Calvinism Defended:
Of Decrees, Causes, and Temptation
By
This is the twelfth section of the e-mail exchange I had with Bill, an individual who objected to Calvinism. Click here to go back to the table of contents, or here to go to the full 88 page exchange.
From My First E-mail:
4. As I read your statement, I thought of some things that I think your statement implies. It seems to me that (whether you meant to convey this or not, I don’t know, I’m just stating what I see as an implication of what you said) that your statement implies that since you believe that you have freewill (whatever that means), then according to what I believe about God’s absolute sovereignty, God would have decreed that you have that belief, which would mean, from my view, that God has decreed that you have a wrong belief about Him and freewill.
And so, we could ask, how could God decree that I, you, or anyone else, have a wrong belief about something? Or, to put it in even stronger terms, how could God ordain that there be sin and evil? Now, I certainly am not trying to put words in your mouth. Again, I am just trying to state the things that came to my mind as read your comment. Well, let’s assume for the moment that my understanding of “freewill” is incorrect. If I say something that is not correct about God, or man, or any other topic for that matter, then what have I done? I have sinned. I have given false testimony concerning a certain matter (in this case, the nature of “freewill,” and by extension, the nature of God). Now, the question is, did God ordain that to be the case? Absolutely. He has ordained all things that come to pass, even sin and evil, for His own purpose, and ultimately His own glory (Eph 1:11; Rom 9:22-23). I deal further with this issue in an article I wrote that is posted on my website entitled “How Do You Reconcile Divine Sovereignty With Human Free Will?” So, God, as the first cause of all things, ensured that my belief would be incorrect.
Bill's Response: Let the Apostle filled with the Holy Ghost speak and let everyone be silent: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.”
If you
say God is the cause of everything, then when you are tempted, the cause of your
temptation is God. Well such
teaching is against the divine revelation that says that even though you are
tempted God does not cause your temptation.
Yes, I
know that Calvinism is internally consistent, but is it consistent with divine
revelation? Now I want to hear it
from you. Did God cause your
temptation to sin today and did He cause you to yield to that temptation?
My Response: God
has ordained the arena where moral agents operate, determined their boundaries,
and ensured through the most wise, holy, and unsearchable depths of His
providence, that all that transpires in time would be only that which He does
ordain. To believe otherwise is to
embrace atheism. So, in that sense,
God is the ultimate “cause” of everything, for in Him we live, and move, and
have our being. However, the fault
does not lie in God, and God is not the one who is said to actually tempt
anyone. Please read the passage
very carefully. It says clearly
that no one is tempted by God.
God is not the agent who is actually doing the tempting, some other agent
(the devil, etc.) is. However,
those agents that are actually doing the tempting have no power to tempt, or to
do anything, except by the providence of God.
Hence, as Luther maintained, the devil is just God’s lackey.
He is on leash, and can only go as far as the Lord has determined him to
go, and wherever he goes, it is with a view to accomplishing the purposes of
God. This is seen throughout the
Bible.
Now, just
from a human analogy, if I write a play where one character tempts another
character, let us ask, who is it that is doing the tempting?
It is the character in the play who is doing the tempting, not me.
However, who is the ultimate cause of the events?
I am, because I have written the play.
Now, if you maintain, as I think you do, that God has exhaustive
foreknowledge of all things, then how can you maintain something other than what
I am maintaining here? You see, any
mention of God’s exhaustive foreknowledge means that all events, from the fall
of man, to the redemptive work of Christ on the cross, to the final
consummation, to my temptation, means that all of those things have been
determined beforehand. Before time
even began God knew what would transpire, and the only reason any of it has
transpired is because God has determined to have it all transpire in space-time
history. It is in that sense that
God is the ultimate cause of everything. Unless
you want to maintain that God does not know the future, or that God could have
not created the world in which He knew there would be all of the things we see.
The fact is, God did create the world we now see, with the full and
exhaustive knowledge of everything that would come to pass.
And not only that, but, as I mentioned before, even one mention of
prophecy moves God’s foreknowledge out of the realm of “simple,” in which
God’s foreknowledge is completely passive, as if He were watching a video for
the 5th time and, just as we know what happens in the movie by virtue
of having watched it, God also knows what will happen.
God’s foreknowledge is never spoken of in that way.
The reason God foreknows the future is because He has determined the
future. He has determined the
purpose of all things, and before any of it came to be, from God’s
perspective, it was settled.
Maybe
some more poignant examples would be those people we see interacting with Jesus
throughout His earthly ministry, such as the Pharisees and others who rejected
Him, and His disciples.
If the
Pharisees and others rejecting Jesus was due to the fact that no one knows the
Father except Son, and the one to whom the Son will to reveal Him (see Matt
11:25-27), then how can it be said that they had the ability, by the power of
their “freewill” to, as you say, “reject God’s grace or yield to God’s
grace. And all of this for God’s glory!” when in fact the only thing
that they were capable of doing was yielding to their temptation and rejecting
God’s grace, and hence they were unable to yield to God’s
grace? As a matter of fact, in that
passage (Matt 11:25-27), Jesus says that God has hidden these things (referring
to salvation) from some, and has revealed them to others, and, this was actually
good in His sight. Here then we see
that what glorifies God is not that we have the “freewill” to either reject
or yield to God’s grace (because ultimately, the only thing that we can do by
the power of our “freewill” is reject God’s grace), but that God has
freely and sovereignly exercised His divine and sovereign rights and
prerogatives as the Potter and is fashioning the clay as He sees fit (Rom
9:18-21), and has determined who it is that He is going to enable to “yield”
to His grace. This is why we, as Calvinists, in accordance with the manifest
testimony of Scripture, say that salvation is entirely of grace
(undeserved favor), and that God receives all of the glory for it,
because no flesh shall glory in His presence.
To
illustrate this even further, in John 10, Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees who
have rejected Him, and He tells them first that He is the good shepherd who
knows His sheep, and He is known by His own (John 10:14).
He then tells them in verse 15 that He lays down His life for His sheep
(not the goats), and that it is Christ Himself who must bring His sheep to
Himself (John 10:16) (but, why must Christ bring them if they have the power by
their freewill to either reject or yield to God’s grace?).
After stating these things, the Pharisees begin to argue among themselves
and finally they just ask Him if He is indeed the Christ (verses 19-24).
Jesus’ response is most telling. He
first tells them that despite His works which bear witness to the fact that
Jesus was indeed the Christ, they nevertheless do not believe (verse 25).
Why don’t they believe? Jesus
says, “you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep…My sheep hear My
voice…” (v. 26-27). Here we see
the classic law of cause and effect dramatically illustrated.
It’s not that a person believes (i.e., yield to God’s grace) in order
to become a sheep. He or she
believes precisely because they already are one of Christ’s
sheep. The effect of believing is
due to the cause of being a sheep, and a person is made a sheep by the sovereign
election of God from the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4; John 6:37; John 17:2,
etc., etc., etc.).
Not only
did the Pharisees and others reject Christ, and handed Him over to be crucified,
but this all took place by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God.
If this was all according to the determined purpose and foreknowledge of
God, how can we then say that those who actually rejected Jesus (i.e., the
Pharisees), betrayed Jesus (i.e., Judas), denied Jesus three times (i.e., Peter)
had the autonomous freedom of will to do otherwise? The Scriptures declared the
betrayal by Judas centuries before it happened.
So, could Judas have done otherwise?
Jesus told Peter that he would deny Christ three times before the cock
crowed. So, could Peter have done
otherwise? Obviously, the answer to those questions is no, and if that is the
case, how can we say that man’s will is “free” in the sense that most
people seem to think?