature and personal relationships, selected leaders, and time to accomplish them. They do not establish dishonesty in every transition.

Nor do the sources reviewed for this book establish a uniform strategy of lying during interviews, signing doctrinal statements a candidate rejects, targeting young people to create a voting bloc, cleaning membership rolls in order to manipulate an election, covertly replacing officers, or introducing elder government so that a pastor cannot be removed. Some documented practices may affect leadership alignment or the voting body, but a possible effect does not prove an unstated motive. Serious accusations require direct evidence rather than suspicion made plausible by an outcome.

The ethical line is not patience versus speed or labels versus no labels. Avoiding a technical label is not automatically deception; pastors often must explain unfamiliar teaching before attaching a disputed name to it. Gradual instruction is not automatically manipulation; people need time to search the Scriptures. The breach occurs when a pastor recognizes that his convictions have materially departed from the doctrine under which the congregation called him, yet withholds that fact while using patient teaching, accumulated trust, private influence, leadership development, or structural change to make his new position increasingly difficult to reverse.

A pastor's subjective truthfulness about every sentence in a sermon does not settle the matter if the congregation did not understand that he was no longer expounding its confessed doctrine but seeking to replace it.

When the Pastor Changes

A pastor must remain free to study, reconsider, and correct his theology beneath Scripture. He should not pretend certainty he no longer possesses, and a congregation should not punish every developing question as betrayal. Theological growth is not duplicity. Neither is a sincere change of conviction.

Material departure nevertheless creates an obligation. The dividing line is not the first private doubt, the first commentary which troubles an inherited interpretation, or the first book which presents an unfamiliar system persuasively. It is the point at which the pastor recognizes that his settled or developing convictions may no longer be compatible with what the church understood him to affirm. Before he turns that departure into a program for changing the congregation, honesty requires disclosure.

The procedure will vary with the church's polity and governing documents, but the obligations can be stated plainly.

First, the pastor should state the changed conviction in ordinary language rather than hiding behind a label or declining a label while leaving the relationship unclear. Saying, “I have come to a deeper view of grace,” is not sufficient if he now believes that God gives regenerating life only to unconditionally selected sinners and that this life irresistibly causes their faith.

Second, he should identify which statements he previously affirmed are now understood differently. If the words remain the same but their objects, scope, or causal relationships have changed, the congregation needs to know that. The issue is whether he and the church still confess the same doctrine through the statement. His ability to sign each isolated sentence cannot settle that question.

Third, he should inform the appropriate fellow pastors, elders, deacons, or accountable leaders before privately organizing supporters. Mature leaders may help him clarify whether the difference is material, advise him about procedure, and prevent a difficult conversation from becoming either a private campaign or an abrupt public crisis.

Fourth, he should tell the congregation before using the pulpit, classes, personal influence, or leadership appointments to normalize the new system. Disclosure after the church's teaching, officers, and active membership have already been reshaped is not meaningful consent to the process which produced those changes.

Fifth, irreversible confessional and structural changes should pause while the church has time to hear, question, study, and decide. The pastor may explain why he believes Scripture requires change, and the congregation must be willing to listen rather than treating its traditions as untouchable. But the outcome should not be secured before the discussion begins.

Finally, the pastor should submit the result to the church's governing documents and legitimate authority. Disclosure does not guarantee that he remains pastor, nor does it require his immediate resignation before the church has spoken. The congregation may revise its confession, decide that the disagreement can be borne, establish boundaries, or conclude that the pastor can no longer represent its doctrine. Whatever follows, it should follow truth brought into the open.

A move from universal provision, faith before regeneration, resistible grace, and election in Christ to definite atonement, regeneration before faith, irresistible calling, and unconditional individual election changes the doctrine rather than merely deepening familiar words. It is a different account of what God intends for every hearer, what Christ provided for him, why one sinner believes, and where election is located.

The same ethical principle would apply if a pastor materially changed his convictions about qualifications for pastoral office or the continuing operation of miraculous gifts in a church constituted around complementarian or cessationist convictions. Although these doctrines occupy different theological categories, each may help constitute a congregation's identity. A pastor is free to reconsider his theology. He is not free to reconsider the congregation's theology on its behalf.

When the Church Realizes It Is Already Changing

Sometimes the congregation does not recognize the departure until the transition is well underway. Members notice that familiar words are carrying unfamiliar meanings, that particular books or ministries are repeatedly recommended, that new leaders share convictions never openly adopted by the church, or that questions are answered as though the historic doctrine were an embarrassment the church must outgrow.

The first duty is not to form a rival faction. Rumor, private accusation, social-media warfare, and attempts to count votes before the doctrine has been established can reproduce the very manipulation members fear. Nor should every mention of sovereignty, election, elder leadership, church discipline, or meaningful membership be treated as evidence of a Calvinistic program. Those doctrines and practices must be evaluated according to what is actually being taught and proposed.

Members should begin by seeking clarity. Ask the pastor to state his present convictions in ordinary language and, where possible, in writing. Request an explanation of how he understands the church's doctrinal statement and whether he believes his position differs from the congregation's historic understanding. Ask about the relationships which this book has traced: whether life precedes faith, whom Christ savingly intended to redeem, what election chooses, whether drawing may be resisted, and what may be promised to every hearer.

The pastor should receive such questions as part of the congregation's stewardship rather than dismissing them as rebellion or theological immaturity. Members, in turn, should listen to his full answer rather than forcing it into a conclusion before he has spoken. If the position is genuinely changing or unsettled, that fact should be acknowledged without demanding artificial certainty.

The church should then use its legitimate structures. Deacons, elders, trustees, officers, or a constitution may assign different responsibilities in different congregations. Those processes are not inconveniences to be bypassed by whichever side believes it has the clearer theology. They are the agreed means by which a church seeks order, hears its members, protects fairness, and reaches a corporate judgment.

Where trust has already been damaged, an outside pastor or respected mediator accepted by both parties may help the church state the issue accurately and prevent personal grievance from swallowing the doctrinal question. Such counsel must not become a substitute authority imported to deliver a predetermined verdict. Its purpose is clarity, fairness, and peace where possible.

The congregation should also distinguish recoverable disagreement from irreversible breach. A pastor who answers plainly, acknowledges the departure, stops unilateral change, and submits the question to the church may be acting honorably even if members ultimately decide he cannot remain. A pastor who refuses clarity, continues organizing support, or treats congregational authority as an obstacle exposes a deeper problem than the disputed doctrine alone.

The goal is neither the pastor's defeat nor the congregation's surrender. It is a truthful judgment about whether they can continue together under a confession both actually affirm.

The Congregation's Stewardship

The congregation does not own the truth, and a majority vote cannot make error biblical. Its authority is ministerial: the church must hear and obey Christ through His Word. Nevertheless, in a congregational Baptist church, the pastor is not the sole proprietor of its confession. The people who call leaders, receive and discipline members, adopt governing documents, and answer corporately for the church's witness possess a real stewardship.

Humility does not require passivity. Members may ask what familiar words mean, how doctrines are being related, and whether the congregation is being asked to change. Respect for pastoral leadership does not surrender the church's responsibility to test teaching and preserve its confession.

Neither side should moralize the disagreement before the facts are clear. The pastor must not treat questions as rebellion, and the congregation must not treat disagreement as treachery. Both must bring the real doctrine into the light.

Questions That Reach Beneath Familiar Words

The best protection begins before a pastor is called. A pulpit committee should not conduct an inquisition, attempt to surprise candidates, or demand agreement with vocabulary the church itself has never defined. It should determine whether the candidate and congregation actually share the faith the pastor will be called to preach.

Questions such as “Do you believe in sovereignty?” “Is salvation by grace?” or “Do you affirm election?” are not sufficient. A Calvinist and a non-Calvinist may answer each one with complete sincerity while placing the terms into incompatible relationships. Agreement with a noun does not establish agreement about its object, operation, scope, or place within the gospel.

The appendix to this book will provide a complete set of practical questions, reasons each question matters, and follow-ups which reach beneath a practiced answer. Five examples show the method.

First, For whom did Christ die, and what did His death accomplish or provide for a person who finally refuses Him? If the answer remains general, ask, May you tell every hearer, without a hidden qualification, “Christ died for you”?

Second, When does the Holy Spirit give a sinner spiritual life: in order that he will believe, or when he entrusts himself to Christ? Then ask whether an unregenerate sinner can respond to the gospel through drawing, enlightenment, and conviction without first being born again.

Third, What does election choose, where is election located, and what does predestination appoint? Ask whether God selected particular unbelievers to receive the grace which would cause their faith, or whether those united to Christ share the election and appointed destiny established in Him.

Fourth, Is God's saving invitation genuine for every hearer in the same sense? Ask whether God has provided both a Saviour and sufficient gracious enablement for every person He commands to believe.

Fifth, If your convictions materially change after you become pastor, what do you believe you owe this congregation before teaching toward that change? Ask whether the candidate will disclose the change and submit the church's doctrinal direction to its informed judgment under its governing documents.

These are not trick questions, and a Calvinistic candidate should be free to answer them honestly. An openly Calvinistic candidate fully explaining his convictions to a non-Calvinist congregation has not deceived it. The church may be wise or unwise to accept the difference, but it knowingly owns the decision.

The purpose of careful examination is not to make a candidate say the expected words. It is to make practiced words unnecessary by bringing the actual doctrine into the open.

Faithful Stewards of the Truth

Pastors and congregations both live under authority. The pastor must not confuse leadership with ownership, and the congregation must not confuse stewardship with the right to silence unwelcome Scripture. Both are responsible to Christ for the doctrine proclaimed in His church and for the manner in which change is considered.

Honorable persuasion says, “I believe our confession or understanding is mistaken, and I want to show you why.” Undisclosed redirection says familiar things until enough trust, influence, and structure have accumulated to make the real change difficult to refuse. One places the argument before the church. The other attempts to secure the church before fully naming the argument.

The distinction is not subtle once the doctrine is brought into the light.

A pastor may change. A congregation may change. Scripture may correct them both. But truth does not need concealment, and pastoral authority does not need preemption. The church can hear, study, question, persuade, and decide beneath the Word of God.

The pulpit is an entrustment. Let the steward be found faithful.

Notes

Mark Dever, “How to Change Your Church,” Capitol Hill Baptist Church, March 1, 2010, https://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/sermon/how-to-change-your-church.

Mark Dever, By Whose Authority? Elders in Baptist Life (Washington, DC: 9Marks, 2006), https://www.9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/By-Whose-Authority-Book-PDF.pdf; Phil A. Newton, “Moving from a Deacon-Led to an Elder-Led Church,” 9Marks Journal (May–June 2010): 19–21, https://www.9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9Marks_Journal_2010_May-Jun_Deacons.pdf. Newton advises patience and expressly directs pastors to follow the method prescribed in the church’s governing documents.

Ernest C. Reisinger and D. Matthew Allen, “Walking Without Slipping: Instructions for Local Church Reformation,” in A Quiet Revolution: A Chronicle of Beginnings of Reformation in the Southern Baptist Convention (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2000), https://founders.org/library/walking-without-slipping/.

Scott Lee, “Reformed by the Word: One Church's Journey,” Founders Ministries, https://founders.org/articles/reformed-by-the-word-one-churchs-journey/; Tom Ascol, “Reforming Churches,” Founders Ministries, https://founders.org/articles/reforming-churches/.

Chris Lewis, “Reviving a Dying Church,” Acts 29, https://www.acts29.com/reviving-a-dying-church/.

The Invitation Means What It Says

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

At the end of a long doctrinal argument, there is a danger that the reader will remember the argument and lose sight of the Person about whom it was made. We have examined confessions, definitions, causal relationships, disputed passages, and competing accounts of salvation because those things matter, but the gospel does not finally bring the sinner to a system. It brings him to Jesus Christ.

The question running through this book has therefore never been whether grace is necessary, whether God is sovereign, whether sinners are helpless to save themselves, or whether salvation belongs wholly to God. Those truths are not concessions to Calvinism. They are the confession of every Christian who understands what sin has done and what Christ alone has accomplished.

Reformed traditions differ over important questions, and individual Calvinists do not formulate every part of the system identically. The question examined in this book has been whether the common causal center beneath those differences is required by Scripture: that God selected certain unbelievers before creation to receive the saving grace withheld from the rest, that Christ died with a saving intention only for those selected people, and that the Spirit regenerates each of them before faith so that their believing becomes the inevitable effect of life already given. That construction is coherent, but coherence cannot establish a premise which Scripture has not supplied.

Scripture gives us a richer and more openly Christ-centered account. The Father purposes salvation in His Son and sends Him into the world, bearing witness to Him and drawing sinners toward Him. The Son gives Himself for the world and rises from the dead as the source of life for everyone united to Him. Through the proclaimed Word, the Spirit reveals Christ and brings conviction and light to hearts that could never discover or embrace Him through unaided wisdom. Grace comes before every saving response. It surrounds the sinner with truth he did not create and provides everything he could never provide for himself.

Yet grace does not need to replace the person in order to save him. The Father draws, but does not believe in the sinner's place. The Spirit convicts, but does not repent for him. The Word reveals Christ, but does not make his surrender unreal. When the sinner relinquishes self-rule and entrusts himself to the Son whom grace has brought near, faith contributes no merit, righteousness, sacrifice, or life. Faith receives Christ; and in that saving union, the Spirit gives the believer life.

The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

This confession reserves no portion of salvation for human achievement; it preserves the actions Scripture actually describes. God remains the source and giver. He reveals and reconciles, He justifies, and He gives life. Christ remains the entire ground of salvation. Faith remains the empty-handed surrender which abandons every competing claim and rests in Him.

Election belongs within that same Christ-centered reality. Before the foundation of the world, God did not improvise a rescue after humanity rebelled. He established His saving purpose in His Chosen Son and determined beforehand what those in Christ would become: holy and without blame, adopted as sons, formed into one people, made heirs, conformed to the image of Christ, and gathered into the praise of His glory. No believer makes himself elect by the strength of his decision. Those who receive Christ share the chosen identity and appointed destiny already established in Him.

This is why election must not be removed from Christ and made into a hidden answer to the question of which unbelievers will be enabled to believe. The sinner is not told to discover whether his name stands upon a secret list before coming to the Son. He is told that God has given Christ, that life is in Christ, and that everyone who receives the Son possesses that life. Christ is the Chosen One in whom God's saving purpose stands, far more than the means by which a prior selection is carried out.

The same truth governs the gospel invitation. Every hearer may be told that Christ died for him, that God commands him to repent, that the Father is drawing through the witness He has given, and that the Spirit is bringing truth to bear upon his conscience. The preacher need not look for evidence of secret regeneration before urging him to believe, nor leave him wondering whether the only grace capable of bringing him to Christ may have been withheld.

The warning is also real. The person who refuses Christ is not a passive victim of an absent decree. Light has come, and he loves darkness rather than light. The Word reaches him, and he may harden himself against it. Grace may be resisted without becoming insincere, and God's patience may be despised without becoming weakness. The condemnation of unbelief is terrible precisely because the Son was genuinely given and the invitation was genuinely extended.

A Final Word to the Church

This brings the argument back to the church for which this book was written. A congregation does not need to become suspicious of every unfamiliar phrase, hostile toward every Calvinist, or afraid of serious theological study. It does need to understand the doctrine it confesses well enough to recognize when familiar words have been placed into a different structure.

Ask more than whether a pastor believes in grace. Ask what grace does and whether it may be resisted. Ask more than whether he believes in election. Ask whom God chose, where that election is located, and what predestination appoints. Ask more than whether he preaches faith. Ask whether the sinner believes before receiving life in Christ or because he has already been secretly regenerated. Ask more than whether he says Christ receives everyone who comes. Ask whether Christ was savingly given for everyone whom he commands to come.

Those questions are not traps. They are ways of bringing doctrine into the light so that pastors and congregations may speak truthfully to one another. An openly Reformed pastor and an openly Reformed church may confess their convictions without accusation from this book. A Calvinistic candidate who explains his theology plainly has dealt honestly with the congregation considering him. The wrong addressed here is trust obtained through familiar language and then used to redirect a church before the actual difference has been disclosed. Open disagreement avoids that wrong.

The church must therefore be both charitable and watchful. Charity refuses to accuse before the facts are known, represents another person's convictions fairly, and remembers that many Calvinists love Christ and preach Him sincerely. Watchfulness refuses to surrender the congregation's confession merely because a confident teacher calls its historic understanding shallow. Charity and discernment are not enemies. Both require truth in the open.

The pastor likewise remains free beneath Scripture. He may study, reconsider, and change his mind, because his first loyalty is to Christ rather than to inherited formulas. But he is a steward rather than an owner. When his convictions depart materially from those he affirmed with the church, faithfulness requires him to say so before using the pulpit and the congregation's trust to make the departure irreversible. Truth may call a church to change, but truth does not need concealment in order to prevail.

These institutional questions matter because neglecting them has wounded churches, divided them, and sometimes brought about their destruction. Yet even here the controversy must not have the final word. The church exists to bear witness to Jesus Christ. Its doctrine must be clear so that its gospel may be clear; its pastors must speak honestly so that sinners may hear the promise of Christ without the invisible footnote this book has challenged.

A Final Word to the Reader

Perhaps you have read this book as a pastor or church member seeking to understand a controversy already unfolding around you. Use what you have learned patiently. Ask questions before making accusations. Bring definitions and relationships into the open. Submit every claim, including every claim made in these pages, to the whole argument of Scripture. Seek truth without delighting in conflict, and remember that winning a doctrinal struggle at the expense of love and fairness, or at the cost of faithfulness itself, is no victory for the church of Christ.

Perhaps, however, you have read as someone who is not certain that you belong to Christ. You may now understand election, calling, faith, and regeneration more clearly while still wondering whether the promise reaches you. Do not turn the doctrine of election into one more place to hide from the Son or one more secret you believe must be solved before you may come.

You cannot save yourself. You cannot erase your guilt or repair your rebellion. You can neither create righteousness nor raise yourself from death. You do not need to do any of those things before coming, because Christ has done what no sinner could do. He bore sin and satisfied justice; He defeated death and rose in life that death cannot touch. God has brought Him near through the gospel, and the command to repent and believe is addressed to you.

Do not trust your understanding of this book or the intensity of your sorrow. Do not rest in the correctness of a prayer or the strength of a decision. Turn from the right you have claimed to govern yourself, and entrust your guilt and future, your very life, to Jesus Christ. You are not being asked to prove that you were secretly made alive before you come. You are being called to the living Son in whom life is found.

The Father who sent the Son is not exposed by the openness of Christ's promise, as though the Son welcomed people whom the Father had no saving desire to receive. The Father's drawing and the Son's welcome belong to one saving purpose. Divine initiative stands at the beginning of the verse, and an unqualified promise stands at its end. We honor neither half by turning it against the other.

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

The invitation means what it says because the Saviour means what He says.

Appendix — Questions That Reach Beneath Familiar Words

A pulpit committee carries a stewardship which is difficult to appreciate until the church must exercise it. The members are guarding a doctrinal trust, a responsibility reaching far beyond arranging sermons or comparing résumés in search of a pleasing personality. They are helping the church determine whether a man should be entrusted with the pulpit and doctrine, with the people themselves, and therefore with much of the church's future direction.

That responsibility cannot be fulfilled by asking only whether a candidate believes the Bible, affirms the sovereignty of God, preaches salvation by grace, or accepts the church's doctrinal statement. Those questions matter, but sincere Christians who construct the doctrines of salvation very differently may answer every one of them with an unqualified yes.

The purpose of careful examination is not to make a candidate say the expected words. It is to make practiced words unnecessary by bringing the actual doctrine into the open.

This appendix is designed particularly for traditionally General Baptist, Independent Baptist, and similarly non-Calvinist congregations, but its method is useful more broadly. It does not presume that every Calvinistic candidate is dishonest or that every theological difference should prevent a call. An openly Calvinistic candidate who explains his convictions fully has dealt honestly with the church. The committee's duty is to understand what he believes, compare it with what the congregation actually confesses, and ensure that the church knowingly owns whatever decision it makes.

The questions should therefore be asked conversationally rather than as an interrogation. Give a serious candidate the principal questions in advance. Invite written answers where precision will help, then discuss those answers face to face. Allow him to ask questions, clarify his language, and correct the committee's summary. The goal is light, never surprise.

Each section below follows the same pattern:

Ask this gives the primary question.

Why it matters explains the relationship the question uncovers.

Follow up supplies additional questions when the first answer remains general.

Listen for clarity about identifies what the committee should be able to explain afterward.

The last element is not a hidden answer key. It does not authorize the committee to force every sentence into a label or to treat a candid disagreement as deception. It tells the committee what must no longer remain ambiguous before it recommends a pastor to the church.

Before Interviewing a Candidate

Recover the Church's Actual Confession

The church must understand its own doctrine before examining someone else's. The committee should begin by reading the complete doctrinal statement, constitution, bylaws, church covenant, and any provisions governing the call, authority, or removal of a pastor. Statements concerning Scripture, God, man, sin, salvation, atonement, election, the Holy Spirit, church government, and pastoral authority should be identified and discussed.

The committee must then distinguish what the documents expressly say from what members have traditionally assumed they mean. A statement may declare salvation to be by grace through faith without saying whether regeneration precedes faith. It may affirm election in Christ without explaining whether particular unbelievers were first selected to be irresistibly brought into Christ. It may say that Christ died for sinners without identifying the intended scope of His death.

Those silences do not prove that the church has no historic position, because confessions often rest upon a shared understanding which earlier generations did not believe needed elaboration. Neither may the committee simply declare its own memories to be the church's binding doctrine. Governing documents, previous teaching, recognized pastoral history, and credible congregational testimony should be brought together honestly. If the church itself is divided or uncertain, that fact should be acknowledged before a candidate is asked to inherit the uncertainty.

Write the Church's Answers First

Before interviewing serious candidates, the committee should answer the questions in this appendix in ordinary language. Those answers should be reviewed with whatever officers or accountable leadership the church's polity assigns, and material ambiguities should be reported to the congregation.

A committee cannot evaluate compatibility if its preferred answer changes according to the candidate sitting before it. Nor should it demand from him a precision the church has refused to pursue for itself. Writing first ensures that the committee knows what it believes it is being asked to preserve. It must never become an attempt to construct a new confession without congregational authority.

Decide Which Differences Are Material

Not every disagreement prevents a faithful pastorate. A church should distinguish doctrines which constitute its identity from questions upon which conscientious differences have historically been permitted. It should also distinguish unsettled doctrine from personal preference. A committee member's favorite explanation is not automatically the church's confession, and a candidate should not be rejected merely because he declines vocabulary the church has never adopted.

Materiality depends upon both the doctrine and the office. A private member may live faithfully within a church while disagreeing with a teaching he does not undermine. A pastor is called to represent and teach the church's doctrine publicly, train leaders, counsel families, shape membership, and guide the congregation's future. A disagreement which can be borne among members may become materially different when the candidate will occupy the principal teaching office.

Establish a Fair Process

Ask the same principal questions of every serious candidate. Provide them before the formal interview rather than attempting to expose an unsuspecting man with a theological surprise. Invite written answers, but do not allow polished documents to substitute for a personal conversation in which examples and follow-ups can be explored.

The committee should keep careful notes and eventually prepare a plain-language summary of the candidate's material convictions. Before that summary is reported as his position, give him an opportunity to correct it. Appropriate confidentiality should protect personal information and preliminary conversations, but confidentiality must not be used to hide a material doctrinal difference from the congregation which will vote upon the call.

Do not recommend a candidate until the committee can explain what he believes without caricature and without relying upon a label he has accepted or rejected.

Questions for the Candidate

1. Your Relationship to This Church's Confession

Ask this: After reading our doctrinal statement and governing documents, are there any statements you reject, understand differently from this church's historic understanding, or would hope eventually to revise?

Why it matters: A signature does not always establish shared meaning. A candidate may sincerely affirm every sentence while placing its words into relationships the church has never held. This opening question asks him to compare his actual theology with this particular congregation rather than affirming a generic statement in the abstract.

Follow up:

Which statement required the most explanation or qualification from you?

Are there doctrines you can affirm verbally but would define differently from most members of this church?

If called, would you teach the church's stated position, teach your differing position openly, or seek to persuade the church to revise its statement?

Are any of your present convictions developing in ways the church should know?

Listen for clarity about: Reservations, redefinitions, intended changes, and whether assent means ordinary agreement or only the ability to fit a different position inside broad wording.

The committee should also listen to the candidate's questions. A man who asks what the church means, requests its history, and wants potential differences clarified is not being difficult. He may be demonstrating precisely the care the church should want from him.

2. Theological Identity and Influences

Ask this: Which confessions, theologians, seminaries, ministries, books, and pastoral networks have most shaped your doctrine of salvation, and where do you disagree with them?

Why it matters: Influences help the committee understand the candidate's vocabulary, theological formation, and likely direction more accurately than a label alone. This use of them must never become guilt by association. A thoughtful candidate should be able to appreciate a teacher without inheriting his entire system and should be able to identify meaningful disagreements with his influences.

Follow up:

Do you identify as Calvinist, Reformed, Provisionist, Arminian, or by another description? What do you mean by that label?

Which confession most nearly states your theology?

Are there teachers you frequently recommend while rejecting important parts of their system?

What are you presently studying that might materially change your position?

Which books would you expect to use in leadership training or recommend regularly to the congregation?

Listen for clarity about: Intellectual formation, candid self-identification, meaningful disagreement with influences, developing convictions, and the resources likely to shape the church's future teaching.

Reading Calvin, Arminius, or any contemporary theologian does not establish that a candidate has adopted that writer's entire system, and appreciation is not assent. Use these influences as context for understanding the candidate's vocabulary, but then evaluate each doctrinal answer on its own terms. A name or label must not predetermine what the committee hears.

3. Sovereignty and Human Response

Ask this: What do you mean when you say that God is sovereign in salvation, and how does His sovereignty relate to a sinner's responsible response to the gospel?

Why it matters: Nearly every Christian candidate will affirm divine sovereignty. The disagreement concerns what sovereignty is made to require. Some understand it to mean that God must determine which particular sinners will believe by giving them an inward grace which makes faith certain. Others believe the sovereign God can draw, enlighten, convict, and enable a genuine response without making that response inevitable.

Follow up:

Does God's sovereignty require Him to determine which particular hearers will believe?

Can God graciously enable a genuine response without making the response inevitable?

When two sinners hear the gospel and only one believes, what explains the difference?

Does a responsible choice require that the person could have responded otherwise under the grace given?

Listen for clarity about: Divine initiative, moral responsibility, resistibility, compatibilism, and whether sovereignty is being identified with the causal determination of saving faith.

Do not accuse a Reformed candidate of teaching that God drags people to Christ against their will. Classical Calvinism ordinarily teaches that regenerating grace changes the will so that the sinner comes voluntarily. The question is whether that inward change makes faith inevitable and is selectively given, not whether the renewed person experiences himself as willing.

4. Spiritual Death and Inability

Ask this: What can and cannot be true of a spiritually dead sinner when the Word is proclaimed and the Holy Spirit is drawing, enlightening, and convicting him?

Why it matters: Both the candidate and church may agree that sinners are dead in trespasses and sins, unable to save themselves, and dependent upon grace. That agreement does not settle whether a sinner must first be regenerated in order to understand and believe the gospel. The committee needs to know what kind of inability the candidate believes Scripture describes.

Follow up:

Does spiritual death mean that a sinner can no more respond to God's gracious address than a corpse can hear a sermon?

Can an unregenerate person receive real illumination, conviction, or temporary belief?

Is the sinner unable because God has not regenerated him, because he remains governed by rebellion, or in some other sense?

How do you understand 1 Corinthians 2:14, and what conclusions about the relationship between regeneration and faith do you believe follow from it?

Listen for clarity about: Moral and relational inability, the corpse analogy, action by the Spirit before regeneration, and what conclusions the candidate draws from spiritual inability about the relationship between faith and regeneration.

A candidate should not be pressed into saying that the sinner possesses an untouched natural ability to believe. The relevant question is whether God can address and enable the sinner through the Word and Spirit before giving him life in union with Christ.

5. The Gospel Call and Grace

Ask this: Does every hearer receive a genuine saving summons from God, together with sufficient gracious action to make repentance and faith a real response?

Why it matters: A candidate may affirm that the gospel should be preached to everyone while distinguishing the universal outward call from an inward effectual call given only to the elect. In that construction, every hearer receives the command, but only selected hearers receive the grace without which faith is possible. The committee must understand whether the invitation has the same saving relation to everyone addressed.

Follow up:

Do you distinguish between a general call and an effectual call? What does each accomplish?

Does God savingly desire every person hearing the gospel to repent and live?

May the drawing, enlightenment, and conviction of the Spirit be resisted?

What grace has God genuinely given to a hearer who finally refuses Christ?

Is unbelief the refusal of sufficient light and grace, or the inevitable condition of someone from whom effectual grace was withheld?

Listen for clarity about: Universal address, divine saving intention, sufficient grace, effectual calling, resistibility, and whether the public invitation discloses God's saving disposition toward every hearer.

The committee should not be satisfied merely to hear that the invitation is “well meant.” Ask what God has actually intended, provided, and graciously brought to the person who hears it.

6. Faith and Regeneration

Ask this: When does the Holy Spirit give a sinner spiritual life: in order that he will believe, or when he entrusts himself to Christ?

Why it matters: This is the central causal difference examined in this book. Both positions may affirm that the sinner believes and that the Spirit alone gives life. They differ over whether regeneration causes the sinner's first saving faith or whether the Spirit gives life to the believer in union with Christ.

Follow up:

Can an unregenerate sinner believe through the prior drawing, revelation, enlightenment, and conviction of God?

Is the person already spiritually alive before he is united to Christ through faith?

Does regeneration make the sinner's first act of faith inevitable?

How do you understand the statement, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God”?

When Scripture says that the believer has life in the Son, how does that union relate to regeneration?

Listen for clarity about: Order, causation, union with Christ, the distinction between illumination and regeneration, and whether faith receives life or necessarily expresses life already given.

If the candidate says that regeneration and faith occur together, ask about logical dependence rather than demanding a measurable interval. The issue concerns the causal relationship: is life given in order to cause faith, or to the person receiving Christ through faith? The passage of minutes between them is irrelevant.

7. What Faith Is

Ask this: What does the sinner do when he believes, and why does that believing contribute no merit or ground for boasting?

Why it matters: Some candidates reject faith before regeneration because they believe any response not irresistibly caused by God would become a saving work. This question reveals whether faith is understood as payment, autonomous virtue, an inevitable effect, or trusting surrender to Christ.

Follow up:

Is faith itself a work which gives the believer reason to boast?

Does God believe for the sinner, cause the sinner inevitably to believe, or graciously enable him genuinely to entrust himself to Christ?

How are repentance and faith related?

What would you tell a person who understands the gospel but has not surrendered himself to Christ?

Why does the believer receive salvation while the unbeliever remains condemned without making faith the ground of salvation?

Listen for clarity about: Merit, reception, surrender, divine enablement, personal agency, and the distinction between the ground of salvation and the means by which Christ is received.

The committee should reject both Pelagian self-salvation and the assumption that a real response must be meritorious. Faith creates no sacrifice, righteousness, or life. It receives the Christ whom grace has revealed.

8. Election and Predestination

Ask this: What does election choose, where is election located, and what does predestination appoint?

Why it matters: A candidate may affirm that election is “in Christ” while still believing that God first selected particular unbelievers to be irresistibly brought into Christ. The biblical phrase alone does not reveal which relationship he believes governs the others.

Follow up:

Is Christ first the Chosen One in whom believers share election, or does an individual selection determine who will later be joined to Him?

Were particular unbelievers selected before creation to receive the grace which would cause their faith?

In Ephesians 1 and Romans 8, what are those in Christ predestined to become or receive?

Does predestination primarily answer who will believe or what believers in Christ are appointed to become and do?

How does Israel's election to receive the oracles of God and bring the Messiah inform your use of the word?

Listen for clarity about: The object of election, election in Christ, unconditional individual selection, corporate identity, and the appointed destiny and service of those in the Son.

Do not permit either party to use corporate as though individuals disappear. Individual people really believe, enter Christ, and share the identity and destiny of His people. The disputed question is whether an eternal selection of those individuals caused their entrance or whether election stands in Christ and belongs to those united to Him through faith.

9. The Death of Christ

Ask this: For whom did Christ die, and what did His death accomplish or provide for a person who finally refuses Him?

Why it matters: The statement that Christ's death is sufficient for all may describe either a genuine provision for every sinner or merely the infinite value of a sacrifice savingly intended only for the elect. The committee must learn what the candidate means by scope, intention, accomplishment, provision, and application.

Follow up:

Did Christ bear the sins of every person or only those selected for salvation?

May you tell every hearer, without a hidden qualification, “Christ died for you”?

If Christ died for someone who finally perishes, did His blood fail, or was a genuinely provided salvation refused?

How do you understand Christ as the propitiation “for the sins of the whole world”?

Is the saving work located in Christ and received through union with Him, or distributed as an individual credit only to those selected beforehand?

Listen for clarity about: Saving intention, universal provision, definite atonement, sufficiency, application through faith, and what may truthfully be proclaimed to every sinner.

The candidate should be allowed to explain the strongest form of his position. A Calvinist may sincerely proclaim Christ to everyone while believing that the atonement's saving design was particular. The committee must understand whether that design agrees with the church's confession while granting the candidate's sincerity.

10. God's Desire and Reprobation

Ask this: Does God genuinely desire every sinner to repent and be saved, and how do you understand those who finally remain under judgment?

Why it matters: This question reveals whether unbelief is understood as persistent resistance to God's genuine saving desire and provision, or as the outworking of a decision to pass over people from whom effectual grace was withheld. It also tests how the candidate relates God's commands, invitations, laments, patience, and judgment.

Because these categories are less familiar and require careful distinctions, committee members may wish to review Chapter 13, “The Shadow Doctrine of Reprobation,” before discussing this question with a candidate.

Follow up:

How do you relate God's revealed saving desire to His eternal purpose?

Did God create any human being for condemnation rather than for life with Himself?

What does it mean that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels?

How do you understand hardening: as an unconditional cause of unbelief or as judicial action upon persistent rebellion?

Do you affirm single predestination, double predestination, reprobation, or some other account? Define the term you use.

Listen for clarity about: Revealed and decretive will, single or double predestination, genuine divine desire, hardening, responsibility, and the purpose of judgment.

This subject should be handled without emotional shortcuts. The committee should not imply that a candidate has made God cruel merely because he holds a Reformed doctrine of reprobation, and the candidate should not dismiss moral or exegetical questions as sentimental resistance to sovereignty. Ask him to follow the biblical texts in their context.

11. Preaching, Counseling, and Assurance

Ask this: What may you promise every sinner in gospel preaching, and how would you counsel a troubled person who asks whether Christ will receive him?

Why it matters: Pastoral practice often reveals qualifications that remain hidden in abstract definitions. The question moves the candidate's theology from the classroom into the pulpit, counseling room, and troubled conscience.

Follow up:

Would you tell the seeker to look for evidence that he has already been regenerated, or direct him immediately to Christ?

May you tell him that Christ was given for him and that the Spirit is bringing the truth to bear upon him?

What do you believe occurs when he entrusts himself to Christ?

Where should a believer look first for assurance: Christ's public promise, evidence of a hidden decree, a past decision, or present fruit?

How would you guard against both pressured decisionism and endless inspection for evidence of election?

Listen for clarity about: The content of the invitation, seeker counsel, assurance, regeneration, union with Christ, and whether the public promise is sufficient to direct every hearer to the Son.

A committee may profitably give the candidate a simple pastoral situation and ask him to respond as he would in his study. “A man says, ‘I know I am a sinner and believe Jesus died and rose again, but I fear I may not be one of the elect. What should I do?’” The answer may reveal more than another page of definitions.

12. Pastoral Authority and Future Doctrinal Change

Ask this: If your convictions materially change after you become pastor, what do you believe you owe this congregation before teaching toward that change?

Why it matters: A sincere theological change is not duplicity. Every pastor must remain teachable beneath Scripture. Material departure does, however, create an obligation when the pastor can no longer affirm what the church understood him to confess.

Follow up:

At what point would you tell the church that your convictions might no longer be compatible with its doctrine?

Would you disclose the change before using sermons, classes, leadership appointments, or structural revisions to advance it?

Who possesses authority to revise this church's doctrinal statement and polity?

Would you pause irreversible changes while the congregation studies and decides under its governing documents?

If the church declined to change, how would you determine whether you could continue serving honorably?

Listen for clarity about: Disclosure, persuasion, informed congregational judgment, constitutional process, the distinction between pastoral leadership and ownership, and willingness to accept an outcome the pastor did not prefer.

The strongest answer is not a promise that the candidate will never change. Such a promise would either be unrealistic or announce that he no longer intends to learn. The committee should seek a commitment that if he changes, he will bring the change into the open before attempting to make it the church's doctrine.

Questions the Candidate Should Ask the Church

The examination should be reciprocal. A church asking for candor must offer candor. Invite the candidate to ask what the church presently believes about grace, faith, regeneration, election, atonement, assurance, pastoral authority, and congregational government. Tell him which doctrines are settled, which permit conscientious disagreement, and which remain unclear.

The church should also disclose unresolved conflicts, recent pastoral wounds, factions, financial difficulties, disciplinary matters, and significant theological changes which would materially affect his ministry. Appropriate pastoral and personal confidentiality must be preserved, but a committee should not hide congregational realities until after a man has moved his family and accepted the call.

He should know what authority belongs to the pastor, officers, and congregation under the governing documents, what changes the church expects or fears, and what process would be required if pastor or congregation later believed Scripture demanded correction.

The church must not require exact disclosure from a candidate while concealing its own divisions, expectations, or history.

Reporting to the Congregation

The committee should not report merely that a candidate “answered all our questions correctly.” That statement asks the church to trust a conclusion without being permitted to understand its grounds. Instead, the committee should prepare a concise summary of his material convictions in ordinary language.

The summary should identify where agreement is clear, where difference is permissible, and where unresolved ambiguity has produced material incompatibility. These categories describe compatibility with this particular church; they pronounce neither upon the candidate's salvation and sincerity nor upon his intelligence or fitness to serve every other congregation.

Before presenting the summary as the candidate's position, give him an opportunity to correct inaccuracies or add necessary qualifications. If a material difference remains, report it plainly. The congregation may decide that the difference can be borne, that further discussion is necessary, or that the candidate should not be called. Whatever it decides, it should decide knowingly.

The completed questionnaire, the candidate's written answers, and the agreed summary should be preserved with the church's pastoral-search records. If questions later arise about what was disclosed, the church and pastor should not have to reconstruct the conversation from competing memories.

The congregation should never be asked to vote upon a theological compatibility which only the committee has been permitted to understand.

When the Questions Concern a Sitting Pastor

Sometimes a church begins asking these questions only after members suspect that the pastor's convictions have changed. That situation requires the same commitment to clarity, but also greater care because trust, relationships, livelihoods, and the congregation's peace are already involved.

Do not begin by accusing the pastor of deception. Do not treat every use of Reformed language, every recommended author, or every proposal for elder leadership, church discipline, or meaningful membership as proof of a hidden Calvinistic program. Do not organize a rival faction, circulate private allegations, or count votes before establishing what the pastor actually believes and proposes.

Use the church's legitimate structures. Depending upon its polity, the initial conversation may belong to deacons, elders, trustees, officers, or another accountable group. The pastor should be asked to state his present convictions in ordinary language and, where the difference is material, in writing.

The conversation should include these questions:

How do you presently understand the disputed doctrines?

Does that understanding differ from what you believed, taught, or understood this congregation to confess when you were called?

When did you recognize that the difference might be material?

What teaching, leadership, membership, confessional, or structural changes have already been made or planned in connection with it?

What process do you believe the church should now follow?

Will you pause irreversible changes while the congregation studies and decides?

If the church retains its historic doctrine, can you continue to represent it honestly?

A pastor who answers plainly, acknowledges the departure, pauses unilateral change, and submits the question to the church may be acting honorably even if the congregation ultimately decides he cannot remain. A congregation which listens fairly, follows its documents, and permits him to explain his convictions may be acting honorably even if it concludes that the difference is irreconcilable.

The goal is neither the pastor's predetermined defeat nor the congregation's surrender. It is a truthful judgment about whether they can continue together under a confession both actually affirm.

Pulpit Committee Summary Sheet

This summary may be copied and adapted to the church's own process. It is not a substitute for the candidate's full answers.

Church: ________________________________________________

Candidate: ______________________________________________

Interview date or dates: _________________________________

Participants: ____________________________________________

For each subject, first preserve the comparison upon which the committee's assessment will rest. Brief statements are sufficient here; attach the church's fuller preparatory answers and the candidate's complete responses when necessary.

Subject | Church's stated position | Candidate's stated position
Church confession |  |
Theological identity and influences |  |
Sovereignty and human response |  |
Spiritual death and inability |  |
Gospel call and grace |  |
Faith and regeneration |  |
Nature of saving faith |  |
Election and predestination |  |
Extent and intention of the atonement |  |
God's saving desire and reprobation |  |
Gospel preaching, counseling, and assurance |  |
Pastoral authority and later doctrinal change |  |

Then mark the committee's present assessment of compatibility. Theological identity and influences provide context for understanding the candidate's answers rather than an independent ground of compatibility or incompatibility, so that subject is not classified again in the table below.

Subject | Clear agreement | Permissible difference | Needs clarification | Material incompatibility
Church confession | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Sovereignty and human response | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Spiritual death and inability | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Gospel call and grace | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Faith and regeneration | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Nature of saving faith | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Election and predestination | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Extent and intention of the atonement | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
God's saving desire and reprobation | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Gospel preaching, counseling, and assurance | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐
Pastoral authority and later doctrinal change | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐

Areas of clear agreement:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Differences the committee believes the church may conscientiously permit:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Questions requiring further clarification:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Differences the committee believes may be materially incompatible with the church's confession:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Candidate's corrections or qualifications to this summary:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Committee recommendation:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Candidate acknowledgment: I have reviewed this summary. It accurately represents my stated convictions except where my corrections or qualifications have been recorded above.

Candidate signature: ___________________________ Date: __________

Committee representative: ______________________ Date: __________

This acknowledgment does not require the candidate to agree with the committee's judgment about compatibility. It confirms only that his convictions have been represented accurately.

Faithful Examination

A pulpit committee has not completed its work when it finds a man who can affirm the church's words. It has completed this part of its work when candidate and congregation understand what each means by those words, where they agree, where they differ, and what honesty will require if either later changes.

The church is not looking merely for a theological examination to be passed. It is looking for a steward who will preach Christ, love the people, submit himself to Scripture, and handle the congregation's trust faithfully. No questionnaire can measure all of those things, and no set of correct answers can substitute for character, calling, pastoral wisdom, or the biblical qualifications for office.

These questions do something more limited, but still necessary. They bring the doctrine into the light before trust is given, so that trust may be given knowingly.

Glossary

This glossary defines the principal terms used in this book. Some are biblical words whose meaning must be followed through their context; others are historical or theological labels used to describe competing accounts of salvation. The definitions are intended to help readers recover the relationships developed in the chapters rather than replace the biblical arguments made there.

Arminianism is an evangelical theological tradition which affirms humanity's pervasive corruption, the necessity of prior enabling grace, Christ's provision for all people, resistible grace, and salvation through personal faith. Classical Arminian accounts commonly understand election as God's choice of those whom He foreknows will believe. This distinguishes Arminianism from Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, both of which assign a greater initiating capacity to fallen humanity. This book shares several conclusions with Arminianism but places election first in Christ rather than in an eternal list of individuals selected through foreseen faith.

Assurance

Assurance is the settled confidence that one belongs to God through faith in Jesus Christ and the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. It looks first to Christ and His public promise rather than behind the gospel for proof of a hidden decree. The believer trusts the living Son to whom he has entrusted himself rather than the remembered strength of a past decision. The fruit of union with Christ, including continuing faith, conviction, growth, love, and obedience, confirms that life without replacing Christ as assurance's foundation.

Atonement

Atonement is the uniting work of Jesus Christ by which He deals with judgment, guilt, death, and alienation and establishes restored communion with God in Himself. Through His obedient death and resurrection, Christ accomplishes the saving work sinners could never perform. Definite atonement, also called particular redemption or limited atonement, teaches that Christ died with the saving intention of securing redemption for the elect alone. Universal provision teaches that Christ was genuinely given for every sinner, while the salvation accomplished in Him is savingly received through faith and union with Him.

See also Expiation, Propitiation, Union with Christ, and Universal Provision.

Calling

Calling is God's authoritative summons to enter, embrace, and live out the life and purpose He has revealed. Through the gospel, God calls sinners to turn from self-rule and entrust themselves to Jesus Christ. This book understands that summons as genuine and resistible. Reformed theology distinguishes the universal general call from the effectual call, an inward work given to the elect which renews the will so that the sinner freely and certainly comes. Scripture also calls believers “the called,” describing the identity and vocation of those in whom the summons has reached its saving end.

Calvinism

Calvinism is a family of Reformed theological accounts which places God's unconditional election of particular sinners at the governing center of salvation's application. In its common confessional form, those elected people are redeemed by Christ, effectually called and regenerated by the Spirit, brought certainly to faith, and preserved to final salvation. Calvinists differ over the extent of the atonement, the logical ordering of God's decrees, the language of the gospel offer, and other important questions. The term therefore describes a related tradition rather than one uniform formulation. This book addresses the common causal center beneath those differences, not the sincerity or Christian standing of every Calvinist.

Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the position that an action may be voluntary and morally responsible even when the person's desires and choice are certainly determined by prior causes. Reformed accounts commonly apply this to conversion by teaching that regeneration changes the sinner's governing disposition so that he willingly and inevitably comes to Christ. The sinner is not externally forced to act against his desires; grace changes what he desires. The dispute in this book concerns two accounts of grace: one enables a resistible response, while the other inwardly makes one response certain. Both affirm voluntary faith and reject crude coercion.

Conversion

Conversion is the decisive passage from self-ruled life in Adam into surrendered life in Christ. In conversion, the sinner turns to Christ in repentant faith, and the Holy Spirit joins him to the risen Son and gives him new life. Repentance, saving faith, union with Christ, and regeneration are distinguishable but inseparable dimensions of this one saving encounter. Faith does not regenerate, and the Spirit does not believe. The sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

Conviction

Conviction is the Holy Spirit's application of the gospel to the human will. Through the truth concerning Christ, the Spirit exposes the hearer's sin and unbelief, overturns his false judgment, confronts him with God's verdict, and presses upon him the necessity of repentant faith or resistance. Conviction reaches beyond conscience or regret, beyond fear, sorrow, or intellectual understanding. It is a real and personal work of grace bringing the claim of Christ to bear upon the hearer, while neither regenerating him nor guaranteeing that he will surrender.

Death, Spiritual

Spiritual death is the condition and dominion of human life alienated from God, the source and fullness of life. It is expressed in corruption and mortality, leading at last to bodily dissolution and judgment. It does not mean nonexistence or unconsciousness, nor does it erase every personal and moral response. Spiritually dead people remain thinking and choosing persons who resist and act, but they do so within an order governed by rebellion. They cannot create life, restore communion with God, justify themselves, or escape death's dominion. Life must be received from God in Christ.

Depravity / Total Depravity

Depravity is the corruption of human nature through sin, affecting every part of the person and leaving him unable to restore himself to right standing and life with God. Total depravity describes the reach of corruption through the whole person; it does not mean that every sinner is as cruel as possible or incapable of every outwardly beneficial action. This book affirms pervasive corruption and moral inability while denying that these truths prove God cannot graciously address, enlighten, convict, and enable an unregenerate hearer through His Word and Spirit.

Drawing

Drawing is God's gracious action by which He brings a person toward the light He has given and, through the gospel, toward the crucified and risen Son. God may providentially lead a person toward fuller revelation and then bring Christ explicitly before him through the Word. Drawing precedes and enables coming to Christ without coercing the will, performing the hearer's faith, or giving regenerating life before faith. The person may resist that drawing or may yield and come to the Son.

Election

Election is God's choosing of Christ as the appointed Redeemer, so that those in Him share His chosen standing and purpose. Election is therefore Christ-centered, corporate, and personal: God chose a people in His Chosen Son, and actual persons fully share that election when joined to Him. This differs from unconditional individual election, in which God selected particular unbelievers before creation to receive the grace which would certainly bring them to faith. Scripture also uses election for historical identity and service, as in Israel's calling to receive God's revelation and bring the Messiah into the world.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment is the Spirit's work by which the gospel comes into intelligible and personally significant view, enabling a hearer to understand and recognize the truth concerning Christ. It is more than encountering religious words without comprehension, but it is not identical to regeneration. A person may receive informed assent, joy, and deep spiritual experience while still withholding life-surrendering faith. Enlightenment brings the hearer into the light of the gospel; it does not itself give him life.

Expiation

Expiation is the removal and cleansing of sin through the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ. It describes what Christ's atoning work does with the guilt and defilement of sin. It is closely related to propitiation, which emphasizes the satisfaction of God's righteous wrath. These are related aspects of the one saving work accomplished by Christ and therefore never competing works.

See also Atonement and Propitiation.

Faith

Faith is trusting reliance upon God as He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Saving faith reaches beyond knowing the gospel and agreeing that it is true, even when religious emotion accompanies that assent. It is the grace-enabled choice to abandon confidence in self and entrust oneself to the Christ whom the gospel reveals. Faith contributes no sacrifice or merit, no righteousness, life, or completion to Christ's work. It receives Christ and therefore excludes every thought of payment or wages, debt, and boasting.

See also Repentance and Surrender.

Foreknowledge

Foreknowledge is God's perfect knowledge of all things, including His relational knowledge and purpose concerning those who are in Christ. Divine foreknowledge is neither late nor impersonal, and God is never surprised by the persons who will belong to His Son. The term describes God's prior relational knowledge, a meaning that exceeds bare foresight of information without making it a lexical synonym for unconditional election. Scripture uses foreknowledge in relation to Christ, God's historical people, and His saving purpose; context must establish what each passage says.

Grace

Grace is unearned favor expressed in generous giving. In salvation, God graciously reveals and provides Christ, preserves the Word, and sends witnesses. He draws, enlightens, and convicts, and He forgives and gives life in the Son. Grace is necessary from beginning to end and is never earned by the sinner's response. Irresistible or effectual grace describes a selective inward work which certainly produces faith; resistible grace describes genuinely divine action which enables but does not replace or determine the hearer's response. Resistance does not make grace deserved or insincere, nor does it make grace weak.

Hardening

Hardening is the settled condition produced through repeated resistance to truth, in which a person suppresses light and retains autonomous self-rule. God may judicially give such a person over to the course he persistently chooses and may use that hardened opposition within His historical purposes. Hardening should not automatically be treated as an unconditional divine cause of the unbelief later judged. Scripture presents resistance as personally meaningful even when God sovereignly directs the consequences.

In Christ

To be in Christ is to stand within the reality of the One in whom God's saving purpose is fulfilled. The phrase names living union, shared identity, righteous standing, new life, inheritance, vocation, and destiny in the Son. Every spiritual blessing belongs together because it is found in Him, rather than in a theological category or as benefits detached from Christ.

See also Election and Union with Christ.

Justification

Justification is God's act of bringing the sinner into right standing by placing him upon the level ground of Christ's righteousness in the presence of God, received by faith. The declaration is grounded entirely in Christ's finished work rather than the believer's merit or moral improvement. Because the believer is united to the righteous Son, God truthfully declares him righteous in Christ. Justification is forensic, but it is not isolated from the covenantal, relational, and participatory reality of union with Christ.

Pelagianism

Pelagianism is the teaching that human beings possess the natural moral ability to obey God and turn toward righteousness without the necessity of prior enabling grace arising from humanity's fallen condition. Historically, it denies or radically minimizes inherited corruption in the Augustinian sense and places the decisive beginning of obedience within natural human capacity. This book rejects Pelagianism: sinners do not discover Christ unaided, initiate their own rescue, create faith without revelation and grace, or contribute saving power to Christ's work.

Perseverance of the Saints

Perseverance of the saints is the Reformed doctrine that everyone truly elected, redeemed, regenerated, and effectually called will be preserved by God and continue in faith to final salvation. It belongs within Calvinism's connected causal order: the decree which identifies the elect also guarantees their final end. This book affirms the faithfulness of Christ and the Spirit's keeping work, while grounding assurance first in the believer's present relation to the Son rather than using perseverance chiefly as retrospective evidence that a hidden decree reached him.

Predestination

Predestination is God's determination beforehand of what those in Christ are appointed to become and to do. In the principal passages examined in this book, believers are predestined to adoption, holiness, inheritance, conformity to Christ, glory, and service within God's purpose. The word should not automatically be treated as a synonym for God's selection of which unbelievers will be caused to believe. It describes the appointed destiny and vocation of those who share the life and standing of the Chosen Son.

Propitiation

Propitiation is the satisfaction of God's righteous wrath against sin through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. God's wrath is not an irrational temper which must be calmed by someone more merciful; the Father gave the Son, and the Son willingly gave Himself, so that sin would be judged and mercy righteously extended. The propitiating work is accomplished and located in Christ and is savingly shared through union with Him.

See also Atonement and Expiation.

Provisionism

Provisionism is a contemporary evangelical description of salvation emphasizing God's universal provision in Christ, the genuine gospel invitation, resistible grace, human responsibility, and faith before regeneration. It is especially useful in Baptist settings as a direct alternative to definite atonement and selective saving intention. This book shares those central affirmations but does not use the label as its complete theological identity. Christocentric election through grace-enabled faith more precisely states where election is located and how sinners enter the saving purpose established in Christ.

Regeneration / New Birth

Regeneration, or the new birth, is the new life the Holy Spirit gives when a sinner trusts Christ. By joining the believer to the risen Son, the Spirit makes Christ's life his life. Enlightenment, conviction, repentance, and faith do not generate that life; the Spirit alone gives it. Reformed theology ordinarily places regeneration logically before faith and treats it as the inward renewal which certainly causes the sinner to believe. This book places faith and regeneration within one saving encounter while preserving their distinct subjects: the sinner believes; the Spirit gives life.

Repentance

Repentance is the turning from sin and self-rule to God that is inseparable from trusting surrender to Jesus Christ. It is more than sorrow, regret, fear of judgment, or a promise of moral improvement. Repentance and faith are not two meritorious tasks added together to obtain salvation; they describe one personal turn, away from rebellion and toward Christ.

Reprobation

Reprobation is the Reformed doctrine concerning those whom God did not elect to salvation. Careful Reformed formulations distinguish God's passing over the nonelect from His ordaining their judgment for sin, while stronger forms of double predestination place election and reprobation within a more symmetrical decree. The traditions differ over how the decree relates to God's commands and expressed compassion. This book rejects the inference that a contrary hidden intention stands behind God's saving invitation, lament, patience, and universal provision in Christ.

Salvation

Salvation is God's rescue. In Scripture, saving language may describe deliverance from danger, healing, preservation, historical rescue, final vindication, or God's comprehensive work of bringing sinners from sin, death, and judgment into life through Jesus Christ. The context must determine the danger, deliverance, means, and result in each passage. In its fullest sense, salvation is life in Someone—the risen Son in whom every saving blessing is found.

Semi-Pelagianism

Semi-Pelagianism is the teaching that fallen man can make the first movement toward God through an unaided natural capacity, after which divine grace assists and completes the process. It differs from Pelagianism by recognizing a greater need for grace, but it still locates the initiating turn in the sinner. Classical Arminianism and Provisionism both deny that account, as does the position defended in this book. God provides the revealing gospel and every work of drawing, enlightenment, and conviction, together with the opportunity and ability which precede saving faith.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is God's absolute authority, power, and freedom to accomplish His will over all creation according to His wisdom and character. It answers who possesses the rightful and effective rule of creation. Determinism and compatibilist causation answer a different question: how a particular human response is made certain. God's sovereignty should not be reduced to one disputed account of causation, as though He can rule only by making every responsible response inevitable.

Surrender

Surrender is giving oneself to Jesus Christ and relinquishing the claimed right to rule oneself. It is the personal reality described by faith and repentance rather than a separate step beyond them: turning from self-rule and trusting Christ with one's guilt, future, and life. Surrender does not mean promising sufficiently mature obedience before Christ will receive the sinner. It means abandoning every competing authority and confidence in order to rest in the Saviour as He is.

Synergism

Synergism literally refers to working together, but the label may describe several unequal theological relationships. If it means that Christ performs most of salvation while the sinner contributes the missing part, this book rejects it. The sinner supplies neither atonement nor righteousness and cannot produce justification, union, or life. If the term means only that God and the sinner perform distinguishable actions in conversion, it says something true but easily misunderstood. The Father draws and the Spirit convicts; the sinner repents and believes; the Spirit gives life. These are not equal contributions to a jointly manufactured salvation.

Supralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism

Supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism are two Reformed ways of describing the logical order of God's decrees in relation to the fall. Supralapsarianism places the decree to elect and reprobate logically before the decree concerning creation and permission of the fall; infralapsarianism considers election and passing over in relation to humanity viewed as fallen. These are meaningful differences within Reformed theology, but both retain God's unconditional identification of those who will receive saving grace. This book does not attempt to settle their intramural debate.

Union with Christ

Union with Christ is the living relationship formed when the Holy Spirit joins a believing sinner to Jesus Christ. In Christ, His risen life becomes the believer's life, and every saving blessing is received through Him. Union is not one benefit placed late in an abstract order of salvation. It is the Christ-centered reality in which forgiveness and justification belong with reconciliation and adoption, while regeneration, sanctification, inheritance, and hope all share the same living source. The sinner does not place himself into Christ by spiritual power. The Spirit establishes the union when the sinner receives the Son through faith.

Universal Provision

Universal provision is God's genuine saving provision of Jesus Christ for every sinner. Christ was given for the world, so every hearer may be truthfully commanded and graciously enabled to repent and believe, and everyone who comes may receive the salvation accomplished in the Son. Universal provision is not universalism. Christ's saving benefits are received through faith and union with Him, and those who finally refuse the provided Son remain under judgment. Their refusal does not turn God's provision into insincerity or Christ's blood into failure.

Further Study in Fireproof Commentaries

This book is intended to stand on its own. Its biblical arguments do not require the reader to consult the author's other works. Readers who wish to pursue particular subjects more fully may find the following companion studies useful.

Creation, Rebellion, and Spiritual Death

The World That Groans traces the biblical movement from creation as God's generous gift, through humanity's grasp for autonomy and exclusion from the Tree of Life, into corruption, mortality, judgment, preservation, and hope through the promised Redeemer. It provides the larger creation-and-fall setting for the treatment of spiritual death in Chapter 3 and creation's purpose in Chapter 13.

Romans, Faith, Justification, and Life in the Spirit

Fortress of Justification: A Fresh Look at Romans follows Paul's argument concerning wrath, righteousness, faith, justification, union with Christ, life in the Spirit, Israel, and the nearness of the gospel. Its discussions of Romans 4, Romans 8, and Romans 10 offer fuller exposition of subjects treated in Chapters 3, 4, and 6 of this book.

Hebrews, Enlightenment, Warning, and Perseverance

Unshakable Kingdom: A Fresh Look at Hebrews reads the epistle as a pastoral address to a mixed assembly of believers, assenters, and rejectors. Its treatments of Hebrews 6 and 10 develop the distinction between profound participation in the Spirit's illuminating work and the things which accompany salvation, considered in Chapter 5.

Preaching, Spiritual Discernment, and Church Stewardship

Building a Fireproof Church: A Christ-Centered Commentary on 1 Corinthians examines the wisdom of the cross, the Spirit's revelation, the ministry of those who plant and water, Christ as the church's only foundation, and the responsibility of ministers as stewards. These themes provide broader context for Chapters 2, 3, and 17.

Repentance, Faith, and Coming to Christ

How to Be Saved: A Clear Invitation to Life in Christ presents the gospel in direct pastoral language, explaining repentance and saving faith as the sinner's surrendering reception of Jesus Christ. It develops for an evangelistic reader the invitation summarized in Chapters 6 and 16.